Short answers, pulled from the story.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice who lived from the 5th of March 1696 to the 27th of March 1770. He is considered a major figure of the 18th-century Venetian school and one of the Old Masters of that period. The critic Michael Levey described him as "the greatest decorative painter of eighteenth-century Europe, as well as its most able craftsman."
The ceiling fresco at the Wurzburg Residenz staircase, completed in November 1753, measures 677 square metres and is one of the largest ceiling frescoes in existence. Its subject is the Allegory of the Planets and Continents, depicting Apollo surrounded by deities and allegorical figures representing the four continents.
Tiepolo painted in the Rococo style and was closely associated with the 18th-century Venetian school. He was known for using a cooler palette than previous Venetian painters to create convincing effects of daylight, and for frescoes that created fluid spatial illusions.
Tiepolo worked in Germany and Spain in addition to Italy. He spent roughly three years in Wurzburg from November 1750, frescoing the Kaisersaal and the grand staircase of the Residenz palace. In 1761, King Charles III of Spain commissioned him to paint the ceiling of the throne room of the Royal Palace of Madrid.
Tiepolo's series of canvases for the church of San Pascual at Aranjuez in Spain were replaced at the instigation of Joaquim de Electa, the King's confessor and a supporter of the Neoclassicist painter Anton Raphael Mengs. Mengs was a rival of Tiepolo and a rising champion of the Neoclassical style.
Tiepolo produced two sets of etchings: the Capricci, made around 1740-1742, and the Scherzi di fantasia, etched from around 1743 to 1757. The ten Capricci were first published by Anton Maria Zanetti as part of a compilation of woodcuts. The twenty-three Scherzi were privately circulated during Tiepolo's lifetime and published commercially only after his death.