Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's paintings use light color and expansive spaces for sacred, mythological, and allegorical subjects within eighteenth-century Venetian art. His ceiling frescoes arrange figures for viewers looking upward, bringing painted architecture, clouds, and open sky into a continuous composition. At the Würzburg Residence, the staircase ceiling of 1752–53 gathers personifications of four continents around a sky inhabited by classical gods, linking the decoration with the prince-bishop's court. An Allegory with Venus and Time likewise uses figures seen from below for a ceiling setting, while Perseus and Andromeda gives mythological narrative a more concentrated canvas. Original drawings and oil sketches show experiments with poses, figure groups, and the movement between light and shadow. Work in Würzburg and later for the Spanish monarchy extended his decorative practice beyond Italy. Altarpieces provided another setting for his treatment of sacred figures and luminous color.