Jacopo Amigoni (c. 1685 – September 1752), also named Giacomo Amiconi, was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Rococo period, who began his career in Venice, but traveled and was prolific throughout Europe, where his sumptuous portraits were much in demand.
He was born in Naples. Amigoni initially painted both mythological and religious scenes; but as the panoply of his patrons expanded northward, he began producing many parlour works depicting gods in sensuous languor or games. His style influenced Giuseppe Nogari. Among his pupils were Charles Joseph Flipart, Michelangelo Morlaiter, Pietro Antonio Novelli, Joseph Wagner, and Antonio Zucchi.

Starting in 1717, he is documented as working in Bavaria in the Castle of Nymphenburg (1719); in the castle of Schleissheim (1725–1729); and in the Benedictine abbey of Ottobeuren. He returned to Venice in 1726. His Arraignment of Paris hangs in the Villa Pisani at Stra. From 1730 to 1739 he worked in England, in Pown House, Moor Park Wolterton Hall and in the theatre of Covent Garden. From there, he helped convince Canaletto to travel to England by telling him of the ample patronage available.

In London or during a trip to Paris in 1736, he met the celebrated castrato Farinelli, whose portrait he painted twice in 1735 and again in 1752. Amigoni also encountered the painting of François Lemoyne and François Boucher.

In 1739 he returned to Italy, perhaps to Naples and surely to Montecassino, in whose Abbey existed two canvases (destroyed during World War II). He travelled to Venice to paint for Sigismund Streit, for the Casa Savoia and other buildings of the city.

In 1747 he left Italy for Madrid, encouraged by Farinelli, who held a court appointment there. He became court painter to Ferdinand VI of Spain and director of the Royal Academy of Saint Fernando. He painted a group portrait that included himself, Farinelli, Metastasio, Teresa Castellini, and an unidentified young man. The young man may have been the Austrian Archduke Joseph, the Habsburg heir to the throne. Amigoni died in Madrid.


 

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
1696 – 1770

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (5 March 1696 – 27 March 1770), also known as Giambattista (or Gianbattista) Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice who painted in the Rococo style, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school.

Giovanni Baptista (Giambattista) Tiepolo, Italian painter, part of a Venetian family of painters, draughtsmen and etchers. The greatest member of the family was Giambattista Tiepolo, the sixth and last child of Domenico Tiepolo, a merchant, and Orsetta, whose maiden name is not known. He was baptized Giovanni Battista after his godfather, Giovanni Battista Dorià, a Venetian nobleman, on 16 April 1696 in S Pietro di Castello, the family's local church and at that time the cathedral of Venice. Although their name belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished of Venetian patrician families, this Tiepolo family did not claim noble lineage. However, perhaps through business connections, not only Giambattista but some of his siblings acquired highborn godparents. Domenico died about a year after Giambattista's birth, and it is possible that Orsetta brought up her children - all under ten at the time of their father's death - in straitened circumstances. In 1719 Giambattista married Maria Cecilia Guardi, sister of the painters Giovanni Antonio and Francesco Guardi. Of their ten children, four daughters and three sons survived to adulthood. One of the sons, Giuseppe, entered the priesthood and the other two, Giandomenico Tiepolo and Lorenzo Tiepolo, became painters and assistants to their father.

Giambattista Tiepolo was the last of the great Venetian decorators, the purest exponent of the Italian Rococo, and arguably the greatest painter of the 18th century. He was trained under an obscure painter named Lazzarini but was really formed by the study of Sebastiano Ricci and Piazzetta among living painter and Veronese among the older masters. He was received into the Fraglia (Guild) in 1717 but had already painted the Sacrifice of Abraham (1715-16, Venice, Ospedaletto), a dark picture very much in the manner of Piazzetta and the 17th century generally. In 1719 he married the sister of Guardi and at about this time his own lighter and loose style began to form.

His first great commission for fresco decorations came in 1725, when he began the work in the Archbishop's Palace at Udine (completed 1728). These already show the virtuosity of his handling, the light tone and pale colours necessitated by fresco obviously helping him to break free from the dark Piazettesque models he had previously followed. The Udine frescoes also show him developing as the creator of a world in steep perspective beyond the picture plane, with the architecture receding into dizzy distances. The highly specialized work of painting these architectural perspectives was done by Mengozzi-Colonna, who did this work for Tiepolo for most of his life.

Following the Udine frescoes Tiepolo travelled widely in Northern Italy, painting many more frescoes in palaces and churches, as well as altarpieces in oil which culminate in the gigantic Gathering of the Manna and Sacrifice of Melchidezek (c. 1735-40, Verolanuova, Parish Church), each of which is about 10 m high. The frescoes of this period culminate in the Antony and Cleopatra series in the Palazzo Labia, Venice, which were probably finished just before 1750, when he left Venice for Würzburg.

He was invited to decorate the ceiling of the Kaisersaal in the Residenz at Würzburg by the Prince-Bishop, Karl Phillip von Greiffenklau, and Tiepolo and his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo arrived in Würzburg at the end of 1750 and remained there until 1753, replacing Johann Zick, a German pupil of Piazzetta. He painted the staircase with frescoes, some overdoors, and some altarpieces as well as the Kaisersaal, helped in the gigantic task by both his sons as well as several assistants. The Palace itself is a superb example of German Rococo architecture and the combination of architecture and painting into one vast and airy allegory - apparently referring to the Prince-Bishop as a patron, but including Barbarossa and German history - is perhaps the most successful even in Tiepolo's career.

In 1755, after his return to Venice, he was elected first President of the Venetian Academy and in 1761 he was invited to Spain to decorate the Royal Palace in Madrid by Charles III. He arrived in 1762, with his sons and assistants, and painted the huge ceilings in the Palace in four years. In 1767 Charles commissioned seven altarpieces for Aranjuez, but Tiepolo's last years in Spain were embittered by intrigues on behalf of Mengs, the representative of that Neoclassicism which was soon to condemn his kind of splendid and carefree painting as frivolous. He died suddenly in Madrid.