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(1) Giambattista [Giovanni Battista] Tiepolo

(b Venice, 5 March 1696; d Madrid, 27 March 1770). He was the most renowned painter of 18th-century Italy and the last great representative of the grand tradition in Italian art. He was especially gifted as a draughtsman and as a painter in fresco. His fresco cycles and religious and mythological canvases demonstrate that he also possessed a sensitive appreciation of his patrons’ requirements, together with a talent, unique in his time, to project narrative and devotional subject-matter with dramatic force. He enjoyed international patronage and painted fresco cycles that glorify such distinguished patrons as Prince Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau of Würzburg and Charles III of Spain. He also painted moving religious works—images of the Virgin, the sufferings of the saints, miracles and Old and New Testament scenes—for a wide spectrum of patrons, among them small and large confraternities, urban and provincial churches, private citizens and religious orders. Apelles Painting the Portrait of Campaspe (c. 1725–7; Montreal, Mus. F.A.) states the themes of his art. Apelles, court painter to Alexander the Great (here a self-portrait of Tiepolo), paints Campaspe, Alexander’s mistress (modelled by Cecilia Guardi). Behind them two large completed canvases, the Brazen Serpent and the Marriage of SS Cecilia and Valerian, rest against giant pilasters. Also in the background are an immense antique sculpture, the celebrated Farnese Hercules, and a distant loggia inspired by Jacopo Sansovino. The parallels are evident: like Apelles, Tiepolo worked for the ruling class. His paintings dealt with the great themes of the Western pictorial tradition, and the setting reveals his allegiance both to antiquity and to the artistic heritage of Venice.

Part of the Tiepolo family

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  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
  © Copyright 2000 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
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