Book description
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent
his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often
covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany
and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the
glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but
though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to
understand him.
Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three
bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the
Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge,
interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that
contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs,
Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including
Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with
Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of
Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go.
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo
in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of
meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly
effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar
Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.
Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is
publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of
the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger,
Literature and the Gods, Ka and K.
Alastair McEwan has translated more than seventy books of fiction
and non-fiction, including works by some of Italy's best-known
writers: Baricco, Calasso, Eco, Tabucchi, and many more. He also
writes occasional articles in both Italian and English for major newspapers.
