Later life of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In the decade from 1740 to 1750, Tiepolo created works based on secular themes in which he experimented with reproducing the great luminosity that was rediscovered in Venetian painting from 1730 by Piazzetta, Canaletto, and Guardi. During this time he became a close friend of Count Algarotti, an important personality in the international cultural life of the time. Tiepolo’s general education had been unpretentious and provincial, but his meeting with Algarotti drew him closer to the classical taste of the time. Nevertheless, the world he depicted in his works of the period on the theme of the tales of Cleopatra (The Banquet of Cleopatra [1744], two canvases [1747], in Arkhangelskoye, near Moscow, and the fresco complex at the Palazzo Labia in Venice [shortly before 1750]) is a fanciful image of antiquity; formally, this image is derived from the Venetian Renaissance master Paolo Veronese and parallels the melodramas on classical themes that were popular in the 18th century.

An invitation to decorate some of the rooms of the Residenz in Würzburg came to Tiepolo at one of the happiest moments of his career, in the full maturity of his artistic genius, and he went there in 1750 with his two sons, 23-year-old Giovanni Domenico and 14-year-old Lorenzo. They painted a cycle of frescoes that worked in marvellous accord with the style of Balthasar Neumann, the architect.

The ceiling of the Kaisersaal, with its Wedding Allegory, is the most boldly luminous work of Tiepolo’s career. The wall frescoes narrate events of the Middle Ages with a supreme naturalness and a total indifference to history. The Olympus, an assemblage of mythological and allegorical representations on the enormous ceiling of the main staircase, has been said to symbolize and exalt the humanistic aspirations of the 18th century. The rhythmic grandeur of these decorative sequences is also reflected in the solemn Adoration of the Magi (1753). (The influence of Rubens has been seen in these works, and it is possible that Tiepolo’s stay in Germany did, indeed, give him the opportunity to become acquainted with artists such as Rubens and Rembrandt, neither of whom was well represented in Venetian collections.) Almost in direct contrast to the grandeur of this official production, the artist pursued an almost romantic, poetic theme, portraying episodes taken from the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso in four magnificent canvases depicting the story of Rinaldo and Armida, now in the Art Institute of Chicago. In their new treatment of landscape and their inclination toward lyric warmth, these canvases are direct precursors of his decoration for Villa Valmarana, near Vicenza (1757), in which the personality of his son Giovanni Domenico asserted itself in exotic rural scenes of carnival season. For the first time since his earliest attempts in 1748–49, Giovanni Domenico achieved something more than his previous depersonalized collaborations with his father and was able to express his own peculiar anecdotal and realistic-grotesque vein. The elder Tiepolo, on the other hand, drew on the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso to express a range of feelings dramatic and passionate, on an idyllic but sensually moving plane. This stay on dry land after his close contact with Venice inspired the great altarpiece he executed for the cathedral of Este in Italy, St. Tecla Freeing Este from the Plague (1759).

Tiepolo was now on the eve of his departure for Spain, from which he would never return. Before leaving Italy for the last time, he accepted the task of celebrating the last dream of power of a noble Venetian family, the Pisani family, who had built their own belated but splendid Versailles in the Villa Pisani at Stra. In Tiepolo’s magnificent Apotheosis of the Pisani Family, the most attractive section is an array of children’s portraits and a frieze of male and female satyrs, which give a stamp of sensual existentialism to the decorative ensemble. Interspersed among his many decorations, Tiepolo painted many portraits. A unique example is the superb portrait of the Procurator Giovanni Querini (?), owned by the Galleria Querini-Stampalia of Venice; it represents not only a man but also an undermined aristocracy destined to fall.

Venice’s political equilibrium was shattered in 1756 by the Seven Years’ War, but Spain remained outside the conflict, and Carlos III invited Tiepolo to Madrid to enhance the glory of the Spanish monarchy at the Palacio Nacional. Tiepolo arrived in 1762 with his active collaborators, Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo. In 1764, this team finished the decoration, in which the elder Tiepolo continued to define, and in part carry out, the complex thematic conception of the three ceilings. Unfortunately, the concepts did not fit in with the architectural environment, and the chromatic vividness of the beautiful sketches was not completely realized in the finished work. Yet, in The Power of the Spanish Monarchy, The Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy, and Aeneas Led to the Temple of Venus, Tiepolo dared to create bold perspective inventions, sustained by rich chromatic orchestration. In contrast to the solemnity that pervaded the Spanish court, Tiepolo presented a poetic art of light and colour, based on an inner feeling of almost romantic melancholy, as may be seen in the religious canvases executed for Aranjuez and in the various sequences of the Flight into Egypt executed for private patrons. The ceilings were Tiepolo’s last major undertaking.