Tiepolo biography

Biography

Giovanni Baptista (Giambattista) Tiepolo, Italian painter, part of a Venetian family of painters, draughtsmen and etchers. The greatest member of the family was Giambattista Tiepolo, the sixth and last child of Domenico Tiepolo, a merchant, and Orsetta, whose maiden name is not known. He was baptized Giovanni Battista after his godfather, Giovanni Battista Dorià, a Venetian nobleman, on 16 April 1696 in S Pietro di Castello, the family's local church and at that time the cathedral of Venice. Although their name belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished of Venetian patrician families, this Tiepolo family did not claim noble lineage. However, perhaps through business connections, not only Giambattista but some of his siblings acquired highborn godparents. Domenico died about a year after Giambattista's birth, and it is possible that Orsetta brought up her children - all under ten at the time of their father's death - in straitened circumstances. In 1719 Giambat

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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, a venetiansk, was the greatest Italian Rococo painter, although his style was founded on the Grand Manner of the High Renaissance. His imaginative decorative frescoes are light in colour and airy in feel; the National Gallery's 'Allegory with Venus and Time' was part of a ceiling decoration and is similarly light and airy. He also executed many altarpieces; several small works in the Collection are modelli for frescoes or altarpieces.

Tiepolo was born in Venice and was trained there by Gregorio Lazzarini. He was influenced by his near contemporaries, Piazzetta and Ricci, but is indebted above all to his predecessor Veronese. In 1719 he married the sister of Francesco Guardi, and in his early years worked in Udine (1726), Milan (1731-40) and Bergamo (1741-2), as well as Venice. He moved in 1750 with his sons, Domenico (a considerable artist in his own right) and Lorenzo, to Würzburg to decorate the residence of the Prince-Bishop, a

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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)

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 of being collected alongside his finished paintings. For his incomparable fresco decorations—such as those in Palazzo Labia, Venice—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