Works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
289 works · 223 msGiovanni Battista Tiepolo painted ceilings that open into bright sky, crowded with gods, saints and allegories, for patrons from Venice to Würzburg and the royal palace in Madrid.
A pupil of Gregorio Lazzarini, Tiepolo left his teacher's careful manner for a fast, sure one, and learned as much from Piazzetta, Sebastiano Ricci, Tintoretto and Veronese. His colour was cooler than that of earlier Venetians, so his scenes seem lit by daylight. The Miracle of the Holy House of Loreto is his last oil sketch for a ceiling in the Scalzi church in Venice, a fresco lost to a bomb in the First World War. Angels carry the Virgin's house up through blue sky, trumpeters swoop in from the right, and the figures shrink as they rise, so that from below the roof would seem to open.
In 1750 the prince-bishop of Würzburg called him north, and over three years he frescoed the palace, the Kaisersaal with his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo, ending with the staircase ceiling. Allegory of the Planets and Continents, dated 1752, shares that ceiling's title and plan: Apollo sets out in a blaze of light at the centre, and the continents crowd the painted cornice all round. In 1761 Charles III of Spain commissioned a ceiling for the throne room of his Madrid palace, and Tiepolo died in Madrid in 1770. Drawings make up much of what follows, beside paintings and etchings. The etchings lean to the strange: in Death Giving an Audience, from the Capricci, a hooded skeleton sits on the ground before a huddle of visitors while a lean dog slinks past.
Sources: Wikipedia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Finnish National Gallery.
