Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696, Venice – 1770, Madrid) is the great master of Venetian Rococo, famous for his expansive frescoes, bathed in light and theatrical fantasy. Between the virtuosity of his drawing and an airy chromatic palette, Tiepolo combines Baroque dramatism with the grace of the 18th century. His specialty is mural painting "di sotto in sù," where ceilings illusionistically open up to the sky, and characters — gods, heroes, allegories — float in swirling clouds and draperies.

In Venice, he created memorable cycles for palaces and churches, and in Palazzo Labia (The Banquet of Cleopatra), he achieves a pinnacle of scenographic grandeur. His collaboration with the quadraturist Gerolamo Mengozzi Colonna enhances the painted architectural effects, melting real space into the spectacle of the image. At Villa Valmarana ai Nani (Vicenza), Tiepolo combines mythology and chivalric epic in a poetry of light; at the Residenz in Würzburg, he creates one of Europe's most impressive vaults, a vast allegorical firmament.

The call to the Spanish court of Charles III concluded his journey: at the Royal Palace in Madrid, Tiepolo painted large ceiling compositions with allegorical triumphs, crystallizing his ideal of painting as sovereign spectacle. Besides frescoes, the print albums "Capricci" and "Scherzi di fantasia" reveal the inventive, capricious side of the draftsman.

Through monumentality, ease of composition, and an incomparable sense of light, Tiepolo remains the symbol of a painting that transcends architecture and transforms it into a theater of dreams.