Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Watermark: letters "BF" below six-pointed star.
This magnificent sheet was formerly part of a group of large drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo pasted onto the pages of an album that belonged to Prince Alexis Orlof; the drawings were dispersed at auction in 1920. The majority were conceived as independent works of art rather than as studies for paintings. One of the artist's many drawn interpretations of the theme of the Annunciation, this sheet may be dated, on the basis of style, to the mid-1730s. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"