Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Born in Venice on 5 March 1696, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo entered a city still gilded by its painting tradition but already slipping from power. Success came early; he built a career not just across Italy but in Germany and Spain, carrying the Rococo style's airy drama to palaces and churches that wanted grandeur without weight. He worked alongside Pittoni, Canaletto, Piazzetta, Crespi, and Guardi - the last generation later called Old Masters of the Venetian school. Michael Levey would call him "the greatest decorative painter of eighteenth-century Europe, as well as its most able craftsman," a judgment that captures both the ambition and the adjective that haunted him: decorative. He died in Madrid on 27 March 1770, prolific to the end, the ceiling tradition dying with him.