Nicole Page-Smith
Speak of the age
The aerial view in Tiepolo's painting reminding us of flight and nature, often with a large expansion of sky and scarcely placed birds as a compositional tool, leads your eye through the painting. The play of light often feels like the sky of Venice, an Italian town facing the sea. Although, we are aware of the popularity of subject matter in Tiepolo's Allegorical paintings, the sky and the clouds have nature as a religious light, the spiritual quality and, almost the Holy Spirit equaling the birds but sometimes the spirit. The sky as some spiritual entity and god, you would image hard to paint and despite the chubby cupids and angels is always the main veil or presence of the work. The depth of the skull is noticed where, some believe the spirit to reside, is in the mind. Our connection to god and the holy spirit is the head as though god could be imagined. Maybe I have been as seduced as the patrons of Tiepolo. However, you would like to feel the presence of Tiepolo's spiritual and religious concern to go beyond the fashion of the day. Time resembling the god Chronos in, "An Allegory with Venus and Time" (1754-1758), with Time looking very much like some demonic, street urchin, we do imagine does bare a resemblance to the weight of the age of the artist Tiepolo, an artist in his seventieth year due to die some four years later. The light and Venus drift off into the clouds. The spirit of Jesus does speak of the age.
