Giovanni Battista Tiepolo A Frieze of Heads Pen and brown ink Although Tiepolo's vast corpus of drawings includes studies of every variety and subject, there are surprisingly few that show a group of heads arranged in this deliberately archaic manner. It was clearly part of the Tiepolo studio repertoire since there is a print by his son, Domenico, showing a row of grotesque heads, made perhaps forty years later, in 1774. Giambattista would have been familiar with earlier examples of this genre, for instance, those of Agostino Carracci. A date in the 1730s seems plausible. |
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