FIGURE 4.5 Giambattista Tiepolo. Apollo andPhaethon, FIGURE 4.6 Giambattista Tiepolo. Apollo and Phaethon, ca. 1733-36. Oil on canvas. County Durham, England, Barnard ca. 1733-36, Oil on canvas. Vienna, Gemaldegalerie der Castle, The Bowes Museum. Akademie der bildenden Kiinste. that surround the protagonists with the rich, dark early career remains a hotly contested question. colors below (the double ground layer, reddish Around the time of the Palazzo Archinto browns and ocher, heightens this intensity of commission Tiepolo executed a number of other color). The light tonalities of the painting's cen- sketches on the theme of Apollo and Phaethon, ter band stand apart from the sinister shadows but their relationship to the LAC MA canvas and formed by the horses and the clouds, accentuating the ceiling itself remains unclear. Two beauti- the sense of foreboding. ful oil sketches from Barnard Castle and Vienna This painting follows the finished fresco (figs. 4.5—6) are easel paintings, with composi- quite closely a feature rarely exhibited in Tiepolo's tions in a rising S-curve, free of any di sotto in su sketches for ceiling frescoes (for example, cat. effects. The Vienna sketch, breezily painted nos. i and 8). For this reason most scholars have on an unusual blue-gray ground, depicts a slightly argued against it as a preliminary design, seeing later moment in the narrative, with Time taking the work as an unusually high-quality ricordo of Phaethon away from Apollo to the awaiting the ceiling, entirely by Tiepolo's hand.7 chariot. The Barnard Castle work, by contrast, How this painting relates to the other paint- bears a much closer connection to the actual ings and drawings of this subject from Tiepolo's ceiling, not only in its tonality but also in such APOLLO AND PHAETHON 37