18th century AD

Keith Christiansen

In discussing the work of Giambattista Tiepolo it has become commonplace to employ terminology that suggests some kind of affinity between his paintings and the stage. Often, the intent is one of analogy. Such is the case for Antonio Morassi in likening Tiepolo's frescoes in the Kaisersaal of the Residenz in Wurzburg (Fig. 1) to staged scenes in which the curtains have been drawn back (the curtains framing Tiepolo's frescoes are in stucco). [1] At other times the purpose is to imply a degree of artificiality or dramatic expressivity in his work--an expressivity that, to modern taste, seems excessive. In his famous (and overly clever) indictment of Tiepolo in the concluding pages of the Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura, written in 1945, Roberto Longhi characterized the artist's saints as officious stewards in theatrical disguise ("sotto il travestimento teatrale") bent on keeping the riffraff at bay. This reaction has found resonance among many modern viewers. No one has done more than Michael Levey to enh ance our appreciation of the artist, but the following passage from his eloquent and highly sympathetic monograph underscores the ambivalence of the terminology now commonly employed. It concerns one of Tiepolo's most impressive works, the massive canvas of the Way to Calvary in the church of S. Alvise, Venice (Fig. 2):

Amid all this action, the passive, vermilion-clad, prostrate Christ is appealing and touching, yet melodramatically so, in his utter exhaustion. His cross is gigantically long, fearful as a burden, yet oddly lacking in real weight, a little too much a stage property. His very prostration and his gesture of painful collapse are suggestive of the stage; there is an overt call for sympathy which is dangerously near the rhetorical. Pathos in religious subjects was not outside Tiepolo's range ... but perhaps at the root of the Way to Calvary lies an ambiguity about the intention. [2]

Interestingly enough, a record of a near-contemporary response to this very painting occurs in the journal of Jacques-Onesyme Bergeret de Grancourt, who visited S. Alvise on July 25, 1774, in the course of a trip to Italy in 1773-74 in the company of Fragonard. Deeply impressed by the picture, he commented that "it could not be better composed or better grouped; the expression is exactly what is required in every part." [3] What struck Levey as theatrical--in the sense of overstated, melodramatic, and artificial--evidently seemed to Bergeret de Grancourt not only acceptable but appropriate, and we are left to wonder about the validity of articulating our response to Tiepolo by terminology whose meaning has, inevitably, been colored by a censorious attitude toward the very conventions of Baroque stage practice that are imagined as informing it. Is not the perceived "ambiguity about the intention" more an ambiguity of response reflecting our distance from the expectations on which Tiepolo's art is based?

It so happens that none of Tiepolo's contemporaries commented on the theatrical quality in his work. Instead, they tended to see it through the lens of artistic theory and discussed it in terms of the categories of invention, expressivity, color, and fantasy. One of the reasons for this was certainly the fact that theater--which in eighteenth-century Italy really means opera--was for them a matter of actors, actresses, singers, and actual performances. Time has erased the reality of eighteenth-century stage practice, which we are prone to visualize through paintings. Yet anyone who reads through treatises on theater will be acutely aware of the fluid relationship that existed between the ideals of theatrical expression and those of painting--ideals grounded in classical theory and extending from issues of decorum and expressivity to the twin goals of edifying and giving pleasure to the viewer. An affinity between Tiepolo's work and theater has been eloquently argued and can, indeed, be assumed. [4] But is th ere a real, purposive link between Tiepolo's art and stage practice? The matter has never been demonstrated, despite two admirable articles devoted to the subject; [5] nor is it likely to be. No literary source alludes to Tiepolo's interest in or employment for the stage, and we have no ticket stubs to document his attendance at one of the many opera houses of his native city. In other words, Tiepolo presents a case quite different from that of Bernini, whose documented activity for the stage provides a firm basis for speculating on its relevance to his sculptural projects, and of Degas, whose attendance at specific operas is a matter of record. Nonetheless, to deny that Tiepolo drew on some of the conventions of contemporary theater would be shortsighted. An interest in theater was common to his circle of friends and patrons and, indeed, to virtually all the intellectuals of his day, regardless of whether they approved or disapproved of what they saw. [6] Tiepolo's imagination was fundamentally theatrical, a nd eighteenth century theater conventions can provide at the very least both a corrective lens through which certain aspects of his art gain sharper focus and a gauge of the astonishing power and originality of his imagination, one nurtured on the grand heritage of Venetian painting but capable as well of taking cues from other, remarkably disparate, traditions and experiences.

It is worth recalling that our notion of Baroque theater as vacuous artifice can be traced back to the eighteenth century itself, to critics ranging from the scholarly Lodovico Antonio Muratori in Italy, to Diderot and Goethe in France and Germany, and to that attractive international courtier Francesco Algarotti. A figure too often dismissed as merely dilettantish, Algarotti exhibited wide-ranging interests and contacts that are the very embodiment of Enlightenment ambitions; he was an amateur artist and architect and, most important for us, a personal friend of Tiepolo's. These figures all played a part in bringing about a reform in acting and performance standards as well as audience expectations. The practices they railed against are brilliantly epitomized by Benedetto Marcello's scathing satire on Venetian opera, Il teatro alla moda, which appeared as early as 1721. [7] Marcello's satire, like the surviving treatises, alerts us to the gulf that frequently separated ideal theatrical performance, as envis aged by the presiding poetic genius of the age, Pietro Metastasio (an almost exact contemporary of Tiepolo) and actual stage practice, conditioned as it was by what might be called the economics of success: that is, the necessity of pleasing a fickle public, the clever implementation of marketing strategies (which invariably emphasized special effects or the employment of supernumeraries), and the accommodation of librettos to the tastes of composers and impresarios, not to mention the vanity of the performers (Marcello is particularly humorous on this subject). For our purposes, actual stage practice, so far as it can be reconstructed, is less important than the ideals of staging and comportment as documented in published manuals and handbooks, for what is at issue is the way in which theater traditions and ideals can be utilized to create a framework for understanding what the artist was about.

Perhaps the most obvious points of intersection between stage practice and painting are in the areas of costume and illusionism--a staple of all of Tiepolo's large-scale fresco decorations. It is a matter of record that a number of Venetian painters occasionally worked as set designers, invariably pairing themselves with specialists in perspective. Sebastiano Ricci, whose paintings shaped the young Tiepolo's vision of art, worked with the brilliant perspectivist-stage designer Ferdinando Bibiena both on fresco cycles (the decoration in 1690 of the oratory of the Madonna del Serraglio near Parma) and on theater productions (the two men designed the sets for Francesco Gasparini's Roderico and Bernardo Sabatini's Orfeo, both staged in Rome in 1694); in 1729 Ricci is referred to as the impresario of the S. Cassiano opera house in Venice. His nephew Marco is primarily known today for his landscapes, but in 1708 he was hired by Lord Manchester in London to create sets for Alessandro Scarlatti's Pirro eDernetrio at King's Theatre, Haymarket, and in Venice he sometimes worked with Romualdo Mauro at the theater of S. Giovanni Crisostomo. This work for the stage seems to inform the illusionistic scheme of decoration Sebastiano and Marco devised for a chapel at Bulstrode House, Buckinghamshire (the chapel itself was destroyed in the nineteenth century, but a series of oil sketches survives). Canaletto's father painted scenery for opera productions, and we would not be wrong to find echoes of this activity in the fantastical architectural ruins that Canaletto contributed to two canvases in the series of tomb paintings commissioned in 1726 by Owen McSwiney--the impresario of Scarlatti's opera at King's Theatre--as well as in his later architectural capricci, which, in their emphatic diagonal recessions, make particular use of a fashion of stage design initiated by the Bibiena. (Was it McSwiney's knowledge of the stage that led him to employ a figurative artist and an architectural painter for each of the tomb paintings?) Gia mbattista Crosato was also employed as a scene designer, most notably at the Teatro Regio in Turin.

We have noted that there is no record that Tiepolo ever designed for the theater. However, it is known that Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna did. The person Tiepolo turned to most frequently for the architectural framework of his frescoes, Mengozzi Colonna conceived the perspective settings for the 1750 production of Domenico Scarlatti's Siroe at the Teatro Regio, on which Crosato was involved and for which, fortunately, there survives a modello documenting their collaboration (Fig. 3). [8] He was also employed by the Venetian theaters of S. Giovanni Crisostomo and S. Samuele. His work with Tiepolo provides a tangible link between the spheres of illusionistic painting and scenography.

The tradition of employing professional perspectivists, or quadraturisti, was not limited to the theater. As far back as the sixteenth century specialists painted illusionistic architectural elements in large fresco compositions. We might recall that Titian's canvas of Wisdom inserted in the ceiling of the vestibule of the Libreria Marciana in Venice has a feigned architectural surround painted by Cristoforo and Stefano Rosa, and by the end of the century Giovanni Alberti was widely employed on architectural backdrops, working with his brother Cherubino as well as other painters; the elaborate perspective setting of the Sala Clementina in the Vatican is usually credited to Giovanni. Precisely because this sort of collaboration was so common--both in and out of the theater--we must be careful about facile assumptions. Are the feigned balconies with worshipers in Tiepolo's frescoes for the vault of the church of the Scalzi (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, Fig. 4) evidence of an intersection of painting and th eater, or are they merely the result of the parallel traditions of quadratura in both? What about the elaborate architectural screen in the ballroom of the Palazzo Labia? Can a meaningful distinction be drawn between illusionism for the stage and illusionism in fresco decorations?

A similar ambiguity pertains to the fantastic-seeming, non-historical costumes Tiepolo preferred in his depictions of biblical and classical subjects and to his use, particularly after about 1740, of a repertory of declamatory gestures to convey expressions. Fanciful costumes had a long Venetian tradition. Sebastiano Ricci, for example, was only slightly less capricious in his costumes than Tiepolo was to be. As was universally recognized by contemporaries, Tiepolo took inspiration from the example of Paolo Veronese, whose conscious rejection of historicizing dress habitually elicited comment from later eighteenth-century critics such as Goethe and the influential artist-theorist Charles-Nicolas Cochin. [9] It has been argued repeatedly that the sumptuous costumes that are a hallmark of Tiepolo's pictures are merely part of his identity as a new Veronese--Veronese redivivus--and to a degree this is true; certainly his contemporaries saw things this way. [10] But the matter, which will be addressed in greater detail, is more complex than this explanation allows. For one thing, Veronese was himself occasionally involved with theatrical productions--we have some drawings of costume studies for a staging of Sophocles' Oedipus the Tyrant in Andrea Palladio's newly completed Teatro Olimpico--and the possibility is thus raised that to some degree his work reflects an intersection of theater practice with painting. [11] In other words, the Veronesian tradition to which Tiepolo laid claim was one in which theater practice and painting reflected and informed one another, in which what we might think of as parallel strands were instead tightly intertwined.

Expressivity has no similarly clear Venetian lineage. Indeed, in his treatise on painting, the Saggio sopra la pittura, first published in 1756 but already drafted in the early 1740s, [12] Francesco Algarotti singled out Tiepolo's emphasis on expressivity, as conveyed through affective gestures and facial expressions, as exceptional for a Venetian painter. [13] Although to many critics today the obvious point of comparison for this aspect of Tiepolo's work might seem to be the stage, to Algarotti, who was as interested in theater as he was in painting and who wrote a treatise on opera, the work of Raphael and Poussin were the relevant models. His observation is usually dismissed as specious, but so long as we allow for Tiepolo's Venetian roots, his freedom from academic tendencies, and his lack of intellectual rigor, his interest in the affetti--the aspect of Raphael's and Poussin's art to which Algarotti alluded--can be seen to have been genuine; was it also (or foremost) tinged by the theater?

Key to any analysis of the potential intersection of painting with theater practice--scenography, costume, and the means by which expression is conveyed--and the larger theoretical issue of verisimilitude that lay at the center of critical debates are the celebrated frescoes of Antony and Cleopatra in the ballroom of the Palazzo Labia, Venice. In these paintings Tiepolo and Mengozzi Colonna transformed the walls and ceiling into something resembling a piece of staged fiction. But to carry conviction our investigation must encompass as well Tiepolo's large-scale canvases and those fresco cycles in which the magic of quadratura plays no significant role.

We know remarkably little about Tiepolo's frescoed decoration in the Palazzo Labia (Figs. 5, 6). Circumstantial evidence suggests that the room was painted between 1745 and 1750. Algarotti never mentions the cycle, and the earliest citation--in 1753--concerns Mengozzi Colonna's quadratura rather than Tiepolo's contribution, which says something about the importance setting plays in the decoration. In 1752 Sir Joshua Reynolds sketched one of the scenes, but only twenty-one years later did Bergeret de Grancourt describe them in the sort of laudatory terms we might expect. [14] The room itself--a near perfect cube with a grand, double-arched entrance opposite two stories of windows overlooking a court--was the product of a renovation undertaken, it would seem, in the mid-1730s. From the outset there was the intention of leaving the lateral walls, each of which is pierced with two doors and, in the second story, two internal windows, free of any architectural features. Indeed, only the entrance wall received arc hitectural detailing, and even there only on the ground floor. The promoter of the project appears to have been Maria Labia, a woman of noble birth who was widowed in 1738. Of interest for the choice of subjects and the character of the frescoes painted by Tiepolo is the fact that Maria had a celebrated collection of jewelry and a love for opera. [15] No less important was the function of the room as a backdrop for social events.

The subjects of Tiepolo's frescoes, loosely derived from Plutarch's Lives (Antony, 25.36.1) and Pliny's Natural History (9.58.119-21), show the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra and the banquet of Cleopatra--the event at which the Egyptian queen dazzled Antony by dissolving a pearl earring of fabulous value in a glass of vinegar and drinking it. [16] These scenes, so rich in narrative possibilities, had to be fitted into awkward vertical spaces delimited by doors; the even narrower corner areas had also to be dealt with. This less than ideal situation was brilliantly transformed by Mengozzi Colonna, who, using the monumental portal of the entrance wall as his point of departure, devised a scheme of feigned architecture to create a screen of columns and pilasters behind which the space of the narrative scenes could be extended continuously across each wall. The simple moldings of existing doors and windows were cleverly incorporated in this elaborate system of illusionistic architecture, which increases in deco rative richness as it rises in elevation, climaxing in the fanciful scrollwork of the ceiling with its oculus providing a view onto a sky inhabited by various mythological and allegorical figures. Mengozzi Colonna's scheme clearly marked off areas of primary and secondary interest; for the latter Tiepolo painted genrelike activities that at once complement the narratives and enrich the overall effect.

The analogy with stagecraft seems at once obvious and inevitable: not only does the architecture function like a proscenium, with the two principal scenes shown as though staged behind the central arch, but the perspective space that opens behind the screen of columns, pediments, and arches inevitably recalls illusionistic backdrops, though obviously shorn of the more fantastic aspects of contemporary stage scenery, which usually consisted of spectacular diagonal recessions and dazzling arrays of colonnades. (At a performance of Andrea Bernasconi's Bajazet given in Venice in 1742, Girolamo Zanetti wittily commented on the "persecuzione delle colonne" of Giuseppe Bibiena's elaborate sets. [17]) On one wall, the background architecture suggests a vast banqueting hall that extends from one corner of the room to the other and from floor to ceiling. On the opposite wall, it is the seaport that fills the area behind Mengozzi Colonna's proscenium. In both, visual access to the main scene is provided by an illusioni stic flight of stairs descending into the ballroom from the central scene, opposite the assumed position of the viewer; by contrast, the lateral scenes on each wall--what we might be tempted to think of as "offstage" action--are isolated by raised balustrades. The analogy with theater thus involves both the use of a prosceniumlike architectural framework and a fictive space beyond. Neither was novel, and each traces its descent to a centuries-old tradition of exchange between stage design and painted narrative.

One of the best-known cases in Venetian art of the direct borrowing of theatrical backdrops in a narrative painting is Tintoretto's Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet (versions at the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the Museo del Prado, Madrid [18]), where the buildings viewed behind the open loggia in which the action takes place were copied more or less directly from Sebastiano Serlio's woodblock illustration of a stage set for the production of tragedies. The intention seems to have been to employ the typology of classical theater for its picturesque effects rather than to suggest the terms of a classical drama. This interpretation would account for the emphatic division between the sacred scene shown in the foreground and the distant street viewed through the loggia. The case is somewhat different in Veronese's Christ in the House of Levi (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice), painted in 1573 to decorate the end wall of the refectory of S. Giovanni e Paolo (Fig. 7). The background of this vast canvas was quite obviously inspired by the same sort of cross-borrowing from the stage found in Tintoretto's, but in this case the analogy with theater was underscored by the creation of a fictive, tripartite proscenium conceived as though illusionistically projecting into the viewer's space. The painted columns support an actual three-dimensional entablature, and lateral staircases further extend the pictorial space forward into the refectory. When in situ, the effect of a simulated staged action must have been astonishing. As in the Tintoretto, but far more emphatically, the figures are placed within the proscenium area--in front of what we might think of as the scenographic backdrop and behind the screen of arches. Secondary figures, including dwarfs, mediate this privileged space, occupied by Christ and his Apostles, and the everyday world of the viewer. As Algarotti aptly remarked, through architecture Veronese transformed the subjects of his pictures into theater ("ha reso teatrali gli avvenimenti della storia").

Essentially the same formula that we find in Veronese's canvas is used in the Palazzo Labia, once allowance is made for the adaptations necessitated by the preexisting doors and window openings. The action is viewed as though taking place on a raised area behind the central arch, with a deep background space that, in the Banquet of Cleopatra, echoes the architecture of the ballroom. And as in the Veronese, but even more emphatically, a staircase and a dwarf link the pictorial fiction with the viewer's space.

Although staircases such as those used by Veronese and Tiepolo to define hierarchies within the narrative can be found in some early stage designs--most significantly in those of Serlio--they had little to do with real eighteenth-century theatrical architecture. [19] They were, however, a standard feature of another branch of theatrical design: the elaborate machines, or apparati, erected in churches for Lenten devotions. These were composed of cutout architectural elements arranged like stage flats for the depiction of a religious scene. The most influential example is unquestionably that illustrated as plate 71 in Andrea Pozzo's De prospectiva of 1693. Erected in the Gesu in 1685, it had as its subject the Wedding at Cana, and there can, I think, be little doubt that when he painted it Pozzo had Veronese's celebrated canvas in mind (Algarotti viewed Pozzo as a Veronese-inspired artist and attempted to acquire an oil sketch by Pozzo of the Wedding at Cana for Augustus of Saxony when he was in Vienna in 1742 ). A similar scheme was proposed by Giuseppe Bibiena or someone from his circle for a vast apparato of the Flagellation of Christ, with secondary figures emerging from side doors and the changes in levels of the stagelike setting establishing a hierarchy among the protagonists (Fig. 8) . [20] Such apparati were clearly the source for Charles-Antoine Coypel's altarpiece of 1749 for the church of St-Merri, Paris (Fig. 9). It shows the Supper at Emmaus staged behind a proscenium defined by the frame with feigned curtains drawn back. A servant climbs a flight of stairs that descends illusionistically into the church while the miracle of Christ making himself known to two astonished pilgrims takes place in an elevated room that was conceived to harmonize with the actual architecture of the church (for the architecture Coypel employed a specialist in geometry, Pierre-Louis Subro). Coypel, to whom we shall have occasion to return at a later point, was intimately involved with theater, and his picture illuminates the degree to which Mengozzi Colonna's scheme for Tiepolo's fresco draws on traditions of quadratura associated with stage design.

It is important to recall that the scheme devised for the Palazzo Labia was by no means typical of Mengozzi Colonna's work with Tiepolo. In the archbishop's palace at Udine and at the Villa Soderini at Nervesa (destroyed, but known through photographs) a no less brilliant but more strictly pictorial system of feigned architecture, sculpture, and enormous quadri riportati--frescoed paintings in feigned frames-was employed. At the Villa Valmarana the mythological scenes are alternatively conceived as though staged within illusionistic architecture, as in the depiction of the sacrifice of Iphegenia in the entrance hall, or presented as framed paintings. The cycle in which the effect of a staged scene was perhaps most conspicuously evoked was that painted by Tiepolo and Mengozzi Colonna in a room of the Villa Contarini-Pisani at Mira. (The ceiling and wall scenes, already much damaged, were detached in 1893 and installed in separate rooms of the Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Paris, so that today the frescoes are littl e more than fragmentary reminders of a once splendid ensemble. Fortunately, Algarotti has left a description of the frescoes when in situ, and we possess measured drawings done at the time of their removal that give their precise locations in the room. [21]

A large horizontal scene showing the visit of Henry III of France to the Villa Contarini-Pisani in 1574 filled much of one wall. Conceived as taking place on a platform flanked by doors for the entrance and exit of characters, it includes a background with a panoramic view of the Brenta River, thereby establishing a play between the real and the imagined, past and present, that is the leitmotiv of the cycle. On the opposite wall, in narrow spaces between the double-arched openings of the staircase from the lower floor and two subsidiary doors, were shown people behind wrought-iron balconies whose curved railings appeared to project into the room itself. (This effect was completely lost when the frescoes were mounted on a concave wall surface in Paris.) The figures observed the ceremonial event across the room and, in doing so, called attention to the viewer's status as a spectator. The theatrical fiction was extended onto the ceiling, where, behind a steeply foreshortened balcony open to the sky--"as in the Pantheon," Algarotti remarked--other spectators, among whom are Tiepolo and his son Domenico, leaned over and gestured toward the main scene. (A favorite feature of a visit to Rome, certainly familiar to Algarotti, involved a peek through the great Roman oculus.) It was to this room that Algarotti referred when he made his comment that the relationship of a quadraturista to a figure painter should be as a bass voice to a soprano. [22] One wonders if he was not moved to make this operatic analogy because of the nature of the decoration itself. (Interestingly, the point of departure for Goethe's dialogue on the nature of theater and art was a theater building in which the spectators in the boxes were painted rather than real.) [23] In any event, it is this work that most insistently raises the issue of intentionality in Tiepolo's decorative fresco cycles in general and in the Palazzo Labia in particular.

The Palazzo Labia frescoes were the culmination of a series of at least three separate commissions Tiepolo received in the 1740s to paint scenes from the story of Cleopatra and Antony. [24] When viewed together, the resulting pictures give an insight into the importance scale and setting had in determining his treatment, and they illuminate the refinements he brought to the issue of narrative.

Earliest in date was a small canvas of the banquet of Cleopatra (Musee Cognac-Jay, Paris), a work owned by Consul Smith, from whom it was acquired about 1743--44 by Algarotti (Fig. 10). This picture--to judge from its meticulous handling, it was painted as an independent canvas rather than as a conventional oil sketch--served, we are informed by Algarotti, as the modello for a larger canvas purchased for Augustus of Saxony's collection in Dresden (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Fig. 11). [25] Almost contemporary in date was the commission by an unidentified patron of two monumental canvases showing the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra and the banquet of Cleopatra (Arkhangelsk State Museum, Russia, Figs. 12, 13). [26] One of these canvases is dated 1747, and a preparatory drawing for the other bears the date 1743. Their execution thus overlaps both with the Dresden painting and the Palazzo Labia frescoes. Extremely freely executed modelli for both canvases exist (private collection, New York, and Nat ional Gallery, London, Figs. 14, 15). [27] Additionally, a splendid series of drawings related to one or the other of these commissions survives, both compositional sketches in pen and ink and detailed studies in chalk. [28]

The various pen and ink drawings make it clear that a primary concern of Tiepolo's was the relationship between the two protagonists. Of those for the Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, the most beautiful is a highly finished drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, showing Marc Antony approaching the Egyptian queen from the left, impulsively bending over to kiss her hand (Fig. 16). Cleopatra gently inclines her head at this act of submission. This gesture was taken up and refined in the freely executed oil sketch for the Arkhangelskoye canvas. Tiepolo evidently found the action too intimate in feeling, too lacking in grandeur to carry on the scale of the completed canvas, where Antony is posed frontally as he gestures expansively toward the gifts Cleopatra has brought him (or he has brought Cleopatra; the matter is not clear). She is shown in profile, regally advancing. Tiepolo returned to the idea of an intimate encounter in the modello for the Palazzo Labia fresco, in which the affectionate gest ure of Antony occupies the center of the composition, with Cleopatra to the left (Fig. 17). Typically for Tiepolo, the oil sketch gives no indication of the architectural features of the fresco. Rather, the interest focuses exclusively on the narrative. Cleopatra looks more queenly than she did in the drawing--she is presented bolt upright, her head erect--and Marc Antony appears perhaps slightly less impulsive as he takes her hand in his and presses it to his lips, but the effect is nonetheless deeply touching. In comparison with this alluringly human scene, the solution adopted in the fresco can seem formal and somewhat conventional, with the figures assuming grandiloquent poses (Fig. 18). Yet to Bergeret de Grancourt Tiepolo's single fault was in not going far enough in this direction: "Everything is grand and noble, the composition of great richness. I could have wished for greater nobility in the figures of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, but the details are ravishing," he writes, adding, "everything is expan sive, grand, and full of taste and made to please everyone." [29]

It would not be difficult to find visual analogies for the grouping of the protagonists in Tiepolo's fresco. Among the most interesting is Giambattista Piazzetta's design for the engraved frontispiece of the 1737 edition of Algarotti's II newtonianismo per le dame, in which the author is shown explaining Newtonian principles to a woman as they stroll through a landscape. However, the conventions governing the changes in Tiepolo's fresco were hardly exclusive to the visual arts. We know from stage manuals as well as from such contemporary critics as Diderot that an emphasis on natural-seeming gestures was out of keeping with the practice of the stage, where a self-conscious formality was preferred and actors invariably assumed prescribed positions one to the other. The case is stated succinctly in Franciscus Lang's Dissertatio de actione scenica of 1727, and even more forcefully by Goethe, who from 1791 was director of the Weimar Court Theater. In the Regeln fur Schauspieler Goethe remarked, when two [protago nists] act together the speaker is always back and he who listens to the speech moves forward a little. If one uses this advantage with understanding and can, through practice, perform it without constraint, the best effect arises as much for the eye as for the intelligibility of the declamation. .... The position for the body is upright, the breast lifted, the upper half of the arms to the elbows rather close to the body, the head turned a little towards the one with whom one speaks, yet so slightly that three quarters of the face is always turned towards the audience.... He who stands on the right side [in Tiepolo's fresco this is Antony] acts with the left hand and conversely so that the breast be covered as little as possible by the arm.... The [actors] must not, out of mistaken naturalness, play to each other as though no third person were there; they should never play in profile nor turn their backs to the audience. [30]

The changes Tiepolo made in the fresco seem to take such notions into consideration--in keeping with the grand site and architectural setting provided by Mengozzi Colonna. Both protagonists share the stage, with Antony grandly addressing the queen, leading with his right hand while he gestures with his left. Cleopatra's regal bearing as she listens to his declaration of love could not be surpassed. Both face the viewer, and were Antony to speak or sing his part nothing would muffle his voice. We may feel that the spontaneity of the earlier idea has been sacrificed, but to an eighteenth-century audience the loss in intimacy and naturalness was more than made up for by the grandeur that befitted the story. [31] Two pen and ink sketches in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (D.1825.186-1885; D.1825.221-1885), show how, in evolving the final solution, Tiepolo took as his point of departure an antique marble illustrated in the Abbe Bernard de Montfaucon's magisterial compendium L'antiquite expliquee et representee en figures, the second edition of which appeared in 1722 (Fig. 19). [32] The pose was adapted with minimal change in the large Arkhangelskoe canvas (Fig. 12) and then became the basis for the Palazzo Labia fresco. The study of ancient sculpture for details of stance and gesture is recommended in acting manuals as well as, of course, in painting treatises, and although we might find it surprising in the case of Tiepolo, it is in complete keeping with eighteenth-century notions of decorum and formality. [33]

The same move from spontaneity and naturalness to formal clarity and grandiloquence marks the facing scene, the Banquet of Cleopatra. Once again we can follow the changes through a series of beautiful drawings related to one or the other commission. In a pen and ink sketch in the Victoria and Albert Museum (D.1825.214-1885) Antony is shown seated at table, his head turned as though to make a casual remark to his companion, the Roman consul Lucius Plancus (Fig. 20). In contravention of recommendations for effective stage practice, he is seated in front of the table and is seen in profile, while a servant seems casually to slip by with a serving platter. In a closely related sketch, also in the Victoria and Albert Museum (D.1825.184-1885), Antony sits spellbound by Cleopatra's action of dissolving the pearl and surprise registers visibly on the features of Lucius Plancus, who grasps the arm of his chair in astonishment (it was Plancus who kept Cleopatra from destroying the matching pearl in her other ear). Cleopatra herself was studied independently, seductively glancing at Antony as she takes the goblet of vinegar from a servant (Fondazione Home, Florence). In the next stage of the design (Victoria and Albert, D. 1825.235-1885) she is shown in a sort of tete-a-tete with a companion as she daintily picks up the pearl to drop it in the goblet, evidently just offered her by the servant holding a tray. It is the second scheme that Tiepolo adapted in his first painted treatment--the small canvas owned by Francesco Algarotti, in wh ich the emphasis on intimacy and spontaneity was perfectly in keeping with the scale and informal function of the picture (Fig. 10). In the larger canvas for Augustus of Saxony (Fig. 11), informality yields to clarity of statement, and Cleopatra is given a commanding gesture. We might say that as the scale of the picture increased and its intended audience expanded, the action assumed the formal quality of the stage.

In both the oil sketch and finished canvas at Arkhangelskoe (Fig. 13) the composition has been reversed so that it reads more clearly from left to right, with Cleopatra's gesture as the climax. More attention was lavished on the ample setting, for which two splendid sheets survive in the Victoria and Albert Museum (D.1825.32-1885, Fig. 21) and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NM 3/1976). In these Tiepolo experimented with a two-tiered composition negotiated by stairs, but he was equally concerned with the problem of how to show Antony's reaction while maintaining his placement on the viewer's side of the table. Ultimately, Tiepolo opted for a somewhat inexpressive profile. Judged from this standpoint, the modello for the fresco marks a new departure, for in it both protagonists face the audience, and it is the minor character, Lucius Plancus, who now turns his back to the viewer (Fig. 22). Cleopatra still retains an element of naturalness in her pose, and the action of the servant offering her the tray with th e goblet adds spontaneity. All of this disappears in the fresco (Fig. 23), where the two figures have their heads turned in a three-quarter view so that, as in theater practice, they at once face the viewer and can glance at each other. Antony wears his identifying helmet (a highly finished drawing of the head demonstrates that until quite late Tiepolo intended to show him bareheaded, as in the modello [34]). and Cleopatra's gestures have been reconsidered so that the play is no longer on her girlish charms but on the action of taking the goblet with one hand while she suspends the pearl in the other. She now fully controls the drama of the scene.

It is worth noting that the concerns with formal presentation evident in the Palazzo Labia decorations are operative as well in the slightly earlier frescoes at Villa Cordellina at Montecchio Maggiore and, later, at the Residenz in Wurzburg, where, in the Kaisersaal fresco of the Marriage of Beatrice of Burgundy and Frederick Barbarossa (Fig. 1), the three main figures are arranged so that each is clearly visible, shown either in profile or three-quarter view, and none is subordinated to the other, either by inclination of the head or position. This is not true of either of the two surviving oil sketches (National Gallery, London, and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), which, though they may be partly or wholly workshop paintings, record earlier phases of the design process. [35]

Of Tiepolo's approach to narrative Levey has commented,

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'; it is from Pliny, not from Tiepolo, that we learn Antony was amazed to see Cleopatra drop her pearl into the vinegar.

What is missing from this characterization is the recognition that the move from drama, or pathos, to ceremony was deliberate and conditioned both by the emblematic theme of the fresco--beauty triumphing over might--and the function of the room it decorates. [36] Eighteenth-century opera operated along similar lines. Handel's operatic music can be deeply moving, but the emotion his arias convey is a formalized one. This is also true of Metastasio's libretti. His letters counseling those staging his operas leave little doubt that for their effectiveness he put his faith in the timing of the formalized actions of the singers--the moments they stand, turn to the audience, exit, and so on; he says little about actual characterization and, indeed, professed to being baffled by Aristotle's notion of a cathartic theater. [37] Mario Fubini has rightly noted that Metastasio's theater is concerned with "exemplarity, a spectacle that is compelling, diverting, and even useful"--but not cathartic. [38] The same is true of Tiepolo's frescoes in the Palazzo Labia, and for many of the same social reasons.

But to restrict ourselves to a wall-scale work that functioned as a ceremonial backdrop hardly does justice to Tiepolo. To understand fully the mind at work and the traditions on which he drew in his narrative compositions, we must turn to pictures with an overtly dramatic subject, such as the S. Alvise Way to Calvary (Fig. 2), whose pathetic figure of Christ so disturbed Levey, or the Death of Hyacinth (Fundacion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), in which Apollo's grief over the beautifully posed body of his dead lover is conveyed by a declamatory gesture, with one hand extended and the other, clenched, raised to his head (Fig. 24). Gestures of this sort belong to that branch of academic practice known as the affetti--that is, affective gestures. The concept of affective gestures goes back to the treatises of Cicero and Quintillian for the training of professional speakers or rhetoricians, and it provided a common basis for both the stage and the visual arts. [39] That eighteenth-century painters should have had recourse to the theater for the study of expressive gestures is, therefore, hardly surprising. Charles-Antoine Coypel's father, for one, urged artists to study actors on the stage. Conversely, acting manuals frequently recommended that actors take their gestures from paintings and sculpture. In the Encyclopedie, published in 1754, Diderot expressed the widely held view that the actor M. Chasse "owes the dignity of his attitudes, the nobility of his gesture, and the fine judgment in his dress, to the masterpieces of sculpture and painting which he has cleverly observed." [40] The object of declamatory gesture was not to give an impression of spontaneous reaction or to imitate nature but to provide movements that were at once dignified, noble, and expressive in a paradigmatic or demonstrative sense. It is this kind of formal gesture that is found, for example, in Guercino's Venus and Adonis of 1647 (formerly Gemaldegalerie, Dresden), in which Venus is shown in an elaborate pose, dropping to one knee while she raises both arms in a stylized gesture of lament, and that Watteau appears to parody in his so-called French Comedians three-quarters of a century later (Metropolitan Museum of Art) [41] The theoretical ideal was to combine expressiveness with beauty through the principle of contrapposto, those balanced contrasts that had reigned in painting since the Renaissance. [42] If one arm is bent, the other should be extended; if the head is turned to the right, the torso ought to shift to the left; if one foot points out, the other ought to point to the side; and so on. [43] An acting manual of 1799 explains:

Contrasts are an arrangement which gives strength and charm to the attitudes and movements. They make that harmony which should inevitably be found between the parts which combine to form a tableau and of which the sum speaks as much to the heart as to the eyes.... The tragic actor should apply himself to them especially, not to elaborate his movements but to make them smooth. [44]

It need hardly be said that these ideas for stage performance are at one with the ideals of classical painting.

The reality of the stage--especially the opera stage--was, of course, considerably different. Benedetto Marcello wonderfully satirizes the common behavior of singers when he perversely advocates,

He maybe as capricious as he wants to in his acting, for the modern Virtuoso must not understand the meaning of the words he is singing. Thus it is not necessary for him to plan any of his gestures or steps. .... He should have a few stock gestures for hands, knees, and feet these he should alternate from the beginning to the final curtain of the opera. [45]

An illustration taken from an acting manual of 1827 displaying a good and a bad way of conveying despondency and desperation exemplifies the ideals of stage acting still in force sixty years after Tiepolo's death (Fig. 25). Of the bad example, which to modern eyes is the more natural (no. 7), the author has this to say: "The legs are placed badly ...; what bad arms, both the same ... ; the whole is, in general, thoughtlessly brought about and objectionable." Of the second, far more artificial pose (no. 8), we read: "What grace, what contrast; how much more preferable, what good bearing, and the hand which lies on the right knee, relaxed and hanging down, completes the whole position, or posture as a true figure of despondency and desperation." [46] There is a remarkable correlation between this illustration and one of the disconsolate sisters in Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii painted in 1784, for this concern with studied gestures was hardly unique to Baroque painting. We know that in working out h is compositions, David turned to both the critical writings of Diderot, who was directly involved with the stage, and to Samuel Richardson's novels.

By comparison with David's Oath of the Horatii, Tiepolo's Death of Hyacinth is bound to appear less severe (or less simple and therefore less natural), less thoroughgoing in its expressive ends, and less classical in its sources of inspiration, and it is easy to understand how, with the triumph of Neoclassicism, this kind of painting--at once formal in its expressive apparatus yet emotionally undemanding--should have fallen so quickly out of favor. Yet, ultimately, the conventions that inform David's painting are no less rhetorical or theatrical than those on which Tiepolo's is based. Rather, the differences have to do with a new relationship posited between truth and beauty, sincerity and simplicity, and a revised standard of what critics understood as verisimilitude, a concept to which we will return. It is well to remember that during this same period the almost ritualized rules that governed opera--the world of Handel's Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo--were displaced by a new, tighter, more theoretically consi stent and classically inspired dramatic presentation at the hands of Cluck. As we have noted, the forces leading up to these changes on the stage had been sown in the first half of the century. One of Tiepolo's most learned patrons, the Veronese antiquarian Scipione Maffei, was also an advocate of theatrical reform, writing the inaugural opera for the Teatro Filarmonica in Verona in 1732 and later attempting revivals of Giovanni Ruccellai's sixteenth-century tragedy Oreste and Ludovico Ariosto's comedies. (As a humorous aside, it is worth noting that Girolamo Zanetti, who was quick to celebrate a tragedy by the Abbate Domenico Lazzarini as evidence of the new, good taste in theater, reports that the Venetian audience at S. Samuele refused to suffer through two scenes of Ariosto's comedies.) Clearly a taste for the antique was not necessarily at odds with admiration for Tiepolo's work. In his Verona illustrata of 1732 Maffei actually lauded Tiepolo's "perfect correctness, frankness, expression of appearances, and above all his taste for the antique," as exemplified in the drawings after ancient busts, statues, and decorative heads the artist carried out for the antiquarian's compendium of classical sculpture. To our eyes, these illustrations are distinguished by their emphasis on pictorial effects that effectively transform an archaeological artifact into a potential prop for one of Tiepolo's paintings. [47] But it would be wrong to measure Tiepolo's accomplishment by the yardstick either of seventeenth-century classicism or later eighteenth-century Neoclassicism. His paintings offered something different.

As noted above, the formal vocabulary of declamatory gesture did not come automatically to Tiepolo; it was the result of careful consideration and revision. He purposely edited his early ideas for the frescoes of Antony and Cleopatra in the Palazzo Labia with a view to their stagelike setting and their function as the backdrop for ceremonious events and entertainments, and in his mythological and religious pictures formal gestures were a self-conscious overlay of narrative interpretation used to transform private sentiment into public expression. This is true of the S. Alvise Way to Calvary, for which there exists a differently pitched modello, and it is true of the Death of Hyacinth (Fig. 26). Just as the preliminary drawings for the various compositional solutions of Antony and Cleopatra reveal Tiepolo's natural tendency to think of narrative in affectingly human terms, so among the many preliminary drawings for the Hyacinth, not one hints at the formal gesture of lament of the finished canvas. Rather, the y are concerned with a more natural-seeming and, to us, more moving relationship between the two lovers. By contrast, the painting is a grand statement, both in scale and intention, and the declamatory vocabulary of gesture was given a new breadth and formality--though not without an ironic touch in the masking of the phallus of the herm by Apollo's outflung hand. That we have no detailed studies, done from life, for Apollo's arms and hands must be an accident of survival, for exactly this type of drawing--invariably in chalk on blue paper--exists for other canvases and frescoes and gives eloquent testimony to Tiepolo's adherence to a kind of practice we tend to associate with the academic tradition that runs from Annibale Carracci and Domenichino to David (Fig. 27). This creative process was clearly at work in the Death of Hyacinth, and it undeniably resulted in one of Tiepolo's grandest, most affective pictures.

"Melodramma metastasiano" is how one critic has characterized the tenor of Tiepolo's narrative technique in his ancient subject frescoes in Montecchio Maggiore, while another has described one of the scenes there--that showing the family of Darius before Alexander--as "una scena teatrale" conceived along Algarottian lines (Fig. 28). What part might Algarotti have played in Tiepolo's thinking on the issues discussed thus far? [48] When he arrived in Venice in 1743 to purchase pictures for Augustus of Saxony's collection in Dresden, he was already a celebrity whose handbook on Newtonian optics had become an international best-seller. He did not immediately ingratiate himself with Venetian society. Girolamo Zanetti felt obliged to mention him in his diary, but he found his foreign affectations intolerable: "so full was he of the affected manners of northerners that it gave one a stomach ache and nausea. The comedians at San Luca thought of performing a satire about him but could not get the backing. ... It is s aid that now he wants to apply himself to painting." [49] Painting, however, was but one of Algarotti's interests, his other great passion being opera. He may not have been an original thinker, but it would be wrong to underrate his stature and influence. His insatiable curiosity and skills as a courtier placed him in a perfect position to form alliances of the most diverse sort. In Venice he was an obvious conduit for the latest critical attitudes being discussed in the salons of Paris. Later, he took pleasure in inventing his own pictorial compositions; he claimed credit for the idea of the capriccio combining archaeology and fantasy. He befriended the scenographic painter Prospero Pesci in order to realize his schemes and managed on a few occasions to enlist Tiepolo's collaboration as well. [50] His arrival in Venice could not have been more timely. He remained for three years, during which he established a close friendship with Tiepolo--a friendship that proved to be mutually beneficial and was to last un til the artist's departure for Spain in 1762. The fact that this friendship coincided with the composition of the Saggio sopra la pittura is of key importance.

Nowhere is Algarotti's intellectual bent so much in evidence as in the pair of allegorical paintings he commissioned from Tiepolo for Augustus of Saxony's minister, Count Heinrich von Bruhl. In one, Maecenas Presenting the Arts to Augustus, the rich Venetian setting contains quotes from Raphael, and the armor of the figure of Augustus has been copied from an illustration in Montfaucon. The program of the pendant, the Kingdom of Flora (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), seems to have been inspired by Giovan Pietro Bellori's extended description of Poussin's celebrated canvas of the same subject in his life of the artist (Poussin's painting had been purchased for Dresden a few years earlier). [51] Moreover, the garden statues in that work are all based on actual antiquities, probably again taken from Montfaucon. [52] At about this time, under Tiepolo's tutelage, Algarotti tried his hand at etching and drawing and, like the great Venetian, he made numerous designs of antique-inspired vases--of the sort that a ppear in the foreground of the Banquet of Cleopatra destined for Dresden. In a letter to Bruhl he intimates that it was on his advice that Tiepolo made some of the refinements in the setting of that picture, adding statues of Isis and Serapis in the background and a sphinx fountain in the left foreground. [53] The fact that the character of the picture seemed to him vastly improved by these changes in "props" is indicative of his whole approach to theoretical concerns--one in complete harmony with Tiepolo's. But Algarotti's interests extended well beyond such incidental details. Tiepolo enlisted his advice for an altarpiece for the church of S. Giovanni di Verdara in nearby Padua showing a miracle of Saint Patrick (Museo Civico, Padua). [54] Seven compositional drawings for that work survive--an exceptional number--and they establish that the main concern was gesture as a means toward narrative clarity. The Miracle of Saint Patrick was painted between 1745 and 1746, the very years Tiepolo was also engaged on the various Antony and Cleopatra commissions. In this same period (1743-46) the artist carried out the two monumental frescoes for Carlo Cordellina's villa at Montecchio Maggiore, in the outskirts of Vicenza. One of those scenes, The Family of Darius before Alexander (Fig. 28), was modeled on a painting of the same subject by Veronese (National Gallery, London), then in the Pisani collection (Fig. 29), but with the placement, gestures, and expressions of the figures reconsidered along the same lines found in the Palazzo Labia frescoes and the Paduan altarpiece. As is well known, it was from Montecchio Maggiore that, in October 1743, Tiepolo wrote to Algarotti lamenting the absence of their discussions about art. [55] From another letter written by Tiepolo, on March 3, 1747, we learn that Algarotti was himself acquainted with Cordellina, and the modello for the fresco appears in the inventory of Algarotti's collection. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that Tiepolo was at the very least encouraged to reconsider the expressive character of his art through his association with Algarotti.

Tiepolo had always had a gift for expression, but it was only in the years 1743 to 1746 that it assumed the formal character we have described. There could be no more eloquent contrast than that between Tiepolo's early, monumental canvas for Ca' Dolfin, Venice, showing Veturia pleading with her son Coriolanus to spare Rome, painted about 1726-29 (Hermitage, St. Petersburg), and the picture of the same subject he painted in Wurzburg some two decades later for Balthasar Neumann (Martin von Wagner Museum, Wuzburg). What in the earlier picture is alluringly natural-seeming and casual, with Coriolanus turned away from the viewer, his children running up to him affectionately, and the setting defined by medieval walls, is in the other formal and emphatic, with the figures deployed across the canvas in two contrasting groups and campaign tents punctuating the background. As it happens, Coriolanus was a subject recommended by Algarotti in his treatise on painting, where he describes its treatment in terms that accor d with Tiepolo's later picture. [56] The same differences pertain to Tiepolo's paintings of Rinaldo and Armida carried out for the Cornaro family in the very early 1740s (Art Institute, Chicago) and those he painted a decade later in Wurzburg (Residenz), for which differently pitched modelli exist (Staatliche Museen, Berlin).

Algarotti's ideas also help explain a remarkable detail in the Palazzo Labia frescoes: Cleopatra's decolletage (Fig. 23). None of the preparatory drawings hint at it, which is all the more surprising when we consider that there even exists a detailed chalk drawing for the bodice of her dress. [57] We are, nonetheless, able to pinpoint its source of inspiration: once again, it is Veronese's Family of Darius before Alexander; in which Darius's queen is only slighdy less brazen in her attire. Veronese's painting was among the most admired works of art in Venice. Algarotti mentions it in his well-known letter to Pierre-Jean Mariette of February 13, 1751, noting that he would have liked to commission a copy of it by Tiepolo, who, in fact, made a number of drawings after various details. In the letter to Count Bruhl discussed above, Algarotti remarks that Veronese was frequently guilty of introducing luxurious and fanciful costumes where they were not appropriate, whence the criticism that his pictures were mere m asquerades. He then went on to note that the subject of Tiepolo's canvas, Cleopatra's banquet, demanded precisely this sort of costume, given the fabled luxury of Egypt and the magnificence of the Orient. There is an echo here of Algarotti's recommendation of exotic themes in opera for the opportunities they provided for fanciful costumes, but it must be admitted that Plutarch, whom Algarotti specifically cites, certainly provided the defense: "Decked out in fine array (as Homer would say) ... she went putting her greatest confidence in herself, and in the charms and sorceries of her own person" (Life of Antony, 25). This line of reasoning, emphasizing the splendor of the Near East, would apply equally to The Family of Darius before Alexander and we may suppose that it legitimized Veronese's picture as a model for Tiepolo; the decolletage of Darius's wife was deemed appropriate to another Oriental queen, especially one who, not unlike a courtesan, seduced the Roman commander with her beauty.

Cleopatra's opulent attire may serve to introduce the larger subject of costume in Tiepolo's work. Since the time of Raphael, one of the cardinal rules of academic practice was that the style of the costumes ought to coincide with the period of the action portrayed. [58] In other words, in a subject such as Cleopatra and Antony or the family of Darius before Alexander, the clothes worn by the protagonists ought to be appropriate to the historical period and copied from ancient sculpture. In his depiction of Antony's armor Tiepolo may have drawn inspiration from antiquities, but the high-collared result is pure fantasy. [59] A historical-archaeological approach to costume had never won over Venetian artists--least of all Veronese. Not only do the female protagonists in the sixteenth-century artist's paintings wear the opulent clothes current in Venice and the soldiers contemporary armor, but in the Family of Darius the two female servants who appear with a court dwarf at the far left of the composition are sh own in Turkish garb. So conspicuous was Veronese's preference for contemporary rather than classicizing costume that it elicited a sort of apology from Charles-Nicolas Cochin in his Voyage d'Italie published in 1758: "[Veronese] has been reproached for violating the rules of ancient dress, but what beauties this happy license has produced, of which we would otherwise be deprived." [60] It is usually stated that Tiepolo was merely following Veronese's example in his own love of sixteenth-century dress and that his use of costume was indicative of a sort of nostalgia for the halcyon days of Veronese's Venice. Algarotti himself declared that the bizzarria of Tiepolo's costumes was principally due to the example of Veronese. Yet the truth is far more interesting, and it points up the real complexities that face us in making overly simplistic assertions about the relationship of Tiepolo's pictures either to the precedent of Veronese or to theater practice.

Tiepolo's costumes reveal the same wide-ranging curiosity, the same exhaustive exploration of pictorial and sculptural sources that are found in his approach to composition. Especially his heroine's costumes present a mixture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dress with a good dose of fantasy. For example, the high starched collar worn by Cleopatra belongs to the early seventeenth century, not to the mid-sixteenth or eighteenth, and draws on northern rather than exclusively Italian models. This is evident if, for a moment, we compare Tiepolo's fresco of the marriage of Beatrice of Burgundy in the Kaisersaal at Wurzburg (Fig. 1) with Rubens's depiction of the coronation of Marie de Medicis (Fig. 30), for there can be little doubt that the Fleming's famous cycle, carried out for the Palais du Luxembourg in the 1620s, provided Tiepolo both with a compositional model and a type of queenly costume. (Tiepolo would have known Rubens's composition, reversed, through a print such as that by his near contemporary Jean Audran.) The derivation from Rubens is hardly incidental, for it is in Rubens's work that we also find a love of exotic dress and, more specifically, those extraordinary Oriental costumes and figures in high turbans that became a hallmark of so many of Tiepolo's paintings. [61] Rembrandt's prints offered no less compelling a model. In his famous etching of Christ preaching--a print that Tiepolo may well have owned--exotic costumes are employed to enrich a biblical scene. His prints of Orientals enjoyed a widespread fame in Italy already in the seventeenth century and had, most notably, inspired the Genoese painter Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to carry out a series of fantasy heads. In turn, these works made an enormous impression on Tiepolo.

It is all too easy to forget that alongside the academic tradition emanating from Raphael there was an alternative one that took Veronese as its fountainhead: that Poussin's Rape of the Sabines (Musee du Louvre, Paris), with its scrupulous attention to the unities of time, place, and costume, is virtually contemporary with Rubens's no less great treatment of the theme (National Gallery, London), with its mixture of Roman history and contemporary taste and fashion. Throughout Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century it was the Venetian tradition that gained the upper hand. Following the critical lead of Roger de Piles, painters came to prefer Rubens and the Venetians over Poussin and the Roman school, and fanciful costumes over archaeological reconstructions. This taste for fanciful costume in history painting was certainly buoyed by contemporary theater, in which plots derived from classical history and mythology were habitually staged in the style of Louis XIV. Such seems to have been the case wit h Francesco Trevisani, who was associated with the reforming Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome, designed theater costumes, and in the second decade of the eighteenth century painted a canvas of Cleopatra's banquet (Galleria Spada, Rome) in which the dominant key is struck by costumes of great fantasy and a dwarf as prominently placed as that in Tiepolo's fresco. (Trevisani, however, treats the event as drama rather than ceremony, and his depiction goes some way in justifying Tiepolo's more formal approach for the setting of a grand salon.)

Nowhere, however, is the intersection between the two art forms more apparent than in the work of the French painter Charles-Antoine Coypel, an almost exact contemporary of Tiepolo,s. [62] Painter and playwright as well as occasional actor, Coypel made a specialty of pictures with theatrical subjects culled from Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. He also designed the commedia dell'arte illustrations for the 1728 edition of Luigi Riccoboni's Histoire du theatre italien. Whether the subject of his pictures was Cupid and Psyche, Hercules and Alcestis, or Cleopatra, the costumes are uniformly a la Louis XIV. [63] At times the reference to stage practice is overt and intentional. In his depiction of Cupid abandoning Psyche-- part of a commission of 1747--48 for paintings inspired by French tragic theater and intended to complement an earlier series dedicated to the operas of Philippe Quinault--Psyche, garbed in a richly fringed dress with a heavy sash and tucked sleeves, stands on a pavement backed by Solomonic colu mns, behind which appears a backdrop of a river landscape. These theatrical interests are found throughout Coypel's work, even when the commission was not based on a theatrical source.

Coypel's paintings cannot compare in quality or inventiveness with Tiepolo's. But as sometimes happens with a secondrate talent, he articulated in writing what he was about in his heavy-handed canvases. For example, his vast and vacuous painting of the Ecce Homo, completed in 1729 for a Parisian Oratorian church, was the subject of a long letter published in the Mercure de France in which Coypel explained his desire to unite the pathos of dramatic action with the magnificence of spectacle in an architectural setting that would harmonize with the chapel in which the altarpiece was placed. [64] The first end was achieved through a careful balance of contrasting emotions--Coypel went so far as to introduce what he describes as a detail of "basse ironie" in the figure of a kneeling soldier to set off the "noble grief' of Christ. The second relied on the illusionistic effectiveness of the architecture, by which he hoped both to make the scene more real ("trompeur") and to maintain a quality of verisimilitude ("vr aisemblance"). His solution cannot help but recall the apparati of Bibiena and Pozzo already mentioned.

We need only compare Tiepolo's work with that of Coypel to see how free the former is of such programmatic intent. However, Tiepolo seems to have drawn on the same conventions, and his canvases and frescoes addressed an audience for whom concerns of archaeological accuracy onstage were no less irrelevant. Inevitably, stage practice altered the public's expectations as well as the artist's notion of historical decorum--especially when, on the one hand, artists were being urged to study the theater for the use of gesture and, on the other, stage designers and actors were directed to painting as a source of inspiration. Just how fanciful actual stage practice in Paris could be is suggested by a watercolor of costume designs for a staging of Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Castor and Pollux, a subject derived from ancient sources (Fig. 31). Castor was garbed as an overplumed courtier and Hilaira dressed to the hilt. When Mlle Chevalier appeared on the stage as Medea in 1744, she was no less fantastically attired. I n Venice costumes were, if anything, even more fanciful. By comparison, those worn by Tiepolo's protagonists look tame indeed, and it is perhaps by this yardstick that we ought to understand Algarotti's appreciation of the artist. [65]

It so happens that Tiepolo owned an album of seventeenth-century French costume design; it is listed in an inventory of his son's collection of prints and books and presumably formed part of the inherited workshop material. [66] The fact that he owned costume books--that of Cesare Vecellio, dating from the late sixteenth century, as well as the French one of the seventeenth--also helps us to understand a whole body of drawings that he produced about the time he was working on the frescoes of Antony and Cleopatra in the Palazzo Labia. Displaying individual figures dressed in exotic costumes, they come from an album to which Tiepolo gave the title Single Costumed Figures (Sole Figure Vestite). The largest group-- numbering eighty-six--is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 32). Some of them show young pages or turbaned Orientals. Others depict those curious figures with squared-off caps that make sporadic appearances in Tiepolo's work. Sometimes these figures play the part of magicians, as in an etching fr om the Scherzi di fantasia in which the curious, square-tipped hat of one figure is embellished with a hieroglyph or Masonic-like symbol (DV 26); and sometimes they are merely musicians--what a surprise to see among the performers in the background of the fresco of the Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra the same, somewhat sinister, figure playing the violin. Still another character is a bearded, priestlike figure, his arms extended imploringly. The same priestly type appears as Moses in Tiepolo's large, splendid canvas of the Israelites gathering manna in the wilderness, painted in 1740--42 for the parish church at Verolanuova, and a decade and a half later he reappears, with changes, as the priest presiding over the sacrifice of Iphigenia in the wonderfully staged fresco in the Villa Valmarana. Among the drawings of this album can even be found the female protagonist who plays Cleopatra, isolated in a way that would make her suitable to assume some other role. The attitudes and poses of some of these figures ar e so decisively theatrical that the source of inspiration would seem to be pantomime and the commedia dell'arte. Yet even these highly individual-seeming poses are occasionally repeated in specific works. A turbaned figure, for example, reappears, in reverse, in one of the Scherzi (DV 25), pointing downward at a snake entwining itself around a sword (Fig. 33).

At face value, it looks as if this assortment of figure studies had grown out of Tiepolo's interest in the theater, and it is worth recalling that although we now associate the commedia dell'arte character of Pulchinello with Domenico Tiepolo, Giambattista led the way. [67] These expressions of popular theater had a complement in the many drawings of fanciful heads. Ninety-three of these were at one time bound together in an album that was owned by the great Neoclassical sculptor Canova, who admired the fertile imagination they testify to. [68] The variety encountered in these is even greater than that seen in the standing figures, for we find not only the exotic types with fantastic costumes but also bishops and rather more ordinary figures. (Tiepolo's interest in head studies spilled over into his painted production of teste di fantasia, including bust-length images of philosophers or sages.) Assembled as albums, these formed a catalogue of some of Tiepolo's favorite "extras"--a sort of repertoire to which he and his sons might turn as occasion demanded or, equally, which might be shown to collectors and friends as a demonstration of his creative fecundity.

It is this chorus of extras that we find inserted as a disjunctive group of spectators in the background of the Death of Hyacinth (Fig. 24)--what Coypel might have called a passage of "basse ironie" used as counterpoint to the formal poses of the protagonists. There is the mustached halberdier, the Oriental with his floppy, plantlike conical cap and striped robe, the high-collared figure in fancy dress, and that most enigmatic and intriguing of Tiepolo's cast of characters, the barefoot youth wearing a simple shift who stares in puzzled fascination at the scene before him. He is a familiar figure that changes gender as occasion demands. We first encounter him in a large canvas of a Roman triumph (Hermitage, St. Petersburg), part of the series painted by Tiepolo between 1726 and 1729 for the salone in Ca' Dolfin in Venice. There, the figure actually looks more like a girl and she would seem to be part of a gypsy family--a piece of local color. A decade later the figure appears again, enigmatically, among the group of Orientals in the background of the Flagellation of Christ (S. Alvise, Venice). On his leg is what appears to be a decorative chain with pendant medallions, and once again the intention is apparently to suggest a gypsy, here a boy. In the Finding of Moses (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)--a splendidly parodic homage to the art of Veronese--the barefoot youth has become Moses' older sister Miriam. [69] We recognize the same figure in a number of Tiepolo's etchings: clinging to a turbaned sage or magician in one of the Scherzi (DV 25, fig. 33), and acting as a page in another (DV 28). Who is he or she and, more to the point, what are we to make of his or her repeated appearance? There is, I believe, no simple answer to this question, for we seem to be dealing with what was, for Tiepolo, a stock, comic figure (comic in the Aristotelian sense that he is drawn from the periphery of society) that had, for him, a personal meaning. [70] Not unlike those comedic characters beloved by Shakespeare, he i s deployed for dramatic contrast, witty commentary, or fanciful embellishment in some of Tiepolo's most haunting compositions. His repeated presence, like that of the fantastically garbed Orientals, underscores the truly theatrical nature of Tiepolo's imagination.

These fanciful costumes and exotic "extras" bring us to the theoretical core of Tiepolo's work, one that was much debated in his own time and that can be placed under the general heading of verisimilitude. The matter is well illustrated by the introductory argument of Girolamo Giusti's libretto for Antonio Vivaldi's Montezuma, staged at the Teatro S. Angelo in Venice in November 1733. In his Saggio sopra l'opera Algarotti recommended this theme together with the more standard ones of Dido and Aeneas and Agamemnon and Iphigenia, for the latter of which he provided his own libretto. [71] What appealed to him was the license the subject provided for exotic costumes and plot, and, indeed, in the opera the sixteenth-century conquest of Mexico is transformed into a colorful tale of intrigue and love. The Aztec king Montezuma is not killed but ends up a grateful ally of his conqueror, Cortes, and his daughter marries Cortes's younger brother. Giusti defended with the following words the obvious licenses he took: "W hat truth [vero] I have omitted and what mere probability [verisimile] I have added has been done for the necessities of the stage and so that the present drama, entitled Montezuma, may be as little imperfect as is possible." [72]

It is worth pausing over Giusti's use of the words truth and verisimilitude, or vero and verisimile, for they are part of the vocabulary of eighteenth-century criticism in general and are crucial both to an appreciation of Tiepolo's art and to contemporary theater. Of the two terms, verisimile is the more important and was subject to the widest interpretation. During the years of Tiepolo's activity the means of achieving verisimilitude on the stage was hotly debated throughout Europe. Muratori, whose treatise on poetry was read by Algarotti and had an enormous influence, condemned the theater conventions of his day, and especially those of opera, for sacrificing poetry and expression to musical display and virtuosity, resulting in an effect he pointedly called inverisimile. [73] Attacks like Muratori's prompted M. de Reymond de Saint Mard to defend opera on the paradoxical but not altogether facetious grounds that however fine vraisemblance might be as an idea, it really was beside the point with opera: "To have what one most likes [i.e., opera], it is sometimes necessary to resolve to accept what one does not like [i.e., lack of truth]." [74] Muratori's was an extreme voice--not unlike that of the Venetian monk Carlo Lodoli on architecture--but the important point is that the focus of the debate resided in defining the means of achieving verisimilitude.

Verisimile, verisimiglianza, or vraisemblance indicated a semblance of reality rather than truth to nature, il vero. In his Vocabolario toscano dell'arte del disegno of 1681, Filippo Baldinucci insisted that an effect of verisimilitude depended on making all the elements of a composition--figures, action, costumes, lighting, and so on--agree with the character of the subject, a notion that can be traced back to Leon Battista Alberti's discussion of the istoria, or historical narrative. [75] Algarotti--a more moderate voice than Muratori's and a real lover of opera--would have agreed with Baldinucci in considering verisimilitude as an inherent part of invention: "We have spoken of things verisimili, not vere, because probability, or verisimilitude, is the real truth of the fantastic arts.... The idealist painter--the only true painter--is like a poet and imitates rather than portrays ... he feigns with fantasy." [76] This, of course, applies perfectly to Tiepolo.

The distinction between vero and verisimile affected not only the style of presentation but the kinds of subjects deemed suitable for representation. In his treatise on opera, Algarotti promoted mythology as the means of reconciling the dictates of verisimile with the frankly extravagant conventions of opera and the reigning taste for the strange and marvelous. Real historical subjects he considered ill suited to musical adaptation since, paradoxically (to our way of thinking), they possessed less verisimilitude--which is to say, they introduced an inherent contradiction between subject and presentation. [77] The presiding notion is of art as a fiction rather than a mirror of life, a fiction that, when consistent within the conventions it establishes, becomes plausible. This idea is hardly unique to eighteenth-century criticism or literary culture, and it hardly precluded intense debate on the means of achieving verisimilitude, but it is central to discussions of the arts. Sir Joshua Reynolds's thirteenth di scourse, on the respective place of mimesis and imagination in the arts, is, for example, heavily indebted to these issues. At the very end of the century, when increased naturalism in acting and stage design had displaced the rigid formality of the old style of declamation, Goethe, in Die Propylaen, still argued that the object of theater--and, indeed, of all art--was not to counterfeit nature but to create a harmonious whole that gave a semblance of reality. [78]

If verisimile was the key term in discussions of tragedy or painting in the grand manner, as practiced by Tiepolo, vero informed many of the debates about comedy and genre--those arts that imitated nature. Vero is a leitmotiv of Carlo Goldoni's reform of Venetian comedy, and it recurs in contemporary appraisals of the genre paintings of Pietro Longhi. [79] Goldoni, whom Voltaire christened the "painter and son of nature," sought to replace the traditional comic repertory of the commedia dell'arte--those stereotypical plots based on Pulchinello and his masked cohorts that appealed so strongly to Tiepolo's imagination--with themes taken from real life. In his memoirs he recounts just how difficult a task it was to win the public over, for nothing could have offered a starker contrast to the fabulous world of staged drama and operas. Yet it is a testament to the persistence of the critical language of the day that however far he may have gone in the direction of nature and vero, he continued to view his task in terms of verisimile--verisimilitude conditioned by a different, more naturalistic set of demands. [80]

As is well known, Goldoni saw his reform of theater mirrored in the unassuming paintings of Pietro Longhi that chronicle the customs and foibles of Venetian society, noting in one sonnet that with his brush Longhi "sought truth [cerca il vero]." On August 13, 1760, Gaspare Gozzi, the editor of the Venetian newsheet the Gazetta Veneta, actually contrasted Longhi's seemingly naive art with the fictive realm of Tiepolo's, and elsewhere he praised Longhi precisely because "he has abandoned figures dressed in the antique manner and imaginary characters, and paints instead what he sees with his own eyes." [81] Tiepolo's art belonged to the great pictorial, literary, and theatrical tradition that emphasized the world of heroes and gods and prized the workings of the imagination over the recording of appearances. In analyzing the conventions that informed Tiepolo's art it is crucial to maintain this fundamental distinction between the aims and methods of high versus low art--a distinction that Goethe instinctively m ade when, in 1786, he visited the Villa Valmarana and commented on the sublime style of Tiepolo's mythological frescoes in the main building and the natural style of the genre frescoes by Domenico Tiepolo in the foresteria (guest house). [82]

The frescoes at the Villa Valmarana illustrate the intersection of theater and painting on a number of levels. The poetic subjects in the main building and their treatment in what Goethe referred to as the sublime style are taken from precisely the four authors Algarotti recommends to librettists--Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. Although the patron, Giustino Valmarana, seems not to have had any strong intellectual ambitions, he was, with his brothers, an underwriter of the Teatro delle Grazie in Vicenza. [83] That theater staged not only a repertory of Metastasian opere serie--Demetrio (1734), Antigono (1753), Alessandro nelle Inde (1757)--but also Ruccellai's classicizing tragedy Oreste, Abbate Domenico Lazzarini's L'Ulisse il Giovane (1742--43, taken by Girolamo Zanetti as a sign of the new, good taste in theater), and lighter, comic fare, such as Goldoni and Nicolo Jommelli's intermezzo L'uccellatrice (1753). [84] It is just this combination of classical and comic (or low-life) themes that we find dist ributed among the villa, the foresteria (with its decorations of Domenico's scenes of peasant and foreign life), and the celebrated garden statues of dwarfs. [85]

That Tiepolo himself was acutely aware of these divisions and that he cast his lot with the grand tradition there can be no doubt. In 1762, on the eve of his departure for Spain, he declared, "Painters should aim to succeed in great works, the kind that can please noble, rich people, for it is they who determine the fortunes of the Masters, and not other people, who cannot buy paintings of great value. Therefore the mind of the painter must always be directed towards the Sublime, the Heroic, towards Perfection." [86] In his secular fresco cycles he transformed the substance of history and mythology into fiction, seeking to meet the expectations of an audience enchanted with the stage and the extravagances of stage machinery. And lest we forget just how central opera was to eighteenth-century European courts, we might recall the attention given it at Dresden by Augustus and his wife, the Austrian archduchess Maria Joseph. Their daughter-in-law Maria Antonia Walpurgis wrote the text and music of Il trionfo del la fedelta and sang in a private performance of the work in 1754. In Berlin Frederick the Great took a personal interest in the various productions and sketched out plots that were turned over to his court poet, staging a production of Montezuma with music by Carl Heinrich Graun in 1754. Vienna was dominated by the presiding genius of Metastasio. The common link between these centers was Algarotti, who served the courts of Frederick the Great and Augustus, corresponded with Metastasio, and, of course, became an intimate of Tiepolo during his Venetian sojourn. [87] (We happen also to know that in 1742 Algarotti's brother Bonomo was among fourteen impresarios at the theater of S. Giovanni Crisostomo for a production of Bajazet with music by Bernasconi. [88])

There is an intentionally Bellorian accent--something probably picked up in the company of Algarotti--in Tiepolo's declaration that painters should ever strive "towards the Sublime, the Heroic, towards Perfection," but we may well wonder what that proponent of the more severe seventeenth-century classicism would have thought of the theatrical mode Tiepolo adopted to achieve his goal. Yet it would be as great an error to underestimate the intellectual ambition of Tiepolo's great projects--the decorations in the Residenz, Wurzburg, the Palazzo Labia, Venice, and the Villa Valmarana, Vicenza--as it to would be to confuse the visual pleasure his work provides with a lack of seriousness or commitment. Tiepolo's art is one of illusion, and at the core of his soaring, all-embracing genius lies the illusion of mere theatricality.

Keith Christiansen is Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings. He has written extensively on Italian painting and has collaborated on exhibitions ranging from Painting in Renaissance Siena to The Age of Caravaggio and Giambattista Tiepolo. He has taught as adjunct professor at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts [Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10028].

Frequently Cited Sources

Algarotti, Francesco, Saggi, ed. Giovanni da Pozzo (Ban: Gius. Laterza e Figli, 1963).

Loire, Stephane, and Jose de Los Llanos, Giambattista Tiepolo, exh. cat., Musee du Petit Palais, Paris, 1998.

Puppi, Lionello, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo nel terzo centenario della nascita (Padua: II Poligrafo, 1998).

Notes

I should like to thank Bill Barcham, Andrea Bayer, Adriano Mariuz, Linda Wolk-Simon, and the Art Bulletin reader for criticisms and suggestions made on earlier drafts of this piece. I was able to complete work on the article thanks to a two-month residence as a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

(1.) Antonio Morassi, Tiepolo (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d'Arti Grafiche, 1950), 30: L'artista immagino le due figurazioni come svolgendo alla ribalta, sul baccascena d'un teatro; in cui si sono aperti ora ora, ai lati, i grandi velari di stucco dorato sorretti da angeli."

(2.) Michael Levey, Giambattisla Tiepolo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 90. John Ruskin, who was unsympathetic toward Tiepolo, saw an affinity between the style of this marvelous canvas and certain aspects of nineteenth-century practice; the art of Delacroix seems particularly germane.

(3.) See M. A. Tornezy, ed., Bergeret et Fragonard: Journal inedit d'un voyage en Italie 1773-74 (Paris, 1895), 388. Bergeret's comments are quoted in William Barcham, The Religious Paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 229, together with other revealing views.

(4.) See Michael Levey, "Tiepolo's Treatment of Classical Story at Villa Valmarana: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Iconography and Aesthetics," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957): 298-317. Levey's article is unsurpassed for its breadth of treatment and critical acumen, but it does not really press the argument much beyond analogy--perhaps wisely.

(5.) In addition to Levey (as in n. 4), see esp. William Barcham, "Costume in the Frescoes of Tiepolo and Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera," in Opera and Vivaldi, ed. Michael Collins and Elise Kirk (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 149-69. Barcham is principally interested in the issue of theatrical costumes. I commented on some of the issues broached in this essay in Keith Christiansen, ed., Giambattisla Tiepolo, exh. cat., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996, 279-84.

(6.) Apart from those people who will be dealt with in the body of the essay, it is worth noting that Anton Maria Zanetti, with whom Tiepolo was on the closest of terms, was the author of a series of caricatures of opera singers, copies of which were owned by Francesco Algarotti; see Alessandro Bettagno, Caricature di Anton Maria Zanetti, exh. cat., Fondazione Cini Venice, 1969; and Edward Croft-Murray, An Album of Eighteenth Century Venetian Operatic Caricatures Formerly in the Collection of Count Algarotti, exh. cat., Museum of Art, Toronto, 1980.

(7.) See Reinhard Pauly, "Benedetto Marcello's Satire on Early 18th-Century Opera," Musical Quarterly 34 (1948): 222-33, 371-403. The satire is of special importance since it is based on stage practice in Venice.

(8.) For Mengozzi Colonna's work for the stage, see Mercedes Viale Ferrero, Mostra del Barocco Piemontese, exh. cat., Palazzo Madama, Turin, 1963, "La Scenografia," I, 7, 29, cat. no. 70; idem, Storia del Teatro Regio di Torino, vol. 3 (Turin, 1980), 129 n. 199, 130 n. 205, 175 n. 128, 176 n. 131; and Nicola Mangini, I teatri di Venezia (Milan, 1974), 124, 142. Mengozzi Colonna's authorship of the modello for Scarlatti's Siroe has been debated, but figures were clearly drawn over the finished architecture--alternative gestures are plainly visible--and there really can be no doubt that the work is the result of a professional scenographer working with a figurative artist.

(9.) Goethe's comments are made in his Italian travel journal of 1786-88 and were occasioned, significantly, by his viewing of Veronese's Alexander and the Family of Darius, now in the National Gallery, London, but then in the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice. He writes, "Once it is understood that Veronese wanted to paint an episode of the sixteenth century, no one is going to criticize him for the costumes."

(10.) As early as 1736 Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, acting for the Swedish monarchy in Venice, was commenting on Tiepolo's imitation of Veronese in his elaborate costumes: see Antonio Morassi, Tiepolo (London: Phaidon, 1962), 232.

(11.) As is frequently noted, the architectural backgrounds of Veronese's paintings also show an evident debt to stage designs, and they were, in turn, recommended to later set designers as models for the theater. The relationship of Veronese's art to stagecraft is discussed by David Rosand, "Theater and Structure in the Art of Paolo Veronese," in Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 145-81. Algarotti, 181, recommends Veronese's work to set designers.

(12.) In letters of May 10 and 13, 1756, Algarotti thanks, respectively, Giampietro and Eustachio Zanotti in Bologna for their comments on the treatise, a printed edition of which bears a dedication of May 1755 to Signor Marchese; see Algarotti, 550. A draft of the treatise in the civic library at Treviso is inscribed, "Dresda, il di 9 agosto 1742"--shortly before Algarotti departed for Venice--and there also exist preparatory drafts with annotations dating from Algarotti's first years in Venice, some of which refer to Tiepolo and contain sketches by Algarotti: see Ivano Miatto, "Alcuui documenti inediti sullo stretto sodalizio tra Francesco Algarotti e Giambattista Tiepolo," Ricerchedi Storia dell' Arte 61 (1997): 94-95.

(13.) Algarotti's observations (in Algarotti, 114) about expressivity were occasioned by Tiepolo's painting of the martyrdom of Saint Agatha, in the Museo Antoniano, Padua (the picture was strangely misidentified by Algarotti as Saint Apollonia). See Algarotti, 114. The picture was also commented on by Charles-Nicolas Cochin: see Loire and de Los Llanos, 125-26, cat, no. 27.

(14.) For a summary of the various materials bearing on the date of the frescoes, see Beverly Brown, Giambattista Tiepolo: Master of the Oil Sketch, exh. cat., Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1993, 251-55; Massimo Gemin and Filippo Pedrocco, Giambattista Tiepolo: I dipinti (Venice: Arsenale, 1993), 394; and Loire and de Los Llanos, 184-86. The 1753 mention is in P. A. Orlandi's Abecedario pittorico. Reynolds's drawing is in the British Museum. For Bergeret de Grancourt's comments, see in text below. Fragonard sketched the two principal compositions during his trip to Venice with the Abbe de Saint-Non in the summer of 1761.

(15.) For information on the palace and the Labia, see esp. Terisio Pignatti, Filippo Pedrocco, and Elisabetta Martinelli Pedrocco, Palazzo Labia a Venezia (Venice: Eri, 1982), 36-46. Note, however, that their assertion that Maria Labia's son Angelo Maria owned a lavishly appointed miniature theater patterned on the opera house of S. Giovanni Crisostomo appears to be mistaken; the theater belonged to a relation, Abbate Antonio Labia: see Nicola Mangini, I teatri pubblici di Venezia (Milan: Mursia, 1974), 178.

(16.) Plutarch describes various meetings between Antony and Cleopatra, and it is not certain which--if any--of these Tiepolo shows. In his description of their first, momentous meeting at Tarsus in 41 B.C., Plutarch emphasizes Cleopatra's toilette and the lavishly decorated barge on which, "adorned like Venus," she sailed down the Cydnus River. Tiepolo surely drew on the evocative description of this event, which marked the beginning of Antony's destruction through his infatuation with Cleopatra. Yet, as rightly pointed out by George Knox, "Giambattista Tiepolo: Variations on the Theme of Anthony and Cleopatra," Master Drawings 12 (1974): 385, there are striking inconsistencies between Plutarch's description of that first meeting and Tiepolo's painting: Is it Cleopatra arriving or Antony, and who is the turbaned figure at the top of the gangplank? Knox argued that what is shown is Antony's triumphant return to Egypt following his Armenian campaign in 34 B.C., and that the turbaned figure is the Armenian kin g Artavasdes, whom Antony took as prisoner and led in procession through the streets of Alexandria. If this is so, then Artavasdes ought to be shown bound, which is not the case. Even allowing that Tiepolo took a good deal of license with his sources, it is worth asking whether he saw his task as illustrating a specific event. There is much to recommend the notion of Levey (as in n. 2), 156-58, that Tiepolo's primary concern was to conceive a prelude to the banquet scene--one that sounded the dominant theme of the cycle, which might be described as the subjugation of military might to love and beauty.

(17.) See F. Stefani, ed., "Memorie per servire all'istoria della inclitta citta di Venezia," Archivio Veneto29 (1885): 103.

(18.) See Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre e profane (Milan: Alfieri, 1982), cat. nos. 124, 128. The Newcastle-upon-Tyne canvas is presumed to have been the one mentioned by Carlo Ridolfi as formerly in S. Marcuola, Venice.

(19.) For a late 17th-century example for the court of Mantua, ascribed to Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, see Theater Designs in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, exh. cat., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, 1986.

(20.) For this drawing see Mary Myers, Architectural and Ornamental Drawings: Juvarra, Vanvitelli, the Bibiena Family, and Other Italian Draughtsmen, exh. cat., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975,13, cat, no. 13. The drawing was for a theatrum sacrum but was not published in Giuseppe Bibiena's Architetture, e prospettive. A remarkably similar design appears in Andrea Pozzo's Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum of 1693; see Janos Scholz, Baroque and Romantic Stage Design (New York: H. Bittner, 1950), 7, cat, no. 18.

(21.) The frescoes are described in a letter of 1756 to Giampietro Zanotti: see Opere del Conte Algarotti, vol. 7 (Cremona, 1781), 38-40. The drawings, by Giuseppe Stefanoni, are reproduced in Jean-Pierre Babelon and Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, Les fresques de Tiepolo (Paris: Noesis, 1998), 40-41, figs. 6,7.

(22.) Francesco Algarotti to Giampietro Zanotti, 1756, in Algarotti (as in n. 21).

(23.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Ueber Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke," in Propylaen eine Periodische Schrifft (Tubingen, 1798), 55-65.

(25.) See the draft of Algarotti's letter to Count Bruhl published by Francis Haskell, "Algarotti and Tiepolo's 'Banquet of Cleopatra,'" Burlington Magazine 100 (1958): 213. Haskell gives a somewhat confused history of the Musee Cognac-Jay picture, which we now know was owned by Algarotti and is, indeed, mentioned in his will. It should be emphasized that although usually described as a modello, the painting has all the traits of a finished work, and this is not contradicted by Algarotti's description of it as a quadretto that "... destinato dappr incipio a dover servir di Modello a questo [the Melbourne canvas], e che finito, fu poi da Pietro Monaco intagliato...."

(24.) I have omitted from discussion a large canvas formerly in the Gerli collection, Milan, that has sometimes been thought a substitute piece for the Banquet of Cleopatra Algarotti sent to Dresden. I have seen that work and consider it probably by Domenico Tiepolo and in any case certainly not by Giambattista: see Gamin and Pedrocco (as in n. 14), 369, cat. no. 309. Although it is a work of considerable importance, it does not bear directly on the discussion here.

(26.) In 1800 the Arkangelskoe canvases were purchased by Prince Nicolas Yousoupoff from Pietro Concolo in Venice. This raises the possibility that they were painted to decorate a Venetian palace, and the tantalizing suggestion has been made that the original patron may have been Carlo Cordellina, whose villa near Vicenza was decorated by Tiepolo and who also had a palace in Venice: see Loire and tie Los Llanos, 180-82. However, if this is so, it is curious that we have no other mention of the two paintings. Fragonard studied the modelli for these canvases, which were then in the Palazzo dei Conti in Vicenza, but curiously he seems not to have been aware of the large pictures.

(27.) See Brown (as in n. 14), 250-55, cat. no. 35.

(28.) The attribution of the chalk drawings and their function--studies for or copies after the frescoes--remain controversial and cannot be addressed here: see, however, n. 34 below. They are conveniently assembled and discussed by George Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: A Study and Catalogue Raisonne of the Chalk Drawings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 14-18, passim, who takes a generous approach toward the matter of a direct attribution to Tiepolo. The largest group of pen and ink drawings is in the Victoria and Albert Museum: see George Knox, Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1960), nos. 69-73. Further drawings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, the Fondazione Horne, Florence, and the Civici Musei at Trieste. For different approaches to the matter of attribution, see Knox (as in n. 16), 378-90; and Catherine Whistler, "Aspects of Domenico Tiepolo's Early Career," Kunstchronik 46 (1993): 393-94.

(29.) Jacques-Onesyme Bergeret de Grancourt, quoted in Tornezy (as in n. 3), 388. He also commented on the painted architecture, which he noted was very near to real and makes for a great illusion." Bergeret visited the Palazzo Labia the same day he went to S. Alvise to see the Way to Calvary, July 25, 1774.

(30.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Dene Barnett, "The Performance Practice of Acting: The Eighteenth Century," part 1, "Ensemble Acting," Theatre Research International 2 (1977): 163. Barnett has conveniently compiled a variety of theater sources relating to acting practices.

(31.) It is all too easy to fall prey to a modern prejudice for spontaneity and vivacity over formality and grandeur. This seems to have happened to Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 94, who have described the Palazzo Labia cycle as a "failure by Tiepolo's own standards" and Mengozzi Colonna as "Tiepolo's nominal collaborator and effective antagonist." Their discussion centers on Tiepolo's response to effects of light, but takes a dismissive attitude toward perspectival painting in general: "The picture in this tradition is bossy" (8). Few books exemplify as well as theirs how different Tiepolo's art appears when judged from a historical rather than a strictly modern point of view.

(32.) On the derivation from Montfaucon, see Knox, 1960 (as in n. 28), 54, cat. nos. 69, 70. Beverly Brown, "Imitation and Imagination: Tiepolo's Search for La Prima Idea," in Puppi, 27-28, comments on other cases in which Tiepolo referred to Montfaucon. That Tiepolo should, on special occasion, have referred to Montfaucon for archaeological details in paintings is not surprising, given his wide-ranging interests and contacts with antiquarians such as Scipione Maffei, but that a compositional idea should have been inspired by an antiquarian publication says a great deal about the character of his imagination.

(33.) See Dene Barnett, "The Performance Practice of Acting: The Eighteenth Century," part 3, "The Arms," and parts, "The Face," Theatre Research International 3 (1978): 80-82; 5 (1980): 4-5. Among the examples cited by Barnett, 1978 (80), may be singled out that of Jean Francois Marmontel, in the Encyclopedie of 1754, in which he asserted, "M. Chasse owes the dignity of his attitudes, the nobility of his gesture, and the fine judgement in his dress, to the masterpieces of Sculpture and Painting which he has cleverly observed." Similarly, in his Dissertatio de actione scenica of 1727 Franciscus Lang maintained, "...anyone can profit most, if he frequently and diligently studies the pictures of the more skilfull painters, or the carved statues of masters ... so that by the contemplation of them he may build up his own imagining properly, and thus let him strive to depict the images imprinted in his heart by lifelike action also" (Barnett, 1980, 4).

(34.) See Knox, 1980 (as in n. 28), 240, cat, no. M.237, pl. 45. As already mentioned, in n. 28 above, the chalk drawings associated with Tiepolo pose special problems. Knox, 14-16, has made a compelling case for considering at least some of the detailed studies of figures and accessories for the Palazzo Labia as Giambattista's preparatory studies. The complexity of the matter is perhaps best exemplified by two drawings, identical in motif but quite different in quality and character of draftsmanship, related to the head of Antony in the meeting scene: see Knox, A.25, J.89, pls. 37,38. One would seem to be a preparatory study by Giambattista, the other a copy (by Domenico?). It should be noted that Knox's hypothetical reconstruction of Tiepolo's fresco technique, on which he posits the attribution and function of a large number of multifigurative drawings related to this and other projects, has been disproved: see Matthias Staschull, "Das Gewolbefresko im Treppenhaus der Wurzburger Residenz," in Der Himmel a uf Erden: Tiepolo in Wurzburg, exh. cat., Residenz, Wurzburg, 1996, 128-47.

(35.) On the status of the two pictures, see my comments in Christiansen (as in n. 5), 310-11 n. 1.

(36.) Quintillian, Institulio oratoria 6.2, makes a distinction between ethos and pathos, though he shifts the meaning of both terms considerably.

(37.) Pietro Metastasio, "Estratto dell'Arte Poetica d'Aristotile e considerazioni su la medesima," in Opere, ed. Mario Fubini and Ettore Bonora (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1968), 556-60.

(38.) Ibid., 19.

(39.) See the fine essay by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, '"Ma c'hanno da fare i precetti dell'oratore con quelli della pittura?': Reflections on Guercino's Narrative Structure," in Guercino, Master Painter of the Baroque, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992, 75-110. Ebert-Schifferer demonstrates the importance of rhetorical traditions in understanding the character of Guercino's later art, and she also touches on the importance of theatrical and musical theory: see esp. 99-100. It is worth underscoring the difference between someone like Charles Lebrun, who dedicated himself to the science of expressions, and Tiepolo, who seems merely to have appropriated basic aspects of the vocabulary of the affetti.

(40.) I have taken the quote of Diderot from Barnett, 1978 (as in n. 33), 80.

(41.) Guercino's painting is very much apropos the discussion of Tiepolo, since its implementation of rhetorical rather than natural-seeming gestures has only gradually come to be viewed in a positive light. Even Denis Mahon, in his ground-breaking Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London: Warburg Institute, 1947), was far less sympathetic to Guercino's late, "classical" style. The Venus end Adonis was painted for Cardinal Mazarin and was, together with its pendant, Cephalus and Procris, acquired for Dresden in 1744. Like many of his contemporaries, Algarotti disapproved of Guercino's early style--"entirely based on nature and truth [vero], without selection--but this is a work to which he must have responded enthusiastically.

(42.) See the various sources brought together by Barnett, 1978 (as in n. 33), 81-86.

(43.) See, for example, Lang, reprinted in ibid., 85. As Ebert-Schifferer (as in n. 39), 100, points out, Lang was a Jesuit whose ideas on gesture go back to 17th-century Jesuit theater.

(44.) Pierre Poupart, lies elements de l'art du comedien (Paris, 1799), quoted in Barnett (as in n. 30), 183-84.

(45.) Benedetto Marcello, quoted in Pauly (as in n. 7), 390-92.

(46.) Johannes Jelgerhuis, Theoretische Lessen over de Gesticulatie en Mimiek (Amsterdam, 1827), quoted in Barnett, 1978 (as in n. 33), 82.

(47.) Giuseppe Pavanello, "Tiepolo e is scultura: Dalla copia all'invenzione," in Puppi, 165-70, tightly notes that Tiepolo's work for Maffei was actually far more archaeological in character than the dramatically inflected drawings he carried out for the Zanetti publication, Delle antiche statue greche e romane, published between 1740 and 1743. Pavanello remarks on some cases in which Tiepolo incorporated this archaeological material into his paintings--without, obviously, aspiring to a classicizing style.

(48.) Remo Schiavo, Villa Cordellina Lombardi di Montecchio Maggiore (Vicenza: Amministrazione Provinciale di Vicenza, 1975), 88; and Giuseppe Barbieri, "Tre stone vicentine di Giambattista Tiepolo," in Tiepolo e la vita in villa: Arte e cultura nel Settecento veneto (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1996), 53. There is a considerable bibliography on the relationship between Algarotti and Tiepolo. See, most recently, Barbara Mazza, "Algarotti e lo spirito cosmopolita di Tiepolo," in Puppi, 411-19.

(49.) Girolamo Zanetti, quoted in Stefani (as in n. 17), 131.

(50.) On this aspect of Tiepolo's career, see Dario Sued, "Francesco Algarotti, Joseph Smith e due eccezionali vedute palladiane a tre mani: Antonio Visentini, Giambattista Tiepolo, Francesco Zuccarelli," Canaletto e Visentini, exh. cat., Venice, 1986, 79-84; and Keith Christiansen, "Algarotti's Tiepolos and His Fake Veronese," in Puppi, 407-8.

(51.) See Christiansen (as in n. 50), 403-9. The fact that the first part of Bellori's text can be read as a gloss on Tiepolo's painting can hardly be accidental. In my view, Bellori's description was more important for Tiepolo than Poussin's painting, which Tiepolo could have known from prints: on this see, most recently, Brown (as in n. 32), 27-28.

(52.) On the derivation, see most recently Brown (as in n. 32), 27.

(53.) For the letter to Bruhl, see Haskell (as in n. 25). The care Tiepolo took in designing the vases and centerpiece for the table is attested by a series of pen and ink drawings at Trieste: see Aldo Rizzi, Giambattista Tiepolo Disegni dai Civici Musei di Storia e Arte di Trieste, exh. cat., Civico Museo Sartorio, Trieste, 1988, 130-31. Tiepolo may have taken some inspiration from Montfaucon's publication, but so far as I can tell, the statues are not based on ancient prototypes but have been freely invented. Algarotti was evidently not dogmatic on such matters, preferring what he terms "erudizione pittoresco" to pure antiquarianism. Interestingly, Sergio Marinelli, "Vicende veronesi di Giambattista Tiepolo," in Puppi, 43-44, has noted that behind the Egyptian queen in the Palazzo Labia Banquet of Cleopatra is an ancient statue of Jupiter Serapis that Tiepolo had copied two decades earlier for Scipione Maffei's Verona illustrate.

(54.) For the Saint Patrick Altarpiece, see the fine analysis of Adriano Mariuz, Da Padovanino a Tiepolo: Dipinti dei Musei Civici di Padova del seicento e settecenta (Milan: Federico Motta, 1997), 273-75. Algarotti's participation--as consilio adjuvans--is recorded in the dedication of Domenico Tiepolo's etching reproducing the work.

(55.) G. Fogolari, "Lettere inedite di G. B. Tiepolo," Nuova Antologia 1 (1942): 34.

(56.) A no less equally fascinating index of the change may be had by comparing the canvases of Rinaldo and Armida in Chicago, probably painted just prior to Algarotti's arrival in Venice, and those done in Wurzburg.

(57.) See Knox, 1980 (as in n. 28), 103, no. B. 13. The highly detailed drawing stands midway between the modello in Stockholm and the finished fresco. It would seem to indicate that the idea of baring Cleopatra's breasts was a late one. As already mentioned, the attribution of these chalk drawings, of which a large number related to the Palazzo Labia survive, is controversial, but I am inclined to accept this one as autograph. Regardless of attribution, the drawing must record Tiepolo's initial intentions.

(58.) The earliest formulation of the notion of historical decorum occurs in the mid-15th century in Filarette's Trattato di architettura, chaps. 23, 24.

(59.) Two drawings by Tiepolo in the Victoria and Albert record Roman armor illustrated in Montfaucon's L'antiquite expliquee. ... One of these was reproduced faithfully by Tiepolo in his painting of Maecenas presenting the arts to Augustus, a work commissioned by Algarotti and intended to showcase the learned side of Tiepolo's art: see Knox, 1960 (as in n. 28), 54, cat. nos. 66, 67. We have seen that Tiepolo also turned to Montfaucon for compositional ideas for the Arkhangelskoe Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is, not surprisingly, in that canvas rather than in the Palazzo Labia fresco that Antony's armor has a more decided antique flavor, although it is anything but archaeological. These examples may serve to underscore the varying intentions behind Tiepolo's work as well as his adherence to the critical notion of verisimilitude, as discussed below.

(60.) Charles-Nicolas Cochin, quoted in Christian Michel, Le voyage d'Italie de Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1758) (Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 1991), 380.

(61.) George Knox, "Giambattista Tiepolo: Queen Zenobia and Ca' Zenobio: 'Una delle prime sue fatture,'" Burlington Magazine 121 (1979): 413, has noted that the soldiers in Tiepolo's Allocution of Queen Zenobia (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)--a work painted almost three decades before the Wurzburg frescoes--derive from Rubens's Decius Mus Relating His Dream (Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein). Tiepolo may have known the Decius Mus cycle through drawings or tapestries. Instructively, Knox also noted a drawing by Tiepolo recorded in a photograph in the Witt Library, London, copying the lower part of the design of the Meeting of Henri IV and Marie de Medicis. Brown (as in n. 32) makes further observations on Tiepolo's widespread use of prints after Rubens for compositional motifs. What requires emphasis is the fact that Tiepolo's study of Rubens's work was not exclusively concerned with compositional invention but extended to costume as well.

(62.) See the article of Antoine Schnapper, "A propos de deux novelles acquisitions: 'Le chef-d'oeuvre d'un muet ou la tentative de Charles Coypel,'" La Revue du Louvre 18 (1968): 253-68.

(63.) The comments that follow are drawn from the catalogue of Thierry Lefrancois, Charles Coypel: Peintre du roi (Paris: Arthena, 1994), to which the reader is referred for further information.

(64.) The letter is reprinted in Charles-Antoine Coypel, Oeuvre (Geneva, 1751), 1-5.

(65.) Barcham (as in n. 5) has relevant observations on this matter, as does Doretta Davanzo Poli, "Fogge e decori tessili cinque-seicenteschi in Tiepolo," in Puppi, 197-200. Davanzo Poli rightly emphasizes prints rather than contemporary theater as the main source for Tiepolo's costumes.

(66.) The album is described under lot 22 of the catalogue of the sale of Domenico's possessions held in Paris, November 10-12, 1845 (Lugt, vol. 2, no. 17909): "Personnages et costumes du regne de Louis XIV, dit Messieurs et Mesdames a la mode. Soixante-neuf pieces publiees par les Bonnart, Mariette, et autres." It is not possible to say which of Bonnart's and Mariette's prints it contained.

(67.) In addition to a number of drawings by Tiepolo treating the theme of Pulchinellos, there are two paintings attributable to him: see Gemin and Pedrocco (as in n. 14), cat. nos. 506, 507. One of these is now in Leeds Castle: see Loire and de Los Llanos, 232, cat. no. 78, whore it is dated ca. 1765-70. My own feeling is that it is of the early 1740s--roughly contemporary with the Capricci: see Keith Christiansen, review of Giambattista Tiepolo by Stephane Loire and Jose de Los Llanos, Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 245.

(68.) On Canova's collection of paintings and drawings by Tiepolo, see Giuseppe Pavanello, "Canova collezionista di Tiepolo," Quadrini del Centro Studi Canoviani 1 (1996): 7-75. "How much I too would love to own an album of drawings by Tiepolo, whom I value for his admirable fantasy and grace," Canova wrote the architect Giannantonio Selva, who was also an admirer of Tiepolo's art.

(69.) For the most recent information on this canvas, which was painted for Andrea Corner in the late 1730s, see Christiansen (as in n. 5), cat. nos. 16 a, b.

(70.) The point is well made by Levey (as in n. 4), 309: "The orientalizing, which superficially seems merely part of Tiepolo's debt to Veronese, is in fact a part and only one part of Tiepolo's private and unique iconography."

(71.) Algarotti, 156.

(72.) Giusti's libretto was published in Venice in 1733 by M. Rossetti: see Anna Laura Bellina, Bruno Brizi, and Maria Grazia Pensa, I libretti Vivaldiani: Recensione e collazione dei testimoni a stampa (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1982), 78-79. I quote from the libretto printed in Jean-Claude Malgloire's 1992 Pasticcio, recorded on Astree.

(73.) Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana, 3.3.4-5, ed. A. M. Salvini (Milan: Societa Tipografica dei Classici Italiani, 1821), 52-68 passim.

(74.) M. de Reymond do Saint Mard, "Reflexions sur l'opera," in Les oeuvres melees (The Hague, 1742), 263: "... si nous reconcons quelquefois a ce que nous aimons, c'est toujours pour avoir quelque chose que nous aimons davantage."

(75.) Filippo Baldinucci, Vocabolario toscano dell'arte del disegno (Florence, 1681), 175-76.

(76.) Algarotti, 95-96: "Abbiamo detto case verisimili, non vere; poiche la probabilita, o verisimiglianza, e la verita reale delle arti fantastiche. ... il pittore idealista, che e il vero pittore, e simile al poeta, imita non ritrae; vale a dire finge con la fantasia. ..."

(77.) Ibid., 152-54. Here Algarotti parted company with Muratori, who would have argued that it was precisely the emphasis on love that eviscerated drama. But then, Muratori deeply lamented the fact that in Italy there really was no theater outside of opera and that this was the very source of the problem.

(78.) Goethe (as in n. 23).

(79.) See the interesting observations of P. Sohm, "Pietro Longhi and Carlo Goldoni: Relations between Painting and Theater," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 45 (1982): 256-64.

(80.) Sohm (ibid.), 262, notes that Goldoni considered his own style as "familiare, naturale e facile, per non distaccarsi dal verisimile."

(81.) Gaspare Gozzi, quoted at length by Adriano Mariuz in Pietro Longhi, exh. cat., Museo Correr, Venice, 1993, 39. See also Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 323.

(82.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tagebuch der italianischen Reise (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1908), 106. Goethe was unaware that Domenico, not Giambattista, had painted the frescoes in the foresteria. He preferred Domenico's frescoes.

(83.) On Giustino Valmarana, see Lionello Puppi, "I Tiepolo a Vicenza e le statue dei `Nani' di Villa Valmarana a S. Bastiano," Atti dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 130 (1967-68): 235-37.

(84.) See Franco Mancini, I teatri nel Veneto, vol. 2 (Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1985), 250-55.

(85.) See Puppi (as in n. 83), 242-48; and Barbieri (as in n. 48), 66-67. Puppi argues that Giambattista or, more likely, Domenico designed the sculpture. The issue of authorship, both in the design of the statues and in the execution of the frescoes of the villa and the foresteria, obfuscates the fact that the program was clearly uniform and under the direction of Giambattista, who allocated Domenico that part in which he would shine. To this degree Goethe was certainly correct in seeing the two cycles as reflecting two modes of Giambattista, the sublime and the natural.

(86.) Giambattista Tiepolo, in Nuova Veneta Gazzetta, Mar. 20, 1762, quoted in Haskell (as in n. 81), 253 n. 2.

(87.) Steffi Roettgen, "Francesco Algarotti in Pressen un Sachsen und--in Wurzburg," in Der Himmel auf Erden (as in n. 34), vol. 2, 46-53, reviews Algarotti's attachment to Berlin and Dresden and tentatively suggests that Tiepolo may have stopped at Wurzburg en route from Berlin to Italy in 1753. She also conjectures that the figure shown with Tiepolo on the ceiling of the Residenz may be Algarotti rather than Domenico Tiepolo.

(88.) See Zanetti in Stefani (as in n. 17), 103.

1 Giambattista Tiepolo, Marriage of Beatrice of Burgundy with Frederick Barbarossa. Wurzburg, Residenz, Kaisersaal

2 Tiepolo, Way to Calvary. Venice, S. Alvise

3 Giambattista Crosato and Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna, Set design for the opera Siroe, for the Teatro Regio, Turin, 1750. Turin, Galleria Sabauda

4 Tiepolo, Figures in balconies, detail of fresco from the Chiesa degli Scaizi. Venice, Gallerie dell' Accademia

5 Tiepolo, Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, fresco. Venice, Palazzo Labia

6 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, fresco. Venice, Palazzo Labia

7 Veronese, Christ in the House of Levi. Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia

8 Workshop of Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, Design for a theatrum sacrum with the Ecce Homo. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

9 Charles-Antoine Coypel, Supper at Emmaus. Paris, St-Merri

10 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Paris, Musee Cognac-Jay

11 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria

12 Tiepolo, Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Russia, Arkhangelsk State Museum

13 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Russia, Arkhangelsk State Museum

14 Tiepolo, Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Private collection, New York

15 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, oil on canvas. London, The National Gallery

16 Tiepolo, Antony and Cleopatra, pen and ink. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

17 Tiepolo, Meeting of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland

18 Tiepolo, Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, detail. Venice, Palazzo Labia

19 Tiepolo, Antony and Cleopatra, pen and ink. London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, D.1825.186-1885

20 Tiepolo, Antony and Lucius Plancus, pen and ink. London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, D.1825.214-1885

21 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, pen and ink and wash. London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, D.1825.32-1885

22 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, oil on canvas. Stockholm University Museum

23 Tiepolo, Banquet of Cleopatra, detail. Venice, Palazzo Labia

24 Tiepolo, Death of Hyacinth. Fundacion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

25 Illustration of despondency, from Johannes Jelgerhuis, Theoretische Lessen over de Gesticulatie en Mimiek, Amsterdam, 1827, p1. 14

26 Tiepolo, Study for the Death of Hyacinth. London, The Victoria and Albert Museum

27 Tiepolo, Praying hands, Study for a figure from the ceiling of the Scalzi, black and white chalk on blue paper. Venice, Museo Correr, 7201

28 Tiepolo, The Family of Darius before Alexander Montecchio Maggiore (Vicenza), Villa Cordellino

29 Veronese, The Family of Darius before Alexander London, The National Gallery

30 Peter Paul Rubens, Coronation of Marie de Medicis. Paris, Musee du Louvre

31 Costume designs for the opera Castor and Pollux. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale and Musee de l'Opera

32 Tiepolo, Costumed figure. London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, D.1824.35--1885

33 Tiepolo, Three Figures Observing a Snake, from the Scherzi di fantasia, DV 25. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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