Let’s get this part over with. No, you don’t have any
real idea of what the brilliant Venetian painter
Giambattista Tiepolo is capable of if you haven’t seen his
great decorative schemes in situ. And yes, a great many of
the pictures in the show at the Metropolitan are hung too
low. Now let’s talk about something interesting.

One of my colleagues declared that seeing a Tiepolo
retrospective without the ceilings was like hearing the
complete works of Beethoven without the symphonies. The
complete works of Mozart without the operas might come
closer to the mark, in spirit, at least—which is neither
to say that I think Tiepolo is the painterly equal of Mozart
nor to imply that the Met’s show of a hundred pictures
includes anything like the complete “other” works of the
eighteenth-century Venetian virtuoso.[1]
But if, at the Met, we miss Tiepolo’s full-blown operas—those dazzling schemes that
blow the roofs off Venetian villas to let us watch
allegorical dramas enacted in a light-struck cloudscape—we
still have the pleasure of his chamber music, his
devotional works, and even his symphonies, in the form of
modelli, fantasy portraits, altarpieces, and substantial
portions of decorative cycles (albeit detached from their
architectural contexts), which embody everything from
secular hedonism to surprisingly convincing religious
fervor.

To compare Tiepolo with Mozart is not purely a conceit,
even though the painter, born in 1696, belonged more or less
to the generation of the composer’s grandfather. (Tiepolo
was