It’s now commonplace to talk about contemporary art in terms of ideas — it’s not about craft, but a concept, right? — but this does the art of the past a great disservice. Old Masters have come to be dismissed as “difficult, ugly, brown art”.
The quick-acting antidote to this fear of foreign complexity is a brisk encounter with the oil sketches of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), the artist who brought a touch of Olympic gymnastics to 18th-century painting. The Courtauld Institute of Art in London is fortunate enough to possess several such sketches and drawings by this most dazzling of Venetian artists, and a new exhibition sets these in context with examples drawn from public collections around Britain.
Immediately you are thrown into a world of light and air, in which sky-blues, pinks and dove-greys breathe confidence and optimism, a place where you only have to arch your feet slightly to find yourself drawn into a dance of upward-moving limbs, flowing robes and swirling cloud.
Look, for example, at Tiepolo’s Allegory of the Power of Eloquence, a preparatory sketch for the great ceiling painting of the Palazzo Sandi in Venice: his first major ceiling commission, created in about 1725, this paean to smooth articulacy (painted for, of course, a rich lawyer) is as spatially commanding as a performance of the Cirque du Soleil, with gods and demi-gods performing impossible acrobatics in the air above you. Don’t worry about the meaning of the story that the sketch depicts. This is Tiepolo’s calling card to the rich and powerful in what was then the most chic city in Europe: look, he says, if you think architecture is finite, all stone and mortar, think again. Tiepolo can take you into the heavens themselves and you don’t even have to leave your front door.
In general, the oil sketch has its origins in the Renaissance, when it was used to plot out in broad terms the composition of a painting on the canvas or panel itself. It would then disappear under the resulting image as the artist completed his work. The step to its becoming a separate piece of work was made by avant-garde artists working in Tuscany and Rome in the late 16th century.
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But perhaps Tiepolo’s greatest predecessor in using it was the early 17th-century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, for whom the oil sketch served several vital functions. It helped to sell the artist’s concept of his proposed painting to the client by mapping out its salient points; allowed him to take on changes insisted upon by the client (religious and political subjects were especially tricky things to get right first go); and, by no means least, to show off the artist ‘s virtuoso technical skills in conveying his ideas with bravura economic means.
It didn’t take long for astute collectors to see how such sketches were essentially a distillation of an artist’s creative genius, and a niche but fiercely competitive market grew up in which these sketches became hot property (all the more so after an artist’s death).
For Tiepolo, the oil sketch proved a crucial tool with which he could plan and communicate his designs — if you are setting out to cover huge ceilings with your paintings, then it’s especially important. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the fabulous ceiling painting The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, the highlight of the Palazzo Labia in Venice. The Labia were very nouveau riche and this commission, showing the first encounter of the celebrated lovers from antiquity, allowed for a feast of colour and sumptuous detail that reflected grandly on the artist’s patrons.
“The Labia did this public- relations trick of throwing all their expensive dinner plates into the canal after their own feast beneath this painting to show how rich they were,” the exhibition curator Caroline Campbell says, “but you can be sure they had placed a net under the water first.”
Tiepolo’s oil sketches present an intriguing dilemma: their spirit and fire is often commuted into something else in the final paintings, be they palace ceilings or church altarpieces (which, understandably, the exhibition cannot include). There is a move here from a sense of experimentation, in which the oil sketch is a still-free resolution of many creative options, to the sculpture-like stasis of the paintings, in which painterly conclusion settles like marble on to the scene depicted. Today’s “concept” obsessives could learn a lot from his craft.
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All Spirit and Fire: Oil Sketches by Tiepolo is at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, WC2 (020-7848 2777), from Feb 23