Scene of Contemporary Life: The Acrobats

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This amusing composition is one of a large group of finished independent drawings representing scenes of contemporary life that are certainly Domenico's most considerable achievement as a draughtsman. These genre scenes are all of the same large horizontal format, and the date 1791 appears on at least twenty of them. Two of the Met's acrobats, the actress holding a fan, and several of the spectators behind the barricade reappear in "Pulcinella e i saltimbanchi", one of Domenico's frescoes from the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo, now in the Ca' Rezzonico, Venice. As Byam Shaw stated in 1962: "The drawing though not dated [or signed], is almost certainly of 1791, the fresco probably of 1793. The pentimenti in the legs of the men turning somersaults seem to confirm that the drawing is earlier and was probably used for the painting."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art