Nearly all his compositions have a serene and limpid horizon, with the figures approaching it painted in clear, silvery hues, airy and diaphanous, while the forms below are more muscular, the flesh tints are deeper, and the whole of the foreground is often enveloped in shadow. Veronese had lit up the shadows, which, under his contemporaries, were growing gloomy. Tiepolo carries his art further on the same lines. He makes his figures more graceful, his draperies more vaporous, and illumines his clouds with radiance. His faded blue and rose, his golden-greys, and pearly whites and pastel tints are not so much solid colours as caprices of light. We have remarked already that with Veronese the accessories of gleaming satins and rich brocades serve to obscure the persons. In many of Tiepolo’s scenes the figures are lost in a flutter of drapery, subject and action melt away, and we are only conscious of soft harmonies of delicious colour, as ethereal as the hues of spring flowers in woodland ways and joyous meadows. With these delicious, audacious fancies, put on with a nervous hand, we forget the age of profound and ardent passion, we escape from that of pompous solemnity and studied grace, and we breathe an atmosphere of irresponsible and capricious pleasure. In this last word of her great masters Venice keeps what her temperament loved—sensuous colour and emotional chiaroscuro, used to accentuate an art adapted to a city of pleasure.

The excellence of the old masters’ drawings is a perpetual revelation. Even second-class men are almost invariably fine draughtsmen, proving that drawing was looked upon as something over which it was necessary for even the meanest to have entire mastery. Tiepolo’s drawings, preserved in Venice and in various museums, are as beautiful as can be wished; perfect in execution and vivid in feeling. In Venice are twenty or thirty sheets in red carbon, of flights of angels, and of draperies studied in every variety of fold.

Poor work of his school is often ascribed to his sons, but the superb “Stations of the Cross,” in the Frari, which were etched by Domenico, and published as his own in his lifetime, are almost equal to the father’s work. Tiepolo had many immediate followers and imitators. The colossal roof-painting of Fabio Canal in the Church of SS. Apostoli, Venice, may be pointed out as an example of one of these. But he is full of the tendencies of modern art. Mr. Berenson, writing of him, says he sometimes seems more the first than the last of a line, and notices how he influenced many French artists of recent times, though none seem quite to have caught the secret of his light intensity and his exquisite caprice.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Aranjuez.Royal Palace: Frescoes; Altarpiece.
Orangery: Frescoes.
Bergamo.Cappella Colleoni: Scenes from the Life of the Baptist.
Berlin.Martyrdom of S. Agatha; S. Dominia and the Rosary.
London.Sketches; Deposition.
Madrid.Escurial; Ceilings.
Milan.Palazzi Clerici, Archinto, and Dugnano: Frescoes.
Brera: Loves of Rinaldo and Armida.
Paris.Christ at Emmaus.
Strà.Villa Pisani: Ceiling.
Venice.Academy: S. Joseph, the Child, and Saints; S. Helena finding the Cross.
Palazzo Ducale: Sala di Quattro Porte: Neptune and Venice.
Palazzo Labia: Frescoes; Antony and Cleopatra.
Palazzo Rezzonico: Two Ceilings.
S. Alvise: Flagellation; Way to Golgotha.
SS. Apostoli: Communion of S. Lucy.
S. Fava: The Virgin and her Parents.
Gesuati: Ceiling; Altarpiece.
S. Maria della Pietà: Triumph of Faith.
S. Paolo: Stations of the Cross.
Scalzi: Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto.
Scuola del Carmine: Ceiling.
Verona.Palazzo Canossa: Triumph of Hercules.
Vicenza.Museo Entrance Hall: Immaculate Conception.
Villa Valmarana: Frescoes; Subjects from Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso; Masks and Oriental Scenes.
Würzburg.Palace of the Archbishop: Ceilings; Fêtes Galantes; Assumption; Fall of Rebel Angels.

CHAPTER XXX

PIETRO LONGHI

We have here a master who is peculiarly the Venetian of the eighteenth century, a genre-painter whose charm it is not easy to surpass, yet one who did not at the outset find his true vocation. Longhi’s first undertakings, specimens of which exist in certain palaces in Venice, were elaborate frescoes, showing the baneful influence of the Bolognese School, in which he studied for a time under Giuseppe Crispi. He attempts to place the deities of Olympus on his ceilings in emulation of Tiepolo, but his Juno is heavy and common, and the Titans at her feet appear as a swarm of sprawling, ill-drawn nudities. He shows no faculty for this kind of work, but he was thirty-two before he began to paint those small easel-pictures which in his own dainty style illustrate the “Vanity Fair” of his period, and in which the eighteenth century lives for us again.