The Glorification of the Barbaro Family

Looking up is what this was made for. Around 1750 it sat in the middle of a library ceiling in a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Barbaro, and Tiepolo built the whole thing to fool you into thinking the roof had opened onto sky. A figure leans out and foreshortens sharply overhead, a trumpet points up, and painted clouds drift past the real stucco frame around them. The cast is an allegory of the family that lived below. Valour, with a lion, stands for the Barbaro themselves. Fame blows the trumpet, Abundance spills a cornucopia, Prudence keeps her snake. This was a proud old Venetian house celebrating its own name at a time when Venice as a power was quietly fading, and Tiepolo was the last great decorator the city produced. The canvas was later cut from that ceiling and shipped to New York, an irregular oval nearly 15 feet across.