Boy's head

The drawing by Giambattista Tiepolo depicts a boy's head with delicate facial features, surrounded by a flowing mane of light curls reaching up to a creche - an undulating collar of thin white fabric, worn following the Spanish fashion in the 16th century. It is a sketch of the head of the page carrying a cushion with the royal crown in the scene of The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra. The page is shown on the right side of the fresco, a wall painting from 1645 decorating the salon of the Palazzo Labia in Venice. Cleopatra, the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt (51-30 BC), met Mark Antony - a Roman leader and politician, one of the three co-rulers of ancient Rome, the so-called triumvir, during his travels in the eastern state provinces. She became his mistress. After Antony's unsuccessful war campaigns and political moves, which she financed, they committed suicide.The drawing was made with black and white crayons on blue paper produced in Venice. It belongs to a group of 36 works by the Tiepolo family, the most extensive Polish collection of drawings created by this distinguished and famous 18th-century Venetian artistic family at the National Museum in Szczecin.

Ewa Gwiazdowska