Painting: One Last Dramatic Moment

The once great republic of Venice was dying. Spies kept watch on the Piazza San Marco, clerics confiscated books by Voltaire and Rousseau, and not infrequently a tourist would stumble upon a dead body ignominiously tagged “For treason against the state.” Throughout the 18th century, Venice still ranked as the favorite playground of Europe, but with its possessions dwindling, its power declining, and its wealthy reveling in pomp and cant, all that remained was shimmer and shadow.

Of all Venice’s once-grand traditions, none seemed destined for a more in glorious end than painting. Not that good painters did not exist. Canaletto and the Guardi brothers turned out thousands of panoramic Venetian views whose impeccable architecture and exquisite plays of light have since delighted generations, while Pietro Longhi mastered a mellow irony to reveal the domestic texture of Venetian life. But it remained for an extraordinarily forceful young artist named Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to ascend that decaying stage and transform shimmer and shadow into one last dramatic moment for Venetian painting.

Heaven Itself. This week Tiepolo’s deft, dramatic touch is revealed in a new dimension. For the first time in a century, three huge masterworks of Tiepolo’s youth, recently acquired by Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum, are being put on exhibition. Part of a ten-work cycle portraying scenes from Roman history,*they were painted for the Ca’ Dolfin in Venice some time be tween 1725 and 1730, when Tiepolo was barely 30 years old. Standing between the gloomy realism of his earliest canvases and the lyrical idealism that made his later ceilings look like heaven itself, the paintings help explain Tiepolo’s immediate success.

Tiepolo was early marked for greatness. At 14, he was sent to study in the studio of the prolific Venetian genre painter Gregorio Lazzarini, but soon broke away to study on his own the works of the Renaissance’s Paolo Vero nese. By the time he was 21, he had become a full-fledged member of the local painters’ fraternity, by 23 he had married Cecilia Guardi, sister of the painting Guardis, and by 26 held the highly important post of “curator” of the Doge’s art treasures. From then on, his reputation spread from northern Italy to northern Europe, until he became one of the most celebrated artists of the century. By the time he died, in 1770, he could boast frescoes and ceilings adorning royal palaces from Germany to Spain.

History & Drama. Venice remained his main proving ground. Though the paintings that Tiepolo is known to have done for the Doge have been lost, they led to a commission from the Archbishop of Udine, a member of the noble Venetian family of Dolfin, to execute the frescoes for the cathedral in Udine and paint the cycle for the Ca’ Dolfin in Venice. Stylistically, Tiepolo was still feeling his way: his warm reds and yellows had not yet dissolved into the icy whites and blues that would dominate his later work; his vigorous brush had yet to master fully the airy elegancies of the rococo. But in all the popular legends of mythology, the classics and Roman history, Tiepolo had found his forte: he was essentially a dramatist.

On Tiepolo’s canvases, every scene became a tableau as lively as any opera bouffe, his every room a stage across which strutted the likes of Orpheus, Eurydice, Scipio, Antony and Cleopatra. As for his ceilings, they were populated with gods, goddesses—and God himself. To be sure, Tiepolo had the live theater of his day to draw on, but his imagina tion more than matched anything the Venetian dramatists might conceive. For one fresco in the cathedral at Udine, he invented an annunciation scene that does not exist in the Bible—an angel appearing to Sarah—brought Abraham’s aged wife boldly to life with two prominent front teeth and a multitude of wrinkles.

For the Ca’ Dolfin cycle, he turned from the Bible to Roman history. Inscriptions in Latin on some of the paintings reveal that his major source was the works of Roman Historian Annaeus Florus. The events he chose were designed to flatter the Dolfin family, who considered themselves spiritually, if not actually, descendants of the far-off conquering Caesars. The Metropolitan’s Battle of Vercellae portrays the triumph of the Romans over the Germanic invaders. The towering 18-ft. Triumph of Marius shows the ruler of the North African kingdom of Numidia, Jugurtha, having been betrayed by his father-in-law, led before the chariot of the Roman conqueror Marius (see above and color opposite). Strangely it is the haughty pride of the conquered and his sorrowing consort that gains the viewer’s sympathy, not gloating Caesar.

The Storming of Carthage re-creates the famed battle of 146 B.C. in which the Romans demolished the wealthiest city of the ancient world (opposite and below). So as not to stay the surge of battle, Tiepolo sketched the fallen citadel of Carthage with brilliant swiftness. To the magnificent actors who command the center of his stage, Tiepolo, by contrast, paid meticulous attention, orchestrating flowing robes, thundering horses and plundered artifacts into a pageant that would have done justice to Venice itself.

A triumph in themselves, the Dolfin murals are a singularly prophetic foretaste of what would follow in Tiepolo’s career. The wide blue skies would open up into infinities of space, the rippling Roman standards give way to the beating of angels’ wings. The white horse charging over the Carthaginian dead presages all the great white quadrigae that would soon soar through the heavens. He had already proved his mastery in foreshortening figures to anchor them in awesome spaces. Then, as if to make unmistakably clear who was producing this show, Tiepolo painted a portrait of himself—just to the left of Jugurtha—peering out from the sidelines like some great theatrical producer surveying the reaction of his audience.

*The rest of the cycle is today divided between Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, which has two works, and Leningrad’s Hermitage, which has five.