Tiepolo Pink

"Roberto Calasso is one of the few writers working today where I just read everything he writes. If he writes something, I read it. I think he’s extraordinary. Yes, I read them in English. I think they’re quite well translated. Calasso is somebody with a passion for large mythological structures, like the whole of Greek mythology , the whole of the Vedas . He’s enormously classically educated and has a wonderful book on Kafka also, that treats Kafka’s stories as a kind of inter-connected set of myths. So I was really curious to see what he would do with a painter. It didn’t seem obvious to me that he would be able to bring the same kind of structures to bear on the work of a painter, and I hadn’t paid much attention to Tiepolo until I read this book. But when I did read it I was astonished to see how much of Tiepolo I had missed and also to see how well Calasso’s particular way of approaching material worked with this painter. The book is a structured in a kind of musical scherzo structure — an A-B-A form — so there’s a middle section that’s got a different melody from the outer sections. That allows you to move from light to dark to light, which is a wonderful metaphor for Tiepolo’s work which is all about light. He looks at groups of pictures, and the way Tiepolo keeps using the same figures in the same kinds of poses and the same props as if he were portraying a kind of travelling company of players. That is really effective, it really allows you to see what Tiepolo was after. So it’s a case of where the particular way of seeing of the writer really is revelatory of what the painter is doing. I went to the Met not long ago to look at Tiepolo under the influence of Calasso and was kind of uplifted by how much better I felt I was seeing. That’s maybe the best measure of whether a book about visual experience is working, whether it returns you to the world with clearer eyes for the particular subject. Right, you don’t necessarily think, “Oh that’s someone I really want to work on, he’s canonical.” You just think, “Oh right, 18th century, things are a little fluttery, it’s not the high moment of the Renaissance.” In a way, Calasso makes a case for Tiepolo as not the last of the Old Masters, but one of the first of the Moderns. That also is interesting and helps bring him into focus."