The Chariot of Aurora

The Chariot of Aurora, painted in 1734 and now in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, depicts the goddess of dawn driving her horse-drawn chariot across the morning sky in a subject that had been a standard repertoire piece for ceiling painters from Guido Reni's Aurora ceiling in Rome (1613-14) through Guercino, Pietro da Cortona, and Giordano. Tiepolo's 1734 version may have served as a modello for a ceiling commission or as an independent cabinet painting for a collector who appreciated the aerial invention of the subject. In 1734 Tiepolo was completing the ceiling paintings at the Palazzo Labia in Venice and preparing major commissions in Milan, and this Aurora belongs to the same moment when his mastery of celestial composition was at its most assured. The Clark Art Institute, endowed by the Francophone American collector Robert Sterling Clark, houses an unusually distinguished group of eighteenth-century paintings that includes works by Fragonard, Boucher, and Tiepolo.

Explosive upward composition with radically foreshortened horses and billowing drapery creates the illusion of figures bursting through the picture surface. The dawn palette of rose, gold, and pale blue captures the specific atmospheric quality of early morning light.