Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
The Banquet of Cleopatra depicts the culmination of a wager between Cleopatra and Mark Antony as to which one could provide the most expensive feast. As recounted in Pliny the Elder's “Natural History,” she won the wager: after Mark Antony's feast, Cleopatra dropped a rare and precious pearl from her earring into a cup of vinegar and drank it once the pearl had dissolved. The third person at the table is Lucius Munatius Plancus, who decided the winner.
The Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was arguably the greatest painter of 18th-century Europe and the master of the Grand Manner. Tiepolo was drawn to a melancholic style with strong contrasts of light and shade, or chiaroscuro. It was not until the frescoes of the Palazzo Arcivescovile of Udine, executed sometime after 1726, that Tiepolo gave up the chiaroscuro of his early works and brightened his color, while preserving his form.
Tiepolo’s art celebrates the imagination by transposing the world of ancient history and myth, the scriptures, and sacred legends into a grandiose, even theatrical language. In his hands, the informal oil sketch was raised to a primary art form, worthy to be collected alongside his finished paintings. Tiepolo’s greatest works are the frescoed ceilings he carried out for churches in Venice and villas and palaces in Italy, Germany, and Spain.
Catherine the Great acquired the painting in 1764, and the work remained in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (later Leningrad). It was part of the Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings, and was purchased by an English art dealer in 1932, and then by the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia in 1933.
- Clinton