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Tiepolo and Ruisdael at London galleries
Contemporary Review, Summer, 2006 by Donald Bruce
THE Courtauld Gallery's opulent set of oil sketches by Giambattista Tiepolo, until recently on display at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, forms the core of its latest exhibition, All Spirit and Fire (25 February-29 May). It is likely that most of Tiepolo's oil sketches will remain on permanent display at the Courtauld Gallery. In the following appreciation, locations will be cited only for works not already part of the Courtauld Institute's collection.
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The extremes of eighteenth-century Venetian painting were demarcated by two glorifiers of its watercourses; in the placid architectural veracity of Giovanni Canaletto (usually with a few gentlefolk dispersed in static groups) and the flickering mobile inventions of Francesco Guardi. Concording with Guardi's volatile dazzle, the visions of his brother-in-law Giambattista Tiepolo (1690-1770) flare, sky-bound. Tiepolo's figures skim palatial heights and frescoed domes. They are accustomed, like Shakespeare's Ariel, 'to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride upon curled clouds', inside a steep and vaulted amplitude. Yet when Tiepolo narrows his range, by no means does he emulate his fellow-wizard Prospero, who threatens Ariel that he will 'rend an oak/ And peg thee in his knotty entrails'. Tiepolo's concepts remain capacious. In his sketches on canvas he merely reverses the telescope.
Neither the spaciousness, nor the range, nor the impact of The Power of Eloquence, designed for a large ceiling in the Palazzo Sandi in 1725, is curtailed in the oil sketch. The Venetian palazzo was built by a family of rich lawyers in the days when lawyers aspired to eloquence. In the painting Pallas and Mercury preside, awash with clouds. In spite of having cajoled grim Dis into releasing Eurydice from the Underworld, Orpheus loses her for the second time when, within reach of the upper air, he looks solicitously back as she stumbles on a boulder. As Virgil retells the legend in a touching episode in his Georgics, Orpheus incautiously broke his bargain that he would not look back on his half-regained Eurydice; an error deserving forgiveness, if Hell knew how to forgive. She slips back into the darkness, stretching out to Orpheus hands no longer his. Opposite Orpheus stands the demigod Amphion, the eloquence of whose songs was more propitious, as he restores the ruins of his birthplace. Incited by his singing, even rocks hurl themselves through the air, row on row, to fortify the renewed city of Thebes.
Tiepolo's sketches were usually presented with a high finish for his patrons' approval of his projects. Even the lines on the palms of the saint's outstretched hands are clearly marked in the sketch of St Clement's Vision of the Trinity (London National Gallery). At times the sketches are the sole originals, since the frescoes derived from them were enlarged copies not always made by Tiepolo himself, but by members of his Studio. In at least one instance the sketches are closer to Tiepolo's intentions than the completed frescoes. The ceiling of the Villa Cordellina, near Vicenza, was decorated with an allegory of Fame trumpeting the union of Mercy and Authority. The Villa was newly built, and so much damp seeped through its plaster that the colours of the now watered-down fresco faded. The colours retain their vigour only in the lively but precise paintwork of the sketch of c.1743 (Dulwich Gallery, London).
Far worse, the ceiling-painting of Apollo and Phaeton in the Palazzo Archinto in Milan, with the palazzo's other frescoes, was destroyed in a bombardment during the Second World War, so that the only traces of it left from Tiepolo's own hand are his cursive elliptical drawings dabbled with shadow (British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum), the heroic panache of two partial oil sketches (one from the Bowes Museum in County Durham) and a sketch of the whole ceiling, regrettably not lent to the exhibition, in the Los Angeles County Museum. Paintings on ceilings are more vulnerable than movable canvases. Already the roof of the Venetian church of Santa Maria di Nazareth had been brought down by cannon-shot in the First World War and, with the roof, Tiepolo's fresco of the house of Mary and Joseph, miraculously carried by obliging angels through the skies from Nazareth to its shrine in Loreto, near the Adriatic coast. The oil sketch for the fresco was likewise not reciprocally lent to the London exhibition by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Five sketches for altarpieces at the Franciscan church of San Pasquale Baylon, in the Spanish town of Aranjuez, represent Tiepolo's intentions before the sketches were revised and reshaped and later discarded by Charles III, the Bourbon ruler of Spain, and his Confessor. Charles decided that Tiepolo's versions, with their rococo clouds and cherubs, were still outdated even after Tiepolo did what he could to conform to the King's wishes. After Tiepolo's death, which soon followed his alterations, Charles replaced the altarpieces with more modish devotional works by Anton Raffael Mengs and his Neoclassical pupils. Two of Tiepolo's sketches may be compared with his mutilated altarpieces stored in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The main altarpiece was of St Pasquale in Adoration of the Eucharist.
