Tiepolo versus Hockney, painting in motion

We know of two paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo. Works that seem to have no connection with each other. Instead, we are aware that originally they were two parts of the same, undivided painting. Why would someone separate them? The answer most likely is not related to the market’s needs, but to the fact that this painting of Tiepolo was too advanced for his contemporaries. We can argue that it was even so advanced that has affected our contemporaries too.

 

The painting stored in Edinburg represents the biblical scene of “Moses saved from the waters of the Nile”; the other, today in Turin, depicts the figure of “Halberdier”. Combining the two works, you realize that the Halberdier is too far from the main scene, and he is also disproportionate compared to the other biblical character, hierarchically more important (the entire scene can be grasped in a copy made by Tiepolo’s son, Giandomenico).

 

However, as Michael Baxandall pointed out, what might seem unusual for the eighteenth-century taste was instead a new linguistic conquest: the composition of a work without a center, which does not require a single point of view and that gives the impression of being inside the painting.

 

A contemporary artist, David Hockney, has confessed to approach his painting the same way. In his dialogue with Martin Gayford (“A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney”, Thames & Hudson, 2011), the artist asserts that to make the most out of the works of Tiepolo, the viewer ought to move along the painting, his characters working from every angle. Referring to his enormous titled painting “Bigger Trees Near Water” (2007), Hockney, almost echoing the intention of Tiepolo, hopes that the viewer reacts to the work not willing to get inside, but with the impression of being “already there.”

July 26, 2015