Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In the 1740s, Tiepolo received a private commission to decorate the last great private home to be built on Venice’s Grand Canal. Owned by relative newcomers to Venetian nobility, the Palazzo Labia featured elaborate formal spaces and a spectacular ballroom. Tiepolo collaborated with a specialist in illusionistic painting to create wall paintings in fresco, a technique in which pigments are applied directly to wet plaster. This foreshortened angel, whose trumpet announces the family’s fame, appeared on a ceiling in a formal room, set into a gilded framework. Removed from its original location and mounted on canvas, the painting is seen here without its original architectural context.