Art: Ten-Cent Tiepolos

On June 29, 1885. a London art dealer named Parsons sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum a couple of albums he obviously was delighted to get rid of. The volumes contained 326 original drawings and sketches by an 18th century Venetian painter whose work had fallen out of favor. Parsons disposed of the lot for £11, about 10¢ a drawing.

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.

The 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.

His paintings and frescoes covered the walls of some of Europe’s noblest palaces, from the Archbishop’s Palace in Udine to the Prince-Bishop’s Residenz in Wiirzburg to the throne room of King Charles III in Madrid. No man of his time was a greater master of drama and color, or knew so well how to unlock the secrets of light or to harmonize painting and architecture. Though he was sometimes guilty of slickness, his best paintings still stun the eye. He was the last of the great baroque artists, and it was not until just before his death at the age of 74 that he began to see the work of the new neoclassic artists threaten his own.

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’s loot, passed from hand to hand until Art Dealer Parsons, a little more than a century later, palmed them off to the Victoria and Albert.