Exhibition review: Der Himmel auf Erden: Tiepolo in Wurzburg, and: Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1996, and: Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections

Underappreciated for at least two centuries, Giambattista Tiepolo’s time has come. The three hundredth anniversary of his birth, 1996, saw exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including those at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Cologne, and the Berliner Kupferstichkabinett (on Tiepolo and Venetian drawing from their large collections); the Museum Boymans-van Beuringen Rotterdam, and Udine in Friuli. The extent of attention—from curators, art historians, technical experts, and the public—has been immense and constitutes a complete reassessment of his oeuvre (and that of his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo) in historical, aesthetic, and technical terms.

Each of the three largest of these exhibitions described here—each exhaustive in its particular area—was accompanied by an exceptionally valuable catalog. To begin at the top, the exhibition in Würzburg, entitled “Heaven on Earth,” showcased the great Treppenhaus (staircase) and Kaisersaal frescoes in the Würzburger Residenz, built by the Prince-Bishops of Franconia between 1719 and 1744. Tiepolo and his sons traveled from Venice to Würzburg in 1750 to execute the paintings over a period of three years. The Treppenhaus painting, “Apollo and the Four Continents,” represents certainly one of the largest, and by any account greatest paintings ever executed. The exhibition occasioned a breathtaking display of the frescoes themselves, accompanied by extensive related material: pen and wash studies, and oil sketches, of figures; paintings or drawings by the Tiepolos executed during this time; similar subjects executed at other times by the Tiepolos; letters and documents pertaining to the Tiepolos and their commission, and so on. What is presented in the exhibition and its catalog, then, is a cultural history of a remarkable moment in Venetian—Franconian exchange, and particularly Venetian influence in German painting and decoration, as well as an archaeology of the great paintings and a full context for understanding the work and the process of its creation. The two-volume catalog is sumptuous and extremely useful, with contributions on aspects of the Tiepolos and their time in Würzburg from both established and younger Tiepolo scholars. One of the most valuable contributions is that of the restorer Matthias Staschull, who presents and interprets the physical evidence from the frescoes and the ceilings and determines conclusively, after decades of controversy, just how the ceiling area was prepared, how the cartoons were transferred to the ceiling, how much painting was applied to wet plaster, and how much overpainting was carried out. Discussions of the drawings elsewhere in the catalog help to assemble a plausible working procedure from sketch design through execution through ricordo.

The only piece missing from the exhibition was conspicuously absent: the Metropolitan’s oil-sketch of the Treppenhaus ceiling, the single most important extant work related to the fresco, the only evidence of Tiepolo’s preliminary scheme for the design of the ceiling in its entirety. Presumably the Metropolitan wanted to keep it for their own Tiepolo exhibition months later. But it should have been sent to Würzburg for this exhibition. Its absence meant that the unique opportunity was missed to examine the complete evidence concerning the design and plan of the great fresco. Nevertheless, the Würzburg organizers made particularly good use of the very rich collection of graphic works from the Staatsarchiv Stuttgart, as well as the drawings, mainly by Lorenzo, in the Martin von Wagner-Museum, Würzburg, providing depth to the presentations, showing fragments of figures, bodies or body parts. The isolation of attention this allows is exhilarating, mimicking in a way Tiepolo’s own daily process of creation, the creation of a moment of experience, sensual, profound, consisting of multiple parts in...