Tiepolo [antikvár]

Life The war with Turkey entailing the loss of Crete (1669), the last heroic endeavour in the military history of the Venetian Republic, came to an end almost thirty years before Giambattista Tiepolo's birth. It was a war fought with bravery, but had nevertheless ended in an irréparable defeat for Venice, and, of course, for her Exchequer. Now that the routes to the East were barred to her, the Republic moved slowly but steadily towards her decline. The interests of the European powers were tied to the houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon, through their alterna-ting fortunes in the course of three wars of succession (Spanish, Polish and Austrian), and impinged only margi-nally upon the Venetian Republic. It was precisely for this reason that Venice had become too sure of her position and her Italian terri tories. Her trading and seafaring nobility settled down to enjoy a life of ease on their estâtes and were too often forgetful of the achievements of the early years of qolonization; and the less they were concerned with strategie security, the more ostentations their way of life became. Between 1745 and 1750, Giambattista Tiepolo, by then an established artist, painted for the Ducal Palace in Venice-a picture entitled Neptune offering to Venice the riches of the sea. This was no empty assertion of past glory, but, rather, a heartfelt tribute to the existing grandeur of a state which, half a century later, was to disappear. It was a tribute ex-pressed, moreover, without any false rhetoric, in the grand manner of sixteenth-century Venetian art, and bore witness to the flourishing economie and intellectual life of the Republic which could well compensate for the strategie and commercial privileges she had already forfeited. In the days of her decline, Venice had found in Tiepolo the artist who could do her full justice. By the magnificence of his créations he perpetuated the illusion that the world of Venice's glory would last for ever: in fact it was only by drawing upon its past greatness that this world gained the strength to survive, and to die in a way which was worthy of it. Giambattista Tiepolo was born in Venice in 1696, proba-bly on 5 March, the son of Orsola and Domenico. His father, who belonged to a well-known family, was co-pro-prietor of a merchant vessel. He died when Giambattista was only a year old, leaving his wife to administer the family property and educate her six young children. Giambattista was apprenticed to the painter Gregorio Lazzarini, who lived in the parish of San Pietro in Castello, where the Tiepolo family also lived. Lazzarini taught the young artist the rudiments of drawing, perspective and composition. In particular, he showed him how to set about arranging complex groups of figures in vast pictorial compositions, and how to enhance the whole by iridiscent effects of colour. However, what Lazzarini taught Tiepolo was very much based on the style of seventeenth-century Venetian art, and this traditional approach could not satisfy the young man's search for a personal means of expression. We are told by his biographers that he was more interested in what was being done by some of his contemporaries, who were at that time enjoying considérable success in Venice: Giambattista Piazzetta, who was greatly influenced by the dramatic style of painting of Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the school of Bologna in general .(whose effects were achieved mainly by means of chiaroscuro); Federico Bencovich, known as Federighetto; and Sebastiano Ricci, whose use of colour he particularly admired. But at the same time Tiepolo found he became more and more drawn to the great artists of Venice's past: to Titian and Tintoretto, and above ali to Veronese. Giambattista's career began early. By the age of eighteen, he was entirely independent, and when he was twenty-one, in 1717, he became a member of the Fraglia, the guild of Venetian painters. He received his first commission when he was only nineteen, to paint over the niches in the church of the Ospedaletto, and his early biographers could see that he had already abandoned the ' painstaking ' manner taught him by Lazzarini, and had adopted a ' resolute and