Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

For most of his life Giandomenico Tiepolo worked at his father's elbow. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the most sought-after decorator in Europe, and by 13 his son was already his chief assistant, up on the scaffolding beside him at the prince-bishop's palace in Würzburg in Germany, then at the royal palace in Madrid, where the old man died in 1770.

Back in Venice, in the family's country villa at Zianigo, Giandomenico painted for no patron at all. Over years he covered its rooms with something entirely his own: crowds of Punchinello, the hook-nosed, white-clad clown of Venetian carnival theatre, shown swinging, tumbling, cooking, being born and buried, a whole absurd human life acted out by one comic figure. Another room, called The New World, shows a line of people from behind, waiting to peer into a travelling peep-show box.

He was also a tireless printmaker and draughtsman, and left a large set of drawings on the Punchinello theme. The Zianigo frescoes were cut from the villa walls in the 20th century and are now installed in Ca' Rezzonico, the 18th-century palace on the Grand Canal that is Venice's museum of its own settecento.