Watermark: circle with indecipherable letters inside, surmounted by trefoil, centered on chain line.
As demonstrated by William Barcham and Anthony Panzera (see "Two Drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo for an Unidentified Ceiling," Master Drawings 53.3 (2015): 343-64), this drawing was likely a collaboration with Gerolamo Mengozzi Colonna (1688-1774) and it and the related sheet in the Museo Horne, Florence, were probably early ideas for a ceiling in Palazzo Casati, Milan, ca. 1729-31. The Horne drawing was surely an earlier sketch, and in the more finished Morgan drawing, Tiepolo presumably copied a (now lost) perspective drawing of the architectural setting by Megozzi Colonna, thus combining his figures and Mengozzi's illusionistic quadratura in a seamless whole.
Fame, with her trumpet, escorts Hercules into the presence of an allegorical figure thought to represent Strength or Fortitude. Probably datable to the 1730s, this drawing is as unusual as it is impressive, since it is the only known sheet by the artist to combine a fully developed figural composition with the complex, fictive architectural setting that would have surrounded it were it painted on the ceiling of a Venetian palace. The architectural surround must have been designed by a specialist--a quadraturista--but the drawing, perhaps made for presentation to a patron, seems to be entirely the work of Giambattista. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"
Numbered on verso, in pen and brown ink, "660-661".
Helbing, Hugo, former owner.
Fauchier-Magnan, Adrien, former owner.
Ryskamp, Charles, ed. Sixteenth Report to the Fellows of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1969-1971. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1973, p. 122.
Aikema, Bernard. Tiepolo and His Circle : Drawings in American Collections. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Art Museum ; New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1996, no. 35, repr.