1.
Ciudad Real
–
Ciudad Real is a city in Castile–La Mancha, Spain, with a population of c. It is the capital of the province of Ciudad Real and it has a stop on the AVE high-speed rail line and has begun to grow as a long-distance commuter suburb of Madrid, which is located 115 miles to the north of Ciudad Real. Ciudad Real was founded by King Alfonso X The Wise in the 13th century to fight with the Military Order of Calatrava, during the Middle Ages, four kilometres of walls and one hundred and thirty towers protected a population made up of Christians, Muslims and Jews. After the unification of the Iberian kingdoms under the Catholic Monarchs and this fact favoured its economic development which was shown by the construction of several important buildings. In 1755, however, an earthquake centred on Lisbon destroyed many of these buildings, in 1809, during the Peninsular War, French troops defeated their Spanish counterparts and occupied the city, using the local hospital as their headquarters and barracks. The Plaza Mayor sits in the centre of Ciudad Real, today, only two parts of the wall that surrounded the city in medieval times remain standing. Don Quixotes Museum is situated next to Parque de Gasset, the Museo Elisa Cendreros exhibits an old collection of fans and carved wood. The Iglesia de Santiago is the oldest church in Ciudad Real and it was built at the end of the 13th century. It has three blocks divided into two parts and it is decorated with gothic paintings and with seven-headed dragons, which were used such us amulets against the bad spirits. The ceiling is decorated with stones forming eight pointed stars, another important church in Ciudad Real is Iglesia de San Pedro. It is the most interesting and typical monument of the city and it was built during the 14th and 15th centuries. Its style is Gothic, and it houses the tomb of Chante de Coca, confessor, in the year 1420 the King of Castile and León, Juan the II, gave him the title to Ciudad Real. Ciudad Real Cathedral, built in the 16th century, has the second-largest nave in Spain, one of the most popular festivals in the city is La Pandorga, which takes place July 30 and 31. On the last day of the month the festival honours its patroness, the usual attire of the participants consists of jeans, a white shirt, and the traditional handkerchief. The city had a team, the BM Ciudad Real. The handball club was one of the best in the world and its former hall, BM Ciudad Real, however, moved its team to Madrid. Its name became BM Neptuno but for sponsorship reasons was often referred to as Atlético Madrid, in 2013, BM Neptuno also disappeared. Ciudad Real also has a team, which included David De la Rubia
2.
Spaniards
–
Within Spain there are a number of nationalisms and regionalisms, reflecting the countrys complex history and diverse culture. There are several commonly spoken languages, most notably Basque. There are many populations outside Spain with ancestors who emigrated from Spain, the Roman Republic conquered Iberia during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. As a result of Roman colonization, the majority of languages, with the exception of Basque. The Germanic Vandals and Suebi, with part of the Iranian Alans under King Respendial conquered the peninsula in 409 AD. The Iberian Peninsula was conquered and brought under the rule of the Arab Umayyads in 711 and by the Berber North African dynasties the Almohads, in the early 16th century the Kingdom of Navarre was also conquered. In parallel, a wave of emigration began to the Americas began with over 16 million people emigrating to the Americas during the colonial period. In the post-colonial period, a further 3.5 million Spanish left for the Americas, particularly Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, as a result, Spanish-descendants in Latin America number in the hundreds of millions. Spain is home to one of the largest communities of Romani people, the Spanish Roma, which belong to the Iberian Kale subgroup, are a formerly-nomadic community, which spread across Western Asia, North Africa, and Europe, first reaching Spain in the 15th century. The population of Spain is became increasingly diverse due to recent immigration, the earliest modern humans inhabiting Spain are believed to have been Neolithic peoples who may have arrived in the Iberian Peninsula as early as 35, 000–40,000 years ago. In more recent times the Iberians are believed to have arrived or developed in the region between the 4th millennium BC and the 3rd millennium BC, initially settling along the Mediterranean coast, celts settled in Spain during the Iron Age. Some of those tribes in North-central Spain, which had contact with the Iberians, are called Celtiberians. In addition, a known as the Tartessians and later Turdetanians inhabited southwestern Spain. The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians successively founded trading colonies along the Mediterranean coast over a period of several centuries, the Second Punic War between the Carthaginians and Romans was fought mainly in what is now Spain and Portugal. The Roman Republic conquered Iberia during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC transformed most of the region into a series of Latin-speaking provinces, hispania emerged as an important part of the Roman Empire and produced notable historical figures such as Trajan, Hadrian, Seneca and Quintilian. The Germanic Vandals and Suebi, with part of the Iranian Alans under King Respendial, the Suebi became the first Germanic kingdom to convert officially to Roman Catholicism in 447 AD. under king Rechiar. After two centuries of domination by the Visigothic Kingdom, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by a Muslim force under Tariq Bin Ziyad in 711 and this army consisted mainly ethnic Berbers from the Ghomara tribe, which were reinforced by Arabs from Syria once the conquest was complete. Muslim Iberia became part of the Umayyad Caliphate and would be known as Al-Andalus, the Berbers of Al Andalus revolted as early as 740 AD, halting Arab expansion across the Pyrenees into France
3.
Painting
–
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
4.
Sculpture
–
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts, a wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded, or cast. However, most ancient sculpture was painted, and this has been lost. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India and China, the Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith, the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelos David. Relief is often classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief sculpture may also decorate steles, upright slabs, usually of stone, techniques such as casting, stamping and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work, many of these allow the production of several copies. The term sculpture is used mainly to describe large works. The very large or colossal statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity, another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades. The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the head, showing just that, or the bust, small forms of sculpture include the figurine, normally a statue that is no more than 18 inches tall, and for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Sculpture is an important form of public art, a collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in form of association with religion. Cult images are common in cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art. The actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were rather small. The same is true in Hinduism, where the very simple. Some undoubtedly advanced cultures, such as the Indus Valley civilization, appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, though producing very sophisticated figurines, the Mississippian culture seems to have been progressing towards its use, with small stone figures, when it collapsed. Other cultures, such as ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture, from the 20th century the relatively restricted range of subjects found in large sculpture expanded greatly, with abstract subjects and the use or representation of any type of subject now common. Today much sculpture is made for intermittent display in galleries and museums, small sculpted fittings for furniture and other objects go well back into antiquity, as in the Nimrud ivories, Begram ivories and finds from the tomb of Tutankhamun
5.
Spanish Civil War
–
Ultimately, the Nationalists won, and Franco then ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from April 1939 until his death in November 1975. Sanjurjo was killed in an accident while attempting to return from exile in Portugal. The coup was supported by units in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, Pamplona, Burgos, Zaragoza, Valladolid, Cádiz, Córdoba. However, rebelling units in some important cities—such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, and Málaga—did not gain control, Spain was thus left militarily and politically divided. The Nationalists and the Republican government fought for control of the country, the Nationalist forces received munitions and soldiers from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, while the Republican side received support from the Communist Soviet Union and leftist populist Mexico. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, operated a policy of non-intervention. The Nationalists advanced from their strongholds in the south and west and they also besieged Madrid and the area to its south and west for much of the war. Those associated with the losing Republicans were persecuted by the victorious Nationalists, with the establishment of a dictatorship led by General Franco in the aftermath of the war, all right-wing parties were fused into the structure of the Franco regime. The war became notable for the passion and political division it inspired, organized purges occurred in territory captured by Francos forces to consolidate the future regime. A significant number of killings took place in areas controlled by the Republicans, the extent to which Republican authorities took part in killings in Republican territory varied. The 19th century was a turbulent time for Spain and those in favour of reforming Spains government vied for political power with conservatives, who tried to prevent reforms from taking place. Some liberals, in a tradition that had started with the Spanish Constitution of 1812, sought to limit the power of the monarchy of Spain, the reforms of 1812 did not last after King Ferdinand VII dissolved the Constitution and ended the Trienio Liberal government. Twelve successful coups were carried out between 1814 and 1874, until the 1850s, the economy of Spain was primarily based on agriculture. There was little development of an industrial or commercial class. The land-based oligarchy remained powerful, a number of people held large estates called latifundia as well as all the important government positions. In 1868 popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of the House of Bourbon, two distinct factors led to the uprisings, a series of urban riots and a liberal movement within the middle classes and the military concerned with the ultra-conservatism of the monarchy. In 1873 Isabellas replacement, King Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, abdicated owing to increasing pressure. After the restoration of the Bourbons in December 1874, Carlists and Anarchists emerged in opposition to the monarchy, alejandro Lerroux, Spanish politician and leader of the Radical Republican Party, helped bring republicanism to the fore in Catalonia, where poverty was particularly acute
6.
Pablo Picasso
–
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, Picassos work is often categorized into periods. Much of Picassos work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style and his later work often combines elements of his earlier styles. Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa, though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist. Picassos family was of middle-class background and his father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts, Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were piz, piz, a shortening of lápiz, from the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was an academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork, the family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his sketch of a pigeon. In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his sister, Conchita. After her death, the moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home, Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, the student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day. Picassos father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrids Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, at age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment
7.
Italy
–
Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
8.
Renaissance
–
The Renaissance was a period in European history, from the 14th to the 17th century, regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science, Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, the Renaissance began in Florence, in the 14th century. Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, the word Renaissance, literally meaning Rebirth in French, first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word also occurs in Jules Michelets 1855 work, Histoire de France, the word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. The Renaissance was a movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism, however, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were back from Byzantium to Western Europe. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe life as it really was. Others see more competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins. During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand, Artists depended entirely on patrons while the patrons needed money to foster artistic talent. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia, silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa, unlike with Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity, Arab logicians had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and the Levant. Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Spain and Sicily and this work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history
9.
Surrealism
–
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream, leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I, the word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works, after the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the son of writer. He admired the young writers anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition, later Breton wrote, In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most. Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and they began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields, continuing to write, they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada form of attack on prevailing values. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin, freuds work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness, as Salvador Dalí later proclaimed, There is only one difference between a madman and me. Beside the use of analysis, they emphasized that one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power, the group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to people from false rationality, and restrictive customs. Breton proclaimed that the aim of Surrealism was long live the social revolution. To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism, in 1924 two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established, leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Guillaume Apollinaire, the other group, led by Breton, included Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Jacques Baron, Jacques-André Boiffard, Jean Carrive, René Crevel and Georges Malkine, among others. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority
10.
Magic realism
–
It is sometimes called fabulism, in reference to the conventions of fables, myths, and allegory. Magical realism, perhaps the most common term, often refers to fiction and literature in particular, the terms are broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous. Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as what happens when a highly detailed, many writers are categorized as magical realists, which confuses the term and its wide definition. Magical realism is often associated with Latin American literature, particularly authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, in English literature, its chief exponents include Salman Rushdie and Alice Hoffman. Roh identified magic realisms accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and it reflects the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. In 1926 he founded the magic realist magazine 900. Novecento, Rohs magic realism also influenced writers in Hispanic America, where it was translated as realismo mágico in 1927. Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who had known Bontempelli, wrote influential magic realist short stories in the 1930s and 40s that focused on the mystery, Luis Leal attests that Pietri seemed to have been the first to adopt the term realismo mágico in Hispanic America in 1948. French-Russian Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who rejected Rohs magic realism as tiresome pretension, developed his related concept lo real maravilloso, or marvelous realism, in 1949. While Flores named Jorge Luis Borges as the first magical realist, Borges is often seen as a predecessor of magical realists, with only Flores considering him a true magical realist. The extent to which the characteristics below apply to a magic realist text varies. Every text is different and employs a smattering of the qualities listed here, however, they accurately portray what one might expect from a magic realist text. Magical realism portrays fantastical events in a realistic tone. It brings fables, folk tales, and myths into contemporary social relevance, fantasy traits given to characters, such as levitation, telepathy, and telekinesis, help to encompass modern political realities that can be phantasmagorical. The existence of elements in the real world provides the basis for magical realism. Writers do not invent new worlds but reveal the magical in this world, as was done by Gabriel García Márquez who wrote the work of the style. In the binary world of realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural. Authorial reticence is the withholding of information and explanations about the disconcerting fictitious world. The narrator is indifferent, a characteristic enhanced by this absence of explanation of fantastic events, Magical events are presented as ordinary occurrences, therefore, the reader accepts the marvelous as normal and common
11.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
–
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, also known as Gianbattista or Giambattista Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice. He was prolific, and worked not only in Italy, but also in Germany, Giovan Battista Tiepolo, together with Giambattista Pittoni, Canaletto, Giovan Battista Piazzetta, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and Francesco Guardi forms the traditional great Old Masters of that period. Successful from the beginning of his career, he has described by Michael Levey as the greatest decorative painter of eighteenth-century Europe. Born in Venice, he was the youngest of six children of Domenico and his father was a small shipping merchant who belonged to a family that bore the prestigious patrician name of Tiepolo without claiming any noble descent. Some of the children acquired noble godparents, and Giambattista was originally named after his godfather and he was baptised on 16 April 1696 in the local church, San Pietro di Castello. His father died about a later, leaving his mother to bring up a family of young children. In 1710 he became a pupil of Gregorio Lazzarini, a painter with an eclectic style. A biography of his teacher, published in 1732, says that Tiepolo departed from studied manner of painting and his earliest known works are depictions of the apostles, painted in spandrels as part of the decoration of the church of the Ospedoletto in Venice in 1715–6. He painted his first fresco in 1716, on the ceiling of a church at Biadene and he probably left Lazzarinis studio in 1717, the year he was received into the Fraglia or guild of painters. In around 1719–20 he painted a scheme of frescoes for the wealthy, Tiepolo depicted the Triumph of Aurora on the ceiling, and the Myth of Phaethon on the walls, creating the kind of fluid spatial illusion which was to become a recurring theme in his work. In 1722 he was one of twelve artists commissioned to contribute a painting on canvas of one of the apostles as part of a scheme for the nave of San Stae in Venice. The other artists involved included Ricci, Piazetta, and Pellegrini, in 1719, Tiepolo married noblewoman Maria Cecilia Guardi, sister of two contemporary Venetian painters Francesco and Giovanni Antonio Guardi. Together, Tiepolo and his wife had nine children, four daughters and three sons survived childhood. Two of his sons, Domenico and Lorenzo, painted with him as his assistants and his children painted figures with a design similar to that of their father, but with distinctive, including genre, styles. His third son became a priest, fabio Canal, Francesco Lorenzi, Domenico Pasquini were among his pupils. Some major commissions came from the patrician Dolfin family, Tiepolo used a much cooler palette than previous Venetian painters, in order to create a convincing effect of daylight. These early masterpieces, innovative amongst Venetian frescoes for their luminosity, dominic Instituting the Rosary, Palazzo Clerici, Milan, decorations for Villa Cordellini at Montecchio Maggiore and for the ballroom of the Palazzo Labia in Venice, showing the Story of Cleopatra. Tiepolo produced two sets of etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi di fantasia, the ten capricci were first published by Anton Maria Zanetti, incorporated into the third edition of a compilation of woodcuts after Parmigiano
.jpg)
