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| 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.
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| Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini Narcissus at the Spring ca. 1704 fresco Villa Alessandri, Mira |
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| Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini Salmacis & the Hermaphrodite ca. 1704 fresco Villa Alessandri, Mira |
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| Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini Pan & Syrinx ca. 1704 fresco Villa Alessandri, Mira |
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| Giuseppe Angeli Abduction of Helen 1760 fresco Villa Widmann, Mira |
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| Giuseppe Angeli Sacrifice of Iphigenia 1760 fresco Villa Widmann, Mira |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Innocence casting out Deception 1734 fresco Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Liberality dispensing gifts 1734 fresco Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Humility casting out Pride 1734 fresco Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Vigilance triumphing over Sleep 1734 fresco Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Marital Harmony 1734 fresco Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale |
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| 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)
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Personification of Valor 1734 fresco Villa Loschi, Biron di Monteviale |
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| 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).