Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

The younger Tiepolo spent the last twenty years of his life drawing Punchinello. He produced 104 sketches of the hunchbacked commedia dell'arte clown, subtitled "Entertainments for the Children", though the satire was aimed at adults. The drawings show Punchinello eating, dancing, courting, being executed, and being buried, a complete biography of a fictional fool used to lampoon the pretensions of Venetian society.

He was born in Venice in 1727, the eldest son of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the greatest ceiling painter in Europe. By thirteen he was his father's chief assistant; by twenty he was producing independent commissions. He assisted at Wurzburg (1751 to 1753), at the Villa Valmarana in Vicenza (1757), and at the Royal Palace in Madrid (1762 to 1770).

His father's death in Madrid in 1770 freed him to develop his own direction. He returned to Venice and turned increasingly away from the luminous Baroque grandeur of his father's work toward genre scenes, religious subjects treated with narrative intimacy, and the Punchinello drawings that became his finest achievement. In retirement at the family villa at Zianigo, he painted frescoes now in the Correr Museum and produced nearly two hundred etchings. He died in Venice in 1804, at seventy-six.