  About the Artwork
  
  
  Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was considered the preeminent Italian painter of the eighteenth century because of his brilliant palette of orange, lavender, and bright apple greens and his astonishing ability to work across a huge range of formats, from small-scale cabinet paintings to vast decorative frescos. This painting depicts a woman tuning a mandolin. Her bared breast, bejeweled hair, and languid gaze suggest that she is a courtesan, while her activity implies that she is preparing to play a love song. It is linked to two other works by Tiepolo showing half-length figures of women in masquerade attire, possibly forming a pictorial series. One of these is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the other in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Trained in Venice, Tiepolo attained a reputation for brilliant decorative ensembles and was sought after by foreign courts; some of his greatest achievements are now in Germany and Spain.
  
  
  Title
  Woman with a Mandolin
  
  
  Artwork Date
  ca. between 1755 and 1760
  
  Artist
  Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1696-1770
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  Italian
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 36 7/8 × 29 1/2 inches (93.7 × 75 cm)
  Framed: 45 5/8 × 39 5/8 × 4 inches (115.9 × 100.6 × 10.2 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  European Painting
  
  
  Credit
  Gift of Anne and Henry Ford II
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  57.180
  
  
  Copyright
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