The Baroque Splendour of Venice – Tiepolo and His Contemporaries – Museum of Arts and Crafts

With the exhibition “The Baroque Splendour of Venice – Tiepolo and His Contemporaries”, the most complete exhibition of Venetian Baroque painting in Croatia to date, Zagreb’s Museum of Arts and Crafts rounds off a series of large projects dedicated to Italian artists of the 17th and 18th centuries.

With this exhibition the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb brings us a selection of the most significant works from the 18^th century kept in the Pinacoteca di Vicenza. Visitors can enjoy 40 works from the collection dedicated to the century in which Italian painters had a significant influence in Europe and some of which are represented in the pages of numerous volumes on the history of art and in important museums around the world from the Louvre to the National Galleries in Washington and London.

Giambattista Tiepolo (Venice 1696 – Madrid 1770) was one of the greatest Venetian painters, some of his works and those of his son influenced the whole of painting in the 18^th century outside of Italy too. Tiepolo’s painting, recognisable by its exceptional relationship between light and shade and colour contrast, in an atmosphere between reality and illusion, is present in numerous churches, palaces and residential villas. His cycles of allegorical and mythological frescoes are located in Venice, throughout northern Italy, in Würzburg and Madrid. Tiepolo’s works and those of his contemporaries exhibited in the Museum of Arts and Crafts range from altarpieces, pictures, drawings and scherzos to etchings and chalcography, and the motifs cover a range from still life, floral compositions, landscapes and portraits, phantasmagorical, mythological and Biblical scenes. As well as Giambattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenica, works by their contemporaries, significant Venetian painters of the 18^th century, are presented: Zais, Pittoni, Piazzetta, Ricci, De Pieri, Carlevarijs, Aviani, Dorigny, Marchioni, Victor and da Castello and Elisabetta Marchioni,one of the few woman painters of that time. The exhibition reveals some of the key moments in the development of art in general, among which are highlighted Tiepolo’s graphic works, which due to the special way they are kept are exhibited in almost total darkness, and the details of which fascinate still today. The exhibition is open until 1 October.