The Last Great Venetian Artist?
If there was a painter who could be classed as Venice’s greatest artist in the city’s twilight years, it was G. B. Tiepolo. However despite Tiepolo’s support of Venice, it hardly treated him well: he was forced to go to Spain in 1761as a gesture of reconciliation between the two powers. In his early career Tiepolo worked in a Venice fraught with social tensions which were exacerbated as the gap between the rich and poor increased due partly to the lost money spent on wars with the Turks in the preceding century. Due to the decline of state patronage, Tiepolo was obliged to work for ruling families in Venice, though he was called outside Venice to work for other well-placed dynasties such as the Pisani at Udine in the 1760s (above). Tiepolo responded to this patronage, lightening his palette leading to a style at odds with the ponderous and dark canvases of the 17th century. There were signs of this: as early as the 1720s, his ceiling paintings for the Dominicans (Gesuati) glisten with vivid greens, golden yellows, frosty pinks and cool blues, completely at odds with the tenebrous canvases of his early career. But Tiepolo was not destined to work solely for the religious orders in Venice. He would use his brush to paint an aristocratic dream world, a fantastic backcloth for a socially disengaged elite which had actually cut back on supporting the arts, with dire consequences for Venice’s future. As Haskell observed, the new nobility in Venice were reluctant to purchase contemporary art; they were intensely retrospective with their galleries full of ancestral greats from Titian to Rubens. There were magnificent exceptions like the collector Zaccaria Sagredi, and some palaces contained pictures by Tiepolo, Piazzetta, Canaletto and Zuccherelli, but inexplicably, for most noble houses in Venice, art seemed to stop at the end of the 17th century.
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