Head of man in turban

Giambattista Tiepolo's drawing depicts a bulky man's head in a turban, with a stand-up collar under his chin. According to George Knox, an English researcher on the Tiepolo family's work, it should be linked to the fresco The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra executed in 1745 in the salon of the Palazzo Labia in Venice, with the man painted to the right of the main scene, behind the portal. The sketch is done using black and white crayons on thick blue Venetian paper. The two most influential figures in the fresco are a pair of lovers - Cleopatra, the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt, and Mark Antony, a Roman commander and politician, one of the triumvirs. Their turbulent affair ended in their suicide after a series of political missteps and the failure of Antony's military campaigns. The drawing used in the painting of the fresco The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra belongs to the collection of 36 works created by the members of the Tiepolo family, eighteenth-century Venetian artists, now housed in the Cabinet of Graphic Arts of the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) in Szczecin. The history of the collection has been studied, among others, by the English scholar Georg Knox. He established that the Tiepolo drawings belonged to Giandomenico Tiepolo's disciple, Johann Dominic Bossi and then to his daughter, the wife of the secretary of the Duchy of Württemberg. In 1882, at an auction held at H.G. Gutekunst's antique shop in Stuttgart, the drawings were bought by a Szczecin lawyer, Johann Theodor Müller, who in the early 20th century donated the whole collection to the City Museum (Muzeum Miejskie) being established in Szczecin. After the war, the Tiepolos' sketches found themselves in the Soviet Union for a short time. They came to Poland in 1956 and returned to Szczecin in 1973 and 1984.

Ewa Gwiazdowska