TIEPOLO: The Colours Of Drawings

The history of European figurative culture is remarkably marked by a huge amount and variety of drawings of the Tiepolos, which stand out as a magnificent monument of Eighteenth-century graphics. Indeed, drawing is the basic element of Giambattista Tiepolo’s genial art and is where he was the most prolific. Similarly, drawing characterized the exceptional and unique production of his family-owned original atelier, where he guided the graphical activity of his sons, Giandomenico and Lorenzo, in the last example of a very old Venitian tradition. Such an inexhaustible narrative vein, mainly intended as an independent exercise, is made of an extensive variety of registers that the artist used to adjust to the different functionalities of his production. Thus, the various typologies, techniques and themes give rise to a “colour of drawing”. This occasion is dedicated to this peculiar perspective on the many-sided world of Tiepolo and finds its reason in the lucky chance of gathering a selection of works coming from Italian collections, unfamiliar to the great public, with sheets that have been hardly ever exhibited before. The four sections of the exhibition feature drawings and a selection of etchings according to prominent thematic clusters, but still arranged according to the range of their techniques: from the project to the early sketches, from “memories” to “amusements” and to the replicas of Giandomenico and Lorenzo, as an emulation of their father’s works.
A measured selection of paintings is also exhibited in order to introduce and somehow represent the painting outcomes of every graphical typology. Some are well known, others have re-emerged or have been recognized only by the most recent research activities – even in the preparation of this exhibition – but they all contribute to grasp the dynamics of Tiepolo’s language, whose exceptional imaginative fertility does not exclude a constant innovation in the iteration of models.