Abraham and the three Angels

Three travellers have stopped at Abraham's tent to tell him that Sarah, who is old, will have a son. He has dropped to his knees. The Prado dates the canvas to around 1770, the last months of Tiepolo's life, and its catalogue notes something odd in it: the manner has picked up things that look as though they came from Anton Raphael Mengs, the younger painter who was his rival at the court in Madrid. The commanding central angel, in particular, is close kin to the angel holding up the Eucharist in Tiepolo's altarpiece for Aranjuez. Where the picture was painted to hang, nobody knows. It surfaced only when the Sainz family gave it to the Prado in 1924, and it was not published until 1942. In the lower right corner a few objects are set out together, and they make a small still life of their own.