Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
The virtuoso of ceiling painting.
Tiepolo painted bright skies full of gods and angels in palaces from Venice to Würzburg and Madrid. He was the last great Venetian decorator.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was born in Venice on 5 March 1696. His father, a shipping merchant, died when his son was a year old. Giovanni Battista was apprenticed to the painter Gregorio Lazzarini and was also influenced by Paolo Veronese, whose bright and festive pictures were everywhere in the city. In 1719 he married Cecilia Guardi, sister of the painters Francesco and Gianantonio Guardi. They had many children, and their sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo became his assistants.
Tiepolo's breakthrough came with frescoes in the Archbishop's Palace in Udine in the 1720s. He quickly became the most sought-after decorative painter in Italy. In the Palazzo Labia in Venice he painted the story of Antony and Cleopatra in a magnificent architectural setting. He was so famous that Carl Gustaf Tessin, who was in Venice in 1736, tried to get him to decorate the new palace in Stockholm, but Tiepolo's fee was too high.
His greatest work is in the Prince-Bishop's Residence in Würzburg in Germany, where he worked in 1750–53 with his sons. Above the staircase he painted one of the largest ceiling frescoes in the world, with Apollo and the four continents of the earth. People, animals and gods crowd along the edges while a pale blue sky opens up in the centre. Tiepolo used sotto in sù, a perspective from below that makes the figures seem to float above the viewer. The colours are light and airy, and he worked with great speed and assurance.
In 1762 he was summoned to Madrid by King Charles III of Spain to paint the ceilings of the new Royal Palace. There he faced competition from the Neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs, and taste began to shift towards a more austere style. Tiepolo died in Madrid in 1770.
He was the last great representative of the Venetian decorative tradition that began with Veronese. After his death his art was long considered old-fashioned, but today he is admired as one of the greatest painters of the 18th century.