G. B. Tiepolo at Valmarana: gender ideology in a patrician villa of the settecento.(Villa Valmarana ai Nani)(Critical essay)

The rural villas that proliferated in the Veneto region of northern Italy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries were domestic spaces that had a public face and role. Designed to reinforce and reflect the wealth, position, achievement, learning, and magnanimity of their high-ranking or patrician owners, they also represented, through their spatial arrangement and decoration, an ideal of gender and class relations in a well-tuned cosmos. (1) Many early decorative cycles in the villas included scenes involving the agricultural life cycle, thereby showcasing the procreative side of the rural life ideal. The country villa was also often shown in such cycles as the setting for domestic life, leisurely pursuits, and civilized recreation and interchange between the sexes, implicitly advancing the concept of the household as a microcosm or reflection of cosmic harmony related to the cycles of nature. (2)

By contrast, at the so-called palazzina of the Villa Valmarana ai Nani on the outskirts of Vicenza (Fig. 1), site of an ambitious program of wall decorations carried out by Giambattista Tiepolo in about 1757, there is an abrupt shift to a more artificial set of images that does not deal with these conventional tropes and ideals of villa life. At Valmarana, no domestic imagery appears, and images of the agricultural cycles of rural life are few in number and relegated to the separate space of the foresteria, the guest quarters, where the decorations were painted largely by the younger Giandomenico Tiepolo. In the palazzina itself, members of the household Would have lived surrounded, at eye level, by proportionally massive and theatrical renderings of stories drawn from works by four of the major classical and Renaissance epic poets: Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furiosi), and Torquato Tasso's Gnusukmme liberata.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In the art historical literature, the Valmarana cycle is commonly described as taking for its theme "stories of love," while the clearly gendered bases of its subjects, intentions, production, and reception have never been recognized, let alone contextually probed. Usually cited to explain the thematic choices that structure the cycle--choices now thought to have resulted directly from the influence of Tiepolo's friend the art broker, librettist, and connoisseur Conte Francesco Algarotti (3)--are traditions in literary criticism that compared the ancient and the modern poets; (4) the patron's fondness for the opera and the popularity of some of these stories in contemporary Venetian theater and opera; the emerging ethos of Neoclassicism in Italy and Europe during this period; and the pressure being brought to bear on Tiepolo, principally by his classically oriented friend Algarotti, to become a "learned painter." (5)

These explanations, however', beg another and. for me. much larger question by ignoring what is striking about these frescoes for a modern female visitor to the palazzina at Valmarana, and that is the cycle's thematic unity as regressive gender propaganda. Some of the stories illustrated here, rare in villa decoration but. popular in contemporary Venetian theater and opera, had been treated pictorially by Tiepolo elsewhere. (6) But never before had he brought, these literary subjects together to form what I will examine here as a coherent sociopolitical as well as iconographic statement. Only at Valmarana are we confronted with a consistent and pervasive cycle of imagery that focuses on women as compliant victims, evil sorceresses, and abandoned temptresses, while their male counterparts are presented as warrior heroes who are carnally tempted but able to overcome temptation for a higher purpose. What does it mean when such imagery is chosen not simply to adorn but overwhelmingly to dominate a domestic interior? I shall propose here that the Valmarana cycle reflected and embodied reactionary social norms and a conservative societal backlash in the middle of the eighteenth century, and that its messages can be fully understood only against the background of changing conditions in the domestic and public lives of both women and men in the Veneto during this era.

The Frescoes

The frescoes of Giambattista Tiepolo at Valmarana, with their emphatically blond tonalities, pastel palette, and light-filled, transparent spaces, are among the most visually seductive works of this artist's decorative oeuvre. And it may well be in part the "prettiness" of their surface appeal for later viewers that has masked their message, disguising as poetic "stories about love" a programmatic cycle, based on gendered dualities, that extols and promotes the renunciation of romantic and sensual love and the sacrifice of feminized forms of personal gratification for the sake of duty and the preservation of a patriarchal social order.