Exhibitions 2
Tiepolo (Ca' Rezzonico, Venice, till 8 December)
Painter of exaltation
Martin Gayford
There are artists who travel well — just as there are wines — and artists who don't. Giambattista Tiepolo, the giant of 18th- century Italian painting, is a prime example of the second type. Of course, a stray paint- ing or two in a gallery will look fine enough but to appreciate the sheer exhilarating sweep of Tiepolo's art, its poetry and its range, it is necessary to travel. The most encyclopaedic display of his talents is in Wiirzburg; most of the rest is in and around his native Venice. In the latter the artist's mixture of grandeur, theatricality, airy fantasy and melancholy seems to grow naturally from the mood of the place.
Ideally, go to Venice to see Tiepolo this autumn while there is a magnificent exhibi- tion, celebrating the tercentenary of the painter's birth, at the Ca' Rezzonico. That palazzo — usually the Museum of Eigh- teenth Century Venetian Art — is conse- quently as thronged as it can have been since Cole Porter threw parties there in the Twenties. Next spring more or less the same show moves to New York, but it will not be, could not possibly be the same — because in and around Venice numerous other palaces, churches and institutions form a parallel, permanent exhibition of Tiepolo. You are encouraged, rightly, to visit these too, in conjunction with the exhi- bition. The visiting paintings amplify and illuminate the resident ones to make this a unique opportunity to see this extraordi- narily fecund painter whole. One comes away convinced that Tiepolo was a tower- ing figure in European art.
Such praise might come as a surprise to those who visited the Glory of Venice at the Royal Academy two years ago. There Tiepolo was pitted against his contempo- rary and rival G.B. Piazzetta, altarpiece for altarpiece, and did not come off all that well. The slow-working Piazzetta, inclined to a dun-coloured palette, seemed the more serious and the deeper of the two. Though there were fine Tiepolos on display, in com- parison he seemed — as he often has to earnest Northern Europeans — brilliant, but also distastefully insipid and sugary. A visit to Venice puts one right about that. It demonstrates very quickly that even a largish selection of portable paintings such as was at the RA gives only a partial impression of Tiepolo's gifts. A major problem is that much of his finest work was — to use the ugly jargon of the present day — `site-specific'. That is to say, it was paint- ed for a particular place, and, indeed, in the case of a fresco indissolubly linked with its structure. There is no substitute for going to that building and standing oppo- site, or more often in Tiepolo's case beneath the painting.
`Beneath' because he was a supreme master of the painted ceiling. The sky was his subject, but in a different way from, say, Constable, Turner or Boudin or any other painter who produced outstanding paint- ings of aerial views. Tiepolo's ceilings are not landscape views, they are environments that envelop the viewer. They orchestrate the space below. If you stand in the church- es of the Gesuati, and the Pieta, or the Scuola dei Carmini and the Villa Pisani at Stra, a huge expanse of sunlit air and cloud opens out above you, dappled with cloud and filled with spiritual, airborne life. Angels dressed in lime-green and apricot, or naked personifications of this and that, inhabit these heights. In the case, say, of the fresco of the Institution of the Rosary in the Church of the Gesuati the effect is inseparable from the ever changing light that flows in through the windows below.
Tiepolo is the painter of flight, of exalta- tion, effortless movement upwards. As such he offers experiences that no other painter ever has. But can these vast pictures be taken seriously? Admittedly, some of the subjects are intrinsically ridiculous — the secular ones often depict the apotheosis of some hard-faced Venetian aristocrat. Today even the devout might find the theme of the main panel at the Scuola dei Carmini, say, hard to take seriously. It depicts the vision in which the Virgin appeared to St Simon Stock — an apparition which rather surpris- ingly occurred at Cambridge — and pre- sented him with the scapular, that is, two pieces of cloth joined by strings which if worn by the faithful would ensure their release from Purgatory on the first Saturday after their deaths, or 'as soon as possible'.
But as a piece of emotionally persuasive painting it is completely convincing. The queenly Virgin floats down to the saint, who is humbly bowed on a ledge of mason- ry, below him is an earthy zone of skulls and wailing misery in which we the viewers are deeply sunk. In the words of Sir Michael Levey, best of all writers on the painter, this is one of Tiepolo's subjects par excellence, 'the assuaging vision of the supernatural to mortals'.
It is hard to assess the piety of artists, but at least the notion of an upper zone inhab- ited by flying, comfort-bringing female forms seems to have meant a lot to him. As a professional artist, he doubtless tackled any subject that was assigned to him. Some produced a more emotional and imagina- tive response. The central drama of the subject sometimes interests him less than the spectators, often Orientals in extraordi- nary hats, who crowd around the periphery.
There are altarpieces in which he seems to be going through the motions, though with tremendous aplomb. But other reli- gious paintings are surprisingly stark and impassioned — for example, St Agatha martyred by the amputation of her breasts, or St Theela praying imploringly for the plague-stricken who surround her in a bleak, grey landscape. The late paintings of the Flight into Egypt, done in Spain in his old age, have an atmosphere both serene and resigned, as if the painter was contem- plating his own death. Those, like many of the most captivating pictures in the exhibi- tion are small. Tiepolo was generally at his absolute best either sketching modelli for big commissions with flickering brushwork, con brio — or on a vast, room-filling scale.
Especially in the mythological paintings, his attitude can be urbanely humorous he was after all a contemporary of Pope's. In the early 'Diana and Actaeon', neither the nymphs and goddess with their dimples and Demi-Moore uplift, nor Actaeon with two horns like bits of Christmas tree, is treated with much gravity. But the whole picture is animated by a wonderful stormy light making it both frivolous and poetic at the same time, like the 'Rape of the Lock'. Tiepolo is an artist, I suspect, little known to the English public. He can seem, on superficial acquaintance, off-puttingly affected and stagy. In fact, he was a unique painter with a vigour and copiousness of imagination to rival Rubens's. It would be hard to think of a more rewarding project than a few days spent in Venice getting to know his world.
Tiepolo's 'Marriage of the Emperor', Residenz, Winzburg
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