Tiepolo Pink

About this book

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches palaces and villas often covering vast ceilings like those at the Wrzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around himbut though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolos series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings the Capricci and the Scherzi but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolos art. Blooming ephebes female Satyrs Oriental sages owls snakes: we will find them all as well as Punchinello and Death within the pages of this book along with Venus Time Moses numerous angels Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundya motley company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid seemingly effortless style Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura the art of not seeming artful.