Antonio e Cleopatra: affresco di Tiepolo (1745), Salone nel Palazzo Labia, Venezia

Speranza




The Palazzo Labia was built at the beginning of the 18th century by Andrea Cominelli for two brothers, Angelo Mario and Paolo Antonio Labia, who lived in it with their wives and their mother, whose portrait was drawn in pastel by Rosalba Carriera.

It was these brothers who commissioned G. B. Tiepolo in 1745 to decorate the Salone, the principal room of the palazzo.

Tiepolo's work is one of the great masterpieces of illusionist art.

It is merely impossible to believe, from looking at the fresco, that every architectural feature of this room except the door and window openings -- balconies, pilasters, the noble arch, the semicircular doorheads surmounted by reclining figures on the massive brackes -- is the work of the brush.

Even when one is standing in the high, square room, shimmering with the luminosity of Tiepolo's clear, transparent colour, and cannot entirely believe in the fictitious reality of this painted world, the eye surrenders deliciously to it for one magical moment, drawn into the watery recessions of the scene of Antony's meeting with Cleopatra by the painted steps leading into the picture.