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Oct. 10 - Oct. 17, 2004 |
The Tiepolos Between Irony and Comedy
Italy celebrates the 200th anniversary of the artist's death in an exhibition taking place on Venice's S. Giorgio Maggiore
On the occasion of the second centenary of Giandomenico Tiepolo's death, Fondazione Giorgio Cini is devoting this great Venetian artist of the 18th century an exhibition titled Tiepolo. Irony and Comedy, that runs to December 5 on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice. The event was organized with the assistance of the major international experts on Tiepolo. Recently, thanks to new studies, new importance and value has been given to Tiepolo's drawings, both those on contemporary life, where his corrosive skill in portraying his times as grotesque ran free, and those on the figure of Pulcinella, that double of the common folk, bitter portrayal of the laughability of history.
In addition to these two groups of drawing, there are those with caricatures of men and women where Giandomenico revisited the models used by his father Giambattista. The older Tiepolo also drew caricatures and Pulcinellas, and he left us one of the most peculiar and visually effective testimonies of 18th-century art. This world also produced the very different drawings of Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, also kept in the archives of the Fondazione.
These drawings highlight another aspect, more properly 'ridiculous', of 18th-century Venetian caricatures, mostly about the world of theatre, whose protagonists were well identified by name, unlike those of the caricatures by the Tiepolos who were rigorously left unnamed.
The exhibition, planned by Adriano Mariuz, professor of Modern Art History at the University of Padua, and curated by Giuseppe Pavanello, director of the Art History Institute of Fondazione Giorgio Cini, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the death of Giandomenico Tiepolo, includes over 140 drawings and paintings by this artist and by his father Giambattista, lent from the collections of the world's main museums, such as the Louvre and the Metropolitan, and private collectors. Some drawings have never been displayed in Italy before.
The exhibition is divided into five sections: Teatro alla moda, a series of Zanetti drawings done from the early 18th century to the mid-1700s; Pulcinella in Arcadia, drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo where the famous character often appears with a solemn air while attending to the base reality of his own bodily functions; Tomo terzo de caricature, titled after a drawing book by Giambattista dispersed at an auction in London in 1943, includes many caricatures drawn by all the Tiepolos; Giandomenico Tiepolo 1791 borrows its title from the artist's signature and date inscribed in numerous satirical drawings on society done in the years immediately following the French Revolution; finally, Divertimento per li ragazzi presents a series by Giandomenico Tiepolo, originally including 104 drawings and now dispersed in museums and private collections all over the world.
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