Nothing is known of the history of this album prior to late 1934, when it was studied by Giuseppe Fiocco and Rodolfo Pallucchini at the Guiraud Frères Antique Bookshop in Rue de Téhéran, Paris. Pallucchini would comment that the sheets of drawings were “fine and delightful, something between Tiepolo and Ricci […] The volume is of great interest to Venice: the drawings would otherwise be dispersed […] as separate sheets […]. I have seen and studied the drawings; and I think that it is one’s duty to guarantee this collection for Venice.” It was due to this indication – and to Vittorio Cini’s patronage of the arts – that the precious album was acquired by the Museo Correr in 1935. It is made up of 28 sheets, all of the same size, with the drawings similar in style and technique. All of them are ‘finished drawings’, being worked out first in pencil and then completed in brown, sepia or sanguine ink; there is also shading in watercolour and some touches of white lead. Each religious in theme, the drawings do not however compose a single narrative: four sheets are dedicated to episodes from the Old Testament, thirteen to episodes from the Life of Christ and eleven to the lives of various saints. This leads one to assume that the artist may have intended the works as a way of ‘presenting’ himself to a possible client, as a demonstration of what he could do in each particular field. The original 18th century binding – coarse-grained leather with rich rococo-style gilding – was lost in 1935, when the drawings were put on display in one of the rooms of the museum. Nowadays most critics agree that these exquisite and finely-worked drawings were produced by Fontebasso in the middle of the eighteenth century, when his work was already fully rococo in inspiration. Look, for example, at the playful putti, or the numerous large angels and bearded Orientals (two features so often to be found in the work of Tiepolo).