Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Venice 1696 – Madrid 1770
Study of a Sitting Male Nude | Académie d'homme assis
Black and red chalks, white chalk highlights, watermark of three stars in a shield surmounted with a fleur de lys
420 x 294 mm (16 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.)
This drawing belongs to a series of academies after male models which document the young Tiepolo's drawing activity at a time when he decided to leave the studio of his first master Gregorio Lazzarini as he "differed from his diligent manner"; "full of spirit and energy he had adopted a rapid and decisive one", explains Vincenzo da Canal.[1]
The sheet – possibly inspired by the Moors on Pietro Tacca's fountain at Livorno, through the intermediary of a sculpture derived from them or a print – is comparable in its morphology and style to those of The Academy: Artists Drawing a Nude which is today in a private collection in London. It was published, when it was in the Rasini collection of Milan with an attribution to Marco Pitteri, by Antonio Morassi[2] who gave it to Tiepolo but who thought it showed Lazzarini's Academy. The scene is today, perhaps more correctly, identified as the young Tiepolo's Academy.[3]
Some other sheets relate to the activity illustrated by the Rasini collection drawing showing a similar formal character, among which the Standing Male Nude with a Club of the Uffizi (7084 S) should above all be mentioned, a work which I myself attributed to Tiepolo, correcting an old attribution to Piazzetta,[4] the Male Nude with a laurel crown in a private collection in Zurich, mentioned by Morassi[5] and finally the Sitting Male Nude of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, which is signed, and is also considered to be one of Tiepolo's first works.[6]
Furthermore, stylistic similarities can be noted between this sheet and other male nude studies, such as the Male Nude study with a serpent in the Fantoni di Rovetta collection.[7] The general treatment of the chiaroscuro with dots is also especially characteristic and can be seen on many sheets from a dismembered album which I have reconstituted,[8] now at the Accademia Carrara di Bergamo and the Fogg Art Museum of Cambridge (Mass.). The angular handling, which is almost rubbed, of the drapery covering the young model's legs and which more generally defines his anatomy, is quite different to the nude studies referred to above, especially in the use of the rare trois crayons technique. In reality it has many echoes in the stylistic formulae developed by Tiepolo in a few pen and ink drawings which I have grouped around an Annunciation of the Museo Civico di Bassano, which also show the influence of Francesco Solimena on the Venetian artist, and demonstrate an unusual attempt at cultural tentativeness.[9]
The study for a Holy Family adored by St. Sebastian and St. Francis in a private collection, published by Julien Stock, also belongs to this group.[10] The St. Sebastian figure shows formal solutions that are entirely comparable to those of this Male Nude, if only in the diversity of the graphic technique used.
In any case, the crucial relationship to establish is that of Tiepolo with Giovan Battista Piazzetta, whose name is inscribed by an early hand on the sheets in the Fogg Museum of Cambridge belonging to the album mentioned above[11] and to whom the Standing Male Hude with a club of the Uffizi was also attributed. The young Tiepolo's style is in fact close to that of Piazzetta in the proposals of emphasized expressionism, but also shows a more personal manner, nourished by the experiments of Federico Bencovich. The two artists at the time had a relationship of artist exchange that was beneficial to both.[12]
More factual elements are needed in order to be able to date the drawing precisely, but we can nevertheless compare it stylistically with the Apostles and the Prophets painted around 1715 in the pendentives of the church of the Ospedaletto in Venice as well as some slightly later works.
Ugo Ruggeri
[1] Vita di Gregorio Lazzarini scritta da Vincenzo da Canal [1732], ed. G.A. Moschini, Venezia 1809, p. XXXXII
[2] Antonio Morassi, "A 'Scuola del nudo' by Tiepolo", Master Drawings, IX, 1971, pp. 43-50
[3] Bernard Aikema, Tiepolo e la sua cerchia : l'opera grafica. Disegni dalle collezioni americane, Venezia New York 1996, p. 13.
[4] Ugo Ruggeri, Alcuni disegni del Settecento veneto, « Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa », Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, serie III, vol. III, 4, 1973, pp. 1027-1045, tav. CXXXI
[5] Antonio Morassi, op. cit., p. 22
[6] Bernard Aikema, op. cit., p. 30, fig 1; cf. also Die Zeichnungen von Giambattista, Domenico und Lorenzo Tiepolo aus der Graphischen Sammlung der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, aus württembergischem Privatbesitz und dem Martin von Wagner Museum der Universitӓt Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1979, p. 17, cat. 1
[7] Ugo Ruggeri, "I Fantoni collezionisti di disegni antichi", in Atti del Convegno di studio I Fantoni e il loro tempo, Bergamo 1978, p. 235, fig. 5
[8] Ugo Ruggeri, "Tiepolo: fogli da un taccuino al tempo di Udine", Prospettiva 1983-1984, XXXIII-XXXVI (Studi in onore di Luigi Grassi), pp. 307-313
[9] Ugo Ruggeri, "Solimena e Venezia: qualche appunto", in Angelo e Francesco Solimena. Due culture a confronto, atti del convegno, a cura di Vega de Martini e Antonio Braca, Napoli 1994, pp. 235-243
[10] Julien Stock, Guardi, Tiepolo and Canaletto from the Royal Museum, Canterbury and elsewhere, Canterbury 1985, n. 16
[11] Cf. note 8.
[12] Roberto Pallucchini, "Un Tiepolo in più, un Bencovich in meno", in Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan, Roma 1984, pp. 366-374