Tiepolo Pink

Overview

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the W�rzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him--but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him.

Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female Satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, as well as Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra, and Beatrice of Burgundy--a motley company always on the go.

Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

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Author Information

Bio of Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso is also the author of The Forty-Nine Steps and Literature and the Gods. He lives in Milan and is the publisher of Adelphi.

Bio of Alastair McEwen

No bio available for Alastair McEwen.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Knopf

Filesize

17.73 MB

Number of Pages

320

eBook ISBN

9780307272966