The Crowning of Merit

This is a working sketch for a ceiling, 43 centimetres wide, painted sometime between about 1755 and 1760, and the museum does not name the ceiling it was made for. Look at the edges. Tiepolo laid the composition out as an oval inside the rectangle of the canvas, which gives the shape of the frame in the plaster it was meant to fill. Reading the allegory has always taken some guesswork. When the sketch came up at auction in Paris in 1889, the catalogue called it an allegorical composition and described the scene as the crowning of a poet. The title it carries now gives the crown to Merit. It reached Boston through two collectors. Charles Fairfax Murray, an English painter who also dealt in old masters, sold it in 1904 to Denman Waldo Ross, who taught the theory of design at Harvard, and Ross gave it to the museum two years later.