Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Giambattista Tiepolo
Italian; 18th-century
Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago
85%
Rinaldo and the Magus of Ascalon. 1742-1745. Oil on canvas
There's this orb of empty space that's tumbling off the canvas at its lower left edge. It's limned by the system comprising that upturned angled shield, Rinaldo's scabbard and lifted cloak, the Magus's tablet, the soldiers' tilt, the rock they're leaning on, and then back again to the upturned shield. Huge in height and width as well as in the depth of its extension into the picture's space — it's, like, half the picture — it seems to push the figures backwards and the picture plane forwards. This orb is nothing, a failure of arrangement: there's nothing special about the way Tiepolo's handled the paint in its big voided belly, nothing that could justify so much of the painting being given over to a turgid absence. Yet right beside it there's a helmet that Rinaldo seems to have tossed down. It's small but it's been handled enormously, paint piled on paint as if it's the star of the show. Tiepolo's value lies in such displacements of the energy of his pictures onto throwaway objects. That helmet is pure painting. (2025)
Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago
82%
Rinaldo and Armida in Her Garden. 1742-1745. Oil on canvas
The first thing worth noting is the blue cloak crumpled in the bottom left corner. It has no real narrative or conceptual relations with anything else in the picture; rather, it's a pure pictorial counterpoint to the sprawling vestments of our lovers. It projects into a further dimension the space they're taking up, while also fragmenting that space, making it discontinuous and tough to know. (Rinaldo's shield, with that fabric flowing from under it, accomplishes something similar.) The second thing to note is this picture's ruptured perspective, about which it's selfsure and deliberate. From the right edge of the painting until the vessel Armida's gripping, we have one view of the scene, but then, to the left of her cloak, there's a break, to the left of which again the remaining eighth (or so) of the picture falls back towards the edge of the painting faster than it should be falling —the angle of that column at left is far obliquer than it should be (and the putto up above, with his goofy dip into air, seems to be cajoling the picture for this odd fact of its structure). Such an interruption to orderly space is characteristic of Tiepolo, a result (I think) of his having been mostly a painter of frescoes on walls and ceilings: I imagine that the strictures of a flat rectangle bored him, and that he conceived his arrangements on a plane as though the curves and corners of architecture were there. (2025)
Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago
74%
Armida Encounters the Sleeping Rinaldo. 1742-1745. Oil on canvas
The sumptuousness of Tiepolo's images could lead one into thinking that he's a thick, sumptuous painter, all about handling and excessive buildings-up. This is only partly the case: the critical moments in his canvases do tend to be piles of paint — here there are key clumps of pinkish orange in the clouds at left — but these are sparingly deployed. Impasto is not the rule of Tiepolo's surfaces. Rather, the scenes he depicts will bustle themselves to the point of exhaustion, the empty spaces around them will grow emptier and emptier in vague reaction to this, but then, off in some backwater of this back and forth, there'll be several strokes that, in their fullness as paint, offer themselves up as an answer or a resolution to the problem of all the pregnant gestures and awkward gaps that make up the picture's (ostensible) flesh and bones. In this case, again, it's those pink clouds' pinkish accents, which combine within themselves all the formless energy of the gap between Armida's toe and Rinaldo's knee, as well as all the bodied bending that puts the energy there. (2025)
Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago
69%
Armida Abandoned by Rinaldo. 1742-1745. Oil on canvas
This is the weakest of Tiepolo's four canvases depicting the 16th-century tale of Armida and Rinaldo. (It is perhaps improper to, for the sake of criticism, consider these paintings as discrete units. They were initially hung together under a Tiepolo-painted ceiling in Venice.) It is weak because the space in which its figures reside suits them so well: Armida Abandoned lacks the breaks and weird absences that make Tiepolo's best canvases seem unaccountable, endless. Look, for instance, at the empty foreground space in the lower right corner, just sand and rocks. Rather than falling away or festering absently as Tiepolo's best voids will do, instead it pushes up and in towards the action, focalizing the picture's energy right where Rinaldo's gaze meets Armida's toes. Focalization, however, is not where Tiepolo excels; disjuncture is his métier. One gets a sense of this when one notices the way the right-leaning tree atop that rock is reflected by the leftward lean of a weed at the rock's base, which sets Armida's already-torqued upper and lower halves spinning. (2025)
Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago
52%
Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Hyacinth. 1730-1735. Oil on canvas
Those earwax clouds are pure Tiepolo, and what looks to be the slight misalignment of the two background pillars (plus the downward tilt of the stairs towards the right) makes the painting's space appear other than readily graspable, in a good way. But that's just about where this work's gainful elements end. The composition is too much the pyramid, the positioning of the saints too call-and-response. Sure, the space between Dominic and Hyacinth amounts to something of a break in the picture's order — Tiepolo thrives where his pictures break — but what's the gap filled in with? Images! It's like Tiepolo lost the will to emptiness, which is what makes his best paintings fall apart (again, in a good way). Most likely, I guess, it's just that his buyer asked for some scenes from the life of Christ; this was an altarpiece, after all. But in artistic terms that's only a partly satisfying explanation for why this painting sort of sucks. (2025)