The Timeline of Art History   The Metropolitan Museum of Art
World MapsTimelines / RegionsThematic EssaysWorks of ArtIndex  



Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Capture of Carthage Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Triumph of Marius Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: A Satyr Family: From the series Scherzi di Fantasia Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Glorification of the Barbaro Family Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Investiture of Bishop Harold as Duke of Franconia Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Allegory of the Planets and Continents
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Head of a Young Man in Three-Quarter View Facing Left, Looking Upward Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Seated River God, Nymph with an Oar, and Putto


Tiepolo: View of Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra

Palazzo Labia, Venice
The Banquet of Cleopatra, ca. 1744
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, Venetian, 1696–1770)
Fresco; 650 x 300 cm
Enlarge for more detail
The Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) was arguably the greatest painter of eighteenth-century Europe and the outstanding first master of the Grand Manner. His art celebrates the imagination by transposing the world of ancient history and myth, the scriptures, and sacred legends into a grandiose, even theatrical language. His art, with its genial departures from convention and its brilliant use of costumed splendor, celebrates the notion of artistic caprice (capriccio) and fantasy (fantasia). In his hands, the informal oil sketch (1977.1.3) was raised to a primary art form, worthy to be collected alongside his finished paintings. For his incomparable fresco decorations—such as those in Palazzo Labia, Venice, depicting the story of Anthony and Cleopatra—he collaborated with a specialist in perspective, Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna (1688–ca. 1766), who also occasionally designed sets for opera.

Colonna's perspective framework for Tiepolo's frescoes is crucial to understanding the eighteenth-century notion of painting as a staged fiction—something intended to involve the viewer on a purely imaginative level. This was in line with theater practice of the day—especially opera. There is a close analogy between the goals of Tiepolo's painting and that of the leading poet and librettist Pietro Matastasio (1698–1782), who, although born in Rome, was at the court of Dresden: "Dreams and fables I fashion; and even while I sketch and elaborate fables and dreams upon paper … I so enter into them that I weep and am offended at ills I invented. But am I wiser when art does not deceive me?"

Tiepolo's first masterpiece was a cycle of enormous canvases painted to decorate a large reception room in the Ca' Dolfin, Venice (ca. 1726–29). They depict ancient battles and triumphs and allowed Tiepolo the opportunity to introduce exotic costumes, ancient sculpture and artifacts, and violent action that seems at times to spill out of the frames and into the room (65.183.1). Originally set into recesses in the wall, the canvases were surrounded with frescoed frames and complemented by a frescoed ceiling (not by Tiepolo).

Tiepolo's greatest works are unquestionably the frescoed ceilings he carried out for churches in Venice and villas and palaces in Italy, Germany (Residenz, Würzburg), and Spain (Royal Palace, Madrid). The high point is marked by the ceilings painted between 1750 and 1753 for the Prince-Bishop Carl Philipp von Greiffenklau in Würzburg. Over the grandiose staircase designed by the German architect Balthasar Neuman, Tiepolo painted a vast ceiling showing Apollo and the continents. In this fresco, the ceiling opens onto a light-filled sky inhabited by the Olympian gods, while around the periphery are shown picturesque vignettes symbolizing the four continents, with figures shown as though standing on the cornice. Tiepolo employed multiple viewpoints determined by the ceremonial progress of visitors climbing the stairs for an audience with the prince-bishop, thus showing his acute awareness of site and function. The oval reception room was, again, decorated by Tiepolo, this time with semi-mythic events from local history, and here dazzling stuccowork frames the frescoes, sometimes feigning curtains drawn back to reveal the scenes and at other times seamlessly transforming painted figures into 3-D by realizing a hand, foot, arm, or prop in sculpted relief.

Tiepolo was equally prized as a draftsman: his powers of invention were boundless and his facility without equal. His imaginative prints enjoyed wide fame and their dreamlike and sometimes troubling imagery of sorcerers, punchinellos, and classical monuments may have influenced Goya.


Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista (Italian, 1696-1770), Painting, Fresco, Theater, Europe, geography, Italian Peninsula, Northern Italy (and Venice), Figure, Mythological, Europe, Figure, Allegorical, Europe, period, Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art, Europe, geography, Italian Peninsula, Southern Italy (and Rome), Drawing, Ink, Europe, Painting, Oil on Canvas, Europe, Italian Peninsula , Baroque and Rococo

Department of European Paintings

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), The Grand Tour, Neoclassicism, The Neoclassical Temple, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669): Paintings, Venice in the Eighteenth Century, Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669): Prints, The Opera, The Ballet, The Idea and Invention of the Villa, Abridged List of Rulers: Europe,

Central Europe (including Germany), 1600-1800 A.D., Rome and Southern Italy, 1600-1800 A.D., Venice and Northern Italy, 1600-1800 A.D., Iberian Peninsula, 1600-1800 A.D.,

Europe, 1600-1800 A.D.