Head of a Young Man in Three-Quarter View

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

While Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is most famous for the exceptional spontaneity of his quick sketches in pen and ink with wash, he was also a brilliant deliberate draftsman, with subtle powers of description, as demonstrated by his rarer chalk drawings. His life studies, in particular, seem to convey the psychological depths of his models through their animated physical gestures and closely observed, naturalistic details. This fresh, beautifully preserved study of a young boy's head is an example of the artist's mature work in a medium he began using in 1740-43: red chalk on blue-gray paper. It is exactly comparable in technique, style, and scale to two securely autograph sheets (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin) from the mid-1750s, which were preparatory for his famous altarpiece compositions of the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art