858 massimo favilla, ruggero rugolo, and dulcia meijers
audience is seen from the back, except for two characters depicted in pro-
file. those two are presumably Giambattista and Domenico tiepolo. all
the others figure as anti-portraits.
tiepolo had no clientele in these later years. this may have been a
deliberate choice. His Pulcinella and Mondo Novo seem to express, respec-
tively, mockery for what is and regret for what has past. the new neo-
classical style had by now replaced the world of his father, which had also
been his in every respect. Piranesi, with his fantasy architecture and ruins,
and Canova’s physically idealized and emotionally detached figures, emit
a completely different taste and spirit that heralded from the last decades
of the century and had made inroads everywhere in europe.118 there was
no point of return since the French revolution of 1789. it was felt in the
works of this last representative of the old world.
Epilogueafter Domenico’s Mondo Novo, the republic had six more years of life left.
a specific line written in a letter to the last Venetian ambassador in Paris
on 22 February 1797, with the carnival season in full swing, illustrates the
atmosphere of the last days: “there was almost nothing unpleasant, and
everything proceeded joyously.”119 in the last meeting of the Great Council
on 12 May 1797, the last doge, Ludovico Manin, was forced to proclaim its
own abrogation. it was ultimately napoleon who ended the swan-song of
the Most Serene republic, while followers of the Jacobins—of course with-
out wigs!—danced around the tree of liberty raised in Piazza San Marco.
Bibliography for the 17th Centuryaikema, Bernard, “Molinari & Co.: riflessioni sul Momento internazionale Della Pittura
Veneziana fra Sei e Settecento,” Arte veneta 63 (2006, 2007), 203–08.
——, “il secolo dei contrasti: le tenebre,” in Lucco, ed., La pittura nel Veneto: Il Seicento,
2:543–72.
——, “Pietro della Vecchia, a Profile,” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 14 (1984), 77–100.
Benassai, Paolo, Sebastiano Mazzoni (Florence, 1999).
the fresco was detached from its walls and remounted in a room of the Ca rezzonico, it
had been given its title.
118 See, for the neoclassical spirit in Venetian art, exh. cat. (Venice, 1983–84), Vene
zia nell’Ottocento: immagini e mito, ed. Giandomenico romanelli and Giuseppe Pavanello
(Milan, 1983).
119 Letter of Lippomano to a. Querini, published in Mariuz, Tiepolo, p. 109.