May 26, 2016
Nearing age forty-five and the reigning genius in eighteenth-century Italy, Giambattista Tiepolo frescoed a remarkable secular ceiling in 1740 for a wealthy, recently ennobled patron in Milan, Anton Giorgio Clerici (1715–1768). William Barcham, Thaw Senior Fellow and Professor Emeritus, Fashion Institute of Technology, explores the surviving drawings for the ceiling and what they reveal about Tiepolo’s brilliant talent and whimsical imagination in transmuting earthly reality into a fanciful but parallel social order.