FIGURE $.1 Giambattista Tiepolo. Saint Rocco, 1730-35. FIGURE 5.2 Giambattista Tiepolo. Saint Rocco, 1730-3$. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. Philadelphia Museum Oil on canvas. Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, of Art, John G. Johnson Collection. gift of Sir J. S. Heron 1912, 1152. Photo: Ray Woodbury for AGNSW. churches, and confraternities were dedicated to landscape visible through the window at right. the saint throughout Europe. Exhausted and haggard, Rocco—now bearded, In the Courtauld canvas, a beardless Saint modestly clad, and significantly older—rests Rocco, with downturned head and closed eyes, his head and shoulder against the wall, barely sits facing the viewer. Tiepolo pulls the young able to open his eyes, prop up his staff, and clasp man to the front of the picture plane; the simple a piece of bread. Here Tiepolo reverses the gray wall, stone ledge, and dark shadows accen- relationship of light and dark, brightly lighting tuate the saint's monumental profile. Despite the composition from the right and shrouding his patched cloak, unkempt hair, and shabby the saint's face and torso in darkness. The boot, Saint Rocco bears clear traces of his cast- striking shadow formed on the wall increases his off wealth. Tiepolo paints his garments with distance from the viewer, locking the saint into radiant luxuriousness: a brightly lit apricot his enervated position. mantle covers a long, shimmering, vermilion In 1950, Antonio Morassi first identified a robe. The walking stick, loaf of bread, and scal- unified group of images by Tiepolo, all of similar loped shell pinned to his cloak all indicate he scale, depicting the same model in various is a pilgrim, but the saint rests from his peregri- 1 guises as Saint Rocco (figs. S.i-i). Subsequent nations, pulling back his robe to reveal a plague authors expanded this group of paintings, sore, highlighted with transparent red glaze, with Filippo Pedrocco recently counting twenty- tenderly observed by the dog, whose head and one as autograph.2 All scholars agree that the paw poke into the image at bottom right. works connect to the Confraternita di San Rocco By contrast, the Huntington's Saint Rocco in Venice. The church of San Rocco was long depicts an urban outcast instead of a pilgrim, 3 the site of exhibitions in the city and Tiepolo slumped before a stuccoed wall, a distant himself had a lengthy relationship with the 42