Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Two Orientals seated under a Tree

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is best known for his monumental ceiling paintings and wall decorations which transformed palaces and monasteries across Europe, from his native Venice to Germany and Spain. Painted at a time when Tiepolo’s fame was growing across Italy, these four narrow canvases once adorned a room on the second floor of the Palazzo Cornaro (or Corner) on the Campo San Polo, Venice.

The interior of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Cornaro was extensively redecorated between 1736 and 1747 in preparation for a marriage. Payments for work in the Sala degli Specchi (Room of Mirrors), on the second floor, are recorded in the 1740s. The room had an allegorical ceiling painting at its centre (now in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and the walls were decorated with woodwork and mirrors. Four canvases with female allegorical figures, painted in monochrome and simulating bas-relief sculpture, hung above the doors (these are now thought to be the paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). In addition, there were four long rectangular canvases by Tiepolo (‘Quattro pezzi di quadro bislunghi’) which have been convincingly linked to the four narrow, upright paintings in the National Gallery. As indicated by an eighteenth-century inventory, the paintings drew inspiration from Torquato Tasso’s popular sixteenth-century poem Jerusalem Delivered. Set during the First Crusade (1096–9), a Christian military campaign to recapture Jerusalem from Islamic rule, the poem tells of the ill-fated love between the Saracen sorceress Armida and Rinaldo, a Christian knight.

The elaborate costumes and headgear worn by the figures in Tiepolo’s four paintings – Rinaldo turning in Shame from the Magic Shield, Seated Man, Woman with Jar and Boy, Two Men in Oriental Costume and Two Orientals seated under a Tree – reflect the eighteenth-century taste for the exotic. The pale pastel tones and Tiepolo’s lively brushwork in these paintings would have helped create a dazzling atmosphere in the room. The stories told in Tasso’s poem were especially popular in eighteenth-century Europe, where they often became the subject of operas, plays and concerts as well as art.