The Virgin Receiving the Prayers of Saint Dominic

The Dominican friars of the Gesuati church in Venice wanted a ceiling about their founder, Saint Dominic, and the rosary that, by their tradition, he had received from the Virgin. Tiepolo divided the vault into three large fields and worked them out first in small oil sketches, five in all, three of them for the central scene alone. This canvas, just over half a metre wide, is one of the five. It shows the Virgin in the clouds receiving the saint's prayers, the subject of one of the two end fields. A sketch for the field at the opposite end, the Glory of Saint Dominic, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sketches like these were working tools and were also shown to the friars before any plaster was laid. The Museum of Fine Arts acquired this one in 1976.