Female portrait

Giandomenico Tiepolo's drawing shows a young woman' bust facing right in profile, with her head tilted slightly forward. The smooth face is full of thoughtfulness, presumably focused on prayer. The head is framed by a white shawl tied under the chin. A coat covers the broad neckline of the dress with a fur collar. Maria Mrozińska, a Polish researcher into the Tiepolos' works, established that the sketch was a preparatory drawing for the figure of the kneeling mourner, placed on the right side of the oil painting with the scene of the Eighth Station of the Cross. This painting is in the Oratorio del Crocifisso of the Church of San Polo in Venice. According to George Knox, an English researcher on Tiepolos' works, Giandomenico portrayed his sister, Giambattista's eldest daughter, born in 1722 in a sketch executed between 1747 and 1748. Giandomenico used dense, fine, diagonally crossing lines so that the drawing, full of detail, has an elaborate, academic character. Such a working method probably resulted from the artist's habits developed when creating engravings and illustrations.The drawing was made with black and white crayons on cream paper with a watermark - three crescents. It belongs to the group of 36 Tiepolos' works, the most extensive Polish collection of drawings of this outstanding and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family. The complicated fate of the works was established by Georg Knox, an English researcher on their work. Before 1907, when the Szczecin City Museum (museum Miejskie) was being established, they found their way into the collection of the Cabinet of Graphic Arts. After World War II, the drawings were taken to the Soviet Union. They returned to Poland as part of the revindication process in 1956, initially as a deposit to the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Warsaw, and then in two batches in 1973 and 1984, they came to Szczecin and were placed in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts at the National Museum.

Ewa Gwiazdowska