Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

“ In 1721 he married a sister of Guardi, settled down in a house near the bridge of S. Francesco della Vigna, and had nine children. His chief artistic education came from the study of Titian and Paul Veronese, and he quickly became known as the most rapid and intrepid ceiling painter of the time. He worked with tremendous spirit, as one deduces from the the examination of his many frescoes. Tiepolo drew with masterly precision and brio, and his colour can be very sprightly: but one always has the feeling that he had no right to be in a church at all, except possibly to confess. ”

“ Born in Castello, the people’s quarter of Venice, he studied in early youth with that good draughtsman, Lazzarini. At twenty-three he married the sister of Francesco Guardi; Guardi, who comes between Longhi and Canale and who is a better painter than either. Tiepolo appeared at a fortunate moment. The demand for a facile, joyous genius was at its height. The life of the aristocracy on the [Pg 299] lagoons was every year growing more gay, more abandoned to capricious inclination, to light loves and absurd amusements. ”

“ We have already noted that to establish the significance of any period in art, it is necessary that the tendencies should unite and combine in some culminating spirits who rise triumphant over their contemporaries and soar above the age in which they live. Such a genius stands out above the eighteenth century crowd, and is not only of his century, but of every time. For two hundred years Tiepolo has been stigmatised as extravagant, mannered, as just equal to painting cupids, nymphs, and parroquets. ”

“ Tiepolo is a singular contradiction. His art suggests a strong being, held captive by butterflies. Sometimes he is joyous and limpid, sometimes turbulent and strong, but he has always sincerity, force, and life. A great space serves to exhilarate him, and he asks nothing better than to cover it with angels and goddesses, white limbs among the clouds, sea-horses ridden by Tritons, patrician warriors in Roman armour, balustrades and columns and amoretti. ”

“ As an artist, Tiepolo was undoubtedly the strongest of these four. In him alone we recognise a genius of the first order, who, had he been born in the great age of Italian painting, might have disputed the palm with men like Tintoretto. His frescoes in the Palazzo Labia, representing the embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be classed with the finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese. ”

“ In 1563, Paolo Tiepolo, after dwelling on the secrecy and unsparing rigor of its judgements, says that every one shudders at its very name, as it has supreme authority over the property, life, honor and even the souls of men. Two years later Giovanni Soranzo speaks of the great fear inspired by it, for its authority transcends incomparably that of the king. In 1567, Antonio Tiepolo echoes these assertions, and all agree in their comments on the influence of the mysterious secrecy of its operation and the relentless severity of its action. ”

“ In the ceiling decorations of Tiepolo, Figure 305, we see the freest fancies of 442the Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio. Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese. ”

“ His hesitations saved him, and won France a master in her long roll of fame. He escaped the taint of learning to see through the eyes of others, evaded the swamping of his own genius in an endeavour to utter his art in halting Italian. Rome was not his grave, as it has been the grave of so many promising young sons of France; and he came out of the danger a strong and healthy man. Tiepolo brought him back vision and inspiration, and the solid earth of his own age to walk upon. And the French utterance of his master Boucher called back his dazed wits to the accents of France. ”

“ In the school of the Carmine in Venice Tiepolo has left one of his grandest displays. The haughty Queen of Heaven, who is his ideal of the Virgin, bears the Child lightly on her arm, and, standing enthroned upon the rolling clouds, hardly deigns to acknowledge the homage of the prostrate saint, on whom an attendant angel is bestowing her scapulary. The most charming amoretti are disporting in all directions, flinging themselves from on high in delicious abandon, alternating with lovely groups of the cardinal virtues. ”

“ Tiepolo's people are haughty, as if they felt that to keep a firm hold on their dignity they could not for a moment relax their faces and figures from a monumental look and bearing. They evidently feel themselves so superior that they are not pleasant to live with, although they carry themselves so well, and are dressed with such splendour, that once in a while it is a great pleasure to look at them. It was Tiepolo's vision of the world that was at fault, and his vision of the world was at fault only because the world itself was at fault. ”

“ Tiepolo was above all a lover of open spaces. He liked to suspend his fluttering groups in great pellucid reaches of sky, and the vast ceiling of the Scalzi gave him an exceptional opportunity for the development of this effect. The result is that the angels, whirling along the Virgin’s house with a vehemence which makes it seem a mere feather in the rush of their flight, appear to be sweeping through measureless heights of air above an unroofed building. ”

“ It is to be regretted that one so eminently gifted should have condescended to the barocco taste of the age in those many allegories and celestial triumphs which he executed upon the ceilings of palaces and the cupolas of churches. Little, except the frescoes of the Labia reception-hall, survives to show what Tiepolo might have achieved had he remained true to his native instinct for heroic subjects and for masculine sobriety of workmanship. ”

“ XXVI. Tiepolo.—But delightful as Longhi, Canale, and Guardi are, and imbued as they are with the spirit of their own century, they lack the quality of force, without which there can be no really impressive style. This quality their contemporary Tiepolo possessed to the utmost. His energy, his feeling for splendour, his mastery over his craft, place him almost on a level with the great Venetians of the sixteenth century, although he never allows one to forget what he owes to them, particularly to Veronese. ”

“ We passed through a couple of cheerful rooms by Carpioni—satyrs chasing nymphs through a romantic forest and, on the fringes of a seascape, a very eccentric rape of mermaids by centaurs—to step across a threshold into that brilliant universe, at once delicate and violently extravagant, wild and subtly orderly, which Tiepolo, in the last days of Italian [181] painting, so masterfully and magically created. ”

“ We have remarked already that with Veronese the accessories of gleaming satins and rich brocades serve to obscure the persons. In many of Tiepolo’s scenes the figures are lost in a flutter of drapery, subject and action melt away, and we are only conscious of soft harmonies of delicious colour, as ethereal as the hues of spring flowers in woodland ways and joyous meadows. ”

“ The Doge soon sent envoys to him, offering amnesty and even pardon, should the rebels submit; but Bajamonte steadily refused. Gradenigo knew that Tiepolo could not be taken in his present quarters without a great loss of men and property; he also reflected that if he captured the leader he must either permit a traitor to go free, or execute the most popular man in all Venice. For these reasons he determined to use all possible means to bring {110} about a satisfactory negotiation ”

“ Tiepolo had many immediate followers and imitators. The colossal roof-painting of Fabio Canal in the Church of SS. Apostoli, Venice, may be pointed out as an example of one of these. But he is full of the tendencies of modern art. Mr. Berenson, writing of him, says he sometimes seems more [Pg 308] the first than the last of a line, and notices how he influenced many French artists of recent times, though none seem quite to have caught the secret of his light intensity and his exquisite caprice. ”

“ Zanetti, who was one of Tiepolo’s dearest friends, writes: “No painter of our time could so well recall the bright and happy creations of Veronese.” The difference between them is more one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo’s lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of the decadence. ”

“ The excellence of the old masters’ drawings is a perpetual revelation. Even second-class men are almost invariably fine draughtsmen, proving that drawing was looked upon as something over which it was necessary for even the meanest to have entire mastery. Tiepolo’s drawings, preserved in Venice and in various museums, are as beautiful as can be wished; perfect in execution and vivid in feeling. In Venice are twenty or thirty sheets in red carbon, of flights of angels, and of draperies studied in every variety of fold. ”

“ With Bajamonte Tiepolo died the old nobility. He and it and the people were sacrificed to the new aristocrats, who had overridden the old Constitution. From the Quirini-Tiepolo conspiracy the peculiar government which was purely Venetian, and unparalleled elsewhere, may be dated; and strangely enough, the leaders of the revolt contributed largely to the success of Gradenigo, since, but for the insurrection, it is doubtful if he could have riveted his chains and clasped them with the Council of Ten.
Time has obliterated the traces of the rebellion. ”

“ Returning to Venice, he devoted himself to the Venetian scenes for which he has become justly famous. Clear in color and correct in line, he is the most important painter of the old Venetian school except Tiepolo, who often painted the figures for his landscapes. ”

“ We have a description of the Coronation of Lorenzo Tiepolo the successor of Renier Zeno, in 1268, which is a type of these ceremonies. The newly elected Doge was escorted to San Marco by a solemn deputation, and at the door was met by the Vice-Doge and the clergy of the Ducal Chapel. At the high altar he took his oath of office, and received the standard of the Republic. He was then led to the throne, and invested with the mantle and other insignia of office, the youngest senators encircling his brow with the ducal beretta. ”

“ In 1212, the same year which witnessed the arrival of the colonists, an insurrection broke out under the leadership of the powerful family of the Hagiostephanitai. The rising soon assumed such serious proportions that Tiepolo called in the aid of Duke Marco I of Naxos, whose duplicity in this connection was narrated in a previous essay. In addition to these internal troubles, the Genoese and Alamanno Costa, Count of Syracuse, an old comrade of the Count of Malta again became active ”

“ A watchman, called a "Signior of the Night," met Pietro Quirini in the Piazza one evening, and insisted on examining him; Quirini knocked the man down, and was heavily fined.
Meetings of the Opposition were held at the house of Marco Quirini, near the Rialto, and an organization was made. They determined to make Bajamonte Tiepolo their leader; he was a son-in-law of Quirini, and was greatly beloved by the people, who called him il gran Cavaliero. He had inherited all the popularity of his father, the Tiepolo who had been elected Doge by acclamation. ”

“ There are Lotto, Parmigianino, Baroccio, Tintoretto, Bassano, Veronese, Domenico Tiepolo, and his celebrated father the fantastic Giambattista Tiepolo—not startling specimens any of them.
In the Spanish section Ribera comes at you the strongest. He was a personality as well as a powerful painter. ”

“ The Venetian minister Tiepolo warmly commends the loyalty of these people to their princes, not to be shaken so long as their constitutional privileges were respected. "Sempre si le sono mostrati quei Popoli molto affettionati, et amorevoli contentandosi de esser gravati senza che mai facesse alcun resentimento forte più de l'honesto. ”

“ It bears an ancient, and I imagine, obsolete, injunction with regard to the sale of bread by unauthorized persons. Turning to the left we are beneath the arcade of the house of the ill-fated Marino Faliero, the Doge who was put to death for treason, as I have related elsewhere. It is now shops and tenements. Opposite is the church of SS. Apostoli, which is proud of possessing an altar-piece by Tiepolo which some think his finest work, and of which the late John Addington Symonds wrote in terms of excessive rapture. ”

“ Modesty can never have been a Venetian characteristic; nor is it now, when Venice is only a museum and show place. All the Venetians—the men, that is,—whom one sees in the Piazza have an air of profound self-satisfaction. And this palace of the Doges is no training-place for humility; for if its walls do not bear witness, glorious and chromatic, to the greatness of a Doge, it is merely because the greatness of the Republic requires the space. In this room, for example, we find Tiepolo allegorizing Venice as the conqueror of the sea. ”

“ When the later-century artists are reached, a good sketch of the Venice of their period is supplied by Philippe Monnier’s delightful Venice in the Eighteenth Century (Chatto and Windus) , which also has a good chapter on the lesser Venetian masters. The best Life of Tiepolo is in Italian, by Professor Pompeo Molmenti. The smaller masters have to be hunted for in many scattered essays; a knowledge of Goldoni adds point to Longhi’s pictures. ”