Tiepolo, Giambattista (1696-1770)
Latino offre in matrimonio Lavinia a Enea (Latinus gives Aeneas his daughter Lavinia in marriage)
1753–1754
Oil on canvas, 140.5 x 109.5 cm
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Decorative pictorial sequences came to play a major role in Giambattista Tiepolo‘s work. Both in his hometown of Venice and abroad, he was commissioned to carry out decoration programmes in several places. This oval painting is similarly believed to have emerged as part of a series of a total of six scenes from ancient mythology that were executed as doorpieces to a large residence, the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice. As a decorative image above a doorway, the painting had to be viewed from below, which explains its perspective di sotto in sù, that is, “from the bottom up”. The frog perspective is supported in the motif, where the male figure in front looks at the woman from below.
The decorative aspect of the painting
The decorative aspect is expressed by the fact that the group of figures and the marble columns are drawn all the way forward in the pictorial space, so that it appears to be close to the ornate picture surface itself. Immediately behind them, the space is emphatically narrowed by a balustrade parallel to the surface. The motif of the man kneeling and giving the woman a ring is Aeneas, the fabled founder of Rome, whose story is told by the Roman writer Virgil (70 b.C – 19 b.C) in The Aeneid. After fleeing the Greek conquest of Troy, Aeneas reached the mouth of the Tiber, where the king of Latium gave him his daughter Lavinia as a wife. Source: Eva de la Fuente Pedersen, OTHERTEXT, 31.12.2004 (SMK)
See also:
• Virgil (70 BC-19 BC): The Aeneid (English)