Amorini in flight

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo was an extremely prolific draftsman and many of his drawings survive to this day. The collector and art historian Charles-Philippe, marquis de Chennevières-Pointel (1820-1899), described him as a ‘chatterbox of drawings, the most seductive and inexhaustible of chatterboxes’. During the last fifteen years of his life, after returning to Venice from Spain, Tiepolo began to produce drawings of the same subject in large series. The drawings in these groups are almost always signed and numbered.

Some series represent sacred themes, others secular ones, and among his most charming subjects are the many studies of angels and cherubs in flight. This drawing and the following lot are variations on this theme. There must have been more than a hundred in this series, as indicated by the numbers on the present drawings. All the drawings in this series are of about the same size (ottavo) and horizontal format. A group of 35 drawings of this subject came from an album dispersed at auction for Earl Beauchamp (Christie’s, London, 15 June 1965).

In these drawings winged putti are clustering together in the sky; because they do not bear any attributes, as was pointed out by Byam Shaw, it is difficult to determine whether they were conceived as celestial visions in a religious context or they were simply creatures of the air envisioned as part of a secular or mythological creation. None of the many known drawings of this subject appears to tell a specific story or to relate to a painted decoration. Giovanni Domenico’s purpose in creating such a large number of variations on the same subject remains unknown; these drawings might have been intended as gifts or as autonomous works to be sold on the art market.