"Apollo and the Continents" (1752-53) by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo

Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, father and son, painted this fresco, entitled "Apollo and the Continents" during 1752-53 in the ceiling of The Residenz, which was located in the city Würzburg, Germany. The Tiepolo family belonged to Venice. In the sixteenth century, the era of Titian and Veronese, Venice had lost its artistic preponderance. Superlative artists like Caravaggio and the Carracci brothers decentralised Venice from its glorious position. But the Tiepolo family retrieved the lost glintz. However, their eminence dispersed throughout Europe. Their style of grand, elegant ceiling paintings and frescos maturate a new tradition and facilitate a sine qua non in the Rococo Painting in Baroque Italy. In the above painting, the Tiepolos had experimented with perspectives, because from various angles of the grand staircase, different continents will be showcased, in the centre of which stands God Apollo. The four continents, Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, are limned with pastel colours with a pronounced softness and liveliness. Such elegant style, bedecked with precision, surfaced ease, and vitality is called 'sprezzatura'. Around the edges of the painting are depicted throngs of people with an impression of looking downwards bolsters the three dimensional perspective in the picture. The sense of a continuity of space beyond the ceiling in the background of a blue firmament blurs the distinction between pictorial space and real space.