Maskerade

Masquerade scenes were among the most fashionable subjects in eighteenth-century Venetian painting, reflecting the city's carnival culture and the social license that the mask provided. Tiepolo approached the Maskerade subject differently from his Flemish-influenced contemporary Pietro Longhi, whose small-scale genre scenes recorded contemporary Venetian social life with sociological precision. Tiepolo's masked figures tend toward the theatrical and the fantastical — they inhabit a world between contemporary reality and the commedia dell'arte tradition that had shaped Italian visual culture for two centuries. The masquerade also provided an opportunity for brilliant costume — the blacks, whites, and primary colors of carnival dress — that suited his decorative gifts.

Carnival costumes are painted with sharp chromatic contrasts — the black of the bauta cloak against white masks or bright silk — using confident, broadly applied paint that captures the theatrical effect of masked assembly without descending to sociological detail. Tiepolo's light source creates strong highlights on the white masks and silks.