Word: tiepolo
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Last week, on loan from the Victoria and Albert, which now regards them as among its finest possessions, 135 of those drawings were on display at the National Gallery in Washington. Their creator was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, whose own native Venice did not begin to rediscover him until more than a century after his death. The drawings are not the finished kind that Tiepolo did for sale, but they are perhaps more interesting. They are notes for paintings and frescoes, ideas jotted down as quickly as they welled up in Tiepolo's prodigiously restless mind...
...artist to whom Tiepolo was apprenticed gave him little more than a routine training, but the boy taught himself enough to get a major commission in 1715 at the age of 19. He married a sister of his contemporaries, Giovanni Antonio and Francesco Guardi, and life became one success after another...
When the neoclassics took over, Tiepolo's work sank into obscurity, but there is a particular touch of pathos about the Victoria and Albert drawings. The story goes that one night while Tiepolo was working in Madrid, his wife lost a large sum of money gambling at cards in Venice. Her opponent suggested that she play again, this time putting up all the drawings by her husband that she had in her house. She played and lost-and then lost again, until not only the drawings but also the house were gone. The drawings, held cheap as gambler...
...Leonardo da Vinci crammed almost two dozen men and half a dozen horses in two detailed, swirling battle scenes. And in a drawing measuring 11 in. by 16 in., Pontormo roughly sketched a single man on horseback that, though deliberately unfinished, bulges with expressive power. Tiepolo's luminous imagination shines in chiaroscuro in the violent Martyrdom of a Saint...
This genteel exercise in white slavery occurred in the home of Italian Ambassador to the U.N. Egidio Ortona at an auction to raise money for Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Sold off with Burton and several minor works by Chagall and Tiepolo were Composer Menotti himself (for $501. to Novelist Pati Hill) and Conductor Thom as Schippers, who brought a mere $325 from Jean Feldman, ex-wife of Agent Charles Feldman. Schippers later registered a complaint with Maxwell: "Traitor, $350 for only an actor!" This week the proud owners were scheduled to feed their...