The full-length treatment in English of Tiepolo's life and career. Examining in detail the genesis and the achievement of Tiepolo's major accomplishments, and presenting a rich array of illustrations-some never before reproduced - Michael Levey presents the evidence for a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the great Italian artist.
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.
From the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart "Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound; my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write, paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found its image again, a hound in astounding light." Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro--a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris--and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover a detail--"a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound"--of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-five full-color reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.
Examines Tiepolo's works as examples of the specifically pictorial as distinct from the verbal intelligence. This study aims to show that Tiepolo's greatness lies not in stories told, or in meanings pursued, but in the use of the visual medium - drawing, painting, and natural light.
Longlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award 'Divine . . . the smart, sexy read you need' Evening Standard 'Startlingly impressive' Daily Mail 'Exhilarating' Vogue.com 'An electric new novel' Guardian AN EXQUISITE DEBUT NOVEL. A MID-LIFE COMING-OF-AGE STORY CHARTING ONE MAN'S SEXUAL AWAKENING AND HIS SPECTACULAR FALL FROM GRACE IN 1990S LONDON. FOR FANS OF ALAN HOLLINGHURST AND EDWARD ST AUBYN. Exiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light. Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life. 'Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling' Financial Times 'Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told' Reverend Richard Coles, Daily Mail
A study of the frescos painted by Tiepolo for the Prince Bishop of Wurzburg between 1750 and 1753. The book provides a history of fresco painting and discusses the intricacies, iconography and importance of each scene at Wurzburg, and its development from
Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest Italian painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his monumental frescoes and epic altarpieces. The scale of these paintings is immense, even overpowering. Yet some of Tiepolo's finest work can be found in the small oil sketches that he often made in preparation for these grand commissions. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Giambattista Tiepolo: Fifteen Oil Sketches brings together a group of the artist's oil sketches from the Courtauld Institute in London that spans his entire career and reveals the amazing confidence and fluidity with which he created these paintings. The unusual intimacy of these preparatory sketches-made directly on the canvas with no preliminary underdrawing-reveals a great artist's vigorous imagination at work. The exhibit will run from May 3, 2005, to September 4, 2005. An introductory essay situates these works within the context of eighteenth-century art and Tiepolo's life and career.