Enfilade

Domenico Tiepolo, A Centaur Playing with Punchinellos, ca. 1770 (Bloominton Indiana: The Anthony Moravec Collection of Old Master Drawings, Eskenazi Museum of Art)

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From the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University:

Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection
Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1 October 2016 — 5 February 2017
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 29 October 2017 — 4 February 2018

Curated by Adeheld Gealt

This fall, the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University will showcase a series of Italian master drawings, in an exhibition that highlights a major gift of art in the museum’s 75-year history. Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection will present a collection of works on paper by the Venetian masters Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo—a father and son who are widely considered two of the most notable Italian draftsmen of their era—along with works by contemporaries Ubaldo Gandolfi and Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, as well as their predecessor Jacopo Palma il Giovane. Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo marks the first time that the Eskenazi Museum has comprehensively exhibited the collection of Anthony J. Moravec, an Indiana philanthropist and civic leader who spent five years building the collection in concert with Dr. Adelheid Gealt, the museum’s director emeritus, before donating his holdings to the Eskenazi Museum in 2010.

Domenico Tiepolo, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: The Second Prayer, ca. 1785, pen and brown ink wash over black chalk on paper (The Anthony Moravec Collection of Old Master Drawings, Eskenazi Museum of Art, 2010.118).

On view from October 1, 2016 through February 5, 2017, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue will provide new scholarship and curatorial insight on Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, two of the most important artists in the Old Masters canon. The exhibition will center on a set of 12 New Testament drawings by Domenico Tiepolo, part of a now-scattered cycle of 320 drawings that is regarded as the most exhaustive and sustained visual exploration of the subject by any artist in history. Domenico’s large pen, brush, and ink drawings were dispersed after his death in 1804, and entered many public and private collections where they were prized as outstanding drawings. However, the actual series to which these individual drawings belonged was not known until two scholars— Adelheid Gealt and George Knox, professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver—spent 10 years piecing the series back together and publishing it as a newly discovered New Testament cycle in 2006. Following Moravec’s 2010 gift, which was the largest private collection of New Testament drawings to enter a public collection in recent history, the Eskenazi Museum has become the world’s third-largest repository of works from Tiepolo’s New Testament series, after the Museé du Louvre and the Morgan Library and Museum.

In addition to works from Domenico’s New Testament series, the Moravec collection also includes important works on paper by his father, Giambattista Tiepolo, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest draftsmen of the 18th century. Works by Ubaldo Gandolfi and Giuseppe Bernardino Bison round out the collection, along with a drawing by Jacopo Palma il Giovane—a previously unidentified study for his painting St. John the Baptist Preaching, which was acquired by the museum in 1964. In total, 24 works on paper will be displayed in Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, which will be a major highlight of the Eskenazi Museum’s 75th-anniversary season.

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The catalogue will be available in October from Indiana University Press:

Adeheld Gealt, with George Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 136 pages, ISBN: 978-0253022905, $50.

Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo documents an important collection of master drawings donated by an individual to the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, including five drawings by the celebrated Venetian genius Giambattista Tiepolo and sixteen drawings by his most famous son, Domenico Tiepolo. Twelve of the sixteen form part of Domenico’s most important drawing series—his exhaustive visual exploration of the New Testament. Also included are two drawings discovered after the 2006 publication of Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament and seen here for the first time. Gealt and Knox are world-renowned experts on the Tiepolos and this book will serve as a useful reference to understanding their work as draftsmen. This beautiful illustrated volume will appeal to art lovers, biblical scholars, and those who value the unique work of the Tiepolos.

Adeheld M. Gealt is Director Emerita of the Eskenazi Museum of Art. Her research has concentrated on reconstructing the lost serial narratives of the Venetian draftsman Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804). She is editor (with George Knox) of Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman (1997) and Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament (2006).

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C O N T E N T S

Foreword, David Brenneman
Preface and Acknowledgments
Structure of the Catalogue
An Interview with the Collector, Anthony J. Moravec and Adelheid M. Gealt
A Brief History of Venetian Drawing
Giambattista Tiepolo, a Brief Biography
Development as a Draftsman
Flight into Egypt
Holy Family
Caricatures
Domenico Tiepolo, a Brief Biography
St. Anthony of Padua
Satyrs and Centaurs
Punchinello
New Testament
Palma Giovane
Ubaldo Gandolfi
Giuseppe Bernardino Bison

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Note (added 29 October 2017) — The posting was updated to include the Crocker Art Museum as a venue.

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