The Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra

This etching is from a group of sixteen made by Fragonard in Paris around 1763-64, based on black chalk drawings he had made in Italy a few years earlier for his friend and patron, the abbé de Saint-Non. Of the sixteen, ten were based on Venetian models, including this one after Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696-1770). To create the compositon, Fragonard merged excerpts from two adjacent frescoes by Tiepolo in the Palazzo Labia, Venice. From Tiepolo's work, he took the scene of the Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra, but replaced the architectural backdrop with clouds bearing the figural group of Pluto Abducting Persephone which, in the villa, appears on the ceiling above.

Credit: Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011