The eighteenth century saw the decline of Venice as a major power. One result of the Republic's dwindling fortunes was the virtual disappearance of state sponsorship of the arts. In response to the need to find new markets the city's painters developed two ways of representing Venice that were intimately related to its gradual descent. The first is the work of the view painters, whose eminently exportable scenes of the astonishing city signal its eminence as a tourist attraction at the time tourism was being invented. The second is the glorious classical, mythological and allegorical paintings with which Giovanni Battista Tiepolo fulfilled the commissions of the great families of Venice. In mythological guise and sixteenth-century garb Tiepolo's extravagant art met the aristocracy's demand for ostentatious representations of their own power, virtues, and glory. Tiepolo painted no more than a few portraits and no canal views or domestic scenes. He seldom painted Venetians at all. Yet the conflicts, desires, self-perceptions, and values of eighteenth century Venice are as clearly revealed in his frescos for the Labia, the Rezzonico, the Pisani and others as if he had done nothing else.
It has been said of Tiepolo's masterpiece, the enormous Wnrzburg fresco of The Four Continents Paying Homage to Karl Philip von Greiffenklau (1753), that "nowhere else in the whole history of recorded art can one find a greater disparity between the insignificance of the patron and the supreme grandeur of the artist's response." At Wnrzburg Tiepolo's original plan was a standard scheme involving the four continents with Asia, Africa and America paying tribute to Europe. But his patron intervened and insisted that he be given a more prominent place in the "sort of pagan-Christian cosmorama" that Tiepolo had designed. The result was that in Tiepolo's great work the Prince-Bishop of a tiny German state, rather than Europe itself, "represente...