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Overview
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 Vari Capricci, 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
These prints were followed by a more disturbing second series of 23 etchings, the Scherzi di fantasia (Sketches of fantasy), which was not widely circulated until after Tiepolo’s death, when they were published by his son Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, himself an outstanding printmaker and represented in Te Papa by his Martyrdom of St Agatha (1965-0001-17). Giovanni Battista'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 (caprice). In 1774 the French art connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote of Tiepolo’s ‘rich and fertile genius … it shines above all in his prints’.
In this scene one of sinister witchcraft is taking place. The aged, central bearded figure, almost certainly a magician from his appearance, is pointing out to two much younger men (apprentices?) a decapitated head of a luckless sacrificial or condemned figure that is about to burn on a pyre. A crowd of onlookers are in the background. Two evil creatures flank the group, an owl to the left of the group, and a monstrously fat cat on a tomb-like structure.
See: https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/807843/vari-capricci
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art July 2017