Enfilade

Now on view at the Beaux-Arts de Paris:

The Tiepolos: Invention and Virtuosity in Venice
Beaux-Arts de Paris, 22 March — 30 June 2024

Curated by Hélène Gasnault and Giulia Longo

This exceptional exhibition brings together drawings and etchings by Giambattista Tiepolo and his two sons, Giandomenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo, a family of virtuoso artists in 18th-century Venice.

The Beaux-Arts de Paris owns a remarkable collection of ten works by Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770), making it the second-largest public collection of the artist’s drawings in France. Above all, this collection is the only one in France to include drawings not only by Giambattista, but also by his two painter sons, Giandomenico (1727–1804) and Lorenzo (1736–1776), as well as another of Tiepolo’s assistants in the 1730s, Giovanni Raggi. This collection alone provides an overview of graphic practices within the family and the studio.

The study of these sheets and prints, combined with works by other artists—sources of inspiration such as Rembrandt, masters such as Piazzetta, and contemporaries such as Canaletto, Guardi, and Novelli—highlights the great modernity of their art. This is particularly evident in their ability to produce variations on the same theme, both in traditional religious and mythological subjects and in figure studies, particularly caricatures, as well as scenes from Venetian life. The exhibition also explores the relationship between the father and his sons, and the work within a family of artists.

The exhibition opens with a series of studies of heads and faces that raise the question of training in the Tiepolo studio. It then moves on to religious paintings and large-scale secular decors produced by the Tiepolos and their contemporaries in Venice, followed by autonomous graphic works conceived outside of any painted project, as pure graphic exercises or pleasures, based on iconographic themes repeated almost obsessively, in multiple variants. It is the exceptional inventiveness of Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo, one of the most fascinating facets of their artistic personalities, that these drawings and prints allow us to rediscover.

Curated by Hélène Gasnault, curator of drawings at Beaux-Arts de Paris, and Giulia Longo, curator of engravings and photos at Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Hélène Gasnault, ed., with additional texts by Catherine Loisel and Giulia Longo, Les Tiepolo: Invention et virtuosité à Venise (Paris: Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions, 2024), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-2840568780, €25.