Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), also known as Giambattista, was born in Venice, the youngest of six children of a small shipping merchant, and became a pupil of Gregorio Lazzarini around 1710. He learned at least as much from contemporaries such as Sebastiano Ricci and Piazzetta, and from the Venetian past, above all Tintoretto and Veronese. In 1719 he married Maria Cecilia Guardi, sister of the painters Francesco and Giovanni Antonio Guardi. He was the leading decorative painter of eighteenth-century Venice, covering ceilings and walls in churches, palaces and villas across the Veneto and Lombardy, with a palette cooler than earlier Venetians used, to give the effect of daylight. From 1750 to 1753 he frescoed the Kaisersaal of the Würzburg Residenz with his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo, and then the vast ceiling over its staircase. In 1761 Charles III of Spain commissioned the throne room ceiling of the Royal Palace in Madrid, and he died in that city. Two works here: The Immaculate Conception and The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha.