Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Drawings by Giandomenico Tiepolo

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Elephant seizing dog
18th century
drawing
British Museum

Drawings by Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), favorite son and most prominent heir of a prolific and incomparable father, Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770).  In his own person Giandomenico carried 600 years of Italian artistic dominance onto the threshold of machine-age Europe. After his death, no Italian practitioner of the visual arts achieved any significant international influence again until the middle of the 20th century.  

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Dead stag & crocodile head
after 1780
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
A centaur, a satyr, and a bull
18th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

"The ultimate peculiarity of Italian culture, the quality it could be proudest of, also because over the centuries it has proved untranslatable into other languages (whereas by contrast the meaning of the word has become obscure and remote for the majority of Italians), is what is known as sprezzatura. Baldesar Castiglione defined it as follows, in complete contrast with the thing he advised people to "steer clear of as far as possible, as if from the sharpest and most dangerous rocks," in other words "affectation." According to Castiglione, the remedy for the "bane of affectation" consisted in "using in all things a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] that may conceal art and demonstrate that what one does and says is done without effort and almost without thinking." A gloss followed: "From this, I believe, does much grace derive." And a decisive consequence: "It can be said that true art is that which does not seem to be art; nor should a man study anything  more than the concealment of it."

from Tiepolo Pink by Roberto Calasso, translated by Alastair McEwen (Knopf, 2009)

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Menagerie with leopards
ca. 1780-1800
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
In a piazza
ca. 1791
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Acrobats
ca. 1791
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Orientals resting
18th century
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Turkish lancer
1760s
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Hercules and Antaeus
18th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Two soldiers seen from below
1750s
drawing
British Museum

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Landscape with hunter, horse and dog
after 1770
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Character studies
ca. 1772-74
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York