VENETIAN VIRTUOSO

By ROBERT HUGHES

Anyone who feels uncomfortable with the sheer artificiality of art is likely to have difficulties with Giambattista Tiepolo, the greatest Italian painter--and one of the three or four chief European ones--of the 18th century. Though based on intensive study of the human body, his work is about as realistic as grand opera. Enter it, and you're inducted into a majestic yet unpredictable fantasy land. It is full of soaring and twisting space, transparency and delicious shot-silk color--a place dedicated to the imagination and filled with idealized personages from history, myth and fable. It is by turns sublime, witty and slightly preposterous in its self-delighting rhetoric.

Tiepolo's world is best experienced in his native Venice, because so many of his large-scale murals and ceiling paintings are there. But this month New York City museums have a veritable festa of Tiepolo's movable work, commemorating the 300th anniversary of his birth. Drawings by him and his disciples--including his sons Domenico and Lorenzo--are on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a show of 80 of his paintings and oil sketches and 33 of his mysterious and brilliantly inventive etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi di Fantasia.

These shows make it clear that the once accepted view of Tiepolo was wrong. It said, in effect, that he was a slightly suspect virtuoso--the last of what had been, a fizzing Catherine wheel of talent at the end of the long display of Venetian genius that ran from the Bellinis to Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Disapproval of Tiepolo was high-toned; his work did not accord with the moralizing grandeur of a later Neoclassicism, still less with the assumptions of Realism. It was rococo, compliant, theatrical and somehow frivolous. It celebrated a city in deep decline and praised a whole string of sometimes pretentious and reactionary patrons. And so forth.

Much of this was true, and none of it matters in the least today. One has to take Tiepolo on his own terms. He wanted, he said, to "please noble, rich people." So did every artist in Europe until the late 19th century. He was working in a tradition and adding to it. His borrowings from the past were inspired, not passive or academic. His great model was Veronese--indeed, his contemporaries called him "Veronese reborn"--and other artists influenced him too. He was acutely style-conscious, and as alert as a magpie. But the effect of his work ran on into the future.

Though Tiepolo worked nearly all his life in Venice, he spent his last eight years in Madrid, at the court of the enlightened, relatively liberal monarch Carlos III, who would later be Goya's first royal patron. Tiepolo's influence completely pervades Goya's early work, particularly the tapestry designs in the Prado, and it continues in the late work. The title page of Goya's Caprichos, that famous image of a dreaming man around whose head owls and bats and other monsters of the unconscious are flitting, is clearly derived from the frontispiece to Tiepolo's Scherzi di Fantasia, a gravestone infested with owls. The terrible figure of the red-capped torturer looming behind the mutilated saint in Tiepolo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha, c. 1755, seems to predict the primal energy of Goya's giants.

This image, in all its pathos and intensity (it is, after all, one of the most sadistic moments in Catholic iconography: a woman's breasts have just been cut off and are seen on the dish held by the androgynous youth on her left), asserts something that has often been downplayed in assessments of Tiepolo--his power as a painter of sacred experience. Keith Christiansen, the Met's curator, has rightly set out to correct this by giving over a whole gallery of the Met to the religious paintings. He has revealed a deeper Tiepolo than we're used to.

Not that the decorative and allegorical paintings are shallow either. Their themes weren't original; their handling became increasingly so. Over his working life--roughly 50 years--Tiepolo didn't use any narratives in his painting that weren't already familiar. There are the figures from antiquity (Achilles, Dido, Alexander, Scipio), the heroes and heroines out of Renaissance literature (Rinaldo and Armida from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme liberata), the biblical patriarchs and Madonnas and martyrs, the allegorical figures of Virtue or Envy or the Four Continents, the flocks of putti as dense as pigeons in the piazza. All these had swarmed across every painted surface in Venice for generations before Tiepolo. But he reinvented them in terms of a spiraling, light-filled exuberance that was unparalleled in its time. No cliche or received idea, once Tiepolo was through with it, failed to come out looking newly minted.

There wasn't a mode he couldn't handle, from the sacred to the sentimental, from the epic to the pastoral, from the mythic to the slyly humorous. As with Bernini or Titian, one stands in awe of his sheer fecundity. And he could be very witty--in a discreet way. His early Apelles Painting Campaspe, c. 1726-27, shows a familiar story from Pliny: the Greek artist Apelles made a portrait of Campaspe, the mistress of Alexander the Great, which so pleased Alexander that when it was finished, he kept the painting and gave Campaspe herself to the artist. In the painting Tiepolo is Apelles, at the easel; the woman posing as Campaspe is Tiepolo's wife, Cecilia Guardi; Alexander is just an extra, a studio model. Apelles looks at her, his black servant looks at him, Alexander studies them both, and a little dog glares out at us: a circle of self-referential glances in lighthearted parody of the Antique.

Campaspe is homelier than Tiepolo's "official" women, who appear in paintings like Time Uncovering Truth, c. 1743. These, one is inclined to think, are among the first "modern" beauties in painting. Not wardrobes of flesh like Rubens' goddesses, not pneumatic dolls like Boucher's nymphs, they are (relatively) slender, blond to redhead, and have the minxy arrogance and perfectly toned skin of runway models, inaccessible, gazing down from their nests of vapor in the blue-rinsed sky above. In Tiepolo, the women always seem to be running the show; his emblematic heroes like Rinaldo, by comparison, look almost effeminate.

Tiepolo loved such ironies and reversals; they were part of the code of his imagination. Out of the traditions of Venetian painting, he taught himself to be one of the most audacious space composers in the history of art, capable of dissolving a solid ceiling into light and vapor. But the distanced, self-aware theatrics of his style--his parade of visual language as a source of delight--make him look modern, even though there isn't an artist today who could begin to rival that virtuosity.