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| 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.
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Dead stag & crocodile head after 1780 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| 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)
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Menagerie with leopards ca. 1780-1800 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo In a piazza ca. 1791 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Acrobats ca. 1791 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Orientals resting 18th century drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Turkish lancer 1760s drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Hercules and Antaeus 18th century drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Two soldiers seen from below 1750s drawing British Museum |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Landscape with hunter, horse and dog after 1770 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Character studies ca. 1772-74 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |