Tiepolo’s “Allegory of Virtue and Nobility” at the Norton Simon Museum

I'm Nicholas Penny. It was several years ago that I started work on the Italian paintings of the 17th and 18th century in the Norton Simon Museum. And now that this splendid catalogue has been published, I'm celebrating with three short videos concerning some of the discoveries I made in the course of compiling the catalogue. I want to talk today about the very large painting, originally a ceiling painting, by Gian Battista Tiepolo, the Allegory of Virtue and Nobility. This is a painting which no visitor to the Norton Simon can miss, such is its size. It's very rare with the paintings that I've been cataloguing for the Norton Simon, that one can trace their entire history, everyone who owned them and everywhere that they've been since being created by the artist and finding their way to Pasadena. Since its arrival in California, much more has been discovered about it. We know for certain that it was made for a very large palazzo on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge. And this great palace belonged to the Manin family. The Manin included the Doge of Venice, the last Doge of Venice, before the Republic fell to the forces of General Bonaparte at the end of the 18th century. So it's rather an extraordinary thought that this painting was hanging in this great palace with this particular historic association. We then know that it was rolled up. We don't know exactly when it left Venice, but it was certainly in the second half of the 19th century. And we do know that it went to the home in Shropshire of Edward Cheney, who was the single most important collector of Tiepolo that there's ever been. He collected almost all the drawings by Tiepolo that now survive. He collected a very great many smaller paintings and works by other Venetian artists. He lived in Venice for some time. But Tiepolo had been somewhat neglected as an artist, fallen somewhat out of fashion, and he'd come back into fashion only at that period, and partly as a result of Cheney's activities. And we know that Cheney put the painting back on a ceiling, a house called Badger Hall. And it was there that it was discovered by a great Italian art dealer, who took it and put it on the ceiling of his villa in Florence. And it was from there that it eventually was exported. So we know almost everything about it. But what was its subject? What's going on in this painting? And one of the interesting things I discovered in investigating that was that people didn't really care terribly much about its title in the 18th century. We like to think that allegories, and this is an allegory, had very important and precise meanings. But it's not at all certain that this really was the case. It's certain that the woman falling out of the picture, and wearing very dark clothes, and being beaten up by a little winged figure, is ignorance. But even the word ignorance, I should emphasise, probably didn't quite mean just a lack of education, such as it means to us today. I think it meant a kind of uncouthness, and just a general bad behaviour. And these would be banished by the allegorical figures representing virtue and nobility. But virtue didn't really just mean virtue as it does today, it meant vertu, which was a type of conduct of a correct, but also perhaps of a rather grand kind. And nobility, nobilita, that also seems perhaps rather surprising to us. But the patrician families of Venice were very proud of their great traditions and of the standards that they maintained. And I think that's what these two ladies rarely stand for. They stand for the aristocracy of Venice, the patrician families of Venice, and they're linked together. But that's the most fascinating thing about the painting. Tiepolo loved combining figures, but it's how they're combined that is so fascinating. It's of course partly by the drapery that floats up around them. It's quite hard to tell what this drapery really is, or what purpose it normally performs. Certainly the golden-yellow drapery of one figure is a sort of dress, but the rest of it are these cloaks. Or what are they exactly? What is the silver-white drapery that floats up around the more prominent of the two figures? Tiepolo loved floating drapery. He must have spent ages looking at cloth on washing lines with the wind slightly underneath it, because that's one of the things that really helps his figures to seem at home in the clouds and in the sky, which was one of his great achievements as an artist. It's quite difficult to put these figures together in a logical way. Try and find the hand of the foremost figure. You'll find in fact that it's looped around the wrist of the other figure who's holding a little statuette. Try and place onto her body the arm that protrudes holding the crown. It's not really anatomically obvious how they fit together. I mentioned the draperies and which drapery belongs to which figure is an interesting question. You'll see that that wonderful bright rose drapery, which is on the lowest patch of colour there, can't really be attached to anything that we can see. Then one of the things I like most, and I think is most clever about this painting, is that of course no female figure who has wings has only got one wing, but the wing on our left of that foremost figure is at first not at all easy to find, and it really is going to get in the way of this union of the two figures, the way that they're really a single unit embracing in the sky. But Tiepolo has blown up a piece of cloudy drapery behind the two heads, which acts as a sort of equivalent to the more prominent wing on the right. All of this is very witty and very enjoyable, and so too are the little putti who are helping these figures, or trying to help these figures, stay in the air. And there's another one at the very top of the picture, but you can only see a bottom and two legs as it flies out of the painting. Altogether, it's always worth looking carefully at the Tiepolo's clouds and the colour of those clouds, and the way in which some of those colours are found in the figures as well. How do they stay so well in the sky? And from where should we be seeing them? We recognise this as a ceiling painting, but we don't feel quite sure when we look at it, at what we would be seeing first if we came into a room, a grand room, on the Grand Canal, in the palace for which this was originally made. And in fact, Tiepolo was very much admired, and has been very much admired ever since, for the way that he made paintings which can be seen from different points of view. And that's one reason why he didn't like including architectural elements in his ceiling paintings, because they always look wrong unless you were in just one place. But his figures look good from different points of view, and that's one reason why, although we recognise immediately that this is a ceiling painting, it can be enjoyed hanging on the wall of a great gallery.