Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
painter
Tiepolo was the last great decorative painter of Italy, and he worked at the top of rooms. Born in Venice in 1696, he built a career on ceilings — vast, high-keyed, weightless compositions in which figures float against pale sky with a confidence that had gone out of fashion everywhere else in Europe.
The technical achievement is the perspective. A Tiepolo ceiling is calculated for a viewer standing in one place on the floor below, with figures and architecture foreshortened so steeply that the painted surface disappears. Seen flat in reproduction the compositions look strange; seen from the intended spot they open the roof.
He painted across the Veneto and then abroad, at Würzburg and finally in Madrid, where he died in 1770 as the taste was turning decisively against him. Neoclassicism dismissed his work as frivolous for a century.
His son Giandomenico worked with him and continued independently in a drier, more sardonic manner.
