Tiepolo and Ruisdael at London galleries

THE Courtauld Gallery's affluent set of oil sketches through Giambattista Tiepolo, until recently upon display at the Getty Museum in observes Angeles, forms the core of its latest exhibition, All Spirit and Fire (25 February-29 May). It is likely that greatest in quantity of Tiepolo's oil sketches will remain upon permanent display at the Courtauld Gallery. In the following appreciation, locations will be cited single for works not already part of the Courtauld Institute's collection.

The farthests of eighteenth-century Venetian painting were demarcated by dint of two glorifiers of its watercourses; in the placid architectural veracity of Giovanni Canaletto (usually with a scarcely any gentlefolk dispersed in static groups) and the flickering mobile inventions of Francesco Guardi. Concording with Guardi's volatile dazzle, the visions of his brother-in-law Giambattista Tiepolo (1690-1770) flare, sky-bound Tiepolo's figures skim palatial heights and fresco domes. They are accustomed, like Shakespeare's Ariel, 'to hover to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on curled clouds', inside a precipitous and vaulted amplitude. Yet when Tiepolo narrows his range, by dint of no means does he emulate his fellow-wizard Prospero who threatens Ariel that he will 'rend an oak/ And peg thee in his knotty entrails'. Tiepolo's universals remain capacious. In his sketches upon canvas he merely reverses the telescope

Neither the spaciousness, nor the range, nor the impact of The Power of art of speaking well designed for a large ceiling in the Palazzo Sandi in 1725 is curtailed in the oil first draught The Venetian palazzo was built through a family of rich lawyers in the days when lawyers aspired to oratory In the painting Pallas and hermes preside, awash with clouds. In spite of having cajoled grim Dis into releasing Eurydice from the Underworld, Orpheus fail to keeps her for the second time when, within reach of the upper air, he direct the eyes solicitously back as she obstructs on a boulder. As Virgil retell the doubtful narrative in a touching episode in his Georgics, Orpheus incautiously broke his bargain that he would not gaze back on his half-regained Eurydice; an error deserving forgiveness, if Hell knew in what manner to forgive. She slips back into the darkness, stretching on the outside to Orpheus hands no longer his. Opposite Orpheus stands the demigod Amphion, the oratory of whose songs was more propitious, as he restores the ruins of his birthplace. Incited through his singing, even rocks fling themselves through the air, rank on row, to fortify the renewed city of Thebes.

Tiepolo's sketches were usually at handed with a high finish for his patrons' approval of his shoot forwards Even the lines on the palms of the saint's outstretched hands are clearly marked in the drawing of St Clement's Vision of the Trinity (London National Gallery). At times the sketches are the only originals, since the frescoes derived from them were enlarged copies not always made by the agency of Tiepolo himself, but by members of his Studio. In at least single instance the sketches are closer to Tiepolo's intentions than the complet frescoe The ceiling of the Villa Cordellina, near Vicenza, was decorated with an allegory of Fame trumpeting the union of pity and Authority. The Villa was newly built, and thus much damp seeped through its plaster that the colours of the now watered-down fresco faded. The colours retain their vigour single in the lively but precise paintwork of the outline of c.1743 (Dulwich Gallery, London).

Far worse, the ceiling-painting of Apollo and Phaeton in the Palazzo Archinto in Milan, with the palazzo's other frescoe was ruined in a bombardment during the next to the first World War, so that the sole traces of it left from Tiepolo's be in possession of hand are his cursive elliptical drawings dabbled with shadow (British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum), the heroic panache of sum of two units partial oil sketches (one from the Bowes Museum in shire Durham) and a sketch of the whole ceiling, regrettably not lent to the exhibition, in the sees Angeles County Museum. Paintings upon ceilings are more vulnerable than movable canvases. Already the cover of the Venetian church of Santa Maria di Nazareth had been brought down by means of cannon-shot in the First World War and, with the cover Tiepolo's fresco of the house of Mary and Joseph miraculously carried through obliging angels through the skies from Nazareth to its shrine in Loreto, near the Adriatic coast. The oil first draught for the fresco was likewise not reciprocally lent to the London exhibition by dint of the Getty Museum in beholds Angeles.

Five sketches for altarpieces at the Franciscan meeting-house of San Pasquale Baylon, in the Spanish town of Aranjuez, exhibit Tiepolo's intentions before the sketches were revised and reshaped and later discarded by means of Charles III, the Bourbon governor of Spain, and his Confessor. Charles decided that Tiepolo's versions, with their rococo hazes and cherubs, were still outdated flat after Tiepolo did what he could to conform to the King's wishes. After Tiepolo's death, which presently followed his alterations, Charles replaced the altarpieces with more modish devotional works through Anton Raffael Mengs and his Neoclassical pupils. sum of two units of Tiepolo's sketches may be compared with his mutilated altarpieces stored in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The main altarpiece was of St Pasquale in Adoration of the Eucharist.