The Triumph of Valor over Time
Location: Seattle Art Museum
City: Seattle, Washington
Artist: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Contents
Artist Biography
About the Painting
Related Links and Resources
References
Artist Biography
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Venice 1696 – 1770 Madrid)
One of the most sought after Italian painters of the eighteenth century and father of the Grand Manner style, Giambattista Tiepolo displayed his dazzling technical abilities in grandiose interior fresco cycles and elevated the oil sketch to an independent art form.
The fourteen-year-old merchant’s son learned the fundamentals of mythological and historical painting in the studio of Gregorio Lazzarini (1655-1750). At the age of twenty, Tiepolo adopted the more fashionable contemporaries Federico Bencovich (1677-1753) and Giambattista Piazzetta (1683-1754) as mentors and the deceased sixteenth-century master Paolo Veronese as a major inspiration. Looking to these models, the young painter developed an approach to painting that synthesized the traditional methods of the past with the innovations of his era.
Tiepolo is known for deliberately exposing the deep red-orange preparatory layers, made popular by Piazzetta in his finished compositions. Atop colored ground layers, Tiepolo applied paint mixtures composed of ancient earth tones, traditional colorants, and Prussian blue; he was among the first Italians to utilize the capabilities of this then-new, chemically synthesized pigment. Painting in an energetic manner, the artist lent a combination of gravitas and novelty to scenes populated by figures borrowed from earlier works. As the head of a workshop that employed his sons Giovanni Domenico (1727-1804) and Lorenzo (1736-1776), Tiepolo enjoyed patronage by residents of cities beyond Venice including Wirzburg and Madrid. He died one of the most important Venetian painters of his generation, having secured the most prestigious and ambitious commissions of the era.
About the Painting
This small-scale oil painting is a sketch for the immense ceiling fresco of the same title, The Triumph of Valor over Time which was given to the Seattle Art Museum by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The allegorical subject depicts the moment before Victory crowns the bearded figure, Valor. This painting was one of several that comprised a decorative scheme commissioned by Orazio Porto (1730-1813) for his family’s sixteenth-century palace, presumably to mark the occasion of his marriage to Lavinia di Lodovico in 1761. The eighteenth-century works for this location, which also included six life-size simulated bronze reliefs by Domenico Tiepolo, were dismantled in 1900; which has now made the iconographic scheme difficult to reconstruct. It is possible that this painting served to commemorate the Porto family’s military legacy rather than the apotheosis of a specific individual.
Related Links and Resources
Conservator Nicholas Dorman restoring The Triumph of Valor over Time
Seattle Art Museum A video documents a conservator’s process of inpainting losses on this fresco transferred to canvas after consolidating the stretcher and cleaning the surface.
“Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Metropolitan Museum of Art A detailed biographical and contextual entry on the artist written by Keith Christiansen, Jayne Wrightsman Curator, Department of European Paintings.
References
Augusti, Adriana. “Deckengemälde von Tiepolo in der Scuola dei Carmini in Venedig.” Restauro: Forum Für Restauratoren, Konservatoren Und Denkmalpfleger 98, no. 3 (June 1992): 157–163.
Brown, Beverly Louise. Giambattista Tiepolo: Master of the Oil Sketch. Milan and New York: Electa and Abbeville, 1993, cat. 44, 278–80.
Burmester, Andreas. “Die Palette Giovanni Battista und Giovanni Domenico Tiepolos.” In Tiepolo in Würzburg: Der Himmel Auf Erden, Peter O. Krückmann, 160–164. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996. Christiansen, Keith. Giambattista Tiepolo, 1696–1770. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.
Daffra, Emanuela. “Il Martirio di san Giovanni visto da vicino: note di tecnica esecutiva. In Tiepolo: Intorno alla pala del Duomo di Bergamo, curated by Simone Facchinetti, 43-50. Bergamo: Museo Adriano Bernareggi, 2001.
Daina, Marzia, and Antonio Zaccaria. “Relazione di restauro.” In Tiepolo: Intorno alla pala del Duomo di Bergamo, curated by Simone Facchinetti, 53-57. Bergamo: Museo Adriano Bernareggi, 2001. De Grazia, Diane, and Eric Garberson. “Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.” In Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 259–308. Washington; New York: National Gallery of Art; Distributed by Oxford University Press, 1996.
Gallone, Antonietta. “L’analisi della material pittorica.” In Tiepolo: Intorno alla pala del Duomo di Bergamo, curated by Simone Facchinetti, 59-61. Bergamo: Museo Adriano Bernareggi, 2001.
Gaskell, Ivan. “Tiepolo in Madrid: The Fogg ‘Aeneas’ Sketch Investigated.” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 1, no. 2 (1992-1993): 55–70.
Ivanova, E.Yu. “Restoration and Examination of Paintings by Giovanni Batista Tiepolo: ‘The Meeting of Cleopatra’ and ‘Antonius and Cleopatra’s Feast.’” Khudozhestvennoe Nasledie: Khranenie, Issledovanie, Restavratsiia 3, no. 33 (1977): 119–125.
Kaley, Diana E. The Church of the Pietà. Washington, D.C. and Venice: Venice Committee, International Fund for Monuments, 1980.
Keith, Larry. “Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Saints Maximus and Oswald: Conservation and Examination.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 15 (1994): 36–41.
Lau, Deborah, David Hay, and Natasha Wright. “Micro X-ray diffraction for painting and pigment analysis.” Bulletin: Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material 30 (2007 2006): 38–43.
Longyear, Teresa. “Giambattista Tiepolo: The Energetic and Fluent Brush.” In Giambattista Tiepolo: Master of the Oil Sketch, Beverly Louise Brown, 64-78. Milan and New York: Electa and Abbeville, 1993.
Muñoz, Antonia Zalbidea. “Giambattista Tiepolo: Estudio del Uso del Cartón.” Restauración & Rehabilitación 87 (May 2004): 56–61.
Payne, John, and Carl Villis. “Finding Light in the Shadows: The Cleaning and Restoration of Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra.” Art Bulletin of Victoria 43 (2004): 21-31.
———. “The Finding of a Tiepolo.” News in Conservation 19 (August 2010): 4–5. Rossi Manaresi, Raffaella, Antonella Tucci, and Ottorino Nonfarmale. “Examination and Cleaning of Paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo in the Scuola Grande Dei Carmini, Venice.” In Cleaning, Retouching and Coatings: Technology and Practice for Easel Paintings and Polychrome Sculpture: Preprints of the Contributions to the Brussels Congress, 3-7 September 1990, edited by John S. Mills and Perry Smith, 13–15. London: International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, 1990.
Schwabe, Bettina, Sonja Seidel, and Ingrid Stümmer. “Vier Leinwandgemälde von Giovanni Battista und Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo.” In Tiepolo in Würzburg: Der Himmel Auf Erden, Peter O. Krückmann, 148–159. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996.
Staschull, Matthias. “Das Gewölbefresko im Treppenhaus der Würzburger Residenz.” In Tiepolo in Würzburg: Der Himmel Auf Erden, Peter O. Krückmann, 128–147. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996.