Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Watermark: two triangles with circle below.
This sheet is one of more than a dozen known copies by Giambattista Tiepolo and his workshop after Alessandro Vittorio's sculpted bust of the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Palma il Giovane. There was a long tradition in Italy of making drawings after sculpture, but this example is remarkable for the extent to which the artist enlivened his model. It is notoriously difficult to distinguish among the hands responsible for the chalk drawings created in the Tiepolo workshop, but according to James Byam Shaw, this sheet is "a touchstone of style and quality for the distinction of Giambattista's hand from that of his sons."