Intense studies on blue paper, in red or black chalk, heightened with white - of heads, hands, legs, draperies, sometimes of entire figures - are a prerogative of Giambattista Tiepolo's way of working since approx. 1742, in preparation of increasingly complex and large frescoes or paintings on canvas.
The acute psychological penetration of the character, described with strong and confident lines of black chalk, illuminated in white, which mercilessly reveal senile decadence,
suggests a life drawing. The rare frontal shot and the direct gaze, as well as the accurate physiognomic characterisation, bring together the sheet with the delicate portrait of the artist's second son, Lorenzo Tiepolo (1736-1776), painted around the mid-1740s (Fondation Custodia, Paris) . The small ruff suggests its intended use in a costume scene, in particular for the frescoes of the Villa Contarini in Mira, from 1745, now in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, such frescoes in fact, recall the passage through Venice of the king of France Henry III, when he was fleeing from Poland in July 1574.
The Trieste miniature painter Domenico Bossi, who was successful in Europe, studied at the Academy of Venice under the direction of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804).
His large collection of drawings, lost during an auction in Stuttgart on March 27th 1882, included numerous sheets of Tiepolo cataloged according to the technique and the measurements, but only loosely described, with the exception of the two portraits, of Giambattista and Lorenzo Tiepolo.
The present sheet was probably included in the group of four “Verschiedene Köpfe” [Various heads], in fourth on blue paper, “Grösser. Mehr ausgeführt. Weiss gehöht” [Bigger. Better conducted. Highlighted in white], distinguished from ten others, of mixed sizes, in eighth and fourth, without the white chalk touches; among these there must have also been a Head of a young man, a preparatory study for the frescoes of the Villa Contarini, annotated in the verse like this.
