Word: tiepolo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...desert with a palpable clang. It had to come. It has come. Art abhors a vacuum, and if Las Vegas hasn't earned a name for being culturally underoxygenated, what place in America has? If the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City can hang banners advertising Tiepolo or Goya from its Fifth Avenue facade without having fingers wagged in its face, why shouldn't Steve Wynn, the modern-day Mike Todd or P.T. Barnum of Vegas, the man with more clout in the gambling-and-hotel business than anyone alive with the possible exception of Donald Trump...
...that the decorative and allegorical paintings are shallow either. Their themes weren't original; their handling became increasingly so. Over his working life--roughly 50 years--Tiepolo didn't use any narratives in his painting that weren't already familiar. There are the figures from antiquity (Achilles, Dido, Alexander, Scipio), the heroes and heroines out of Renaissance literature (Rinaldo and Armida from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme liberata), the biblical patriarchs and Madonnas and martyrs, the allegorical figures of Virtue or Envy or the Four Continents, the flocks of putti as dense as pigeons in the piazza. All these had swarmed...
...Painting Campaspe, c. 1726-27, shows a familiar story from Pliny: the Greek artist Apelles made a portrait of Campaspe, the mistress of Alexander the Great, which so pleased Alexander that when it was finished, he kept the painting and gave Campaspe herself to the artist. In the painting Tiepolo is Apelles, at the easel; the woman posing as Campaspe is Tiepolo's wife, Cecilia Guardi; Alexander is just an extra, a studio model. Apelles looks at her, his black servant looks at him, Alexander studies them both, and a little dog glares out at us: a circle of self...
Campaspe is homelier than Tiepolo's "official" women, who appear in paintings like Time Uncovering Truth, c. 1743. These, one is inclined to think, are among the first "modern" beauties in painting. Not wardrobes of flesh like Rubens' goddesses, not pneumatic dolls like Boucher's nymphs, they are (relatively) slender, blond to redhead, and have the minxy arrogance and perfectly toned skin of runway models, inaccessible, gazing down from their nests of vapor in the blue-rinsed sky above. In Tiepolo, the women always seem to be running the show; his emblematic heroes like Rinaldo, by comparison, look almost effeminate...
...Tiepolo loved such ironies and reversals; they were part of the code of his imagination. Out of the traditions of Venetian painting, he taught himself to be one of the most audacious space composers in the history of art, capable of dissolving a solid ceiling into light and vapor. But the distanced, self-aware theatrics of his style--his parade of visual language as a source of delight--make him look modern, even though there isn't an artist today who could begin to rival that virtuosity...