Lorenzo Tiepolo Lorenzo Tiepolo

The Conviction of a Vestal Virgin

Oil on canva…
Description

Lorenzo Tiepolo

Lorenzo Tiepolo The Conviction of a Vestal Virgin Oil on canvas (relined). 69 x 92 cm. Provenance Acquavella Galleries, New York 1969 - Belgian private collection. Literature Burlington Magazine, Dec. 1959 (as G. B. Tiepolo) - G. Knox: Chalk Drawings of Tiepolo, 1980, p. 229, M. 158 - G. Knox: The Drawings of Giustino Menescardi, Arte/Documento 10, 1996, no. 11 - G. Knox: A Panorama of Tiepolo Drawings, 2008, p. 229, ill. 104. This painting is a remarkable and unusual product of the Tiepolo workshop, which has been the subject of intense art historical research, especially by George Knox and Bernard Aikema. Knox, who repeatedly devoted himself to Venetian painting from his dissertation until the end of his life, writes: "This painting must be identified as an important addition to the work of the young Lorenzo, to be dated to the mid-1750s." Bernard Aikema, on the other hand, describes it as a workshop work in which the three central figures were painted by Giovanni Battista himself. He refers to drawings by Giovanni Battista, which he identifies as studies for this composition. The study of a standing man with a cape and flat hat in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (inv. no. D182433.1885), which we recognize on the left of our picture, is particularly convincing. However, drawings by Lorenzo Tiepolo can also be linked to this painting, including a portrait of Palma Giovane from the collection of the British Museum in London after a bust by Alessandro Vittoria: This concerns the standing man to the right of the Vestal Virgin. Lorenzo Tiepolo, born in Venice in 1736, was one of Giovanni Battista's sons and the younger brother of Domenico. He worked in his father's workshop, accompanying him to Würzburg in 1750 and to Madrid in 1762. After his father's death, he remained in the Spanish capital, where he died in 1776. The iconography refers to the punishment of the lewd vestal virgins according to Plutarch, which the English lexicographer John Lemprière (1765-1824) describes in detail in his "Classical Dictionary": "Numa ordered her to be stoned to death, but Tarquinius the Elder dug a large hole under the ground, where a bed was placed with some bread, wine, water and oil and a lighted lamp, and the guilty Vestal Virgin was stripped of her habit and forced to descend into the subterranean cave, which was immediately sealed up, and she was left to die of hunger".

1068 

Lorenzo Tiepolo

Auction is over for this lot. See the results

You may also like

Attributed to LORENZO TIEPOLO (Venice, 1736-Somosaguas, 1776). "Study for portrait of a maja. Pastel on vejurado paper. Measurements: 35,5 x 25,5 cm; 76,5 x 66,5 cm (frame). Lorenzo Tiepolo, son of the famous Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, distinguished himself within the powerful family current as a portraitist and accomplished pastelist. The portrait of the maja shown here can be compared to the collection of pastels preserved in the Spanish royal collections. All of them show popular types resolved with sensual Venetian ranges. They are idealized portraits, through which Tiepolo reinvents the human types to go beyond stereotypes through gestures and costumes. The eighteenth-century aristocracy valued the emulation and sublimation of the popular, as did Goya at the same time. The present painting could be a study of a fragment for a larger composition, in which the variegated atmosphere and the characteristic crossing of glances that Tiépolos used so much in his works (see, for example, "La mielera", Galería de las Colecciones Reales, Madrid). Over time, the figure of Lorenzo Tiepolo has been rediscovered, acquiring a personality of his own, beyond being an imitator of his father's figure. It is now known that he played an important role in the decoration of the ceiling of the Throne Room of the Royal Palace in Madrid (1762-64). His work as a portrait painter deserves to be highlighted, since already in his early works of his youth he reveals his ability to create works of delicate palette and barely visible drawing. The most obvious reference is that of Rosalba Carriera, whom Lorenzo was forced to meet. He was the youngest of Giambattista's ten children. In 1750 he traveled to Wurzburg with his father and his brother Giovanni Domenico, where he worked with them on the decorative fresco cycle of the lavish Wurzburger Residenz. In 1753 he returned to Venice, leaving a good memory in Germany despite his youth, as evidenced by his correspondence years later with Prince-Archbishop Adam Friederich von Seinsheim. On March 31, 1762, Giambattista and his two sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo left for Spain. They will arrive in Madrid on June 4. Lorenzo was not lacking in commissions: in 1763 he painted a series of pastel portraits of the Prince of Asturias and the Infante Don Gabriel. Later (1763-64) he will be busy with the decoration of a Chinese cabinet in the Royal Palace of Madrid. Later he will be in charge of painting the vault of the Cabinet of the Birds and other minor commissions in the same building.