Giovanni Domenico TIEPOLO

The present sheet served as a model for a larger and more expansive drawing of the same subject by Domenico Tiepolo, today in the collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen. The Rouen sheet was part of a distinctive group of around three hundred and twenty highly finished drawings, known as the ‘Large Biblical Series’, executed by Domenico over a period of several years between the 1770s and the 1790s. The pen and wash drawings of the ‘Large Biblical Series’ depict subjects taken mainly from the New Testament, as well as from fragmentary gospels and the Apocrypha. 

The subject of this drawing appears to represent the Feast of the Holy Sacrament as told in Jacobus de Voragine’s 13th century text known as the Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend): ‘The blessed Son of God would make us partners unto his divinity and godhead, and therefore took our nature to the end that making himself man, he would make men as gods. And all that he took of us, he gave all again to us for our salvation. He gave his proper body an offering unto God the Father on the altar of the cross, for our reconciliation, and shed his blood in price and washing our sins, to the end that we might be redeemed from the miserable servitude wherein we were, and that we should be also clean and cleansed of our sins.’

The Tiepolo scholar George Knox’s account of the subject of the Rouen drawing applies equally well to the present sheet: ‘In a stunningly complex visual exegesis on the Eucharist, Domenico shows Jesus offering the cup and wafer to God as he kneels upon the instruments of his Passion. Floating on a celestial cloud over an altar…this extraordinary apparition is blessed by the Holy Ghost…A crucifix placed over an altar is transformed into a vision of the Trinity supported on clouds, with Jesus kneeling before the Almighty, bearing the chalice and wafer of the Sacrament, wearing the crown of thorns, with the scourge of the flagellation by his side.’