The Marriage of Frederick Barbarossa and Beatrice of Burgundy

The image is of a ceremony, with a set of high ceilings and columns, a bishop with a crozier in his hands, standing at the center, surrounded by people.The image depicts a ceremonial event, possibly a wedding, with a high ceiling and columns, a bishop with a crozier, and several people present. The scene depicts Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190, marrying Beatrice of Burgundy in 1156; Tiepolo however shows no interest in the historical accuracy. The clothes and the setting are of the sixteenth century not of the twelfth century the story itself depicts, and the Emperor's face is based on one of Prince-Bishop Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau who had sponsored the original fresco. A substitution that transforms a far distant legend from the Middle Ages into a more contemporary form of flattery, as is often done with mythic or historical subjects in eighteenth-century court commissions, where the mythical or historical element was surreptitiously added to please the vanity of a living patron. The stiffly ceremonial nature of the main action is broken by Tiepolo's focus on the fringes of the crowd: A man on the right and a boy on the left glance directly out of the canvas toward the viewer, and a court jester ascends the steps to hug a barking dog, all kinds of small human distractions from the ceremony which give the whole scene an unexpected, lived-in humor. This canvas is not a new invention, but a small oil sketch produced after another monumental wall painting, which Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted in the early 1750s for the archbishop's palace at Würzburg and which was probably created by his son, Giovanni Domenico, a preparatory or recording exercise that compresses a monumental wall painting into portable, workshop-scaled form and gives a rare look into how the two generations of Tiepolo worked together across scale and medium.