Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was an Italian painter and printmaker from Venice, regarded as the greatest decorative painter of eighteenth-century Europe and a leading figure of the Rococo style. He worked prolifically on luminous frescoes and ceiling paintings of religious and mythological subjects across Italy, Germany and Spain. By 1750 his reputation was strong enough to draw commissions from European nobility, including a three-year engagement decorating the Wurzburg Residenz, and he later worked for the Spanish royal court in Madrid, where he died.