expression of the artist than the artifice of the final composition: "Why does a beautiful sketch please us more than a beautiful pictured It is because there is more life and fewer forms. As one introduces these forms, the life of it 9 disappears/' Claude-Henri Watelet's entry on sketches in the Encyclopedic (177$) extended this idea even further, seeing in the quick preparation of an oil sketch the mark of genius and individual personality: "It is this rapidity of execution which is the essential principle of the fire one sees ablaze in the esquisses, the sketches, of painters of genius: there one recognizes the mark left by the movement of their soul, one calculates its force and fruitful- 310 ness/ This increasingly modern critical attitude toward the painted sketch extended to Italy, and the 1731 remarks to Count Giacomo Tassi by Sebas- tiano Ricci — a painter who particularly influenced the young Tiepolo — have special significance. Ricci argued that the sketch was the primary work cc of art, with the final composition merely a reflection of the original: Your Excellency should know that there is a difference between a bozzetto, which bears the name ofmodello, and what you will be receiving. Because that is not a mere modello, but a completed picture. . . . You should also know that this small one is the original and the altarpiece is the copy/'11 It was from this tra- dition— surely instilled by Tiepolo's early training with Gregorio Lazzarini as well as close observation of artists such as Ricci and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta—that Tiepolo emerged. Today we appreciate oil sketches as spontaneous expressions of artistic inspiration, but these works held a complex position in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often functioning simultaneously as artistic tools as well as expressive, collectible works of art. The word sketch in English retains this double meaning, on the one hand describing the work's purpose as a preparatory study while on the other referring to a loose and rapid manner of execution. This multivalency also appears in the early terminology de- scribing oil sketches. A vocabulary for these paintings only came into being slowly, with the first terms emerging from the language of drawing, for these paintings were understood initially as a subset of drawing instead of paint- 12 ing. For example, in one of the few references Rubens made to his own 13 sketches, he used the expression "dissegno colorito" derived from disegno ad olio, an Italian term for oil sketch used well into the seventeenth century. Rubens's term thus associates the oil sketch with disegno, or drawing. In Italian artistic theory, disegno refers to the intellectual component of making art, while the adjective colorito connects not only to the manual and corporeal aspects of art but also to the senses, indicating that Rubens considered oil sketches a tool to sharpen the intellectual content of a work as well as a concrete way to 14 establish color relationships. We nowadays distinguish between a bozzetto, or an initial idea laid out in paint, and a modello, a more elaborate, finished composition used by the artist in developing a larger work, but these terms only began to gain consis- tent use in the eighteenth century The Italian bozzetto derives from the verbs abbozzare and sbozzare, words used to describe roughing out a design in paint on a canvas. In actual practice, however, the words were used more loosely referring to both underpaint and independent preparatory works. In 1681, 14