I mapped my path around Venice based on the Tiepolos. I was in Italy to conduct research on another artist, in other cities, but Venice was a detour I made purely for my own pleasure. At Ca’ Rezzonico, I craned my neck to stare at Tiepolo’s Nobility and Virtue defeating Wickedness, a cloud-laden battle where winged cherubs are tossed around and Virtue, suspended in the air, wears a gown of bewildering sherbet orange. At Gallerie dell’Accademia, I stood before The Feast of the Cross and Saint Helena, a giant, glowing orb, once a ceiling fresco, where the discovery of Jesus’s cross muddies the divide between the divine and the earth-bound. I saw a lot at the churches: Crowning with Thorns, Flagellation, Ascent to Calvary, Abraham and the Angels. I couldn’t get into Palazzo Labia, now an office of some kind, where I had hoped to see Pluto Abducting Persephone and The Banquet of Cleopatra – a variation of the Tiepolo in the NGV Collection that had spurred my fixation with the Venetian painter.

In centuries past, Tiepolo’s reputation as one of the greats of eighteenth-century painting was diminished. He was branded too decadent, too frothy, too bourgeois – interested primarily in appeasing his patrons. His brushstrokes, so easy and alive and seemingly effortless, were interpreted as evidence of a lack of interiority or inner conflict. Lazy connections were drawn between the sumptuous and the facile. Writer and art historian John Ruskin lumped him into what he defined as the ‘Grotesque Renaissance’, lambasting Tiepolo’s romantic flourish as ‘what a first-rate Parisian Academy student would do … after having read unlimited quantities of George Sand and Dumas’. Author Henry James, in various writings, called him ‘pompous’, ‘tardy’ and a ‘florid master’. Nowadays, Tiepolo is not so much condemned as he is overlooked – at the National Gallery in London last year, I watched gallery patrons brush off the Tiepolos and beeline for the Titians.

This canonical bruising led me to his defenders, a small pack of Tiepolo devotees, about whom this essay was written. They share my affinity and something of my view: that Tiepolo sends his spectators skyward into a carnivalesque dreamworld unhooked from reality, where hierarchies are neutered of their power – angels are placed on the same plane as the destitute and oftentimes the destitute are as elegantly dressed as lords. While his subjects are old myths and religious scenes, his colours, so luminous, push them into uncharted, mystical realms. His blues, pinks and reds seem to contain their own electrical charge.

Tiepolo is an extravagant, excessive artist – a genius melder of the monstrous and sublime. In this way, Tiepolo is the perfect embodiment of Venice, past and present, where surreal beauty mingles with abjection. I saw this in the mass of tourists clogging up the tiny arteries of the city, screaming and lugging plastic suitcases over ancient stone, tossing cigarette butts into green water and letting dollops of ice-cream fall on marble lion heads.

My guide around Venice was Italian writer Roberto Calasso’s 2006 book Tiepolo Pink, an exuberant apologia on the artist – ‘the last breath of happiness in Europe’ – routinely misunderstood. Calasso was a writer of exceptional breath, but he always circled back to his fascination with myth, ritual and spiritual possession. He found an easy accomplice in the work of Tiepolo.

Calasso’s book is sprawling, impish and declarative, a style befitting of his subject. At the beginning, Calasso takes aim at Ruskin and other naysayers, namely the Italian art critic Roberto Longhi, who once concocted a rather hysterical dialogue between Tiepolo and Caravaggio in heaven, imagining the latter as a sage and truth-seeker, the antidote to Tiepolo’s frippery. He also lays out the words of his fellow devotees, and their faint traces of admiration: Edith Wharton, Mark Twain (who calls Tiepolo ‘my artist’), Proust, who in À la recherche du temps perdu, uses ‘Tiepolo pink’ and ‘Tiepolo red’ to describe the robes and gowns of three of the narrator’s most tortuous fixations – Odette, the Duchess of Guermantes, and Albertine.

Calasso decries the depiction of Tiepolo as a decorator par excellence, a provider of gorgeous vacuity to palaces. What fascinates him is how Tiepolo, with his speedy work ethic and carousel of stock figures, created paintings of elusive power, where meaning is liquid and slippery – and still wet after hundreds of years. He painted faces disengaged from ‘set meanings’ – ‘oscillating between horror, scorn, surprise, tenderness, emotion, and measured eloquence … Tiepolo was a tireless explorer of those intermediate areas, nameless and for the most part off the beaten track’. This comes to a head on Calasso’s analysis of Tiepolo’s etching series Capricci and Scherzi. Art critics have struggled to define these thrillingly perverse scenes, suffused with sorcery and death, where nymphs, satyrs and snakes – figures on the fringes of eighteenth-century painting – are pushed to the centre, lolling about plein air. Their baffling brilliance is precisely in what they refuse to depict. As Calasso wrote:

Tiepolo chose to portray the moment in which the invisible is about to appear or maybe it has just appeared or is taking shape. It does not seem that others attempted this, and especially not in the guise of variations in sequence. It’s pointless to look for predecessors, not only in the eighteenth century, which so frequently affected to ignore the invisible, but in the two centuries before. Tiepolo was disinclined to put symbols onstage, but he intended to show what happens when a symbol is discovered, sometimes beyond the scene portrayed.

There is something of this anticipatory magic in the NGV’s The Banquet of Cleopatra. While his predecessors were more inclined to depict the Queen of Egypt’s suicide, Tiepolo returned again and again to her famous wager with Marc Antony, where she made a bet that she could host a lavish feast far beyond any of her lover’s expensive meals (Tiepolo was also fond of painting their first meeting, with Cleopatra dressed up as the goddess Venus). When her dinner came, the delicacies were decadent but routine. What she did have, though, was a pair of enormous, rare pearl earrings – the largest in the world – one of which she plunked into a glass of vinegar, dissolving the concretion, which she subsequently drank. She was crowned the winner of the bet.

Melbourne’s Cleopatra is a triumphant figure. Her face is sly, flushed and knowing (Calasso wrote that in this version she is ‘svelte of figure and mordant of gesture’). She holds the pearl between her fingers, above the vinegar glass, just about to stun Marc Antony and her gaggle of courtesans. The colours chosen conjure up gourmet delights: buttery yellows, apricot oranges, cherry pinks and nutty browns. Every figure in the foreground is opulent, swaddled in ruffs and jewels and feathers and layers of fine fabric. A tiny dog is perched on Cleopatra’s lap. Beyond the marble columns, an eager crowd watches. There is something a bit pitiful about Marc Antony, much of his face hidden behind a baroque helmet. Tiepolo revels in Cleopatra’s ability to outwit her lover in excess; the painting is hedonistic, almost giddy in extravagance and glory – there isn’t much moralism about greed and gluttony to be seen here.

The reigning authority on this painting is Melbourne art historian Jaynie Anderson, another devotee, whose great, grand 2003 monograph Tiepolo’s Cleopatra leaves no stone unturned. It’s a precise document lovingly compiled, running the reader through the Renaissance’s constant conjuring of Cleopatra, Tiepolo’s fascination with her story (as well as his own connoisseur tastes for dried grapes, chocolate and mullet roe) and the painting’s long, tangled path to the NGV. To her, the genius of Tiepolo is the ‘interplay between the artist’s ambition and his patron’s ideas’ and his effortless fluency on the canvas – ‘Overdrawing is not hidden beneath the surface of the painting, but romps along the surface, enforcing the underdrawing, the exact opposite of what is normally found in Renaissance painting’. But she also widens the frame, showing us how a painting cannot only be understood in the story of an artist, but needs to wrestle with all those ancillary figures: students, writers, merchants, art collectors, statesmen, and art gallery heads.

While writing this essay, I visited Anderson at home, on a quiet street near the university, to see her enormous Banquet painting by Tiepolo’s student Giovanni Raggi. She bought it for a steal at Sothebys while she was writing her monograph. Raggi’s painting crops in on Cleopatra and Marc Antony, replicating Tiepolo’s pinks and dignified drapery. Cleopatra’s face is far more vacant, but Marc Antony is a pretty close reproduction, containing the same brute disbelief as the Tiepolo work. It’s an imposing painting in a small home: there is barely an inch of white around the wall it hangs on. She tells me her love for the Banquet began in childhood, when she first saw the painting. It reminds of the schoolchildren that can still be found at the gallery gathering around the painting, sucked into Tiepolo’s vortex of epicureanism and exultant victory.

Isabella Trimboli is a critic, essayist and editor living in Melbourne.