The Finding of Moses

Venice in 1740 still loved a spectacle, and Tiepolo gives the Bible one. Pharaoh's daughter has just found the infant Moses in the reeds, but there is nothing solemn here. The baby hangs upside down and howls, and the courtiers around the princess look like players borrowed from the city's popular theatre. Tiepolo was openly courting the memory of Veronese, the great Venetian of two centuries before, in the shimmering silks and the tall, easy figures. What you see in Edinburgh is only part of it. A strip at the right, with a foot-soldier and his dog, was cut away long ago and now hangs separately in Turin.