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Your galleryDemocritus and Heraclitus Laughing and Sorrowing over the Follies of the World
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Find the globe and the dividers measuring it, then look up into the bare tree for the owls perched in its branches.
The ancient philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus were paired as opposites: one laughed at the follies of the world and the other wept over them, and Heraclitus was traditionally shown beside a globe. Tiepolo gathers them around a globe, with dividers, books, skulls and a snake at their feet and owls in the tree above. Old men in fanciful dress like these also people the fantasy etchings he made in the 1730s and 1740s.
Black chalk, with pen and black and brown ink and brush and various brown washes, heightened with white gouache, on cream laid paper · 40.5 × 27.2 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Rococo
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Democritus and Heraclitus Laughing and Sorrowing over the Follies of the World
- Artist
- Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Italian, 1696–1770
- Date
- 1742/43
- Medium
- Black chalk, with pen and black and brown ink and brush and various brown washes, heightened with white gouache, on cream laid paper
- Dimensions
- 40.5 × 27.2 cm (16 × 10 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.