Latinus Offering his Daughter Lavinia to Aeneas in Matrimony

Download2260 × 3000 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696–1770)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 140.5 × 109.5 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

Decorative sequences came to play a major role in the works of Giambattista Tiepolo. He received several commissions to carry out entire decorative schemes, both in his home town of Venice and abroad. For example, this oval painting is believed to have been part of a series of six mythological scenes originally created as overdoors for a large house, the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice.

A decorative feature Being a decorative feature above a doorway, the painting was intended to be viewed from below, a fact which explains its di sotto in sù perspective, meaning “from below and up”. The worm’s eye view is accentuated in the scene itself, where the foremost male figure looks at the woman from below. The painting's decorative aspect The decorative aspect is apparent in the fact that the figure group and the marble columns have been drawn forward, giving them the appearance of being close to the decorated surface itself.

Behind them, the space is emphatically restricted by a balustrade running parallel with the picture’s surface. The motif The kneeling man proffering a ring to the woman is Aeneas, the founder of Rome whose tale is told by Virgil (70 BCE - 19 BCE) in the Aeneid. After escaping the Greek conquest of Troy Aeneas reached the estuary of the Tiber, where the king of Latium gave him his daughter Lavinia to be his wife.