Head of man in oriental headgear

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing depicts an older man with ascetic facial features and a bushy beard, who stares persistently from under his furrowed brows at an indefinite point. The man is wearing a conical cap with a flattened end and a drapery with an oval jewel fixed above his forehead. The sketch with black and white crayons on thick blue paper produced in Venice is a preliminary drawing for representing the head of a man standing behind St John in the composition Martyrdom of St John, Bishop of Bergamo, painted between 1743 and 1745 in the Bergamo Cathedral. St John Bishop of Bergamo (San Giovanni vescovo di Bergamo) in Lombardy, northern Italy, held the post between 660 and 688. According to George Knox, a researcher on the Tiepolos' works, the fact that the painting lacks a jewel on the man's headdress indicates that the drawing preceded creating the painted work, not being cast from it as had been guessed.The drawing belongs to the group of 36 works created by the Tiepolo family, the most extensive Polish collection of drawings by this distinguished and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family. The fate of the collection was established by Georg Knox, an English researcher on the Tiepolo family's works. According to his examinations, they were brought to Szczecin by a Szczecin lawyer, Johann Theodor Müller, who, motivated by patriotic impulse, donated the whole set of drawings to the collection of the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the Szczecin City Museum (Muzeum Miejskie) before 1907. After World War II, the drawings were taken to the Soviet Union and returned to Poland as part of revindication in 1956, first to the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Warsaw, and then in two batches, in 1973 and 1984, to Szczecin. They are currently held in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum.

Ewa Gwiazdowska