18th century AD

In discussing the work of Giambattista Tiepolo it has become commonplace to exercise terminology that suggests some kind of affinity between his paintings and the stage. frequently the intent is one of analogy. of the like kind is the case for Antonio Morassi in likening Tiepolo's frescoe in the Kaisersaal of the Residenz in Wurzburg (Fig. 1) to staged shows in which the curtains have been drawn back (the curtains framing Tiepolo's frescoe are in stucco) [1] At other times the end is to imply a stage of artificiality or dramatic expressivity in his work--an expressivity that, to recent taste, seems excessive. In his famous (and overly clever) indictment of Tiepolo in the concluding pages of the Viatico through 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 upon keeping the riffraff at bay. This reaction has fix resonance among many modern viewers. No individual has done more than Michael Levey to enh ance our appreciation of the artist, on the other hand the following passage from his persuasive and highly sympathetic monograph underscores the ambivalence of the terminology now commonly occupyed It concerns one of Tiepolo's greatest in quantity impressive works, the massive canvas of the Way to Calvary in the meeting-house of S. Alvise, Venice (Fig. 2):

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

Interestingly enough, a record of a near-contemporary rejoinder to this very painting meet the eyes 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. far down impressed by the picture, he remarked that "it could not be better compos or better grouped; the expression is exactly what is required in each part." [3] What struck Levey as theatrical--in the faculty of perception of overstated, melodramatic, and artificial--evidently appear to beed to Bergeret de Grancourt not alone acceptable but appropriate, and we are left to amazement about the validity of articulating our reply to Tiepolo by terminology whose meaning has, inevitably, been colored by dint of a censorious attitude toward the true conventions of Baroque stage practice that are imagined as informing it. Is not the perceived "ambiguity about the intention" more an ambiguity of reply reflecting our distance from the expectations upon which Tiepolo's art is based?

It thus happens that none of Tiepolo's contemporaries make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed on the theatrical quality in his work. Instead, they accompanyed to see it through the len of artistic theory and discussed it in limits of the categories of invention, expressivity, color, and fantasy. single 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 recumbent to visualize through paintings. still anyone who reads through treatises upon theater will be acutely aware of the fluid relationship that existed between the ideals of theatrical expression and those of painting--ideals soded 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] on the contrary is th ere a real, purposive link between Tiepolo's art and stage practice? The matter has not at any time been demonstrated, despite two admirable articles devot to the subject; [5] nor is it likely to be. No literary source alludes to Tiepolo's interest in or craft for the stage, and we have no ticket stumps to document his attendance at individual of the many opera houses of his native city. In other words, Tiepolo not aways a case quite different from that of Bernini, whose documented activity for the stage provides a firm basis for speculating upon its relevance to his sculptural throw outs and of Degas, whose attendance at specific operas is a matter of record. Nonetheless, to declare to be untrue that Tiepolo drew on more [i]or[/i] less of the conventions of contemporary theater would be shortsighted. An interest in theater was belonging to all 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 hundred theater conventions can provide at the real least both a corrective len end which certain aspects of his art gain sharper focus and a gauge of the astonishing power and originality of his imagination, individual nurtured on the grand heritage of Venetian painting on the other hand capable as well of taking hints from other, remarkably disparate, traditions and experiences.