Day 240 - Two Tiepolos

 March 1, 2021

I've mentioned that the Met has the largest collection of works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo outside of Venice, and many of them, including small sketches in oil for larger paintings, are in Gallery 622. Tiepolo is not my favorite, perhaps because his paintings are so high Baroque - full of swirling garments and forms and self-importance  - and because I am not enamored of his palette. But today I want to write about two of his paintings. One of these I like a lot, the other I don't. 

The one I like, which measures about 36 inches high and 21 inches wide,  is entitled "Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken" and was completed around 1758-9. The work is a sketch for a large altarpiece for a cathedral in Este, near Padua, where the work commemorated the plague 0f 1630.  I'd never even heard of Saint Thecla until recently - she was a first-century acolyte of Paul - and perhaps the fact that she's new to me makes any painting showing her more interesting.  Or perhaps the fact that we are now afflicted with a plague of sorts increases the work's relevance.   In the painting, the saint ,at the lower left, is shown  kneeling and gazing imploringly at the Heavenly Father in the upper right, who is surrounded by a cloud and held up by angels. What appear to be shrouded corpses occupy the lowest zone of the painting.  I'm not sure what the gray figures in the air are - embodiments of the plague? - but it doesn't really matter:  While there's a fair amount going on,  our attention focuses on the endpoints of the diagonal between the saint and the deity. What I especially like about the painting are the depictions of Este in the background, in a plain with craggy mountains in the distance, and of God, who, with his flowing white beard and outstretched right arm, looks like he flew right out of Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

On the other hand, Tiepolo's oil sketch for an "Adoration of the Magi," also dating from the late 1750s and measuring about 28 inches high and 24 inches wide, doesn't appeal to me at all. The signage refers to Tiepolo's "compositional ingenuity," but the painting is a muddle to me.  For one thing, the setting, with its  classical architecture, made me wonder whether the subject was a "Presentation in the Temple." The Magi themselves are a blur. Who is the figure clinging to the column and looking down? And what's the ladder doing there? The sign goes on to say that the altarpiece was never executed. Maybe the potential sponsors agreed with me.