Olympus or The Triumph of Venus

In the early 1760s the chancellor of the Russian empire, Count Mikhail Vorontsov, ordered three large ceilings for his palace in Saint Petersburg. Tiepolo was to paint two of them and his son Giandomenico the third, a Triumph of Hercules. None of that was ever installed, and this small canvas, 87 centimetres tall, is the only surviving sketch from the whole project. The Prado dates it between 1761 and 1764. Venus rides up through the cloud in a long zigzag that sits almost flat against the viewer, the way an easel picture does rather than a ceiling, and Tiepolo would use the same device again over the hall of the halberdiers in the royal palace in Madrid. A cleaning brought back the creamy whites of the naked figures, and with them the strongest notes of colour in the picture: the red and blue of a macaw low down, and Mercury's hat near the top. It entered the museum from the royal collection in 1834, listed simply as a sketch for a ceiling.