Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In March 1746, officials at the church of the Carmini in Venice decided that the church's old processional mace was not only in poor repair but was also too unwieldy, requiring three porters to carry it in procession. In August of that year, Tiepolo offered to design a replacement, and on 12 December 1746 presented his "disegno del penello" (a pen drawing) -- almost certainly this sheet. The project did not, however, progress beyond this stage, and instead, in 1748, the old mace was restored.
This remarkable drawing, which, like a number of others in the exhibition, formerly belonged to Prince Alexis Orlof, depicts the Virgin and Child accompanied by an angel holding a scapular, the emblem of St. Simon Stock, a thirteenth-century general of the Carmelite order. The sheet may be a rare example of Giambattista Tiepolo's designs for metalwork, in this case perhaps a processional mace for the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, Venice, for which he had produced a series of paintings in the early 1740s, and of which he became a member in 1743. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"
Watermark: Bow with arrow.