Watermark: Fir tree over shield with flowers. Watermark, beta radiograph. Fir tree, flowers. 253750wm_IV_95a_WM_transmIR.tiff
One of a series of 108 drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo from an album bearing the title, "TIEPOLO DESSINS ORIGINAUX", inscribed by Edward Cheney, "E.C. Venice 1852 May 31 / bought from the Conte Corniani Algarotti".
In 1745 Giambattista Tiepolo painted a fresco of the miraculous transport of the house in which the Virgin Mary had been born and raised from its original location in Palestine to the Italian city of Loreto. In the lost fresco--which decorated the ceiling of the church of Santa Maria di Nazareth (also known as the Scalzi), Venice--a host of angels escorts the Holy Family and their humble residence through the sky. This drawing is one of numerous similarly scratchy, schematically rendered quick sketches associated with the same important commission. --Exhibition Label, from "Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings"
Algarotti, Francesco, conte, 1712-1764, former owner.
Algarotti, Bonomo, 1706-1776, former owner.
Algarotti-Corniani, Maria, former owner.
Corniani, Bernardino conte, former owner.
Cheney, Edward, 1803-1884, former owner.
Cure, Alfred Capel, former owner.
Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849-1919, former owner.
Morgan, J. Pierpont (John Pierpont), 1837-1913, former owner.
Morgan, J. P. (John Pierpont), 1867-1943, former owner.
George Knox, "G. B. Tiepolo and the ceiling of the Scalzi," Burlington Magazine, CX, 1968, p. 397.
Cambridge, MA., Fogg Art Museum, Tiepolo, A Bicentenary Exhibition, 1770-1970, 1970, under no. 39.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Drawings from New York Collections III, The 18th Century in Italy, 1971, pp. 56-67, no. 117, repr.