Punchinello Collapses on the Road

Punchinello Collapses on the Road — Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. c. 1791.

Medium: Pen and brown ink and brush and brown washes, over traces of charcoal, on off-white laid paper, with framing lines in pen and brown ink. Dimensions: 36 × 47.5 cm (14 3/16 × 18 3/4 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

Between 1797 and his death in 1804, Domenico Tiepolo created 104 inventive wash drawings for what he called Divertimenti per li ragazzi (diversions for children). This series described the life, from birth to death, of the tragicomic commedia dell’arte figure Punchinello (identified by his conical hat and beaked mask), in a loosely structured tale of an everyman. In Punchinello Collapses on the Road, we see the protagonist, surrounded by eleven of his companions and three lamenting women, in the final days before his death. While Punchinello is indeed a kind of everyman, Tiepolo also made references throughout the series to the life of Christ. This drawing calls to mind one of Christ’s falls as he carried the cross.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.