Comparison 2: Giordano and Tiepolo, Maximum Myth

 https://andrzejosinski.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/giovanni-battista-tiepolo-perseus-and-andromeda-probably-1730-painting-artwork-print.jpg
[Click either image above to be taken to a larger version.]

 LEFT: Luca Giordano
Mars and Venus Discovered by Vulcan (c. 1670s)
Oil on canvas, w182 cm x h232 cm (71.7" x 91.3")
Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria

RIGHT: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Perseus and Andromeda (c. 1730)
Oil on paper mounted on canvas, w40.6 cm x h51.8 cm (16" x 20.37")
The Frick Collection, New York, NY USA

https://everydayartcritique.blogspot.com/2017/09/amore-e-psiche-cupid-and-psyche.html

Note how you can often tell how 'important' an artwork is trying to be by how many people are nonsensically naked in it.

Anyway, above we have two paintings in the outright-mythological mode, the left one (Giordano's) predating Cupid and Psyche by ~35 years and the other (Tiepolo's) following it by about 20 years. Comparing these three and their approaches to the 'mythological painting', we can get a little idea of the broad range of painting styles that existed in Crespi's time, even just within Italy.

Giordano's painting favors complex composition, with a lot of figures and a scene-within-scene element. There's a fussiness here shared by a lot of the grand-themed works of the time (whether mythological, historical, religious, etc.), and certainly a more 'finished' appearance to the brushwork than Crespi's. Also unlike Crespi's: here we're given very little to grab onto emotionally. We can perhaps be surprised, given what this image is depicting (the ugly/deformed god Vulcan, discovering his wife, goddess of love Venus, sexing it up with hot-stuff god of war Mars), but yeah, Vulcan and Venus both seem more mildly annoyed than anything, and Mars is posturing emotion while looking off into space1. This leaves everything in the picture *needing* to be explained in terms of intellectual symbolism on top of the obvious action, because there's not enough emotional sense here to satisfy us without a supplemental form of analysis.

Contrast Tiepolo, with the BAM color and the overall swagger, very much here for the emotional interpretations (soaring, danger, triumphant, victory!). Like Giordano, he has a decently complex composition, but Tiepolo buries that complexity in the simplicity of those big positve/negative shapes (the dark sections at bottom right and left + that stack of figures in the middle, a simple three-punch of places to focus), bringing him a little more in line with the very simple setup of Crespi's painting. We can also notice that Crespi had been loosening the drawing element of his work in favor of rough brushstrokes, but we see Tiepolo goes even further, a lot of the drawing just falling away entirely in favor of color patches2.

A lot of things in visual art exist on a spectrum (intimate/grandly public, restrained/dramatic, limited color/bold color, detailed/loose brushwork, etc). Looking at these three artists and knowing that they trained by looking at a lot of the same 'masterworks', you can get a definite feel for the sorts of artistic choices available to an artist like Crespi, and where he chose to situate himself on those various spectra.

NOTES:

1.  You look at enough paintings/sculptures of the Greek/Roman gods, you start building up an impressive amount of headcanon based on your favorite interpretations. For any fans of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", and given Mars'/Ares' usual depiction as either impassive or blindingly angry, I've started to run with the theory that he uses war and his affairs with Venus as an attempt to fill his god hole.

2.  Tiepolo's a pretty big deal, and this sort of work will become an example of Italian Rococo. I assume I'll be talking about Rococo more fully at some point, because it's all awesome and pretty messed up :)