Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, VENICE 1696 – 1770 MADRID
PORTRAIT OF A LADY AS FLORA
Oil on canvas
88.3 x 69.9 cm.; 34 3/4 x 27 1/2 in
Private collection
This is one of only a very small number of paintings of beautiful women in fancy dress by Tiepolo to have survived. Though they occupy only a tiny part of his output, these depictions of idealised feminine beauty remain among the most famous and easily recognised of all Tiepolo’s works. Painted during the artist’s last years in Venice in the late 1750s, this canvas was very probably among a series of ‘half-length figures of women done a capriccio’ recorded in a letter of 1760 as painted for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. Completely unknown and unrecorded before its reappearance in 2008. More on this painting
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1696 – 1770. Born into a wealthy and noble family in Venice, Giambattista Tiepolo was recognized by contemporaries throughout Europe as the greatest painter of large-scale decorative frescoes in the 1700s. He was admired for having brought fresco painting to new heights of technical virtuosity, illumination, and dramatic effect. Tiepolo possessed an imagination characterized by one of his contemporaries as “all spirit and fire.”
A gifted storyteller, Tiepolo painted walls and ceilings with large, expansive scenes of intoxicating enchantment. In breath-taking visions of mythology and religion, the gods and saints inhabit light-filled skies. His ability to assimilate his predecessor and compatriot Paolo Veronese’s use of color was so profound that his contemporaries named him Veronese redivio (a new Veronese).
Tiepolo’s commissions came from the old established families of Italy, religious orders, and the royal houses of Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Russia. His frescoes adorn palaces, churches, and villas, and his artistic legacy consists of some eight hundred paintings, 2,400 drawings, two sets of etchings, and acres of fresco. When Tiepolo died at the age of seventy-four, a Venetian diarist noted the “bitter loss” of “the most famous Venetian painter, truly the most renowned…well known in Europe and the most highly praised in his native land.” More on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
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