Product Description

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 them 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, as well as Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra, and Beatrice of Burgundy—a motley 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172609 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-20
• Released on: 2009-10-20
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307267665
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

About the Author
Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is
publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch, The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and Ka.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What happened with Tiepolo was the same thing that was to happen with certain imposing and mysterious ancient objects like the Shang bronzes: those aspects that resisted interpretation were considered decorative, while those too charged with meaning were labeled ornamental. The twenty-three Scherzi, which are a kind of Art of the Fugue in Tiepolo’s work—variations built on an established repertoire of characters, accessories, talismans, and gestures—were seen with some condescension as bizarre entertainments with a hint of the disquieting about them. Many took pains to repeat something that is obvious, but perhaps true: Tiepolo marks the definitive end of an epoch. But they failed to notice the unprecedented accumulation of venom and sweetness contained in that motus in fine velocior.

Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe. And, like all true happiness, it was full of dark sides destined not to fade away, but to get the upper hand. Recognizable by its effortless, unfettered air, doomed to disappear afterward. Compared with Tiepolo’s happiness, that of Fragonard is based on tacit exclusions. But Tiepolo excludes nothing. Not even Death, who joins the number of his characters without drawing too much attention to himself. The happiness that Tiepolo emanates did not necessarily spring from within. Perhaps there were many occasions when he told it to come back later, because right now he had a job to finish and he was behind schedule.

The ultimate peculiarity of Italian culture, the quality it could be proudest of, also because over the centuries it has proved untranslatable into other languages (whereas by contrast the meaning of the word has become obscure and remote for the majority of Italians), is what is known as sprezzatura. Baldassare Castiglione defined it as follows, in complete contrast with the thing he advised people to “steer clear of as far as possible, as if from the sharpest and most dangerous rocks,” in other words “affectation.” According to Castiglione, the remedy for the “bane of affectation” consisted in “using in all things a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] that may conceal art and demonstrate that what one does and says is done without effort and almost without thinking.” A gloss followed: “From this, I believe, does much grace derive.” And a decisive consequence: “It can be said that true art is that which does not seem to be art; nor should a man study anything more than the concealment of it.”

For those looking for an example of sprezzatura, no one is likely to be more convincing than Tiepolo, who for a lifetime did his utmost to conceal, behind his blinding speed of execution, the subtly aberrant nature of his subjects to the point that he succeeded in having his most daring and enigmatic works, the Scherzi, passed off as facile amusements. If no one ever took Tiepolo completely seriously, we might almost say that this was what he wanted. He never had symbols and meanings assume pose, with the result that those symbols and meanings were generally overlooked. In the Scherzi too, although no fewer than eleven of the twenty-three plates are steeped in an almost unbearable tension bound up with the act of looking at something unknown, others are imbued with a sort of torpor, as in the two portrayals of family groups at rest, one group of satyrs and another of humans. The Scherzi have no obligatory meaning (as was the case later with Goya’s The Disasters of War), but a physiological rhythm, an alternation of psychic atmospheres in which no single element prevails over the others. Even when meanings gather densely in his images with brazen insolence, Tiepolo never abandons the air of one who does things “without effort and almost without thinking.” He does this so well that some are led to believe he didn’t think at all. And in this way he protected his thinking from intruders.

“Tiepolo was a happy painter by nature,” wrote his contemporary Anton Maria Zanetti, son of Alessandro—and he was not forgiven for that happiness. Zanetti added: “But this didn’t stop him from assiduously cultivating his fertile spirit.” This pleased some even less: the idea that Tiepolo possessed more erudition than he admitted to. In 1868 Charles Blanc outlined a judgment of Tiepolo that was to be picked up on and elaborated by many critics for decades: “His fire is mere artifice, a firework display; his abundance has more to do with temperament than with spirit.” It was therefore necessary to deny Tiepolo access to the area reserved for the spirit. But for what original sin, if not the “happiness” that seemed to deprive his work of a certain praiseworthy decorum? Tiepolo always had “stern critics” against him. This was so already during his lifetime, as Zanetti himself tells us when he mentions that Tiepolo had reawakened “the dormant, happy, most graceful ideas of Paolo Caliari.” The idea that Tiepolo was a sort of born-again Veronese was deeply disturbing. Hence the observation that “the forms of the heads are no less graceful and beautiful; but the stern critics will let no one say that they have life and soul like those of the old Master.”

After having a go in various directions (toward Piazzetta, toward Bencovich), with the frescoes in the Palazzo Patriarcale in Udine the young Tiepolo shows his hand: to bathe the world in an all-embracing light that would never be drab. And, as Giuseppe Fiocco wrote, “he breaks out like a fanfare.” The supremely frivolous angel that tells Sarah of the imminent birth of Isaac is also the herald of an entire tribe—Tiepolo’s tribe—that for the next few decades was to spread out on the ceilings of churches and palaces, as well as on canvas and copper plates. Apparently Tiepolo was not remotely interested in subduing the totality of appearance. Right from the start he wanted to take appearance and, using invisible shears, cut out from it a segment of related and secret correspondences: between ferns and the faces of young boys, lopsided tree trunks and halberds, drapes and the busts of Nymphs and courtesans, greyhounds and ominous Orientals. Tiepolo’s patrons committed themselves, together with him, to welcoming his entire tribe, which moved from one neighborhood to another, from villa to villa, as far as Würzburg and Madrid. It was “the prophetic tribe with blazing eyes” that Baudelaire was later to call up, an unstoppable motley caravan that dragged along with them all their assorted trappings, the flotsam and jetsam of history. They could always serve, from time to time, as scenic accessories. Without declaring or stressing this (since he never declared or stressed anything), Tiepolo allowed something to happen that would soon become an insuppressible component of all experience: the transformation of history—and of all the past—into phantasmagoria, material suited equally to providing the scenery for a fairground sideshow or to becoming a haunting image, pure power of the mind.

Why an angel was needed—that angel in Udine in particular—to herald the unfolding of Tiepolo’s painting was illustrated with eloquent ease by Giorgio Manganelli: “Tiepolo is not only a painter of angels, but one has the impression that he had a superstitious fancy, ready to run riot at the first beam of light to catch his eye. It could be Jupiter, or a harbinger of fertility to the pensive Sarah: it was always a mantled light, a cloud with precious sandals, a miraculously stable and elegant glow.” A description that introduced a definitive judgment: “He is an idolater of light disguised as a human being.” These few words provide the indispensable elements that allow us to get closer to Tiepolo: light, theater (the mask, disguise). And above all idolatry, a natural reverence for the image.

Baudelaire made his debut with a Salon review and, a few years later, on finding himself obliged to write another, he spoke of “that kind of tedious article known as the Salon.” Working one’s way through the vast bituminous expanses that opened up every spring in the rooms of the Louvre or, later, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, must have been fairly depressing. “No explosions; no undiscovered geniuses,” but above all a succession of characters in vacuous or mawkish poses, often portrayed in period costume. All the names of history were mobilized, without ever granting the past its salutary foreignness, but reducing all things to a modest range of perfunctory expressions. What was missing, what air was lacking in that oppressive art to make Baudelaire feel the need to escape it? He felt at home only among Boudin’s clouds, “those clouds with fantastic, luminous forms, those chaotic shadows, those green and pink immensities, suspended and superimposed one over the other, those gaping furnaces, those firmaments of black or violet satin, creased, rolled-up, or torn, those horizons in mourning, glittering with molten metal.” Here, in a kind of theurgical process, Baudelaire ventured far beyond the admittedly delightful Boudin, who acted solely as a fortuitous device for evocation (this is how magic works). What Baudelaire was calling up was that all-embracing air no longer present in painting after the French Revolution. And that air had a name: Tiepolo. The entire eighteenth century was branded, like a herd of cattle, by that absence. One day, without realizing it, it had forever lost the sovereign sense of sprezzatura, of facility and fluidity of movement. That grand air, on a measure with the skies, which for the last time had been perceived with Tiepolo and his family. Of whom Baudelaire knew nothing, because he had not come across their works (no other country had been as reluctant to welcome them as France, a jealous g...

Customer Reviews

Tiepolo Pink
Roberto Calasso's newest book, //Tiepolo Pink//, is a study of Giambattista Tiepolo (1695-1769), a classic Venetian painter of the Rococo period. Calasso must no doubt be the foremost authority on this Old Master who has largely been left to history, and he brings an incredible amount of insight and research to his subject. However, this book is by no means for the casual reader, as his references are often unexplained and his allusions at times hard to follow. For example, Calasso fixates, without much explanation, on Tiepolo's //sprezzatura//, or the Italian art of executing great works effortlessly, and fills his book with sentences like "Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe" without any further elaboration.

Perhaps of most interest to the art history community is that Calasso spends almost a third of his book addressing Tiepolo's strange and unexplained series of drawings called the //Scherzi//. These untitled drawings feature a crew of satyrs, owls, "Orientals," and maidens that, according to Calasso, foreshadow the modern era of painting. In the end, //Tiepolo Pink// is much like jumping into a graduate-level art history class midterm: you might not get all of the references, but the professor's passion keeps you paying attention.

Reviewed by Margo Orlando Littell