This presentation was born from the encounter between the extraordinary heritage of the Drawings and Prints Department of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the foresight of Save Venice, which brings together a selection of 64 restored drawings, part of three albums by as many masters of the Venetian eighteenth century: Giambattista Tiepolo, Pietro Longhi and Francesco Guardi.

They are exceptional nucleuses both in number and in the quality of the sheets, already assembled by their authors and remained intact after centuries. Not finished drawings, independent works intended for collectors, but studies and sketches functional to the work of the artists themselves and their workshops, traced over the years, precious testimonies of the art and creative processes of the three artists but also of the life and physiognomy of the city and its inhabitants.

Giambattista Tiepolo's album was donated to the Correr Museum in 1885 by the Trieste painter Giuseppe Lorenzo Gatteri, who bought it in his youth, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, not for collecting but as a support for his own activity as an artist . The two funds from the workshop of Pietro Longhi and Francesco Guardi were instead purchased by Teodoro Correr from the sons of the same artists not long before his death in 1830, when his bequest to the city formed the first nucleus of the Civic Museums.

Giambattista Tiepolo (Venice 1696 - Madrid 1770), whose 250th anniversary of death occurs in 2020, made the album in the period of maturity. His hand is sometimes accompanied by that of his son Giandomenico, who continued to use the notebook even after his father's death, for other preparatory drawings. It is one of the most important existing nuclei on blue paper by Tiepolo, a prolific draftsman who has explored every genre and technique, which here mainly represents the human body.

For Pietro Longhi (Venice 1701 - 1785) the privileged subjects are predictably the interiors of the houses of the patricians and the daily life of the Venetians, of which he was an attentive observer and which he recorded live. In this which is his most important and consistent graphic corpus we find alongside the drawings, quickly executed, with charcoal and white chalk, of interiors and people, notes on the objects of the scene, draperies, bottles, chairs, elements that would later find their place in his paintings.