Blindfolded Cupid, armed, with winged putti and doves

The present and the following lot belong to a series of lively drawings of similar subjects, showing Cupid with putti tumbling in the clouds and sometimes accompanied by doves. James Byam Shaw, who compared the virtuosity of these drawings to that of 'a pianist improvising on his instrument', dated the series to after 1770, after Domenico's return from Spain (J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, no. 125). The code inscribed on the verso of the sheets links them to the the greates collection of Tieplo drawings ever assembled, that of Giovanni Domenico Bossi.