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Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art

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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.