Born in March 1696 in the densely populated Venetian district of Castello, Giambattista Tiepolo died at a ripe old age in Madrid in 1770, where he had arrived a few years earlier at the invitation of the Spanish king, thus proving that he had achieved absolute celebrity, which made him one of the most sought-after artists in all of Europe. Splendid frescoes, altarpieces, triumphs of light and colour for churches and palaces: from Udine to Bergamo, to Venice and then to Würzburg, where his unattainable creative imagination emerges with extraordinary force in the frescoes that decorate the Residenza, dominated by an Apollonian, dazzling light, by limpid and transparent colours; Giambattista is then in Venice again and finally in Spain, where his long and extraordinary parabola comes to an end, in the awareness that his art by now clashed with the reality of the new culture that was beginning to take hold in a Venice by then in its twilight years.
