Tiepolo is an example of the specifically pictorial intelligence. This book is both a study of his art and an argument for fuller recognition of the peculiarities of the painters' representational medium. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall locate distinctive modes of Tiepolo's representation of the world and human action; follow his process of invention from first pen drawings through small oil-sketches to great frescoes; and analyze his best and biggest painting, the "Four Continents", in the Stairway Hall of the Prince-Bishop's Residence at Wurzburg, which is illustrated with photographs specially taken for the book. The topics taken up include: painting's resistance to enacted narrative drama, its engagement with indeterminacies and repetitions, the senses in which painters may "perform" both past art and themselves, the constructive roles of gestural drawing, the exploitation of shifts of scale between design and finished work, the dialogue between the changing natural site lighting and in-picture lighting, contributions made by the beholder's own mobility, the expressive scope of tensions between two and three dimensions, the deep rationale of rococo formal structure, and the sources of the moral force of pictures that lack an explicit moral. The book - both art criticism and a practical polemic - ends with an annotated gazetteer for travellers, listing those Tiepolo paintings that can still be seen in the places and conditions for which he painted them.
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18 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't paint a word,
By A Customer
This review is from: Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (Hardcover)
He favored an effect of light by skillfully contrasting finely unbroken and unmixed pigments with dully subdued colors, so that a golden ochre would bring out latent blue in a grey field or latent tawny in a muddy buff one. He also tended toward Veronese-type clouds to lighten and shape vaults with cumulus masses or stratus bands, as in his "Discovery of the true cross"; dogs to colorkey Cleopatra in "The banquet with Antony" and graphic and tonal range complexities in "The meeting of Antony and Cleopatra"; and poles to finetune viewer attention, as with his Santa Maria dei Gesuati ceiling frescoed pike to increase interest in the figure of St Dominic. Against expectations at the time about dramatically interacting figures, he parallel played arms, hands and heads, without bringing angled faces and pointing fingers together into any interpersonal contact, as Picassolike people deconstructed and divided into bodyparts. Also against usual practice, his painting was more caught up in a Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione-type showing and beholding than with discovery, as with "Adoration of the Magi" and "Institution of the rosary" handed down from heaven. The Veronese-style asymmetry of his figures lounging and lunging around picture edges, the princess off-center with her escort, the riverbank almost half-empty of figures, and the unexpected scale, with a miniature Miriam and a sliver of a dog, aggravated one critic into sawing "The finding of Moses" in two, with the severed part becoming known as "Landscape with halberdier." His preferred oblong format was considered just as aggravating in his "Madonna and saints," with its purgatorial rescue scene so drawn out on the left that another critic cut that painting temporarily into two. Along with Domenico di Pace Beccafumi, Duccio de Buoninsegna, Gentile da Fabriano, many Northern European painters, and Antonio Pisanello, he betrayed the tradition from Giotto, Masaccio and Raphael of putting a picture together as a framed rectangular window on proportionally scaled human figures in a definite space as verbally intelligent meaning- or story-painting to be seen from only one viewing point. But trend-bucking Giambattista TIEPOLO AND THE PICTORIAL INTELLIGENCE of his aesthetic, color-oriented and visually impacting works were behind successful fresco and oil on canvas painting throughout the North Italian 45th parallel cities of Bergamo, Milan, Trevigiana, Udine, Venice, Verona, Vicentina and Vicenza. His sculpturelike art was always part of and dependent on where it was displayed, taking in building form, layout and lighting: my sculptress mother always said, and my artist sister continues to say, that Tiepolo was not afraid of anything, and his biggest painting, "The four continents" fresco for the Wurzburg Residenz stairway hall ceiling, ended up one of the greatest and largest in Europe even though it was located off the beaten path and bravely doled unpicturelike changing light and odd angles to viewers needing to climb and walk around just to see it. So authors Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall leave readers with fresh insights into and new photography of Tiepolo's art: their book completes Bernard Aikema's TIEPOLO IN HOLLAND; William L Barcham's, Keith Christiansen's, and Michael Levey's works on GIAMBATTISTA TIEPOLO; and Adelheid M Gealt and George Knox's DOMENICO TIEPOLO.
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