Friday, August 12, 2016

Venetian Fresco Figures by Pellegrini, Angeli, Tiepolo

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Venus weeping over the body of Adonis
ca. 1704
fresco
Villa Alessandri, Mira

18th-century Venetian fresco-painters cultivated bright, light, weightless compositions. They used the heavy traditional machinery of myth and morality for their subjects, but the treatment remained always buoyant as if the pigments could not under any circumstances lower themselves to sobriety.

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Narcissus at the Spring
ca. 1704
fresco
Villa Alessandri, Mira

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Salmacis & the Hermaphrodite
ca. 1704
fresco
Villa Alessandri, Mira

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Pan & Syrinx
ca. 1704
fresco
Villa Alessandri, Mira

Giuseppe Angeli
Abduction of Helen
1760
fresco
Villa Widmann, Mira

Giuseppe Angeli
Sacrifice of Iphigenia
1760
fresco
Villa Widmann, Mira

Giambattista Tiepolo
Innocence casting out Deception
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Giambattista Tiepolo
Liberality dispensing gifts
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Giambattista Tiepolo
Humility casting out Pride
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Giambattista Tiepolo
Vigilance triumphing over Sleep
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Giambattista Tiepolo
Marital Harmony
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Giambattista Tiepolo
Time revealing Truth and casting out Envy
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

"When they reached Tiepolo, therefore, Time and Truth were a seasoned couple, one that in other periods had been destined to embody incompatible meanings. Now they were no longer any different from other stock characters, who might prove useful according to circumstances. And thus they found themselves on the verge of winning back a condition of sovereign indifference, which allowed them to return to their primordial nature as enigma: visually expressed as the complicity between a winged old man, equipped with a fearsome scythe, and a naked young woman, who in certain cases was portrayed as she emerged from a dark recess. But for Tiepolo, as in Marcolini's device, the most appropriate place for their evolutions, like dancers, would be the sky, with its retinue of clouds."

 from Tiepolo Pink by Roberto Calasso, translated by Alastair McEwen (Knopf, 2009)

Giambattista Tiepolo
Personification of Valor
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Giambattista Tiepolo
Personification of Intellect
1734
fresco
Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale

Tiepolo was usually skillful at concealing his debt to Michelangelo (whose achievement already had retreated two centuries into the past). For the figure of "Intellect" (immediately above) Tiepolo untypically appropriates wholesale the style and flavor of Michelangelo's ornamental nudes on the Sistine Ceiling. Many scholars would in fact mark the functional end of a living Renaissance tradition of painting in Italy with the career of Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770).