The Institution of the Rosary

The Institution of the Rosary has a grandeur of conception which seems to recall the pomp of the Venetian High Renaissance, of which Tiepolo is perhaps its last representative. Yet, despite the scale of the piece and its extreme foreshortening, Tiepolo never loses control. He painted swiftly, and his bravura brushwork never falters. The eye rises in zig-zag fashion, first encountering one group of figures and then another, before arriving at the central figure of St. Dominic and so to the Madonna and the Christ Child above him on the cloud. The upshot is high drama tempered by a light-hearted Rococo charm and grace of form for which Tiepolo is famous. There is piety here, to be sure, but there is a certain levity too, in all senses of the word: a lightness of body, a lightness of touch and indeed a lightness of being.

What first strikes one about this fresco, which Tiepolo painted on the ceiling of the church of the Gesuati (or Sta. Maria del Rosario) in his native Venice, is its sheer size. Indeed at 40 feet by 15 feet, it is the largest version of this subject in European art.

Tiepolo divides the work into two realms: heaven and earth. In the former, the Christ Child stands at his mother's knee and hands the rosary to several putti. They in turn pass it on to an earth-bound Saint Dominic dressed in the black and white habit of the order to which he gave his name. He in turn passes it to the outstretched arms of the faithful gathered on the steps beneath an imposing Palladian building complete with mighty ionic columns.

Behind Saint Dominic stand two angels and behind them several soldiers in shadow brandish weapons known as halberds. Beneath them on the right, all manner of people wait to receive the Rosary from the saint's hand. Among them is Doge Alvise Pisani, in a golden brocade coat, and the patriarch Correr, in an embroidered pluvial. Beneath the former, sit two women one with serpents in her hand and hair and the other clutches some golden coins. Two soldiers, one of whom has his back to the viewer, perch precariously on the last step. Finally, in a triumph of trompe l'oeil five unfortunate souls - symbolising avarice, lust, heresy, arrogance and the Devil - tumble headlong out of the painting. A grey dog sits with its head bowed on the lower left-hand corner of the painting, an allusion to the Dominican order (in latin domini canes, or God's hounds).

This fresco measures 1200 x 450 cm and is in the Sta. Maria del Rosario, Venice