Hello my name is Letizia Treves and I'm the Curator of the Later Italian
Paintings here at the National Gallery. In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to tell
you a little bit about the artist who painted this picture, the 18th century
Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo who was probably the most brilliant
decorator of his age. I'm also going to unpick the subject of this picture, tell
you who the characters are and what's going on, and I'm also going to tell you
why this enormous canvas is such an odd shape.
[Music] Here at the National Gallery we have a
large range of pictures by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo but also by his son Giovanni
Domenico Tiepolo. We have pictures on a small scale, on a large scale, highly
finished works and a lot more sketchy paintings too.
Now, Tiepolo was known for his extraordinary exuberance and energy in
his brush work, an amazing virtuosity in laying paint on canvas, and this is
especially sort of obvious in the small scale paintings but you cannot
talk about Tiepolo without considering the large-scale decoration that was on
the walls and ceilings of the greatest palaces in Europe, in Italy, in Germany
and in Spain. The decoration of these palaces would
often have taken place directly on the walls in fresco, that is painting
directly onto the wet plaster but in Venice where the air was salty and damp,
fresco was unstable, so Tiepolo and others would have painted a lot of the
interior decoration for walls and ceilings on large canvases like this one,
and this would have then been set into plaster work or wooden compartments
within the room itself, and that's something I've really tried to evoke
here in the National Gallery you can see I'm not hanging this picture flush to
the wall it's tilted to really give visitors a sense of this picture
towering above you to give you a sense of you having to look at this painting
from below and this is really something that Tiepolo would have thought about in
putting together his composition that your viewpoint is really underneath. It's
very important to try and imagine the original location of this picture
because what Tiepolo has effectively done is he's opened up the ceiling to
the sky above so we're looking up to the sky and we can see these deities sort of
perched on these sort of fluffy rose-colored clouds, it's almost a window
to the sky and this is what Tiepolo was so brilliant at. So, in this painting
which is called 'An Allegory with Venus and Time' the main protagonists are quite
easy to identify but the meaning of the allegory is a little less clear. Our eye
is immediately drawn to Venus she's the goddess of love, in fact she won a
contest where paris awarded her the winning trophy, the winning prize for
being the most beautiful of all the goddesses and here she is bathed in
light set against these beautiful pastel colours and look she has this elegant
pearl necklace around her neck, her hair is adorned with pearls and she even
wears a pearl encrusted girdle across her waist.
Now, behind her you can see the wheel of Venus's chariot, now this is normally
drawn by swans or doves and actually if you look up above Venus, you can see two
doves coupling. They're forming this wonderful flying circle like a halo or a
crown above Venus's head. And just beside those doves are three
beautiful graceful women. These are the three graces. The three handmaidens of
Venus and look how sensual they are, they're naked and one is sort of half
concealing the one behind. I love the one in the front, she's sort of looking
coquettishly over her shoulder at us. And beneath them, the main figure to whom
Venus is turning to with a sort of very elegant gesture, is a bearded winged old
man and this is the figure of time and you can tell it's time because around
his waist is a red hourglass that shows the passing of time and his scythe is
lying at his feet, he's propped it up against this fluffy cloud.
This is the scythe that cuts lives short. And what Venus is doing is she's passing
a baby to time and you can see between them this sort of wide-eyed babe who
seems completely oblivious to what is going on around and this baby is
self-soothing, it's sucking its finger and it's looking out directly at us.
Giovanni Battista's son, Giovanni Domenico, engraved this composition shortly after
it was painted and he called the painting 'Il Parto di Venere', Parto
meaning childbirth in Italian, so this is Venus's son this baby,
but it can't be Cupid. Cupid is in fact most probably this little
winged putto at the feet of time and we think that because he's also holding the
quiver full of arrows that are cupid's emblem.
So, who is this baby? he doesn't have wings, he doesn't seem to be a god, in
fact he's a mortal. This is probably Aeneas and the reason father time has
put his scythe down is that this is not the moment to cut this little boy's life
short. In fact Aeneas is destined for immortality.
Now, Giovanni Domenico's engraving of this composition also, luckily for us, told us
where this picture once hung and it was in the Ca' Contarini, Casa Contarini or the
Contarini Palace. Now, the Contarini were one of the oldest and most established families
in Venice. No less than eight Contarinis served as Doge in Venice, that
is the kind of ruler of Venice, and the Contarini dynasty also claimed
to have its roots in Roman antiquity and so it would have made sense to have
Aeneas, the founder of Rome, on your ceiling. A ceiling like this might have
been commissioned for their Palazzo perhaps to commemorate the birth of a
son, a Contarini heir, or even on the occasion of a marriage
you know wishing for a prosperous union between the couple.
And Venus, interestingly, was not just the goddess of love, she was also the goddess
of fertility and prosperity. It's very important in looking at
pictures that would have once adorned the interiors of these great palaces to
remember that these paintings didn't just serve a decorative function, they
also served a very important social and political function. Now, for Tiepolo to
produce such a complex iconographical painting but also a picture on such a vast
scale, he would have produced a large number of preparatory drawings and
sketches, both for individual figures but also to work out his composition.
Now, Tiepolo was a very prolific draftsman and drawing really gave free
reign to his imagination and although no
sheets that are directly related to this picture exist today, there is a drawing
of this subject in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where Venus is
more central and has her arm around father time and it may be a sort of
first idea for this composition. Now the next stage in his sort of preparation
for a work like this, Tiepolo would have painted small scale sketches or 'Botsetti',
like the ones you see behind me by his son.
And then these would have often been worked up into a slightly more finished
state as a 'Modello', as a sort of presentation piece to show
to the patron and get approval before scaling it up on his final work and all
these stages in preparation were really to work out the composition as you can
see Tiepolo hasn't cluttered the composition in this painting, you haven't
got all the figures in the centre, your eye is naturally lead around the canvas
and you're first drawn of course to Venus who's the main
figure. She's sort of pale skinned and she's bathed in light and then her
gesture leading you down to father time and you notice the little baby in the
middle and there's no doubt these are the main protagonists of the painting.
Now, Tiepolo loved to paint, he loved paint and colour, you know you can tell
when you stand in front of his paintings how much he's enjoying creating
different effects within a single canvas. I like to think of it as painting as
performance, and look for example at the white drapery um over Venus's legs, look
how thickly painted it is. We call this 'Impasto'.
And he's loaded the brush with grey and he's created these swirls to
imitate rocks and folds in this drapery on her legs.
And there's such a kind of energy and exuberance in the way he he applies
paint and it really gives the picture this kind of very lively effect, the
picture surface but also the figures within it. Look for example at the
squiggles in the hair and the beard of father time, you really get a sense of
the kind of fluffiness of them, and that's really a vote with a brush with
some dark paint and then some light paint too,
or look at perhaps at the urn, it looks like an urn, which is held in the crook
of Venus's arm. Just with a few marks of paint he creates this kind of grotesque
mask, an ornamental face, and just with a splash of white the highlight on the urn.
There's such a kind of confidence in the way he applies the paint and in this I
think he really is unparalleled in the 18th century. And Tiepolo was also a
great colourist like the Venetian Renaissance painters that had come
before him, Titian and Veronese. Look at the wonderful subtle pastel colours that
he uses to offset Venus, she's bathed in these sort of beautiful light colours and
that really contrasts with the darker foreground around father time.
Look at those flecks of blue feathers and the flecks of red also in his wings
that tie in beautifully with the blue drapery
wrapped around his legs and of course the red hourglass and the red quiver
full of arrows in the foreground. Like many paintings here at the National
Gallery, this picture has been on a journey until it got here. It was in the
Contarini Palace probably until the mid-19th century, until the contents of
the palace were sold and the painting was bought by a millionaire collector
and banker and brought to his house here in London. It was called Butte House in
South Audley Street in Mayfair and there it remained in the 1920s that
building was bought by the Egyptian government and became the Egyptian
Embassy. So, this painting hung on the ceiling of the main drawing room in the
Egyptian embassy until 1969. And in that year, The National Gallery were able to
acquire this work and it was an exceptional thing for us to buy, you know
so rare to find pictures on this scale that once formed part of an interior
decoration by Tiepolo, find these sort of things on the market.
And the Times Newspaper at the time called it a shrewd bargain on the part
of The National Gallery. [Music]
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Thank you for watching, we'll see you next time.
[Music]