Natoire (1700–1777) the absorption of Italian influences gained when resident in Italy. But for Natoire
and Boucher in particular, the influence of Venetian artists such as Paolo Caliari Veronese (c.1528–1588),
known for their attachment to visual spectacle and color effects, meant that the conventional moralizing
grandeur of history painting was not a central concern. Natoire completed in around 1736, for the then
Director of Public Buildings Orry, a serious work of national history relating to the legendary rule of the
founding king of France, Clovis I (reigned c.481–511), The Siege of Bordeaux (Le Siège de Bordeaux).
However, he was generally more attracted to a picturesque rather than rhetorical treatment of historical
themes, and his works on the theme of Sancho Panza fell into the category of “gallant mythologies.”
In the Netherlands, the great popularity of history painting evident in the seventeenth century, in, for
example, the work of Rembrandt (1606–1669), had generated many manuals on emblems and
mythological subjects with a view to increasing public understanding. As elsewhere, the popularity of the
genre subsided there in the eighteenth century as there was greater demand for other genres such as
portraiture. Genre painting became less prevalent in the Netherlands than it had been in the seventeenth
century. The popularity of paintings of “everyday life” combined with the lucrative genre of portraiture, in
many European countries, to undermine demand for history subjects. By the end of the century, history
painting had absorbed many of the conventions of genre painting: modern rather than classical dress and
greater naturalism. It also turned increasingly to more recent national or literary topics.
The increased taste in the early eighteenth century, and particularly in continental Europe, for “gallant”
mythological subjects, led to widespread unease, in official circles, regarding history painting’s loss of
dignity and moral purpose. Mythological subjects were treated with much less gravitas and more rococo
“playfulness” than their seventeenthcentury precedents. They revealed the influence of the Italian artist
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) and his sons Giovanni Domenico (1727–1804) and Lorenzo
Baldissera (1736–1776), whose services, like those of their predecessor Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734),
were in great demand across the most prestigious courts, churches and palaces of Europe, particularly for
frescoes (Figure 2.2). Although many of G.B. Tiepolo’s works were on a large scale, his style was often
applied to smallerscale decorative works. Larger royal commissions, such as Coypel’s Aeneid scenes
for the Palais Royal in Paris, or the work by François Lemoyne (1688–1737) at the Salon d’Hercule,
Versailles, were exceptional.