Saint Joseph and the Christ Child

This was among the last things Tiepolo painted. The greatest decorator of 18th-century Venice had gone to Madrid in 1762 to fresco the ceilings of the new royal palace, and he stayed on. Near the end King Charles III set him seven altarpieces for a church at the palace of Aranjuez, outside Madrid. This tender image of old Joseph holding the Christ child was the central one. Tiepolo never saw them in place. He died in Madrid in 1770, and the church was finished about seven weeks later. Spanish taste was already turning toward the cooler, more classical manner of his rival at the court, Anton Raphael Mengs. Within a few years Tiepolo's altarpieces were taken down and scattered, which is how this panel came to hang an ocean away from the church it was made for.