Word: tiepolo
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...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...
...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...