A page wearing a breast plate holding a dish in his right hand

George Knox connected this expressive Page wearing breastplate in red and white chalk on blue paper to the large group of Tiepolo drawings known as the Bossi-Beyerlen collection (Stuttgart).

Domenico (or Giovanni Domenico) Bossi, born in Trieste in 1767, was a renowned portrait painter, who traveled throughout Europe before settling as a court artist in Munich in c. 1850¹. During his youth, he studied in the Venice Accademia with Domenico Tiepolo, who bequeathed him what is considered today the largest collection of chalk drawings by the Tiepolo family. The c. 650 sheets, originally bound in volumes, were inherited by Bossi’s daughter, Maria Theresa Caroline, wife of Carle Christian Friedrich Beyerlen. After Beyelern’s death, his collection was sold in Stuttgart in 1882, and is divided today among public and private collections.

As reconstructed by Knox, the Bossi-Beyerlen collection included another version of the Page in a breastplate, attributed by him to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and currently in Stuttgart (fig. 1)². According to Knox, the sheet is related to ‘a painting which is lost or was never executed’, although close similarities can be found in the figure of the page on the left in painting The Banquet of Cleopatra (Arkhangelskoye Palace, near Moscow). This hypothesis received further support in 1980, when Ljubov’ Jurevna Savinskaya observed that one of the four smaller paintings, now lost, that surrounded the large canvas in Arkhangelskoye depicted ‘a soldier and a slave holding plates’ which probably constituted the final destination of the Page study³.

Giovanni Battista’s study of the subject is also attested by another red and white chalk Study of a young man in the Woodner Collections (fig. 3), in which he deepens the expression of the face and the position of the neck⁴. The date of the Russian commission has been much debated, but is now commonly accepted that the project was under consideration by c. 1743, which must consequently constitute the term post quem for the execution of the drawing here discussed⁵.

A second version of Giovanni Battista’ s sketch for the composition in Arkhangelskoye is conserved in the so-called Second Sketchbook in Würzburg (fig. 2) and has been recognised as the work of Domenico’s younger brother, Lorenzo (1736-1776)⁶.

According to Knox, the composition of the Page in a breastplate thus provides ‘a unique example of the same subject treated by three hands’⁷. The rediscovery of Domenico’s sketch allows us to compare for the first time the work of the father and his sons.

Giovanni Battista’s sheet, free and stylistically coherent to the Woodner Study of a young man, is completed on the right with the study of a palm. The line that delineates the young man’s figure suggest that the artist had already in mind his position in the final composition, probably secluded by a monumental column or by another figure.

Lorenzo’s sketch, much stiffer, copies slavishly his father’s composition, qualifying itself as the product of a methodical, daily training on Giovanni Battista’s drawings. The sketch by Domenico, on the other hand, focuses only on the figure of the page, successfully attempting to fix not just the figure and his vest, but the soft touch of the elder Tiepolo.