Lot 1068 Dα

This painting is a remarkable and unusual product of the Tiepolo workshop, which has been the subject of intense art historical research - especially by George Knox and Bernard Aikema. Knox, who repeatedly devoted himself to Venetian painting from his dissertation on, wrote: "This painting must be identified as an important addition to the work of the young Lorenzo, to be dated to the mid 1750s." Bernard Aikema, on the other hand, describes it as a workshop work in which the three central figures were painted by Giovanni Battista himself. He refers to drawings by Giovanni Battista, which he identifies as studies for this composition. The study of a standing man with a cape and flat hat in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (inv. No. D182433.1885), which we recognise on the left of our picture, is particularly convincing. However, drawings by Lorenzo Tiepolo can also be linked to this painting, including a portrait of Palma Giovane from the collection of the British Museum in London after a bust by Alessandro Vittoria. It depicts the standing man to the right of the Vestal Virgin.
Lorenzo Tiepolo, born in Venice in 1736, was one of Giovanni Battista's sons and the younger brother of Domenico. He worked in his father's workshop, accompanying him to Würzburg in 1750 and to Madrid in 1762. After his father's death, he remained in the Spanish capital where he died in 1776.
The subject of the painting refers to the punishment of the unchaste vestal virgins according to Plutarch, which the English lexicographer John Lemprière (1765-1824) describes in detail in his "Classical Dictionary": "Numa ordered her to be stoned to death, but Tarquinius the Elder dug a large hole under the ground, where a bed was placed with some bread, wine, water and oil and a lighted lamp, and the guilty Vestal Virgin was stripped of her habit and forced to descend into the subterranean cave, which was immediately sealed up, and she was left to die of hunger".