Giambattista Tiepolo, i disegni con alberi della collezione Sartorio: datazioni, fonti visive e confronti

The eleven drawings with trees at the Civico Museo Villa Sartorio, etched in pen and then watercoloured, date back to the second half of the 1730s; they represent a rare group of sheets without figures among Giambattista’s artworks. In both his pictorial and graphic production the construction of the scenes is often balanced on that kind of elements. Veronese, Tiziano, Salvator Rosa and Alessandro Magnasco influenced the Venetian painter to have a more classical, sometimes manneristic or imaginary vision of nature. This article includes some examples of what could be considered as his visual sources and it focuses on the collaboration with Giuliano Giampiccoli regarding some of the etchings in which he added the “macchiette”. These illustrations reproduce some landscapes by Marco Ricci, who was the artist from whom Tiepolo’s tree models arise. The after-effects on other contemporary painters are also mentioned, including a “vedutista d’eccezione” like Francesco Guardi, who seems to have known the same series of etchings engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi and that were printed in a later edition by Joseph Wagner.