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Giambattista Tiepolo’s Narrative: Vitality and Animation through Dynamic Figure
When we begin to discuss Tiepolo, certain images come to mind. We think of grand history paintings taking place amongst fields of cerulean blue sky and on pink, flesh-colored clouds with flocks of figures amalgamating to create a compositional frenzy. We often think of ceilings and unconventional picture settings; when we see the oil sketches for “The Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, we immediately sense that these images were not meant for the confines of the picture plain within the canvas Tiepolo has painted on. The shining star of eighteenth-century Venetian painting, Tiepolo has long been the pinnacle of the Italian Rococo. The work of the painter has come to the attention of modern scholarship with the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1996, and has been explored in such exhibitions as “Giambattista Tiepolo” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections” at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and the publishing of essays on the subject, most notably a new edition of Michael Levey’s Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice.
Yet, despite this great outpouring of recent scholarship on the master, there seems to be a persistent confusion as to Tiepolo’s role as an artist and representative of the eighteenth-century. In John Steer’s A Concise History of Venetian Painting, the author claims that “in the last resort Tiepolo’s paintings lack passion and, for all their brilliance and range, are the works of a great artist held in by an artistic tradition in decline” (Steer 195).
Much of the traditional scholarship on Tiepolo belittles the painter’s work in this fashion. Even in Tiepolo’s time, and despite the apparent satisfaction on the part of his patrons, he did not get the sterling praise from the growing pool of art critics that an artist might have hoped for. One such critic was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a critic who established a hierarchy within the arts and subsequently founded a basis for the development of art historical theory. In regards to Tiepolo, Winckelmann was unforgiving. “In the 1760s, Tiepolo’s final years in Madrid, the paintings of Anton Raffael Mengs laid claim to a new sobriety. Winckelmann, an admirer and advocate of Mengs, wrote from Rome in 1763 that though Tiepolo could paint more in a day than Mengs could in a week, Mengs was immortal and Tiepolo forgettable” (Alpers & Baxandall 7).
Modern scholarship is not so demeaning. Of particular note is the work of Keith Christiansen in his role as the Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan, and this position, as well as his many published writings within his field, has expanded the understanding of Tiepolo exponentially. Yet, a great deal of the scholarship focuses on the historical context of the paintings, the importance they had to their patrons and the political and social climates of Venice, Spain, and southern Germany, where Tiepolo lived and worked. Especially of note is the great focus on contextualizing Tiepolo’s work within a literary standpoint; the Venetian theater has been used as a comparison, as in Christiansen’s “Tiepolo, Theater, and the Notion of Theatricality.” Levey himself analyzes Tiepolo’s work in terms of its relativity to Venetian Opera: “The curtain rises on rococo drama and it is, once again, opera” (202 ).
Our general understanding of the Rococo itself is as confusing and abstract as our flawed understanding of Tiepolo. We group art history into broad categories, David Hyde Minor states,
because we tend to think in terms of broad spreads of time with some identifiable character, [thusly,] art historians are loath to abandon periods and labels altogether… terms suggest not just a period but an overarching philosophy, style, and vision; using these terms connotes some basic similarities among objects and attitudes throughout (Minor 15).
Yet when we study the eighteenth-century, we see an imperfection in the way that Rococo art has been traditionally understood. In their essay, Alpers and Baxandall discuss the art historical context from which Tiepolo and all other eighteenth-century painters are approached:
The rococo is ill-defined. Its primary sense is to a style of ornament, not pictures; and when it is use of pictures it tends to refer to a subject matter or to an individual like Watteau rather than to a generic pictorial manner. At the time it was, as has rightly been said, an art without theory; and the better modern studies have been genetic studies of motifs rather than analytical studies of morphologies (Alpers & Baxandall 143).
Within this framework, art history has placed Rococo culture as an appendage of the eighteenth-century aristocracy. The unpopularity of an elite social group after the French Revolution and the rise of Nationalism in Europe tended to represent the art of the Rococo as a bauble of the privileged. This art was characterized as containing no meaningful significance, as the work of Jacques-Louis David and the Neo-Classicists did. If we have such a handicap when we approach the Rococo, we must find a new way in which we can approach Tiepolo’s art. Perhaps this is an appropriate place to state that the work of Giambattista Tiepolo deserves a more scrutinized look than it has previously received. His paintings contain some of the greatest sense of human vitality and animation in the Western tradition, and this should certainly delegate him a second look. One author eloquently describes the intelligence Tiepolo’s imagination explored:
Imagination, indeed, is one of the attributes of Tiepolo’s genius that his contemporaries most frequently recognized in him. For them, as for us, it must have been cause for astonishment, and one of the real pleasures offered by his painting, to witness with what originality and magnificence of style he interpreted even the most traditional subjects… Giambattista would transform old scripts into a new fable for the eyes (Mariuz 9).
The most appropriate choice, therefore, is a formal perspective, which has been underrepresented in intellectual and systematic capacities. If we analyze Tiepolo’s oeuvre from its compositional and applicational approach, we can obtain a much more objective reading of the work. In any case, this approach is closer to Tiepolo’s methodology, as he indicated his disinterest in the art theory of the day; he was a painter for painting’s sake, and took little notice of the differences between poussinistes and rubenistes or the idealistic framework from which they approached their images. Tiepolo’s images create human vitality and dynamism through his sustained engagement with a unique decision-making of three-dimensional form within a two-dimensional surface, which in turn delegates his treatment of animated figures.
This issue is not new by any means in Western art. For three hundred years, painters in Italy and Western Europe had been dealing with the issue of three-dimensionality tangibly understood within a two-dimensional picture plain. It has been generally accepted that the Renaissance artist Michelangelo of Florence was the culmination of a spirituality represented three-dimensionally on a two-dimensional surface.
Amongst the collection in the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are a few choice selections of Tiepolo paintings and oil sketches, the more publicized of which are the oil sketches for Tiepolo’s “Allegory of the Four Continents” in Würzburg, and two oil studies for the ceiling of “Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy” in Madrid. These paintings, and the final frescos that they correspond to, are an excellent place to discuss the issue of formal and spatial representation.
“Allegory of the Four Continents” sits in a gallery amongst paintings by Giambattista and his son, Domenico. It is an oil painting on approximately four feet high by two feet wide. The composition is typical for Tiepolo:
Giambattista would often resort to similar schemes, in which many figures are arrayed along the outer border of the scene, while the center is occupied by the vast blue expanse of the heavens, variously peopled by mythological deities, heroes, or sacred figures (Pedrocco 45).
Apollo stands just off-center, while groups of figures, representing the personifications of Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, surround the border in a helix of activity. Through a series of selective formal choices, Tiepolo creates a layering of space back into the heavens while describing a blizzard of movement within the forms.
One of the more important of the two elements Tiepolo uses to create his stylistic uniqueness is his color choice in union with the application of the paint on the surface. Tiepolo employs atmospheric perspective, and the effect of surface color is convincing of a complex color world. This creates a layering of forms in space, revealing that Asia is in front of a non-descript cloud mass, which in turn is in front of Apollo. And yet, we do not realize how important the choice to be selectively non-descript is for the composition. When we look at the figure of Asia, for instance, we see a perfectly rendered form that is convincing of its mass. There is careful attention to edge, which is crisp and reinforces the physicality of the figure. Yet, when we look at the forms under her raised arm and behind her elephant, we see only blocks of color that amount to a two-dimensional plain. To be nondescript with these areas implies that there is a certain hierarchy of form, and this creates a dialogue of representational inconsistency between the different elements. The relationship between Asia and the blob of color behind her is one of mass and non-mass, three-dimensional and two-dimensional; this is central to what creates the dynamic narrative in the picture.
Pictorial narrative really is not, Tiepolo asserts, a matter of just depicting human beings more or less theatrically enacting incidents such as being strangled by sea-snakes or whatever the tale may be. The painter realizes human characters and predicaments through his control of the conditions of his depiction- such conditions as the shifts between two and three dimensions inherent in visual perception of anything (Alpers & Baxandall).
Alpers and Baxandall remind us of the similarity of Tiepolo’s paintings, despite their subject. “Allegory of the Four Continents” has the same dynamism that, say, “Road to Calvary” has, even though the former is a mythological derivative and the latter a religious story.
The hierarchy in which the narrative takes place is engaged through Tiepolo’s treatment of figures. Michael Levey reminds us that there is a lack of difference between the characters’ facial features, and this heightens the responsibility of the figures to convey a meaningful dramatic dialogue.
Tiepolo’s scene is conceived operatically rather than dramatically… Again and again in Tiepolo where we might look for reaction in a face or a gesture, nothing but the stolidity of a splendidly-dressed lay-figure greets us: the bovine impassivity of Antony at the ‘Banquet of Cleopatra’ (Levey).
What, then, within the figures creates this dialogue? When we look at the central figure in “Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy,” we see what Alpers & Baxandall call “rotational-symmetrical figures,” or, more specifically, a twist in the body along a winding axis. It is this phenomenon within Tiepolo’s painting that creates engaging narratives, not the specifics of the narratives themselves. We have already seen the disregard for the particulars of stories Tiepolo has painted; his interest lays in the interaction of human form in movement.
This type of painting is not at all new to Western art. We can see many of the same poses in figures when we look at the work of Peter Paul Rubens. What is unique about Tiepolo, however, “is how astringently [he] submits this institution to analysis” (128-129). Alpers & Baxandall, in Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, hypothesize that Tiepolo’s engagement with the human form is what makes his paintings dynamic. Like Rubens, Tiepolo “avoids bilateral symmetry, which is inherently static in suggestion, but rotational symmetry… The main counter or foil to these… is a class of relatively straight and solid figures set at a slight angle to the vertical, often quite massive, sometimes set in pairs” (128). In “Apotheosis of the Spanish Monarchy,” the gyrating figures are set off by the architecture, which serve as a plumb line of sorts, from which the figures’ movement may be heightened in comparison.
This situation creates a unique experience in Tiepolo’s paintings. The effect that is created is an almost observable movement of figures. It seems likely that the painter planned this, since much of his handiwork ended up on the ceiling.
The gyres are the source of much of the more obvious animation of Tiepolo’s human beings. Among other things, they are the mobile articulation we supply to the many fragments of figures, heads and arms and so on, with which he habitually embellishes groups (128). We can see this when we view different angles of Asia. The foreshortening of her body coupled with the twisting of her form gives her the appearance of movement when seen sequentially from the left to the right.
When we take into account all the figures that have this unique movement occupying one composition, we can begin to understand how Tiepolo creates such vitality and animation in his narratives. Understandably, it would take a person of great foresight to be able to mastermind such a composition. Keith Christiansen confirms that “it would be as great an error to underestimate the intellectual ambition of Tiepolo’s great projects… as it to would be to confuse the visual pleasure his work provides with a lack of seriousness or commitment” (Christiansen 689).
More than “one of those awkward figures straddled between two centuries and two styles” (Levey 195 ), Giambattista Tiepolo was a master in his own right. He rejected forms of standardized convention when they did not achieve the vitality and animation he required in his work. His color palette and selective use of description and non-description within form creates the perception of space and establishes a hierarchy in which the narrative may take place. The figures in his composition are the voice of these narratives: their active poses create an actual sense of movement, and when we consider the many figures that move within one composition, the interaction of these figures creating narrative is understood. The existing art historical predisposition to view Tiepolo in terms of his historical relativity may be understandable, given the confusion to which we approach art of the eighteenth-century. But it is inappropriate for modern art historians to study Tiepolo as merely “a great artist held in by an artistic tradition in decline” (Steer 195). Tiepolo was the champion of dynamism in human narratives, and only when we view his work on its own terms can we get closer to understanding this great painter.
Bibliography
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This blog is going to be about Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Houdin, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Fragonard, and Tiepolo, starting soon.
