Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art [Hardcover]

Michael Levey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1986

Tiepolo was a decorative artist in the 18th century, this prize-winning volume provides a cogent and sympathetic analysis of Tiepolo, tracing the development of the painters career and art in the context of his times, and emphasizing his essentially Venetian qualities.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the age of 20, Tiepolo astonished Venice with Crossing of the Red Sea, a forceful, baroque canvas. Nearly six decades later, as an old man in Madrid, his frescoes of cosmic proportions for the Royal Palace awed the Spanish court. Sheer industry and confidence in his artistic mission sustained this Venetian master. His aim was to create an alternative universe of light and color; he saw light as divine, and it gave clarity and vitality to his images. Claiming to be the first full-length book on Tiepolo to be written in English, this splendidly illustrated study by the director of London's National Gallery shows us many sides of an artist who could be broadly comic or solemn and didactic. His caricaturesbizarre etchings of Punchinellos and dwarf-like humansare the mellow musings of a sage. His landscapes reveal meticulous observation of nature. Born in Venice when it was still the capital of an empire, this socially conservative artist blazed a uniquely personal style that was quintessentially Venetian.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (July 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300030185
• ISBN-13: 978-0300030181
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 10 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,454,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Helpful but Tiepolo Deserves More, August 4, 2005

By 

Buce (Palookaville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art (Paperback)

It cannot be easy to write a successful biography of Tiepolo. There is none of the usual stuff that can make a biographer's life so easy: gossipy letters, shrewd observations from friends or enemies. Moreover Tiepolo seems to have been, by any conventional measure, a pretty boring guy. By all the evidence, he had little or no contact with the cultural icons of Venice in his time-Goldoni say, or Metastasio, or Vivaldi (one notable exception: the artist Giambattista Piazzetta-Levey says that Piazzetta and Tiepolo were "the Picasso and Matisse, or perhaps better the Turner and Constable of their period). For an artist whom we identify as a child of the Age of Absolutism, it perhaps comes as a surprise to recognize that he worked only once in a "major" court-at the very end of his life, Madrid. Rather, he seems to have been something of a workaholic: it has been said that he covered more square feet of wall space than any other artist in history. Perhaps the most interesting thing about him is to observe how much of his life he spent on a scaffold, 20 or 50 feet off the ground.

Michael Levey has done a creditable job of walking us through the Tiepolo gallery. He offers shrewd and appreciative insights on any number of works, making us understand Tiepolo with new eyes. Has the reader noticed, for example, how many of Tiepolo's really important figures are women? Or, perhaps even more remarkable, how many of the "really important figures" in the pictures are not that "iimportant" after all? Or how, for all his pomp, his pictures remain gentle, playful, almost light-hearted?

Levey's book is thus an honorable effort, but Tiepolo deserves more. Attractive as he is on his own terms, he cries out to be put into a larger context. For surely, whatever his intrinsic merits, a large part of the appeal of Tiepolo today is his utter foreignnesss: the sense he conveys of exemplifying a world so different from our own. The Greeks and the Romans and the Bible themselves seem scarcely more remote than Tiepolo's representation of them-sometimes less so, since the originals are more part of our cultural equipment. It is good to have an appreciative understanding of Tiepolo's art. It would be even better to see him evaluated as a figure of his times.