Cacciatore a cavallo, 1718 Today is the 316th birthday of the Venetian master Rococo painter Giambattista Tiepolo , one of the last great painters of Italy's four hundred year heritage of Old Masters. It's interesting that Venice—once proud of its greats such as Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto—began to fall into a kind of artistic recession in the 1700's, losing out the spotlight to Rome and Bologna. What Tiepolo did was reinvent the ceiling fresco in a way that few artists were able to equal. And he did with an uncanny ability to take the best elements from his past and contemporaries and make it his own, working quickly and with a remarkable use of color that is highly underrated. Apollo and Daphne, 1745 In the example above Tiepolo uses warm skin tones to contrast with the deep blues of the sky behind them. If we look closely we see Apollo's cloak is a fiery red, a symbol of passion and infatuation in this case, but look how Tiepolo metamorphosizes it int...
Thoughts and inspirations on art from the Old Masters to my own art