I've feasted my eyes on every Tiepolo I could find but I don't think I ever wrapped my mind around this point:
[T]he artist focuses over and over again on the pairing of a weathered old man and a young woman with a flawless body, flawless posture, and a superior expression; these are the two members of his painted company of players who can be trusted to look knowingly down upon the events around them, observing attentively, yes, but too involved in one another to care actively about what happens outside their charmed, hermetic circle.
And:
People may argue about the relative temperature of Giambattista's muse, but there is no doubt that he aims for, and achieves, a triumph of eros. His old men are still powerfully muscular, and his milk-white women have the strength of body and will to match their venerable consorts. Tiepolo returned repeatedly to painting the contrast between a besotted Marc Antony and a majestic, disdainful Cleopatra, acting out the eternal strife of War and Love, Mars and Venus.
That's Ingrid D. Rowland, rsponding to Roberto Calasso's
Tiepolo Pink in "Tiepolo: Eros, Mystery, Menace," in the
New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010, 13-15, 13. Here's a
link to some Tiepolos on line.
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