Tiepolo the airy, the unsubstantial. A volatile spread of pink-greyish clouds, a blaze of flesh without gravity. He is theatrical, celebrating ephemeral triumphs, fragrant. He spent all his life working on commission in churches, palaces and villas. Sometimes he frescoed immense ceilings. Tiepolo is a biographer’s despair, his private life goes by without jumps or episodes worth being mentioned, in an almost ending century: he has to take care of sons, orders, the gradual and obtained internationalism, the death at the Spanish court. There is no other artist so suited to embody what Nietzsche called “the Olympus of appearance”. No mysteries, no shades, just some pictorial light and shade effect. This is the Tiepolo to whom we are used thanks to a “comfortable” reading spread in centuries. Roberto Calasso, in his last work “The pink Tiepolo” (Adelphi € 32,00) overturns this apparent quiet and breaks reassuring visions. From the first lines Calasso addresses him with ironic lightness. Tiepolo: the last touch of happiness in Europe. And as all happiness, it is full of dark sides (….)”.

Then he goes into the meanders of what is dark, careless, concealed. In order to do it, the patron of Adelphi focuses the attention on a sequence of thirty-three itchings, “I Capricci” and “Gli scherzi”. Different from all the previous works, they gather clues; close mysteries to become “secret indications, mysterious invitations”. Each piece of paper is composed of sharp, oblique, dense lines, and it is a chapter of a noir novel, full of disturbing characters: apollonian ephebi, female satyrs, esoteric eastern characters, owls and snakes, Pulcinellas and skulls. When they appeared, they circulated only between a few connoisseurs:”The twenty-three Scherzi, which are a kind of Art of escape in Tiepolo’s work, variations built on a fixed repertoire of characters, accessories, talismans, gestures, were observed as weird diversions. Many kept on repeating what, being obvious, maybe is also true: Tiepolo was the end of an age. But they did not register the incredible concentration of poison and sweetness contained in that “motus in fine velocior” as Calasso cautiously warns us in the beginning. It will be a fast-slow reaching of the darker regions of a critical literary itinerary, full of commonplaces, that have to be discredited. Delicious is the incursion in the “Tiepolo pink” of Proust.

In the “Recherche” there is plenty of references to that special tone of pink, which is never ascribed to the painter. It is shining in Odette´s robes, glittering in the mantel of the duchess of Guermantes, it appears in Venice in the lining of Albertine´s robe. Then, at page 47, he introduces a light syncretism: “Tiepolo is an extreme example of Taoist smoothness in art. A quality unimaginable before him, never reached after him”. Following the themes of the “Scherzi” we discover that they are present in all his works: snakes insistently twisting around eastern figures, stone masses exposed to sacrifice; but the scherzo will remain a silent novel: “like all esoteric beings, Tiepolo never said anything about his secret. He just showed it. He probably knew that it would not have been recognized. And it was not indeed.” There comes the paradox of a saturnine Tiepolo in radiant light , as testify the meridian rays running over the enigmatic reunions of sparse symbols and thoughtful figures avoiding the eye: “The Scherzi are also the place where comes to light a high silent psychic density, an absolute mingling with the most ominous gestures of the heathen past”. And then Calasso goes deeper, urges talking about the hypothesis of the “Gnostic character” of the Scherzi and, why not, about the closeness of the painter to a sect coming from the origins of Christianity and still active in the heart of the Vence of the eighteenth century, the sect of the Ofidici.