Adding Insight to Works of a Venetian Master

Giambattista Tiepolo (1692-1770) has always seemed the textbook definition of a celebrity artist. Famous for being famous, he’s a painter whose name recognition far outstrips any sense of deep respect.

The Venetian master could turn a vast expanse of empty palazzo ceiling into an airy fantasy of glittering celestial figures, wafting on an invisible updraft into a periwinkle eternity, all to the giddy accompaniment of herds of fat pink cherubs and sylphidine trumpeters. And he could choreograph a composition in which a cast of hundreds came together in a heart-stopping crescendo, with a facility unmatched until Cecil B. DeMille parted the Red Sea.

Some sense of what these frescoes are about can be had at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a large exhibition of 80 Tiepolo paintings is enlivened by a wonderful selection of modelli--the magnificent oil sketches in which the artist worked out his initial ideas for frescoes (and altarpieces).

In one, a classically exquisite Apollo encircled by a sunburst sheds his radiant light upon a luxurious gathering of exotically garbed ambassadors from four continents. In another a splendid apotheosis is performed by a rich Venetian family, identifiable by precise portraits of every man, woman and child. In a third a lustrous Virgin Mary rides atop the Holy House of Loreto as it miraculously flies through the air on a voyage of salvation from Nazareth to Italy, like a more serene Dorothy Gale on her way to an unimaginable Oz.

Now, that’s entertainment.

The modelli at the Met constitute the most affecting portion of the show. One room pairs sketches with the actual corresponding altarpieces, allowing for revealing comparisons between planned and finished pictures. When you get to the sketches for absent ceiling frescoes, you’ve been subtly prepared to crank up your imagination.

And imagination’s role in Tiepolo’s art turns out to be the show’s principal point. Met curators Keith Christiansen and Andrea Bayer emphasize his imaginative inventiveness, in which standard subjects from Christianity and classical mythology were given surprisingly resourceful renditions, often laced with wit and irony.

Take the exquisite “The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora,” an oil on canvas ceiling painting executed before Tiepolo was yet 40. A kind of pictorial nuptial song, painted for the wedding of two children of patrician families, it depicts in convincingly foreshortened form the union of Zephyr, Greek god of the west wind, and a voluptuous Flora, Roman goddess of flowers.

The dragonfly-winged Zephyr hovers in space, holding aloft a victorious crown of flowers, while the zaftig Flora is hoisted aloft on the back of an ever-so-slightly straining cupid. The two demigods and a half-dozen attending putti are arrayed in an infinity of blue sky along a buoyantly Baroque spiral of clouds, which rhythmically darts in and out of deep shadow and glistening light.

This ceiling composition is an astonishing erotic machine--a pulsing image of delirious sexual fecundity rising to a breathlessly exhausting pitch. The marriage between two powerful Venetian families that Tiepolo was hired to celebrate clearly involved a careful breeding effort, designed to produce potent offspring.

(In case you’re wondering, the planned pollination didn’t work out. Hubby died shortly after the marriage, leaving a childless widow.)

Inventive certainly describes “The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora.” But the museum is focusing on Tiepolo’s witty creativity for a specific--but dubious--purpose.

*

The aim is to rescue Tiepolo’s artistic reputation from the doldrums in which it has pretty much languished for the past 200 years. To revive it, the museum points to his imaginativeness to make the startling claim that Tiepolo is a remarkably modern artist.

Yes, modern.

This is surprising enough for a painter who was working at the height of his powers in the 1750s. When you consider also that Tiepolo’s work has long been one representative of precisely the type of art--and corresponding worldview--that the political and artistic revolutions of the 19th century meant to sweep away, the claim becomes both audacious and bizarre.

In fact, Tiepolo was no modern rebel out to upset the status quo. His clever art instead sought to conserve a passing order.

In fact, a canonical Modern work such as Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” (1915-23) can on one level be seen as a jaundiced satire that mocks just the sort of erotic oom-pah-pah machine that Tiepolo painted in “The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora.”

Tiepolo was the most famous Italian artist of the 18th century and among the most famous in all of Europe. Since then he’s typically been regarded as the end of the line--last in a great sequence of Italian painters originating in the early Renaissance, and last in a remarkable line of Venetians, which included his 16th century idols, Titian and Veronese.

Within a few decades of Tiepolo’s death in 1770, his reputation had fallen far. Just think of events that occurred on subsequent familiar dates--like 1776 and 1789--and you’ll see why critics began to regard him as a provincial exemplar of the decadent tastes of a fallen government.

Those assessments don’t hold up, but that doesn’t mean Tiepolo doesn’t remain the end of a line. His contemporaries recognized his peculiar genius and, interestingly, they too focused on the inventiveness that the Met now uses to spuriously claim his modernity.

Merely reviving an awareness of a deft imagination today doesn’t somehow shift Tiepolo from his secure position at the end of one line over to a vaunted place at the start of another. Instead, praise Tiepolo for going out with a bang.

* Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, (212) 535-7710, through April 27. Closed Mondays.