Giovanni Battista Tiepolo entered the world on the 5th of March 1696 in Venice. He was the youngest of six children born to Domenico and Orsetta Tiepolo. His father worked as a small shipping merchant within a family that carried the prestigious name of Tiepolo without claiming noble descent. Giambattista received his baptism on the 16th of April 1696 at San Pietro di Castello, which served as the official cathedral of Venice at that time. Tragedy struck when his father died about one year later. This left his mother to raise a large family of young children under somewhat difficult circumstances.
In 1710, he began his formal training as a pupil of Gregorio Lazzarini. Lazzarini was a successful painter known for an eclectic style. Yet Tiepolo drew equally strong influence from studying works by Sebastiano Ricci, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Federico Bencovich, Tintoretto, and Veronese. A biography published in 1732 described how he departed from his teacher's studied manner to embrace a quick and resolute style full of spirit and fire. His earliest known works appeared between 1715 and 1716 as depictions of apostles painted into spandrels decorating Santa Maria dei Derelitti in Venice.
He became painter to Doge Giovanni II Cornaro around this same period. He oversaw hanging pictures at the Doge's palace while painting many works himself. Only two portraits from that early phase have been identified today. In 1716 he painted his first fresco on the ceiling of a church at Biadene near Treviso. By 1717 he likely left Lazzarini's studio and entered the Fraglia or guild of painters.
Mature Venetian Commissions
Major commissions arrived from the patrician Dolfin family starting in 1726. Dionisio Dolfin, Archbishop of Udine in Friuli, employed Tiepolo to decorate a chapel in Udine Cathedral. He then painted another cycle depicting episodes from the lives of Abraham and his descendants from the Book of Genesis at the archiepiscopal palace. These works completed between 1726 and 1728 remained bright in color despite their elevated subject matter. Michael Levey described them as shimmering tableaux full of wit and elegance.
Tiepolo used a much cooler palette than previous Venetian painters to create convincing daylight effects. His first masterpieces in Venice were ten enormous canvases created for Ca' Dolfin on the Grand Canal between 1726 and 1729. They depicted battles and triumphs from ancient Roman history. These early frescoes brought him many more commissions across northern Italy.
He painted canvases for churches such as that of Verolanuova between 1735 and 1740. The Scuola Grande dei Carmini received his work from 1740 to 1747. A ceiling appeared for Palazzi Archinto and Palazzo Dugnani in Milan in 1731. Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo held his work from 1732 to 1733. He decorated the Gesuati church with St. Dominic Instituting the Rosary between 1737 and 1739. Villa Cordellina Molin in Montecchio Maggiore received a ceiling fresco in 1743-1744. The ballroom of Palazzo Labia in Venice displayed his Story of Cleopatra completed between 1745 and 1750.