A Female Allegorical Figure

In the 1740s Venice was past its political prime, yet its palaces were still being lavishly done up. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the city's master of vast, airy painted ceilings, took on a stranger task here. Instead of sky and light he painted an illusion of carved stone, a single female figure in cool grey monochrome, standing in a shallow niche of gold and made to look like sculpture rather than paint. She came from the Room of Mirrors in the Palazzo Cornaro on Campo San Polo, redecorated across the 1730s and 1740s for a family marriage. Four such figures once hung there together. Two are now here, and the other two are in Amsterdam.