Giambattista Tiepolo, Philosopher Standing with a Book, Lithograph, 1785

Philosopher standing with a book is an etching realized by Giambattista Tiepolo, in 1785. Sheet 32 x 23 cm. Good impressions on paper, with wide margins. Reference: De Vesme, 3/10; Rizzi 29/38. Succi 41/50. It belongs to the edition of "Varii Capriccj" dedicated to Girolamo Manfrin. This is the only edition which was issued as a stand-alone publication. Following Rutgers, the realization of the series was realized between 1733 and 1735. One of the most celebrated painters of eighteenth-century in Italy, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) began making prints with his first collection of ten etchings, known as the Varj Capriccj: a very personal response to the production by Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione . The prints don't have any straightforward or overt meanings, surely several prints evoke the ancient or Arcadian world, with classical urns, figures alongside tombstones, and fragments of obelisks; in one plate, the figure of Death was reading a book, faced by a group of the living. Tiepolo’s Vari Capricci received with great acclaim among collectors and connoisseurs, thanks to their technical virtuosity and to their enigmatic meanings, a mark of his brilliance and a successful and personal declension of the “capriccio”. In 1774 Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote about Tiepolo: “ Rich and fertile genius … it shines above all in his prints ’'.