Agatha's raised knee—features of the original oil sketch, abandoned in the Padua altarpiece — suggest that Tiepolo retained the sketch and consulted this composition before embarking on the second version twenty years later. The intense facial expression, worked out coloristi- cally in the Courtauld sketch, is also documented 4 in a series of drawings, including two in Berlin and one at the Getty (fig. 6.4). & NOTES 1 Based on documents indicating that a delegation from Padua went to Venice to sign the contract for the altar- piece with Tiepolo in 1734, Antoine Seilern (1971!), 20-21) hypothesized that the artist must have presented the sketch to his patrons at that time. 2 Rodolfo Pallucchini (Piovene and Pallucchini 1968, 101) considered the second sketch a copy after the final composition, but it differs considerably from the altar- piece and surely records an intermediate stage, even if it is a studio work. Antoine Seilern (i97ib, 20-21) noted that the motifs of the stone platform, the executioner, and the halberds also appear in a number FIGURE 6.4 Giambattista Tiepolo. Head of a Man Looking of related works by Tiepolo from the same period, Up, ca. 1755. Red and white chalk on blue paper. Los Angeles, including the 1733 Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002.31. Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo and a drawing of The Martyrdom of Saints Domnius, Eusebia, and Domninus in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (to which I would add the Metropolitan's Martyrdom of Saints Gervase and Protase), suggesting that a variety of drawings and modelli were circulating around the studio in this period. 3 On this point, see especially Christiansen 1999. 4 Knox 1980, 1:212-14. 48