Head of man

The drawing by Giambattista Tiepolo depicts a young man's head in a veil, with a thick moustache, looking thoughtfully upwards. At an unspecified period, the sketch was cut off at the top. Its purpose has not been established. In the past, it could have been used to paint the man's head in the upper part of the painting The Adoration of the Magi held in the collection of the Old Pinacotheca in Munich. However, this conjecture should be rejected as the painting shows the mature man's head with tightened, straight eyebrows, on whose face there is fear mixed with anger. On the other hand, the drawing shows a smooth face with a gentle, soulful look from under arched eyebrows. The sketch was performed using black and white crayons on blue Venetian paper with an illegible watermark. A drawing of a hand pointing to the left with the index finger extended is on the verso, i.e., the reverse of the card.The Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum in Szczecin (Muzeum Narodowe) holds the collection of 36 drawings by the Tiepolo family members from Venice. The sketches of Giambattista Tiepolo, the father, were inherited by his son Giandomenico Tiepolo. After his death, they became the property of Johann Dominick Bossi (1767-1853), a miniaturist and draughtsman, painter at the Bavarian court, who also worked at courts in Sweden, Russia, and Austria. In 1882, the Tiepolos' drawings were auctioned off at the H.G. Gutekunst’s antiquarian bookshop in Stuttgart. They were bought by Johann Theodor Müller, a lawyer from Szczecin, who donated them to the collection of the Szczecin City Museum at the time of its foundation. After World War II, famous Venetian artists' works were located in the Soviet Union for several years. It was brought to Poland in 1956 and returned to the National Museum in Szczecin in 1973 and 1984.

Ewa Gwiazdowska