Tiepolo Blue: 'The best novel I have read for ages' Stephen Fry

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The subject for this magnificent fresco, originally painted on a wall in the ballroom of the Palazzo Labia, Venice, is drawn from Pliny the Elder's Natural History which tells of a wager between Mark Antony, the Roman Consul in Egypt and Cleopatra: who could put on the more extravagant feast? Cleopatra outwits Anthony and thus wins the wager by dissolving a precious pearl worth 10, 000 sesterces into a cup of vinegar which she then drinks. The Institution of the Rosary has a grandeur of conception which seems to recall the pomp of the Venetian High Renaissance, of which Tiepolo is perhaps its last representative. Yet, despite the scale of the piece and its extreme foreshortening, Tiepolo never loses control. He painted swiftly, and his bravura brushwork never falters. The eye rises in zig-zag fashion, first encountering one group of figures and then another, before arriving at the central figure of St. Dominic and so to the Madonna and the Christ Child above him on the cloud. The upshot is high drama tempered by a light-hearted Rococo charm and grace of form for which Tiepolo is famous. There is piety here, to be sure, but there is a certain levity too, in all senses of the word: a lightness of body, a lightness of touch and indeed a lightness of being. The writing, when talking about Art History, Cahill’s area of expertise, is convincing, even beautiful at times. But when he talks about the London art scene and gay scene, in fact most things out of the realm of classical art, it came across as naive and cliché. Perhaps Cahill is almost as out of his own depth in these worlds as his protagonist? The novel starts out in Cambridge, at Peterhouse College where we meet Don, a don, professor, whose speciality is art history and who is currently involved in studying the skies in Tiepolo’s paintings. He lives a fairly secluded life, it’s very safe, sheltered from the exigencies of the world and he likes his routines. He has a room and study, he eats regularly in the refectory with other highfalutin minds from the world of academia and life is acceptable and certainly not challenging in a worldly way. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman

Ejected from his safe yet stultifying academic life, the central character, Don, is an art historian who seems, like the stereotype of his scholarly kind, to be as stunningly naive about life as he is is brilliant in his subject area. Beyond what we have just said, very little is known of Tiepolo's childhood and one has to wait until 1719 for documented facts to become available. 1719 was the year of his marriage to Maria Cecilia Guardi, sister to the veduta ("view") painters: brothers Gian Antonio and Francesco Guardi. Maria bore Tiepolo no fewer than ten children (two of whom would take up painting and became apprentices to their father). Following his marriage, his dark, fledgling style - owing much to the chiaroscuro of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta - became lighter, his palate more brilliant and his touch noticeably more elegant. Tiepolo had learnt the rudiments of fresco from Lazzarini but it was Piazzetta, Ricci, and above all Veronese, who would exert the greatest influence over him. Don is writing a book about his abiding love, the 18th-century Rococo painter Giambattista Tiepolo. He spends his time mapping out the symmetry of the skies in Tiepolo’s frescoes, trying to explain that their ‘infinite blue space’ can be ‘dissected, triangulated’ to reveal a ‘precise and beautiful geometry’. Tiepolo has for too long been seen as a mystical painter of ‘sweetness and light’. ‘No more,’ Don imagines the artist saying to him at one point. ‘Show them how classical I am.’ His departure from academia was not entirely by choice but at the times when it seems that someone is pulling the strings that guide him through his new life, there is doubt caused by some event or other. Maybe things aren't orchestrated, it could just be other peoples' ignorance or folly that sets up some of the situations Don finds himself in. The sympathetic descriptions of the people he meets in his new role as a gallery director in London seem always to redeem them. They are as unworldly, in their ways, as Don was himself when he was cocooned by the traditions he has left behind. A few things bothered me… firstly a few of the London locations where a bit all over the place, including a bar in the book called The Sphinx, which is clearly meant to be The Vauxhall Tavern. Carhill locates The Sphinx in Hern Hill, but then inside the bar he included customers talking about Vauxhall. Perhaps Carhill included this to give a clue as to the bar’s real inspiration… but it’s just a bit too messy for me. (Incidentally according to local queer legend, the comment about Princess Di and Freddie Mercury is true!)

What first strikes one about this fresco, which Tiepolo painted on the ceiling of the church of the Gesuati (or Sta. Maria del Rosario) in his native Venice, is its sheer size. Indeed at 40 feet by 15 feet, it is the largest version of this subject in European art. It is, I accept, a clever enough work which does pass the time quite well, but I kept having the nagging feeling that this kind of thing has been done before, and the closest comparison I can think of is with Martin Amis’s Money, in which the main character finds that he has been the unknowing – until the very end – victim of a years-long conspiracy of vengeance for an offence committed long in the past. (Unlike Money, though, it is not trying to be funny.) The thing is that one doesn’t really read Amis for the plot, but the language; it’s kind of the other way round with this novel. James Cahill’s debut novel was a mixed bag for me. I’ve settled on a three-star rating as at times I felt I could’ve given it four, but then again at times perhaps even a two.

Basically, it's a whole book of meandering plots and plot holes. No answers are ever given to the questions raised and to be honest no thought to the context of them. Set in the mid-90s, Tiepolo Blue follows Don Lamb, professor of art history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, who has led a life so attenuated he knows little or nothing of the world outside of his college until he’s thrust onto the London gallery circuit. At it’s heart I think there’s a good story here, and I thought it got off to a strong start as I enjoyed the early chapters set in Cambridge more than the later ones charting the protagonist’s demise, trying to adjust to life in 90’s London.

Featured Reviews

As for setting, it’s a fascinating mix of worlds where you start in academia and end up in the art world and Soho. Don is an out of touch and rather pompous academic who hasn’t a clue about the real world. I read how he started in Cambridge and ended up in London and Soho at that. A story that was painfully fascinating in so many ways.

The best novel I have read for ages. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read . . . There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in’ Stephen FryThe best novel I have read for ages. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read . . . There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in' Stephen Fry

Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge' Michael Donkor, Guardian His move to London yields even more of these scandals, alongside a slow-burning realisation about his sexuality and about what he has been too oblivious to see along. It is likely that by the time he arrived in Madrid in June 1762 for his last major undertaking, Tiepolo (ably assisted by sons, Domenico and Lorenzo) had become aware that the appetite for panegyric paintings promoting the glorification of kings and nations (not to mention the ennobled more generally) was coming to an end. Tiepolo was nevertheless one of the few European painters still working on such an overpowering scale and Spain was at that time a leading European power. Little wonder, then, that King Charles III would commission him to adorn the throne room in the recently built palace with allegorical depictions of Spain's rule in the Americas and other far flung lands. At 66 years of age, Tiepolo was approaching the end of his life but he proved with his ceiling frescos that, even despite some serious architectural shortcomings, he was still able to produce work of an exceptionally fine quality.Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don’s turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life.