Scipio Africanus Freeing Massiva

Scipio Africanus Freeing Massiva, painted around 1719 and now at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, is a very early work depicting the Roman general's magnanimous release of a Numidian prisoner — a subject celebrating the Stoic virtues of clemency and self-restraint in the moment of military triumph. Scipio's legendary generosity toward captives was a standard example in the humanist education that shaped European aristocratic culture, and the subject had been treated by painters from the fifteenth century onward as a compliment to noble patrons who modeled themselves on Roman republican virtue. Tiepolo was approximately twenty-three when this was painted, still consolidating the style that would make him Europe's greatest decorative painter. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, founded by William and Henry Walters in the early twentieth century, holds an important collection of European old masters spanning the medieval period to the nineteenth century.

The early Tiepolo renders the classical scene with dynamic figure arrangement and rich, warm colors. The dramatic gestures and the strong chiaroscuro of this early work contrast with the lighter, more luminous palette of his mature ceiling paintings.