Standing philosopher and two other figures, from the series Vari Capricci (Various caprices)

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was one of the most celebrated painters of eighteenth-century Italy. He began making prints in the 1730s, and his first set of ten etchings, known as the <em>Vari Capricci</em>, are a personal response to the prints and drawings of Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione that he had been able to study in the collections of Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder and Zaccaria Sagredo. These prints have no straightforward or overt meanings, though they generally show groups of figures at rest or in contemplation: soldiers and young boys in pastoral landscapes, a horse and rider with a groom, women and children with goats and other animals. Several prints evoke the ancient or Arcadian world, with figures set alongside tombstones, classical urns and fragments of obelisks. In this etching, a philosopher figure holds a huge book, probably theological, and beside him is a funerary urn. He looks away - towards what and where?  To his left, a completely unrelated pair of men, one an armoured soldier are engaged in deep conversation, the further figure expressing concern and perhaps protection to the soldier - whose expression we crucially don't see. A large standard lies beside him - what's it all about? Art historians can't even agree on a definitive title for this beautiful but enigmatic print.

From about 1742 Zanetti began including the <em>Vari Capricci </em>in his own volume of woodcuts, the <em>Raccolta di Varie Stampe</em>, writing to the Prince of Lichtenstein in 1751 that he had added prints by Tiepolo, ‘being of a most spirited and piquant taste and worthy of the highest esteem’.These prints were followed by a second series of 23 etchings, the <em>Scherzi di fantasia</em>, which was not widely circulated until after Tiepolo’s death. Tiepolo’s etchings received great acclaim among collectors and connoisseurs, their enigmatic meanings considered a mark of his brilliance and a successful rendering of the term capriccio. In 1774 the French art connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote of Tiepolo’s ‘rich and fertile genius … it shines above all in his prints’.

See: https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/807843/vari-capricci

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    July 2017