Jacopo Guarana

Jacopo Guarana outlived the world that made him. Born in Verona in 1720, he trained in Venice in the orbit of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the last and grandest of the city's ceiling painters, and he carried that airy, light-filled manner well past the point when Venice itself stopped being a republic.

He worked mostly in fresco, on ceilings and walls where mythological and allegorical figures float in bright blues and golds. Among the best loved is his decoration of the music room of the Ospedaletto, one of the Venetian charitable institutions where orphaned girls were trained as musicians. There Guarana painted a whole gallery of the girls at their instruments. He also had a hand in grand houses like the Villa Pisani at Stra and the Ca' Rezzonico.

He was among the founding members of Venice's new Academy of Fine Arts. He died in 1808, in his late eighties, remembered as the last direct heir of the Tiepolo tradition.