Allegory, Fact, and Meaning in Giambattista Tiepolo's Four Continents in Würzburg

Abstract

On the vault of the ceremonial staircase in the Würzburg Residenz, Giambattista Tiepolo painted his variation on a popular allegorical theme of the day, the four continents. There is no mistaking the subject of the fresco: under a god-studded sky that allegorizes the planets in the heavens, Asia, Africa, America, and Europe range along the borders of the rectangular vault, each identified by personifications with attributes belonging to a long allegorical tradition. But Tiepolo's fresco is vast, and his earth teems with figures that have puzzled many observers. Some scholars have taken the painting's obvious allegorical subject as meaning enough and have not worried over the untraditional. Others have singled out a few of the novel images as central to the meaning of the whole, but have not examined the rest.1 To discover the nature of the iconography, this essay studies both the obvious and the unconventional in Tiepolo's continents and concludes that the one viewpoint misses the importance of the iconographic novelties and the other ignores their context. It finds a consistent pattern of new factual imagery that is attributable to the patron and his milieu and important in interpreting the painting; and it sees in Tiepolo's handling of certain prominent images not only further evidence of his patron's collaboration, but also a key to comprehending the painting.