Giandomenico Tiepolo (Venice, 1727-1804) GROUP OF PUNCHINELLOS oil on canvas, cm 31x55 A GROUP OF PUNCHINELLOS oil on canvas, cm 31x55 Provenance Paris, Duc de Trévise; Paris, Hôtel Drouot, December 8, 1947, lot 71; Paris, Broglio; Paris, Palais Galliera, March 20, 1974, lot 44; current owners. Bibliography [Daniel Catton Rich], Loan Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints by the two Tiepolos: Giambattista and Giandomenico, Chicago exhibition catalog (The Art Institute, February 2-March 6, 1938), Chicago 1938, p. 32 cat. 41 (Giambattista Tiepolo); A. Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G.B. Tiepolo, London 1962, p. 40 (Giandomenico Tiepolo); Adriano Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice 1971, p.132 tav. 202 (Giandomenico Tiepolo); A. Mariuz, I disegni di Pulcinella di Giandomenico Tiepolo, in "Arte Veneta," XL, 1986, p. 270 (Giandomenico Tiepolo), reed. in A. Mariuz, Tiepolo, edited by G. Pavanello, Verona 2008, p. 233; Isabella Valente, Pulcinella da uno a centomila: la Maschera e la coscienza critica del reale in Giandomenico Tiepolo, in Quante storie per Pucinella. Combien d'histoires pour Polichinelle, proceedings of the conference of studies edited by Franco Carmelo Greco, Naples 1988, table XXXIV (Giandomenico Tiepolo); Isabella Valente, scheda, in Pulcinella maschera del mondo. Pulcinella e le arti dal Cinquecento al Novecento, edited by Franco Carmelo Greco, Naples 1990, p. 289 cat. 6-10, p. 292 (Giandomenico Tiepolo); G. Pavanello, Canova collezionista di Tiepolo, Mariano del Friuli 1996, pp. 18, 20-21 (Giandomenico Tiepolo); F. Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo: gli affreschi della villa di Zianigo, in Satiri, Centauri, Pulcinelli. Giandomenico Tiepolo's restored frescoes preserved at Ca' Rezzonico, exhibition catalog edited by F. Pedrocco, Venice 2000, p. 53 (Giandomenico Tiepolo); George Knox, Punchinello in Arcadia, in Tiepolo. Irony and Comedy, Venice exhibition catalog (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, September 3-December 5, 2004) edited by Adriano Mariuz, Giuseppe Pavanello, Venice, pp. 97, 109, 112 (Giambattista Tiepolo). Apart from the abrasions at the corners, due to contact with the frame as can also be seen along the edges of the canvas, the pictorial surface appears to direct observation to be in a good state of preservation, with an old restoration varnish that slightly lowers the transparencies of the chromatic tones tempered since theorigin, however, by the visible reddish preparation, usual for the Venetian figurative sphere of the 18th century, which agglomerates in the most chiaroscuro areas of the composition, giving it a coruscating, enigmatic setting. Thirty-two Punchinellos are crammed, hunched and pot-bellied in their characteristic conical hats, between the shadow of a massive behind them and a low country wall, to the right, on which several piñatas are leaning. None of them are eating: on the left, a mask appears to be leaning its hooked nose to smell the pot's effluvia; in front, a comrade is lying down, slumbering perhaps drunkenly, with his mouth half-open and a flask at his side; a little further to the center, the pot has become the seat for an impassive Punchinello, who puts his feet propped on a long stick, in turn poised on a headdress that has fallen perhaps to theasleep behind him or to the defecating person in front of him, and has next to him a second one dozing from presumable excess of goitering, clutched by a companion at the level of the lower abdomen; a final piñata, again, is clinging to another acolyte, almost to the far right of the main group of figures, while by now eyes are pointing to the obscene image of the dejected in the foreground. A Punchinello, in fact, has dropped his breeches and frees his bowels by leaning out while sitting on a branch slightly raised from the ground, showing us his terga observed by a pair of standing masks. Exhibited in 1938 at the Art Institute of Chicago with an attribution to Giambattista Tiepolo, when it was still in the Paris collection of Édouard Mortier duc de Trévise (1883-1946), the canvas passed after the nobleman's death into the Broglio collection, also in Paris, and then came to its present ownership in 1974 (see Provenance). It was up to Morassi, in the catalog of Tiepolo's pictorial work (1962), to assign the painting to Giandomenico, his father's main collaborator. The authoritative opinion was accepted by the following bibliography, until the last mention, to my knowledge, in the art literature when instead Knox (2004) returned, albeit "on the basis of the scanty reproduction" available to him, to stylistic authorship