Image: Giandomenico Tiepolo (Venice, 1727–1804), The New World (detail), c. 1765. Oil on canvas. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado
Gallerie d'Italia – Vicenza presents Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727–1804). Un mondo nuovo from 9 October 2026 to 17 January 2027. Marking the 300th anniversary of the artist's birth, the exhibition sets out to reassess one of the most inventive figures of eighteenth-century Venice, a painter the museum considers to have been overshadowed for too long by his father, Giambattista Tiepolo.
Curated by Valter Curzi, Carolina Brook and Fabrizio Magani, the show is held under the patronage of the Municipality of Vicenza and organised in collaboration with the Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Würzburg. It gathers 68 works lent by institutions including the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the Musée du Louvre, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice and the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, as well as by churches and private collections. A replica of a pantoscope, an optical viewing device, is lent by the Museo del PRECINEMA in Padua.
The route follows Giandomenico's career from his early years assisting his father on large decorative commissions to his late work, and traces the travels that shaped him, from the Veneto to Germany and Spain. Religious paintings sit alongside the celebrated etching series Idee pittoresche and Divertimento per li regazzi, drawings based on his father's models, and the Character Heads, in which the museum sees an echo of Rembrandt.
A central section is devoted to genre scenes, where daily life in eighteenth-century Venice becomes the subject of close observation. The final part turns to the Pulcinella cycle painted at the family villa in Zianigo, in which the stock character of the commedia dell'arte becomes, according to the curators, a vehicle for reflections on time, memory and the human condition.
The title refers to one of his best-known paintings, Il mondo nuovo (The New World), and to what the museum describes as his new way of looking at the world, centred on the gestures and faces of ordinary people. The Allemandi catalogue accompanies the exhibition, and a programme of talks, guided tours, family workshops and school activities runs throughout.
