The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo · c. 1734

Medium

Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with black chalk and traces of charcoal, heightened with touches of white gouache, on ivory laid paper

Original size

40 × 24.7 cm (15 3/4 × 9 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Tiepolo's depiction of Saint Anthony's temptation crackles with the nervous energy that distinguishes his draughtsmanship from nearly every other eighteenth-century Venetian artist. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the supreme decorative painter of his age — a master of vast, light-drenched ceilings — but his works on paper reveal a more intimate and spontaneous side of his genius. This composition, built from pen and brown ink over black chalk with luminous touches of white gouache, demonstrates how fluidly he translated religious drama into expressive line and wash. The figures have an almost theatrical urgency, which is entirely characteristic: Tiepolo approached sacred subjects with the same dramatic invention he brought to his grand fresco commissions. The drawing is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world's foremost repositories of Tiepolo's works on paper, a testament to how seriously scholars have long regarded his graphic output alongside his celebrated paintings. Because the original is a work on paper, our hand-painted oil reproduction interprets its tonal richness and gestural confidence in the painted medium, preserving the sense of light and movement that gives the composition its remarkable vitality while translating it into a format made to last for generations.