From the first didactic panel for Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings, the viewer was likely to be hooked. Showcasing works by Giambattista Tiepolo, his son Domenico, Francesco Guardi and their contemporaries, the Morgan Library’s exhibition stressed the importance of an artistically resurgent Venice in the eighteenth century.
The exhibition was set in a large gallery space, separated by a number of temporary walls for a format as surprisingly comprehensive as it was manageable. Viewers were greeted by the senior Tiepolo’s Virgin and Child Seated on a Globe (1740s), an unusual and exciting preparatory design for a decorative finial. While it was perhaps a slightly muted introduction to the show, its sociohistorical presence – signifying the artist’s association with the prestigious Scuola Grande del Carmine in Venice, of which he became a member in 1743 – made it a fitting starting piece.
On the first long wall, several drawings by Sebastiano Ricci were a welcome greeting, offering viewers Tiepolo-esque studies for flying angels, mythological figures and religious scenes. Several more by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, whose delicate hand has a playful and trained quality, delighted. While his Young Woman with a Pear (c. 1710s) came off as rather sluggish, her nose not unlike the flattened snout of a swine, his Young Woman with a Tambourine (n.d.), so angelically reminiscent of Federico Barocci’s young girls, more than compensated for it. Likewise, his Male Nude with Staff was lovely in the way that Vanloo’s young boy in the Met’s collection just down the road is, dripping beau idealism across the page and onto the surrounding images. Equally striking was a sheet from an eighteenth-century Venetian drawing book – ears and eyes all akimbo – inviting viewers to partake in the nuances and bizarrities of draughtsmen of the period.
If the first wall existed to whet the viewer’s palate, the second offered up the first course of an extremely promising meal. The younger Tiepolo’s Hercules (1718-20) provided a glimpse into his early career, while the following works – Abraham and the Angels (c. 1732) and Communion of the Apostles (before 1726) – offered two very different views of subsequent stages in the artist’s practice. These and others, so delicate in pen, brown ink, and brown wash, gave a formidable portrait of the young artist as an engaged and ambitious draughtsman.
Gems on the ensuing walls included Domenico Tiepolo’s depictions of the Holy Family juxtaposed with a set of his caricatures, delightful and different in their sheer whimsy. Particularly dazzling was one Holy Family (shortly before 1762), in which the mouths and faces of Mary and Joseph are pulled taut and wrinkled but remain joyous, and an especially fun rendition of Drunken Punchinello (n.d.) from the Commedia dell’Arte.
A literal turn in the exhibition’s architecture signalled a change in theme in the next section. Viewers were greeted with Italian genre scenes, a smartly curated segue into Italian life, travel, landscape and architecture. Of these, works capitalising on the Grand Tour aesthetic dominated: Marco Ricci’s travellers and shepherds and Guardi’s scenes of sweeping landscapes and dwarfing interiors: View of Levico in the Valsugana (1778) and Ascent of a Balloon in Venice (c. 1780), just to name a couple.
Given the fair amount of recent media coverage of what journalists have called ‘ruin porn’ (see, for example: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/detroit-ruin-porn), viewers were perhaps aesthetically set for what came next: Canaletto’s decrepit facades of Italian cities and countryside, such as his Capriccio with a Round Tower and Ruins by Lagoon (c. 1740-45). An open book of his etchings in a nearby vitrine complemented this, helping viewers understand how period audiences might have observed a group of these works.
Moving forward, Pietro Longhi greeted viewers with work that, while perhaps not as compelling as other imagery in the show, presented another portrait (or social document) of common Italian life. In particular, his Pastoral Landscape with Figures (n.d.; thought to be an early work) in red chalk and red wash was a treasure, depicting fragile figures and an utterly delightful cow accompanied by sheep.
The final three walls were arguably the strongest as far as the exhibition’s celebration of eighteenth-century Venice was concerned, capturing a new, whimsical and expansive artistic spirit. A giddily modern feeling accompanied Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Design for a Title Page with a Pulpit (mid 1740s), and Giambattista Tiepolo’s Two Turbaned Figures (early career, n.d.). Further cinching the exhibition’s success was its final flourish, selections of three of the senior Tiepolo’s greatest undertakings: his emotional and hard-to-look-at Large Biblical Scenes (1786-90), gay Scenes from Contemporary Life (off which artists like Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni riffed endlessly), and his raucous Life of Clowns. The message of the latter, showing audiences more of the Commedia dell’Arte, summed up the show: Venetian life can be uncanny, whimsical, and even grave, but it is, above all, deserving of the highest art.
Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings was at The Morgan Library & Museum from 27 September 2013 to 5 January 2014.