Dim.: 15,5 x 7,5 cm On the front: the drawing is signed on the bottom right. Depicted is a bull, relatable to a drawing in the National Gallery of Art, Accession Number 1983.45.1. (link available on our website) A study of a cow with a study of a bearded man on the back was with Galleria Cortona. (link available on our website) On the back: depicted are four Venetian elder males, with a long beard and typical late baroque head dresses. Tiepolo liked to observe his subjects in daily life scenes before placing them in his religious or iconographical settings. Expert: Cabinet Rene Millet. Provenance: (same for lots 447, 451, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460) - A Belgian private collection. - Acquired in the art market, according to the previous owner all removed from the same late 19th C. album acquired in London. Born in Venice in 1696 to a prosperous merchant, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo chose to pursue a career in painting. He was taught by Gregorio Lazzarini (1655-1730), studying under him probably c. 1710. In 1717 he was inscribed in the Venetian painters guild as an independent painter. His earliest dateable works, in the Ospedaletto, Venice (1715-1716), do not display the classical compositions and smooth finish characteristic of Lazzarini's paintings, but rather the avant-garde tenebrism of Federico Bencovich (1677-1726) and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1683-1754). Much controversy surrounds the course of Tiepolo's development in the next fifteen years in which there are few dated paintings. Knowledge of his activities in the teens and twenties comes mostly from Vincenzo da Canal's biography of Lazzarini (1732), in which the author devoted several pages to the talented pupil whose popularity had soared in the previous decade. During these early years Tiepolo experimented with various styles simultaneously, and recent scholarship based on da Canal's listing of Tiepolo's paintings prior to 1732 has shown that the artist vacillated between the tenebrism practiced by many Venetian contemporaries and a lighter, more atmospheric style. As early as c. 1716 Tiepolo was practicing the art of fresco painting on the terrafirma, a technique reintroduced into the Veneto in the late sixteenth century by non-Venetian artists. His grandest decorative cycle of the period, painted for the Archbishop's Palace in Udine (c. 1726-1729), reveals his interest in Veronese's color and compositions. Tiepolo's frescoes in Udine brought him immediate fame and commissions for further decorative ensembles. In the next ten years he painted and frescoed in palaces and villas in and around Milan, Bergamo, Venice, and elsewhere in the Veneto, the subjects of which derive mostly from ancient history. With the Bolognese quadrattura painter Girolamo Mengozzi-Colonna (c. 1688-c. 1766), who designed his architectural surrounds, Tiepolo revolutionized the art of fresco decoration in Venice by combining the deep perspective of Venetian cinquecento ceiling decorations with a compositional clarity that connected the diverse elements of the design into a greatly expanded pictorial space. Unlike their direct precedents in which forms were arranged haphazardly across the ceiling, Tiepolo's compositions are ordered in zig-zag patterns that expand the illusionistic view into the heavens. By 1740, after conquering towering church ceilings such as the Gesuati, Venice (1737-1739), with this method, he brought figures closer to the spectator in long, low secular rooms by distributing his deeply colored figures along the cornice and contrasting them with increasingly lighter pastel hues in the open skies (Palazzo Clerici, Milan, 1740). In the same years Tiepolo developed as an artist of religious altarpieces, in which he captured counter-reformatory devotional images in a neo-Renaissance format. Tiepolo's fame and prices increased further in the 1740s. He moved several times during his career, always to grander quarters, which he shared with his wife Cecilia, the sister of Francesco Guardi and their nine children. The artist had already rejected an invitation to Sweden in 1736, and now his paintings were being requested in northern Europe. His friendship with Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), whom he met in 1743, brought him commissions from the Saxon court of Dresden. Although always inspired by ancient history, in this period Tiepolo turned increasingly to representations of antique monuments and dress. At the same time, he took up etching, producing two sets of prints - the Scherzi di fantasia and the Capricci - both heavily laden with antique references. External political forces kept foreigners from Venice in the second half of the 1740s, causing an economic slowdown in the city and compelling Venetian artists to seek employment abroad. Although Tiepolo was so active in this decade that he enlisted the help of his son Giovanni Domenico (Giandomenico, 1723-1804), he neverthele