Читать книгу Baroque Art - Victoria Charles - Страница 8

Only a few painters have managed to find a place in art history from the operations of the other Italian art schools during the seventeenth century. In Florence, only Christofano Allori stood out among the large number of followers and this only with one work, with Judith with the Head of Holofernes (c. 1613). Legend has it that he painted this picture while embittered by the betrayal of a disloyal lover, more or less with his heart’s blood.

Italian painting achieved a late blooming in Venice where the locally-born Giovanni Battista Tiepolo attached himself to the offerings of the classical school and soon sought to compete with both Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto. In this he was successful in his wall, altar and ceiling pictures in whose creation and execution he developed an imagination and force that are unique even in this period of the most florid decorative painting. He decorated churches and palaces with frescoes of religious, allegorical and mythological content and thus created various masterworks of unique decoration. His main work in Venice is the frescoes in a hall of the Palazzo Labia, with pictures from the history of Anthony and Cleopatra. At least in scope, and maybe also in beauty, it is outdone by the wall and ceiling pictures in the Residence Palace in Würzburg where, in the decoration of the Imperial Hall and the stairwell, (1750–1753) with a pompous characterization of the four parts of the world, he produced the most brilliant decorative painting of the eighteenth century on German soil.

One of his contemporaries was Giovanni Antonio Canal, whose nickname “Canaletto” is taken from his views of the Venetian canals with their churches and palaces and who thus founded a particular genre of architectural painting. Canaletto was apprenticed to his father and first worked as a stage designer. After his journey to Rome (1719–1720) he changed to topographical pictures and painted many views of Venice. He spread this fast-growing new art over a large part of Europe as he was also active in Dresden, Munich, Vienna and Warsaw and painted “Perspectives” of these cities and their surroundings. These works were later continued by his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, also named Canaletto.

Two other noteworthy Venetian painters of this time are Francesco Guardi, who was a pupil of the older Canaletto and who exclusively painted views of Venice in fine colouration, and Pietro Longhi, who was a portrait painter and narrator of folk life. Longhi was one of the freshest artists of the times as an observer of his fellow countrymen, full of humour and perspicacity. His genre pictures such as The happy Couple (about 1740), The Charlatan (1757), Lady at her Toilette (about 1760) and various others are witness to an astounding independence.