Tiepolo and the Rococo in Italy | Grandeur on a Massive Scale

This lecture is entitled The Rococo in Italy, Tiepolo, or The Rococo Finds a Grand Setting. Now, you may recall from our introduction to Rococo that Rococo art, very generally speaking, is considered a sort of more intimate art than some of the art that came before in the Baroque period. And it was intimate both in the subject matter, you may recall there were lots of scenes of love and fantasy and eroticism, but they were also intimate in their scale and their setting and who would view these works of art. And it's true that they were often very elegant paintings, very sumptuous paintings created for the most elite members of upper class society, but they weren't on this really massive scale for the masses to see. They weren't these huge public works of art. And that is where Tiepolo, who we're looking at today, differs from what we have come to understand the Rococo to be. This image here is a ceiling fresco from a palace in Germany. And this is often just called Apollo and the Continents. Apollo and the Continents. And it dates from the 1750s, 1752 to 53. And it's in the residence, which is just the palace, in Würzburg, Germany. And over here, you can just see the setting for this enormous ceiling fresco. You can see it's in this grand hallway with this really elegant, beautiful staircase. And it's up above this elegant architectural space. Now, Tiepolo, and let me write his full name on the screen here for you. Giovanni Tista Tiepolo. He was a very popular artist working in 18th century Italy. He was from Venice, but he was really popular outside of Italy as well. As you can tell, I already mentioned this is in Germany, and this is one of his most famous works of art. But he also worked in Spain and was really famous throughout Europe. So he was an interesting international figure. And he helped spread his own local traditions throughout Europe. He was working very much in his local tradition, both borrowing from what he saw in the heritage of high Renaissance and Baroque, and also very Venetian-specific influences of artists like Titian and Veronese, who you may have studied in earlier art history courses. Now let's take a look at this in comparison to one earlier Italian work of art. Okay, so here on the right, again, we have Apollo and the Continents by Tiepolo. And on the left, we have what you might consider a precedent, a sort of precedent for Tiepolo's ceiling fresco. This is by an Italian artist known as Pietro da Cortona. And this was painted on the Palazzo Barberini in the 1630s. And it's an allegory, an allegory of divine power and really asserted the power of the people who owned the palace that this was painted in. Now I'm showing you this example, which is from more than a century before, because you might recall that illusionistic ceiling painting was really popular in Baroque Italy. And clearly, Tiepolo here is carrying forward that tradition into the Rococo, because just like Pietro da Cortona's, and just to give you some sense of what you're looking at here, this is what you might see if you were standing directly in the center of this room looking straight up at the ceiling. Both of these artists are creating a ceiling that has this illusionism of the space continuing up, right? It's not as though there's a sense of space being cut off. Instead, these figures move beyond the barrier of the ceiling. Tiepolo is very much continuing this tradition from Baroque Italy. But I think you can see that the style is a little bit different. And before we look at the style, I just wanted to point out even the subject matter is similar, right? These are both allegories, right? I mentioned this is an allegory of power being bestowed by the divine, whereas Tiepolo is showing an allegory of the world. I mentioned the continents. We have personifications of different parts of the world. We have Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. So these are both allegorical paintings. But the style, again, is where they differ. And that's where we see that Tiepolo is really a part of the Rococo. I think you can see right off the bat, he uses those pastel colors that we come to associate with Rococo, the softer colors, a more even, delicate lighting, and even this softer, delicate use of gesture and form, the way the forms fill up the space. And really quickly, I just wanted to also compare this to another artist, and this is Veronese. And this is Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi from 1573. And I'm showing this to you because Veronese was one of the leading artists of Venice, and it's considered to have been very influential on Tiepolo. And I think you can just see there's some of the same interest in this illusionistic sense of space, right? You can see these architectural elements in Veronese that blur our sense of what's painting and what's real, what's the real space of the room and what's the fictional space of the painting. So there's a similar interest there. And Veronese was also famous for his use of gesture. And you can see, even in just this little bit of the painting here by Tiepolo, there's that same interest in gesture to tell his story. So a clear influence from his native Venice as well. But where does Tiepolo sit in relation to other Rococo paintings? Now, on the right here is Fragonard's The Swing, which we've already looked at. And that was the quintessential French Rococo painting. Now, how do these relate to one another, they're both considered Rococo. I think that you can see that compared to Fragonard's painting, Tiepolo's is a unique interpretation of the Rococo. There's the same colorism, the same elegance, but it's on this massive scale that we associate more with Baroque art. And again, that allegorical painting, which we also associate more with the earlier Baroque period. And that's worlds away from the greater intimacy and sensuality of Fragonard's painting. I think that Tiepolo, in comparison to Fragonard, we see how the Rococo style spread to different uses around the globe, and how this new Rococo style was adapted to suit the needs of the patrons and even could be used, as in Tiepolo's work, in a very traditional, perhaps even old-fashioned allegorical painting.