Tiepolo on the Boy-Girl Thing

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.

Climbing Over the Fence on Each Other's Shoulders

Guess I'd never thought of this particular example:

Many times in history two artists have provided their contemporaries with alternative and complementry visions: Masaccio and Fra Angelico, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, Raphael and Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Annibale Csrracci, Rembrandt and Rubens, Ingres and Delacroix, Picasso and Matisse.

That's from Keith "Duccio and the Origins of Western Painting," Metropolitan Museum of Arts Bulletin, 7-55 at 29-40 (Summer 2008). May be old stuff to art historians but new to me. And it fits: we have lots of examples of virtuous circles in the arts: talent responding to talent and rising to heights they wouldn't have achieved otherwise--climbing, as it were, on each other's shoulders. The instances are perhaps so frequent that it isn't even worth catalogueing examples, although it is the kind of thing that gets hidden in plain sight, so obvious that you don't know it. It recalls the observation of Herman Melville in an essay on Hawthorne:

…genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

For some interesting background and context on the Melville quote, go here.