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Lot Essay
Tiepolo dedicated his life to decorating the palaces of the ruling classes of Enlightenment Europe. He himself proclaimed that 'painters should aim to succeed in great works that give pleasure to the nobility and men of wealth', and in an age when mythology and allegory were the lingua franca of the liberal arts, Tiepolo was the unsurpassed master of mythological painting in the Grand Manner.
In the classically constructed and vividly painted Apollo Receiving Homage from the Muses, Tiepolo presents the god in his traditional role as patron of the arts and leader of the Muses. Wearing a laurel crown (a symbol of achievement in the arts) and holding his lyre, he is perched on the rocky promontory of Mount Parnassus; behind him, unseen, runs a stream from the Castalian spring which is the source of inspiration and learning, and from which man is advised to drink. Around him gather the Muses - the goddesses of poetic inspiration and the creative arts - who venerate the deity. In the foreground a prominent female figure, perhaps Venus, goddess of Love, restrains an energetic Cupid who frolics with his flaming torch.
It is not known for whom Apollo Receiving Homage from the Muses was painted, but the particular significance its subject would have had for the collector who commissioned it is obvious, as is Tiepolo's cunning ability to flatter the patrons who employed him. Probably, as Keith Christiansen has observed, it is a highly finished modello for an unknown mural or fresco painting, a theory that is given further support by the possibility that the original composition had a shaped top that was subsequently altered to the present, more conventional horizontal shape.
Morassi was the first to publish the painting (loc. cit.) dating it to circa 1740-5, and placing it slightly earlier than the celebrated Rinaldo and Armida suite in the Art Institute of Chicago. He compared its style to that of The Triumph of Flora in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, a painting commissioned by the antiquarian Francesco Algarotti in 1743. Pallucchini (1968, loc. cit.) proposed a dating closer to 1745, and recently Gemin and Pedrocco suggested that the Crane modello might have been one of a small group of mythological pictures made by Tiepolo around 1743-4, when his imagination had been fired by Algarotti's fashionable aesthetic theories (loc. cit.). Keith Christiansen, the first Tiepolo scholar to have examined the painting at first-hand in many years, believes that the painting is no later than circa 1740, and may in fact be slightly earlier (private communication).
In the classically constructed and vividly painted Apollo Receiving Homage from the Muses, Tiepolo presents the god in his traditional role as patron of the arts and leader of the Muses. Wearing a laurel crown (a symbol of achievement in the arts) and holding his lyre, he is perched on the rocky promontory of Mount Parnassus; behind him, unseen, runs a stream from the Castalian spring which is the source of inspiration and learning, and from which man is advised to drink. Around him gather the Muses - the goddesses of poetic inspiration and the creative arts - who venerate the deity. In the foreground a prominent female figure, perhaps Venus, goddess of Love, restrains an energetic Cupid who frolics with his flaming torch.
It is not known for whom Apollo Receiving Homage from the Muses was painted, but the particular significance its subject would have had for the collector who commissioned it is obvious, as is Tiepolo's cunning ability to flatter the patrons who employed him. Probably, as Keith Christiansen has observed, it is a highly finished modello for an unknown mural or fresco painting, a theory that is given further support by the possibility that the original composition had a shaped top that was subsequently altered to the present, more conventional horizontal shape.
Morassi was the first to publish the painting (loc. cit.) dating it to circa 1740-5, and placing it slightly earlier than the celebrated Rinaldo and Armida suite in the Art Institute of Chicago. He compared its style to that of The Triumph of Flora in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, a painting commissioned by the antiquarian Francesco Algarotti in 1743. Pallucchini (1968, loc. cit.) proposed a dating closer to 1745, and recently Gemin and Pedrocco suggested that the Crane modello might have been one of a small group of mythological pictures made by Tiepolo around 1743-4, when his imagination had been fired by Algarotti's fashionable aesthetic theories (loc. cit.). Keith Christiansen, the first Tiepolo scholar to have examined the painting at first-hand in many years, believes that the painting is no later than circa 1740, and may in fact be slightly earlier (private communication).