Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the last great decorative painter of the Venetian tradition and the finest fresco painter in Europe in his century. Born in Venice in 1696, the son of a shipping merchant who died when he was an infant, he trained under Gregorio Lazzarini and was independent by his early twenties. His early work is dark and Caravaggesque. He lightened it dramatically after studying Veronese, adopting the silvery blues, pale pinks and blond light that became his signature, and he worked with an extraordinary speed and confidence that fresco demands, since plaster must be painted while wet. He specialised in illusionistic ceilings. The technique — di sotto in sù, seen from below — projects figures onto the vault so convincingly that architecture appears to open into sky. He decorated palaces and churches across the Veneto, and the Palazzo Labia in Venice with the story of Antony and Cleopatra. His masterpiece is at Würzburg, where between 1750 and 1753 he frescoed the Kaisersaal and then the staircase of Balthasar Neumann's Residenz. The staircase ceiling is the largest fresco in the world, some six hundred square metres, showing the four continents around Apollo, with the local prince-bishop and Neumann himself among the figures. He returned to Venice, painted the Villa Valmarana and the Ca' Rezzonico, and served as president of the Venetian academy. Charles III called him to Madrid in 1762 to paint the throne room of the new royal palace. He spent his last eight years there, in competition with the neoclassical taste that Anton Raphael Mengs represented and that was already making his manner look obsolete. He died in Madrid in 1770.

• Lived: 1696 CE – 1770 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter