VI
It is quite true, however, that Tiepolo was not primarily a devotional painter. He was first of all a great decorative artist, a master of emotion in motion, and it probably mattered little to him whether he was called on to express the passion of Saint Theresa or of Cleopatra. This does not imply that he executed his task indifferently. Whatever it was, he threw into it the whole force of his vehement imagination and incomparable maestria; but what he saw in it, whether it was religious or worldly, was chiefly, no doubt, the opportunity to obtain new effects of light and line.
If he had a special bent, it was perhaps toward the depicting of worldly pageants. In the Labia palace on the Canareggio, a building in which Cominelli, the ablest Venetian architect of the eighteenth century, nobly continued the “grand manner” of Sansovino and Scamozzi, Tiepolo found an unequalled opportunity for the exercise of this side of his talent. Here, in the lofty saloon of the piano nobile, he painted the loves of Antony and Cleopatra transposed to the key of modern patrician life. He first covered the walls with an architectural improvisation of porticoes, loggias and colonnades, which might have been erected to celebrate the “triumph” of some magnificent Este or Gonzaga. In this splendid setting he placed two great scenes: Cleopatra melting the pearl, and Antony and Cleopatra landing from their barge; while every gallery, balcony and flight of steps is filled with courtiers, pages and soldiers, with dwarfs and blackamoors holding hounds in leash, and waiting-maids and lacqueys leaning down to see the pageant.
From this throng of figures the principal characters detach themselves with a kind of delicate splendour. Royal Egypt,
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
in her brocaded gown of white and gold, with a pearl collar about her throat, and a little toy spaniel playing at her feet, is an eighteenth-century Dogaressa; Antony is a young Procurator travestied as a Roman hero; while the turbaned black boy, the maid-servants, the courtiers, the pages, are all taken sur le vif from some brilliant rout in a Pisano or Mocenigo palace. And yet—here comes the wonder—into these “water-flies” and triflers of his day, the ladies engrossed in cards and scandal, the abatini preoccupied with their acrostics, the young nobles intriguing with the prima amorosa of San Moisè or engaged in a sentimental correspondence with a nun of Santa Chiara—into this throng of shallow pleasure-seekers Tiepolo has managed to infuse something of the old Roman state. As one may think of Dante beneath the vault of the Gesuati, one may recall Shakespeare in the presence of these rouged and powdered Venetians. The scene of the landing suggests with curious vividness the opening scene of “Antony and Cleopatra”—
Look where they come!
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet’s fool—
and one can almost hear the golden Antony, as he brushes aside the importunate Roman messengers, whispering to his Queen: “What sport to-night?”
Still more Shakespearian is the scene of the pearl. Cleopatra, enthroned in state at the banqueting-table, lifts one hand to drop the jewel into her goblet, and in her gesture and her smile are summed up all the cruel grace of the “false soul of Egypt.” It is Tiepolo’s best praise that such phrases and associations as these are evoked by his art, and that, judged from the painter’s standpoint, it recalls the glory of another great tradition. Studied in the light of Venetian painting, Tiepolo is seen to be the direct descendant of Titian and Veronese. If the intervening century has taken something from the warmth of his colour, leaving it too often chalky where that of the Renaissance was golden, he has recovered the lines, the types and the radiant majesty of the Venetian cinque cento, and Veronese’s Venice Enthroned, in the Ducal Palace, is the direct forbear of his Virgins and Cleopatras.