Alessandro Magno e Bucefalo

Alexander the Great and Bucephalus, painted around 1758 and now in the Petit Palais in Paris, depicts the legendary scene from Plutarch where the young Alexander — perhaps twelve years old — calmed and mounted a horse that Philip II's attendants could not control, having observed that the horse shied at its own shadow. Tiepolo treated this subject in the period immediately before his departure for Madrid, when he was completing the Villa Valmarana frescos and producing a series of smaller historical and mythological canvases. Alexander the Great was among the most popular subjects in Rococo history painting, valued by aristocratic patrons as models of princely virtue: courage, intelligence, and mastery over powerful forces. Tiepolo's contemporaries Pompeo Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs were creating their own versions of princely exempla for the same international market, but in a more sober Neoclassical manner that would eventually eclipse Tiepolo's style. The Petit Palais acquired this work as part of the Tuck bequest of 1930, which gave Paris one of its finest collections of eighteenth-century European painting.

Oil on canvas, the work demonstrates Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's dramatic foreshortening and bravura brushwork. The composition is carefully structured to balance visual elements, while the handling of light and color creates atmospheric coherence across the picture surface.