k and self-indulgent
world, but within himself he possessed a fund of buoyant and
inexhaustible energy. He evokes a throng of personages on the ceilings
of the churches and palaces confided to his fancy. His creations range
from mythology to religion, from the sublime to the grotesque. All
Olympia appears upon his ample and luminous spaces. It is not to the
cold, austere Lazzarini, or to the clashing chiaroscuro of Piazetta, or
the imaginative spirit of Battista Ricci, though he was touched by each
of them, that we must turn for Tiepolo's derivation. Long before his
time, the kind of decoration of ceilings which we are apt to call
Tiepolesque; the foreshortened architecture, the columns and cornices,
the figures peopling the edifices, or reclining upon clouds, had been
used by an increasing throng of painters. The style arose, indeed, in
the quattrocento; Mantegna, the Umbrians, and even Michelangelo had used
it, though in a far more sober way than later generations. Correggio
and the Venetians had perfected the idea, which the artists of the
seventeenth century seized upon and carried to the most intemperate
excess. But Tiepolo rose above them all; he abandoned the heavy,
exaggerated, contorted designs, which by this time defied all laws of
equilibrium, and we must go back further than his immediate predecessors
for his origins. His claim to stand with Tintoretto or Veronese may be
contested, but he is nearest to these, and no doubt Veronese is the
artist he studied with the greatest fervour. Without copying, he seems
to have a natural affinity of spirit with Veronese and assimilates the
ample arrangement of his groups, the grace of his architecture, and his
decorative feeling for colour. Zanetti, who was one of Tiepolo's dearest
friends, writes: "No painter of our time could so well recall the bright
and happy creations of Veronese." The difference between them is more
one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the
opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo's
lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the
modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes
himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of the
decadence. Full of enthusiasm for his work, he was ready to respond to
any call. He went to and fro between Venice and the villas along the
mainland and to the neighbouring towns. Then coveting wider fields, he