Word: tiepolo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tiepolo's world is best experienced in his native Venice, because so many of his large-scale murals and ceiling paintings are there. But this month New York City museums have a veritable festa of Tiepolo's movable work, commemorating the 300th anniversary of his birth. Drawings by him and his disciples--including his sons Domenico and Lorenzo--are on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a show of 80 of his paintings and oil sketches and 33 of his mysterious and brilliantly inventive etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi di Fantasia...
These shows make it clear that the once accepted view of Tiepolo was wrong. It said, in effect, that he was a slightly suspect virtuoso--the last of what had been, a fizzing Catherine wheel of talent at the end of the long display of Venetian genius that ran from the Bellinis to Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Disapproval of Tiepolo was high-toned; his work did not accord with the moralizing grandeur of a later Neoclassicism, still less with the assumptions of Realism. It was rococo, compliant, theatrical and somehow frivolous. It celebrated a city in deep decline and praised...
Much of this was true, and none of it matters in the least today. One has to take Tiepolo on his own terms. He wanted, he said, to "please noble, rich people." So did every artist in Europe until the late 19th century. He was working in a tradition and adding to it. His borrowings from the past were inspired, not passive or academic. His great model was Veronese--indeed, his contemporaries called him "Veronese reborn"--and other artists influenced him too. He was acutely style-conscious, and as alert as a magpie. But the effect of his work...
...Though Tiepolo worked nearly all his life in Venice, he spent his last eight years in Madrid, at the court of the enlightened, relatively liberal monarch Carlos III, who would later be Goya's first royal patron. Tiepolo's influence completely pervades Goya's early work, particularly the tapestry designs in the Prado, and it continues in the late work. The title page of Goya's Caprichos, that famous image of a dreaming man around whose head owls and bats and other monsters of the unconscious are flitting, is clearly derived from the frontispiece to Tiepolo's Scherzi di Fantasia...
...pathos and intensity (it is, after all, one of the most sadistic moments in Catholic iconography: a woman's breasts have just been cut off and are seen on the dish held by the androgynous youth on her left), asserts something that has often been downplayed in assessments of Tiepolo--his power as a painter of sacred experience. Keith Christiansen, the Met's curator, has rightly set out to correct this by giving over a whole gallery of the Met to the religious paintings. He has revealed a deeper Tiepolo than we're used...