Tiepolo and Zuccarelli

As I reread my previous post I realized I had written something that might strike the reader as odd; I attributed to Tiepolo and Zuccarelli the playful rendition of everyday life. Surely this does not hold for Tiepolo who was thematically speaking very much in the baroque tradition: biblical scenes and depictions of the lives of saints are predominant with the occasional mythological motive from ancient Greece or Rome. Zuccarelli fits more closely to my description, but he liked to portray idyllic country scenes, sometimes adding mythical figures like fawns to spice up scenes of bacchantic folly. None of the two painters was interested in depicting the life of the rising bourgeoisie - since most of Tiepolos work was commissioned either by the church or by aristocracy, he was still rooted firmly in the old order of the world. Zuccarelli also had patrons among the aristocracy, but his paintings were obviously intended for a different function, not for public exhibition but for private enjoyment, for the aristocracy that was already under the sway of bourgeois values. Tiepolo's paintings were obviously meant for public use in the context of what Habermas had called representative publicity - the public showcasing of authority. This is revealed in the excessive pathso of his compositions, baroque drama taken to the extreme, but on the other hand the colour palette reveals an entirely different story. Baroque painters had discovered the dramatic effect of light and shadow and even master of colour like Rembrandt in his later years (Johannes Itten noted that Rembrandt's colours are like gems glittering in the darkness) subordinated colour to the effects of light and shadow. If baroque can be characterised as dramatic (deviating from the rationalism of the renaissance and the middle ages), the 18. century is somewhat schizophrenic: on the one hand compositions are nearly bursting with dynamism, everything that was still solid in baroque now melts away, every trace of rationalism and order that the baroque retained is abandoned in favour of drama. The colour palette on the other hand became by far less serious, the dramatic opposition of dark and light gave way to the play of bright colours, harsh contrasts are avoided, there are no uniform expressive planes of colour, everything is in motion, everything is in harmony and everything expresses a joie de vivre. It is this quality of colour that is chronicling the ongoing social transformation. It expresses the very ideal of bourgeois intimacy. Art of the 18. century is a prophesy, it is the trumpet that singalls the by now inevitable triumph of the bourgeoisie.