Scene of Contemporary Life: The Acrobats

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

1727–1804 · Pen and dark brown ink, brush and brown wash, over traces of black chalk · Drawings and Prints

This amusing composition is one of a large group of finished independent drawings representing scenes of contemporary life that are certainly Domenico's most considerable achievement as a draughtsman. These genre scenes are all of the same large horizontal format, and the date 1791 appears on at least twenty of them. Two of the Met's acrobats, the actress holding a fan, and several of the spectators behind the barricade reappear in "Pulcinella e i saltimbanchi", one of Domenico's frescoes from the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo, now in the Ca' Rezzonico, Venice. As Byam Shaw stated in 1962: "The drawing though not dated [or signed], is almost certainly of 1791, the fresco probably of 1793. The pentimenti in the legs of the men turning somersaults seem to confirm that the drawing is earlier and was probably used for the painting."

Artist

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

Date

1727–1804

Medium

Pen and dark brown ink, brush and brown wash, over traces of black chalk

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1968