Legacy of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

The hostile attitude of the official Spanish milieu seems to have resounded in the 19th century, when connoisseurs and critics rejected Tiepolo, along with the Baroque and Rococo styles, in general. He was considered an unhealthy and bizarre genius. But the change in taste brought about by Impressionism late in the century prepared the way for the rediscovery of the great Venetian. Generations of critics in Italy and elsewhere have worked to reconstruct his enormous pictorial output and to reassemble his prodigious mass of quick sketches and brilliant etchings. Modern taste accepts him without reservation and without need for either historical perspective or cultural justification. His huge decorative works formed a perfect complement to the Rococo churches and palaces of his time. Described by one of his contemporaries as being “all spirit and fire,” he worked with astonishing verve, and his output of ceilings, murals, easel compositions and portraits, sketches, and etchings is so huge as to invite the suspicion of superficiality. Yet there is an underlying melancholy in all his best works that gives them a profundity rarely found in other art of his time. Critics now rank him with the great painters of all ages.