The Feast of the Cross

This is a small painting, roughly half a metre each way, and Tiepolo used it as a design to plan a much larger ceiling. The subject is the feast the Church keeps on 14 September, the Exaltation of the Cross, when the cross on which Christ died is raised up and honoured. Tiepolo sends it climbing into a bright open sky, carried by angels, with the crowd below craning upward, the same dizzy view from beneath that he loved. Because it is a sketch, the paint is quick and loose, laid down to catch the light and the movement rather than to finish every face. He made it around 1740, in the busiest Venetian years of his career, when commissions for church ceilings were coming faster than he could paint them.