Heading Towards Comedy: Tiepolo & the Venetian Caricature.
In Italy, the caricature has a long history going back to Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of old men. However, this might be classified as the overlapping of both the portrait and caricature genres: Leonardo amused himself by drawing the men with unusual ugliness, but this was not really an example of comedy since Leonardo undertook it in a spirit of merciless scientific enquiry. As we saw with Ghezzi in Rome, caricature in this tradition were used with connoisseurs as targets. Good examples of this genre exist by G. B. Tiepolo. But sometimes Tiepolo would combine the emblem of aristocratic fashion with a specific Venetian feature: the mask, a symbol of aristocratic intrigue and fantasy (above).1 There are similar caricatures by Tiepolo’s son, Domenico who worked with his father at Würzburg and in Spain and who like his father learnt from Venetian masters like Veronese. After Giambattista’s death in 1770, Domenico kept his father’s albums but added his own drawings to them. Thus, we have a sheet comprising old men and a row of oriental and bizarre heads, many of which appear in his religious paintings which caused disquiet in the minds of the anti-fantasy faction in Venice.2 These caricatures should be contrasted with the grave, dignified heads of old men found in a series of etchings from the 1750s known as the “Raccolta di Teste” by Domenico, his father and his brother Lorenzo. These heads of Orientals and philosophers are entirely without humour and owe much to Rembrandt and G. B. Castiglione.
1George Szabó, “Eighteenth-Century Italian Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection,” 1981.
2Jacob Bean, “William M. Griswold 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Ex. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, cat. no. 264, fig. no. 264, pp. 264-65, ill.
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