The full-length treatment in English of Tiepolo's life and career. Examining in detail the genesis and the achievement of Tiepolo's major accomplishments, and presenting a rich array of illustrations-some never before reproduced - Michael Levey presents the evidence for a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the great Italian artist.

Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest Italian painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his monumental frescoes and epic altarpieces. The scale of these paintings is immense, even overpowering. Yet some of Tiepolo's finest work can be found in the small oil sketches that he often made in preparation for these grand commissions. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Giambattista Tiepolo: Fifteen Oil Sketches brings together a group of the artist's oil sketches from the Courtauld Institute in London that spans his entire career and reveals the amazing confidence and fluidity with which he created these paintings. The unusual intimacy of these preparatory sketches-made directly on the canvas with no preliminary underdrawing-reveals a great artist's vigorous imagination at work. The exhibit will run from May 3, 2005, to September 4, 2005. An introductory essay situates these works within the context of eighteenth-century art and Tiepolo's life and career.

Published in conjunction with an exhibit which opened in Venice in 1996 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the first part of 1997. The exhibit organizers aimed to show Tiepolo as one of the presiding geniuses of the European imagination. In essays and entries on every work shown, the text illuminates his formation; his mastery of mythological and poetic subjects; his religious pictures; his excursions into portraiture and studies of ideal heads; and the process by which he proceeded from initial ideas--small- scale sketches--to large canvases and frescoes. Beautifully produced, the volume makes a stunning impact, and will have to suffice for those who can't make it to the exhibit itself. Distributed by Abrams. 10x12"Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Venetian painting, which had flourished during the High Renaissance, saw one of its final and yet most brilliant high points in the art of Giambattista Tiepolo. His monumental wall paintings adorned the most important sacred buildings and residences of the ruling houses of the period. Tiepolo's masterpieces include the fresco decorations in the bishop's palace at Wurzburg, which represent a milestone in the history of painting.

From the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart "Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound; my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write, paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found its image again, a hound in astounding light." Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro--a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris--and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover a detail--"a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound"--of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-five full-color reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.

The exhibition reunites surviving preparatory drawings and paintings, as well as documentary photos, for an extraordinary lost fresco cycle by the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770). The frescos were painted for Palazzo Archinto in Milan and destroyed in a bombing of the city during World War II.