El Descendimiento

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo had spent his life as the great decorator of Venice, filling ceilings across Europe with bright, soaring skies. In 1762, already in his sixties, he was called to Madrid to paint frescoes for the Spanish king, and he never came home. He died there in 1770. This Deposition belongs to those last Madrid years. It is a smaller, graver, more inward thing than his grand ceilings, the body of Christ lowered from the cross among mourners. The airy Venetian lightness has cooled into something heavier and more shadowed, the work of an old man far from his own city. It passed through a Portuguese family for generations before Portugal bought it in 2008 for its national museum in Lisbon.