Coriolanus at the Walls of Rome

Around 1730 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was working through a set of ten large canvases on scenes from early Roman history, ordered by the Venetian nobleman Dionisio Dolfin for the reception hall of his family palace. This is one of them. The story comes from the Roman historian Livy. Coriolanus, a general driven out of Rome, has joined the city's enemies and marched an army back to its walls, and his mother and his wife have come out to stop him. Tiepolo makes an unusual choice. He turns his hero away from us, the face all but lost inside the helmet, so that the whole scene pivots on the older woman before him, his mother, who tells her son she would sooner die than watch him enter Rome. Soldiers and standards crowd upward behind them in the tilting, airy way Tiepolo loved. Five of the ten Dolfin paintings, this one among them, now hang together in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.