(Venice 1727–1804)
Paris holding an apple,
oil on canvas, 35.5 x 26 cm, framed

Provenance:
Paul Delaroff Collection, St. Petersburg (as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo);
D. Heinemann Collection, Munich;
with Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna, 1963/64;
Private collection, Austria

Literature:
E. Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo. Ihr Leben und ihre Werke, Hamburg 1910, p. 208, no. 431 (as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo);
A. Morassi, A complete catalogue of the paintings of G. B. Tiepolo, London 1962, p.15 and p. 31 (as by Domenico, a fragment)

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution after examination of the present painting in the original.

The present painting was published in 1910 by Eduard Sack, in his monograph on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, as an autograph work (see literature). Antonio Morassi revised this opinion and gave this picture to Giovanni Battista’s elder son, Giovanni Domenico, whose style of painting developed out of that of his father. Giovanni Domenico’s individual manner is clearly recognisable by the expressive, though somewhat nervous, contours and a different sense of space – characteristics we find in the present painting.

Morassi proposed that the picture might be a fragment. The young protagonist holds what looks like an apple in his outstretched right hand and it would appear that the Trojan prince Paris is represented, but the three Olympian goddesses whom he is addressing are missing. The subject of the Judgment of Paris, which was very popular from the Renaissance right up to the Venetian settecento, does not occur otherwise, in either Giovanni Domenico’s oeuvre, or in that of his father. Aikema has suggested dating the present painting to Giovanni Domenico’s early period, before 1762, when he left for Spain with his father and his younger brother, Lorenzo.