Roberto Calasso's 'Rose Tiepolo' Recasts the Venetian Master as a Profound Thinker

In his 2009 essay 'Rose Tiepolo,' published by Gallimard in the 'Du monde entier' collection, Roberto Calasso challenges the long-held view of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo as merely a painter of lightness and decorative frescoes. Calasso argues that Tiepolo is a 'deep painter,' whose work conceals layers of eroticism, mystery, and mortality beneath its luminous surfaces. The essay draws on Tiepolo's lesser-known series of etchings, 'Capricci' and 'Scherzi,' which were not commissioned and thus reveal a more personal symbolic vocabulary. Calasso identifies recurring motifs—skulls, owls, snakes, truncated columns, books, Orientals, ephebes, satyrs—that point to a meditation on death and the nature of the world. He contends that Tiepolo's art functions as a 'chronotope' (after Bakhtin), a distinct space-time that transcends mere theatrical allegory. The book is praised for its high-quality reproductions integrated into the text and for its translation. Calasso concludes that Tiepolo, like Daphne transformed into laurel, has been transformed into a color: 'rose Tiepolo,' a shade noted by Marcel Proust.