Monday, August 15, 2016

Giambattista Tiepolo paintings, prints, drawings

Giambattista Tiepolo
Zenobia before Aurelian
c. 1717
oil on canvas
Prado

Giambattista Tiepolo
Cherub with flower wreath
c. 1767-69
oil on canvas
Prado

Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) spent the last several years of his life in Spain at the court of Charles III. As Francis Haskell writes in Patrons and Painters"Tiepolo was indeed outstanding in his day in that almost alone, quite wholeheartedly and without a tremor of doubt, he really believed in the Venetian ancien regime. It is surprising that the State failed to make more use of him beyond driving him against his will to Madrid as a gesture of appeasement towards Spain." 

Giambattista Tiepolo
cartoon for The Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy
1760s
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum

"Tiepolo himself deliberately aimed at a special class of patron. He used to say that 'painters must try and succeed in large-scale works capable of pleasing the rich and the nobility because it is they who make the fortunes of artists and not the other sort of people, who cannot buy valuable pictures. And so a painter's spirit must always be reaching out for the sublime, the heroic, the perfect.'"

Giandomenico Tessari after Giambattista Tiepolo
Woman with parrot
1740s
etching
British Museum
 
Matthias Oesterreich after Giambattista Tiepolo
Io, messenger of the Gods
1745
etching
British Museum

after Giambattista Tiepolo
Figure study
mid-18th century
engraving
British Museum

"Present-day taste finds the artist's bozzetti more appealing and, attracted by the general glamour of 'rococo' art, fails to grasp the grandeur and megalomania of Tiepolo's full-scale decorations. There is reason to believe that painters like Fragonard and some connoisseurs of the time may have made the same distinction. But admiration for Tiepolo's marvelous color and fantasy should not blind us to his moral commitment to the cause he was serving any more than it does in the case of Rubens."  

Giambattista Tiepolo
Nereids & Triton
c. 1753-62
drawing
British Museum

Giambattista Tiepolo
Neptune seated on a cloud
c. 1740
drawing
British Museum

Giambattista Tiepolo
Man wearing overcoat
1750s
drawing
Getty

Giambattista Tiepolo
Figure with long hair, from behind
c. 1754-62
drawing
British Museum

Giambattista Tiepolo
Wall with gateway
c. 1757
drawing
British Museum

Giambattista Tiepolo
The Horses of the Sun
1719
fresco
Villa Baglioni, Massanzago

Giambattista Tiepolo
Fall of Phaethon
1719
fresco
Villa Baglioni, Massanzago

Giambattista Tiepolo
The Triumph of Eloquence
ca. 1724
ceiling fresco
Palazzo Sandi, Venice