Two Heads of Angels

Two Heads of Angels, painted around 1768 and now in the Courtauld Gallery, is a late fragment from Tiepolo's final years in Madrid, when he was working on ceiling paintings for the churches of San Pascual Bailon and San Antonio de la Florida. These tender studies of angelic children — soft-featured, luminous, and suffused with a gentle warmth — represent one of the most intimate categories of Tiepolo's output: the fragment or study preserved as an independent work. Such angel-head fragments became particularly sought after by collectors in the nineteenth century, when Tiepolo's reputation was being reassessed after the Romantic period's preference for more emotional styles. The Courtauld Gallery holds two significant Tiepolo works — this and the Saint Aloysius Gonzaga — and their presence in London reflects the sustained British appreciation for Venetian eighteenth-century painting that extended from the Grand Tour through Victorian collecting. In his final years Tiepolo was embattled by the Neoclassical faction at the Spanish court, and these angel studies suggest a return to the devotional tenderness of his earliest commissions.

The angel heads are rendered with luminous warmth and rapid, confident brushwork. Tiepolo's ability to create convincing three-dimensional form through minimal but precisely placed strokes is evident in these small-scale details.