18世纪意大利素描

A Selection from the Exhibition The Eighteenth Century in Italy Drawings from New York Collections, 111 O n January 31, 1971, the Metropolitan Museum will open a spectacular exhibition of Italian drawings of the eighteenth century that has been jointly organized with The Pierpont Morgan Library. Three hundred drawings taken from the incomparable resources of New York collections, public and private, will offer a remarkably comprehensive panorama of Italian draughtsmanship in a century rich in artistic invention and fantasy. The stars of the occasion will be Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his son Domenico, the view painter Francesco Guardi, and the architect-printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Venice thus has the place of honor, but other major Italian artistic centers of the time-Rome, Naples, Bologna, Genoa - will all be richly accounted for. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. The presentation of the drawings, in galleries decorated with furniture and sculpture of the time, will be supplemented by shows of Venetian oil sketches and of Italian eighteenth-century prints and books. J. B. The Meeting of Anthony and Cleopatra, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), Italian. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over a little black chalk, 16x6 x 11i2 inches. Rogers Fund, 37.165.10 Giambattista Tiepolo was the most brilliant and productive artist of eighteenth-century Venice, and his extraordinary virtuosity and original- ity are evident throughout his work as a painter and draughtsman, print- maker and decorator. The Meeting of Anthony and Cleopatra was the subject of three painted works by Giambattista dated in the 1740s: a fresco in the Great Hall of the Palazzo Labia in Venice, an oil sketch in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, and a painting at Arkhangelskoye near Moscow. The pose of the figures in the present drawing is closest to the oil sketch. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin www.jstor.org® a I11 SY Kbi ! 4I ;t t A N :r* `J r cc / -7C?I? eS r: ,?z /'I -i2 t . .-. K if I i;y m / --' . I - prllle =. I 4 t fI- I . M I . eK' ^-' - i 1 C? C c L ?? ?: ? ?i ? ? ? c--r? r ?J d I \ t * 1 I ,., -- ,- "- , I AV~C il A I.' I L I 1 I j I ?MLA I 1 , ,- . n't -I I , SI r) Icc .r --I ...3 ?' ?'7` ' r /" c ; r i .? ;t )'-? " A r I1 r' '- . I. li ii ,,il 9 1- //r. " ! . Y# - I 0 * S I r r I t The Stairway of the Giants, by Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), Italian. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over red chalk, 10% x 7Y6 inches. Rogers Fund, 37.165.85 The great courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, dominated by the Stairway of the Giants, was the point of departure for a great many of Guardi's painted and drawn capricci. Here he has recorded the principal architectural features of the staircase and courtyard, but has transformed Jacopo Sansovino's monumental statues of Mars and Neptune at the top of the stair into twisting draped figures in a rococo taste. Prison Interior, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Italian. Pen and brown ink, gray and brown wash, over black chalk, 7Y?6 x 91X6 inches. The Pierpont Morgan Library, Bequest of the late Junius S. Morgan and Gift of Henry S. Morgan, 1966.11:16 An early drawing by the Venetian-born Piranesi, this dramatic scheme foreshadows his famous series of etchings of prisons, the Invenzioni capric. di carceri, executed in 1745. The elaborate network of vaults and arches testifies to the artist's preoccupation with architecture. Although he was briefly active as an architect, most of his architectural drawings were extraordinary imaginary designs that had expression only on paper. Scene of Contemporary Life: At the Dressmaker's, by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), Italian. Pen and brown ink, gray-brown, gray, and ocher wash, over black chalk, 11Y6 x 16'6 inches. The Pierpont Morgan Library, Gift of the Fellows, 1967.22 In the 1790s Domenico Tiepolo executed a series of highly entertaining scenes of contemporary Venetian life, intended as ends in themselves rather than studies for pictures. Here, with good-natured humor, Domenico shows the dressmaker fitting a dress on a rather bewildered young girl, while the girl's mother and an assistant look on. Article Contents p. [248] [unnumbered] [unnumbered] [unnumbered] [unnumbered] Issue Table of Contents The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 29, No. 5 (Jan., 1971), pp. 195-248 Eighteenth-Century Italian Draughtsmen Twenty-Four Picturesque Ideas of the Flight into Egypt [pp. 195-203] Eighteenth-Century Italian Prints [pp. 203-225] Venetian Book Design in the Eighteenth Century [pp. 226-235] Grand Occasions [pp. 236-243] Venice as It Was, Is, and Must Be [pp. 244-247] The Eighteenth Century in Italy: Drawings from New York Collections, III [pp. 248] Back Matter