Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In December 1750 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo arrived in Würzburg, a city in Bavaria in southern Germany, with his two sons, invited by the local prince-bishop Carl Philipp von Greiffenclau to fresco the ceiling of his new palace's dining hall. The prince-bishop was so pleased that he asked Tiepolo to take on a second job, the ceiling above the palace's grand staircase.

What Tiepolo painted there, finished in 1753, is still the largest fresco in the world, covering more than 600 square meters of unsupported vaulted ceiling with allegorical figures representing Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, the four continents as Europeans then understood them, gathered around the sun god Apollo. It was the high point of a career spent painting airy, light-filled ceilings for churches and palaces across the Republic of Venice and beyond.

Near the end of his life, in 1762, King Charles III of Spain summoned Tiepolo to Madrid to fresco the new royal palace, and he stayed there the rest of his career, even as a younger, more austere Neoclassical taste was starting to displace the Rococo style he had spent decades perfecting. He died in Madrid in 1770, having never returned to Venice.