Arithmetic

Arithmetic, painted around 1760 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, personifies the mathematical discipline as a female allegorical figure as part of the Liberal Arts series that Tiepolo created for what may have been a palace library or study ceiling. The painting belongs to a group of seven Liberal Arts allegories — Grammar, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Rhetoric, Logic, and Astronomy — that the Met holds, representing one of the most complete survivals of a Tiepolo allegorical program. In 1760 Tiepolo was preparing to leave Venice permanently for Madrid, and this series was almost certainly executed in Venice before his departure. The Liberal Arts tradition, deriving from medieval university curricula, had decorated European palaces and academic institutions since the Renaissance; Tiepolo's version brings Rococo grace and luminosity to subjects that earlier painters like Raphael had treated with more monumental solemnity. The Met's collection of these allegories — assembled partly through bequest and partly through purchase during the early twentieth century — constitutes one of the most significant Tiepolo holdings in the United States.

Executed with bravura brushwork and attention to dramatic foreshortening, the work reveals Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.