TIEPOLO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1696–1770)

TIEPOLO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1696–1770), Italian painter, master of Venetian school. Tiepolo was famous in his own lifetime as a superb painter in fresco and a brilliant draftsman. A highly inventive artist, he could create spectacular effects in difficult sites, from the narrow gallery at the patriarchal palace at Udine in the mid-1720s to the vast staircase ceiling in the Residenz at Würzburg in the early 1750s. Contemporaries recognized his spirited, dynamic approach to subject matter and his frankly sensuous manner of painting. Tiepolo is comparable in his restless energy and imaginative power to Peter Paul Rubens, and essentially he worked with a similar baroque language of myth, allegory, and history, which he infused with a sense of freshness and modernity. His approach to religious art is characterized by candor and naturalism, while he was responsive to the different concerns of patrons and viewers at a time when the church was faced with new kinds of devotion and criticism. With the advent of neoclassicism, Tiepolo's art fell from favor: In an age that prized archaeological correctness, rationality, and ideals of improvement, his witty, Veronese-inspired conception of historical or classical subjects seemed frivolous, while his visually seductive qualities were seen as inimical to the serious intellectual aims of the new art. Nevertheless, his drawings and oil sketches continued to appeal to collectors, including Antonio Canova.

The son of a Venetian shipping merchant, Tiepolo was apprenticed in 1710 to Gregorio Lazzarini (1655–1730), an artist of international reputation patronized by prominent Venetian families. Before becoming an independent master, he worked in the household of Doge Giovanni Corner; members of the Corner family were to be his most steadfast and liberal patrons. Lazzarini encouraged his pupils to study Venetian sixteenth-century art, and Tiepolo made drawings of some famous works for publication in Domenico Lovisa's Gran Teatro di Venezia of 1717. His early involvement with the thriving Venetian engraving and publishing world was renewed in 1724 when he made drawings of antique sculpture as illustrations for Scipione Maffei's Verona Illustrata, an experience that gave Tiepolo an imaginative empathy with fragmentary antique remains, which recur in his drawings, etchings, and paintings. As well as studying the art of the past, Tiepolo looked to the tenebrism of Federico Bencovich (1677–1753) and the realism and monumentality of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682–1754). In 1719 Tiepolo married Cecilia Guardi, with whom he was to have nine children. By then, the artist was working for a network of mercantile and noble patrons on religious and secular subjects.

Tiepolo's reputation was assured, however, with the success of his employment by Patriarch Dionisio Dolfin on a complicated iconographic program of fresco decoration at the patriarch's palace in Udine around 1725–1727; other members of the family commissioned a series of large oil paintings on martial Roman themes for the Ca'Dolfin in Venice, painted in 1726–1729. A variety of commissions followed in the north of Italy, with fresco decoration at the Archinto and Dugnani palaces in Milan (c. 1729–1731) and at the Villa Loschi near Vicenza (1734) of particular importance, generating further commissions from Milanese and Vicentine patrons. By 1736 Tiepolo was sufficiently renowned for the Swedish ambassador in Venice to invite him to decorate the new royal palace in Stockholm. Both local and foreign clients appreciated how his distinctive qualities of lucidity, gracefulness, and spirited handling contrasted with Piazzetta's more intense and rugged style. Thus, the newly elected archbishop elector of Cologne, who visited Venice in 1734, was to commission altarpieces from both artists. Among Tiepolo's celebrated works in Venice are the frescoes of 1737–1739 at the Dominican church of S. Maria del Rosario, and those of 1743–1745 at the Discalced Carmelite church of S. Maria di Nazareth (later destroyed), together with the decoration of the grand salon at the Palazzo Labia (c. 1746–1747) with sumptuous scenes from the story of Antony and Cleopatra. Francesco Algarotti became a close friend in the early 1740s, commissioning paintings and seeking his artistic advice; they shared a passion for the art of Paolo Veronese (born Paolo Caliari). Around this time, Tiepolo worked on two series of etchings, the Vari Capricci and the Scherzi di Fantasia, which contemporaries compared to the work of Rembrandt and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. He ran a busy studio, with his sons Giovanni Domenico (1727–1804) and Lorenzo (1736–1776) gradually taking on important roles.

In late 1750 Tiepolo traveled to Würzburg with Domenico and Lorenzo, working over the next three years on fresco decoration at the prince-bishop's residence and on a variety of altarpieces and cabinet paintings. After his return to Venice, Tiepolo's achievements included fresco decoration at the Villa Valmarana near Vicenza in 1757, where he painted themes from epic poetry, side by side with son Domenico's enchanting genre scenes, and the large, majestic Saint Thecla altarpiece (1759) for the cathedral at Este. Invited to Madrid in 1761 to decorate the throne room of the new royal palace at a time when he had numerous commissions in hand, Tiepolo was pressed by the Venetian government to accept. With Domenico and Lorenzo, he worked on various frescoes at the royal palace from 1762, and on religious commissions, until his death in Madrid in 1770.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aikema, Bernard. Tiepolo and His Circle. Translated by Andrew McCormick. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

Barcham, William L. The Religious Paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo: Piety and Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Venice. Oxford and New York, 1989.

Brown, Beverly L., ed. Giambattista Tiepolo: Master of the Oil Sketch. Fort Worth, Tex., 1993.

Christiansen, Keith, ed. Giambattista Tiepolo 1696–1770. Venice and New York, 1996.

Gemin, Massimo, and Filippo Pedrocco. Giambattista Tiepolo. I dipinti. Opera completa. Venice, 1993.

Knox, George. Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings. Oxford and New York, 1980.

Krückmann, Peter O., ed. Tiepolo in Würzburg: Der Himmel auf Erden. Munich and New York, 1996.

Levey, Michael. Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art. New Haven, 1986.

Puppi, Lionello, ed. Giambattista Tiepolo: Nel terzo centenario della nascita. Venice, 1998.

Whistler, Catherine. "Devozione e decoro nelle pale di Giambattista Tiepolo ad Aranjuez." Arte Veneta 52 (1998): 70–85.