Venetian Virtuoso

Eighteenth Century Venice was gay, decadent and lip-service pious. Its sophisticated proverb: "In the morning a bit of Mass, in the afternoon a little game, in the evening a woman." Its most famous son: the amorous mountebank Casanova. Its most accomplished artist: industrious Giambattista Tiepolo, who painted exactly to his townsmen's taste.

In proud retrospect this week, Venice is giving Tiepolo his due in the biggest roundup of Tiepolos in history: 112 canvases, 150 drawings and engravings, gathered from museums, churches and private collections from Helsinki to Kansas City. In addition, special "Tiepolo Tours" cart art lovers through Venetian palazzi, churches and nearby villas to see the painter's magnificent frescoes, full of spiraling angels, cherubs and pretty ladies.

Clogged Lagoons. The golden heyday of Venetian painting (Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto) was long past when Tiepolo was born in 1696. The Republic of Venice, its trade failing, its lagoons clogging with silt, was living on past glories and borrowed time. Tiepolo, like the Venetian aristocracy, took the riches accumulated by the Renaissance, blew them on one last spectacular display.

He began his own talented display in his teens, at 26 was considered accomplished enough to decorate the walls of the palace of the reigning Doge Cornaro. Soon he had so many commissions for his theatrical representations of the Scriptures and his fancy-dress treatments of mythology that he could not keep up.

Gravity Defied. As his fame spread, he got offers from abroad. In 1736, the Swedish Ambassador to Venice invited him to travel to Stockholm to decorate the royal palace, wrote home to King Frederick I: "He is full of spirit, very accommodating, and a painter of infinite fire . . ." But Stockholm didn't promise a big enough commission; Tiepolo decided not to accommodate. He scattered his sprawling frescoes and altar pieces across northern Italy and Germany, brightened palace ceilings from Milan to Wuerzburg with gravity-defying gods and goddesses posed dramatically on luminous, pink-edged clouds. With his lightning technique, facile draftsmanship and virtuoso brush, he covered more feet of canvas and wall than any other first-rate painter of his day.

At 66, Tiepolo made his last long European journey; he took his two painter-sons, Giandomenico and Lorenzo, and traveled to Madrid. There, on the vaulted ceilings of Carlos Ill's royal palace, he painted his last great works, glorifying the Spanish monarchy. But the peak of his popularity had passed. The baroque style which he had exploited to its limits had gone out of fashion. When he died in Madrid in 1770, at 74, his last canvases, altar screens painted for the San Pasquale convent in Aranjuez, were carted off to the basement. It was more than 150 years before the last of them was brought back upstairs, hung in a place of honor in Madrid's Prado.

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