Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista

Tiepolo was famous throughout Europe as an unrivaled fresco painter and a splendid draftsman. His first teacher, Gregorio Lazzarini, encouraged his disciples to study 16th-century Venetian art but Tiepolo was also influenced by the tenebrist technique of Federico Bencovich and the monumental realism of his great contemporary, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. His first clients were Venetian noblility, especially the Cornaro and Dolfin families. Around 1718-1720, he painted a series of canvases on the life of Queen Zenobia for the Ca’Zenobio palace in Venice. One of these is now at the Museo del Prado. In 1719, he married Cecilia Guardi, with whom he had nine children. Very active in the Veneto and in northern Italy, he perfected his fresco painting in the archbishopric of Udine (ca. 1725-2727) and in Venice’s Archinto and Dugnani palaces (ca. 1729-1731). He was already famous in 1763, when the Swedish ambassador invited him to decorate the Royal Palace in Stockholm, but as the ambassador himself feared, it proved impossible to agree on a price. Meanwhile, Tiepolo painted two important altar paintings for illustrious German clients. Among his famous works in Venice are frescoes at Santa Maria del Rosario, for the Dominicans (1727-1739) and Santa Maria di Nazareth, for the barefoot Carmelites (1743-1745), as well as the story of Marco Antonio and Cleopatra for the grandiose Salone delle Feste at the Palazzo Labia (ca. 1746-17437). In the early 1740s he became close friends with Francesco Agarotti, a fellow admirer of Veronese who sought Tiepolo’s advice on art and purchased his works. Around the same time, Tiepolo was working on two series of etchings—the Capricci and the Scherzi di fantasia—that led his contemporaries to compare him with Rembrandt and Castiglione. His sons, Giovanni Domenico, and Lorenzo were also etchers, and the former was a particularly prolific engraver. Towards the end of the 1750s, Tiepolo moved with his sons Domenico and Lorenzo to Germany to decorate the Kaisersaal at the Würzburg Residenz, home of the Bishop-Prince. They remained there for three years, working on altar paintings, cabinet paintings and most of all, a vast decorative program of frescoes for the building’s monumental stairway, where the artist’s heroic imagination reached astonishing levels. The return to Venice was marked by new triumphs, including frescoes for the Venetian church of la Pietà in 1754 and the Villa Valmarana, near Vicenza, in 1754 (where he painted subjects drawn from epic poetry while his son Domenico painted enchanting genre scenes), and the enormous and splendid Saint Thecla at Este Cathedral. When he was called to Madrid in 1761 to decorate the throne room at the New Palace, Tiepolo attempted to wriggle out, claiming he was too old and too busy, but Charles III wanted no other artist, and his ministers’ pressure on Venetian authorities sufficed to satisfy his wish. With the efficacious help of Domenico and Lorenzo, Tiepolo decorated the palace’s reception halls between summer 1762 and summer 1766. Afterwards, his desire to remain at the Spanish court led him to accept other royal commissions as a chamber painter. At the time of his death, in late March 1770, he was busy designing frescoes for the dome of the collegiate church of San Ildefonso at La Granja. That project was taken over by Francisco Bayeu (Whistler, C. in: E.M.N.P., 2006, Vol VI, pp. 2070-2072).