Centaur on his Back Teasing a Female Faun

c. 1775.

196 x 275 mm.
(7 7/10 x 10 4/5 inches).

Pen and brown ink, with brown and grey wash over black chalk. Pentimenti in pencil. Signed in brown ink lower right: "Domo Tiepolo" and in the top left corner appears the number 58 but the 5 has been partly cut off.

Provenance:
Formerly in the Italico Brass Collection, Venice.

GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO
Venice 1727 ~ 1804 Venice

J Cailleux, who divided 100 delightful drawings by Domenico of Centaurs, Fauns and Satyrs into categories, dates the series between 1753 and 1762.¹ According to Cailleux our drawing belongs to the group dealing with seduction or rape of a female faun by a centaur. There are seventeencompositions which depict the so-called "ballet" of the rape and they are numbered 49 to 65. Our drawing appears to be no. 58, (illustrated as fig 41, cat no 44 – C&F b5) but the five has been badly cut. J Byam Shaw, when cataloguing the drawings from this series in the Metropolitan Museum, gave the whole group a date of about twenty years later, 1761-1791.²

1. J Cailleux, "Centaurs, Fauns, Female Fauns and Satyrs among the drawings of Domenico Tiepolo", Burlington Magazine, CXVI, June 1974, advertisement supplement no 31 pp II-XXVIII.

2. J Byam Shaw and G Knox, 'Italian Eighteenth Century Drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection,' New York 1987, pp 170-174.