The Immaculate Conception by Tiepolo, 1767 - 1769. Recorded on May 8, 2024

Hello everyone. Welcome again to the Prado Museum here in Madrid, Spain, with the American Friends of the Prado Museum. We are a non-profit organization, so thank you so much to all of those who support us. And if you want to find out more about what we do, then I do encourage you to find us on our website, or the Fundación de Amigos del Museo del Prado as well, to find out more about the projects that we work on and how we put together programs like this one, sharing the treasures in the Prado's collection with the English-speaking world. And today we'll be talking about one of these treasures here in the Prado's collection by Gian Battista Tiepolo. Tiepolo was an Italian painter in the 18th century, and he was famous for his airy, elaborate, decorative frescoes that can be found in noble residences and royal palaces throughout Europe from the 18th century. He was born in Venice and he trained there, and he's kind of thought of as this last link in a long chain of great Venetian painting. And that's a tradition of painting that we have so well represented here at the Prado with artists like Titian, and Tintoretto, and Veronese. So it's a real treat to see Tiepolo here at the Prado, surrounded by these artists forming part of that story. And that really is a direct result of the collecting preferences of the Spanish monarchs from the 16th and the 17th centuries. And maybe that's one of the reasons that Charles III in the 18th century decided to call Tiepolo to Madrid for the decoration of the new royal palace. The original royal palace, the Alcázar, had burned down, and so Charles III had to decorate the newly rebuilt palace. So if you come to Madrid today and you do see the royal palace, and you see some of Tiepolo's paintings in their original settings and in really important spaces like in the throne room. When he came to Madrid, he was already an older man and he was here working with his sons. We have some of his sons' paintings here in this room as well. And he asked after he was done with the project at the royal palace to stay in Madrid. And so he was given more commissions, like this painting of the Immaculate Conception for an altarpiece in the church of San Pascual in Aranjuez, which is south of Madrid. Now of Tiepolo's religious paintings, the Immaculate Conception is really a principal work. And it was really famous in its day too. It is a truly beautiful painting. And when we look at it, we can appreciate some of Tiepolo's unique capabilities and his style. He has this creamy, dreamy, pastel palette, but that's punctuated with rich Venetian yellows and blues and oranges. And he has a really distinct use of line that's really characteristic of Tiepolo that's fluid and vibrant and dynamic. If you go to the website, you can see this image online also and really zoom in and see the details of the line. It's really beautiful. The whole thing really represents kind of what the English painter and theorist Joshua Reynolds called the Grand Manor. Reynolds didn't really define what the Grand Manor was exactly, but he admired Venetian painting and he encouraged his students to paint with expressive qualities, elevating their subjects, infusing them with grandeur in every aspect, in invention, meaning in the idea, in the composition, in expression, and even in coloring and in drapery. And we can see all of that in Tiepolo's work, I think. It's elaborate and theatrical. And this is a bit of a tangent, but those are ideas that would have been fundamental for the development of the tradition of British portraiture that Reynolds was so important in. So the subject is the Immaculate Conception, which is part of a Catholic belief. Catholicism holds that all humans are born with an original sin and this is a sin that's inherited from the first sin that was committed by Adam and Eve in the biblical book of the Genesis. And the Immaculate Conception is the idea that the Virgin Mary was always free from this sin, that she never carried original sin, that she was conceived and born completely pure. And the depiction of this dogma is rooted in the visual tradition that was consolidated in Baroque painting and also in biblical text. So with Baroque painting, of course, we can think of Murillo. Murillo is probably the most famous painter of these Immaculate Conceptions of images of the Virgin Mary. I'm sure we all have Murillo's Immaculate Conception in mind right now, and I bet that Tiepolo did as well when he was painting this. And then, however, I think that the face maybe is a little bit different than Murillo's Mary. Murillo's Mary is maybe a little bit warmer, a little bit sweeter, and Tiepolo's Mary is maybe a little bit more cold, a bit more distant, more hieratic. She's rather majestic. She has this aura of regal power, I think, that that distance provides her. And in the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, St. John has a vision of a powerful woman that's coming from the skies, that's dressed in light, and is crowned with 12 stars. Pretty close to what Tiepolo has painted here, I'd say. And one of the great things about this painting, too, is that there's so much going on down here below. And this is another way that painters could add that grandeur to their paintings, to elevate a subject, to include allegories and symbols. So we have all of these different elements here, like the crescent moon, because, again, going back to the vision of St. John, the woman that was coming from the skies was standing on a base or a plinth, a base that was a moon. The crescent moon is something that always refers to the Virgin Mary. We also have the serpent. The serpent is representative of the devil and has an apple in its mouth, which reminds us again of that Genesis story of Adam and Eve. And notice that Mary is stepping on the serpent. So this is showing how she's triumphing over that story, over original sin, making her the new Eve, the second Eve. There's a palm tree, and the palm tree also is a symbol of triumph, and it's related to ideas of the paradise. We see an angel, an angel that's bowing down in reverence, and carrying a flower, carrying a lily. And lilies are a symbol of purity, and of course purity is associated with the Virgin Mary. And then we also have a mirror here, a spotless mirror, an immaculate mirror, a mirror sin macula, meaning without any stains, without any spots. And the mirror's ability to reflect a pure image without distortion was a metaphor for Mary's purity and her conception without sin. Tybalt's grand decorative style would ultimately be replaced for a new taste in the court, for the cool, calm, structured balance of neoclassicism, which really would be embodied by his fellow court painter, Anton Raphael Mengs, who we have here just in the room nearby. So this is such a unique place to see Tiepolo, like I said, because you can see him as part of this long tradition of Venetian painting, and also see how he coexisted at the court, both in time and in place, in the Spanish court in the 18th century with a new taste for neoclassicism. So thank you for joining me again today, and we'll see you again next Wednesday.