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The Villa and its guests: braided lives 
Travellers, literary figures and illustrious guests

 

On 24 April 1786, in his diary J.W. Goethe writes about “Tiepolo's natural and sublime style”: in fact, he was the first to sense that the frescoes in the two parts of the Villa were painted by two different hands. Giambattista (the father), painter of the Palazzina, was the artist with the “sublime style”; Giandomenico (the son), painter of the Foresteria, was the artist with the “natural style”.
Antonio Fogazzaro, husband of Rita Valmarana, depicts the rooms of the Palazzina in his novel “Piccolo Mondo Moderno” (“Little Modern World”, 1901).
Guido Piovene, son of Stefania Valmarana, in his complete works on the Tiepolos writes a magnificent introduction about the Villa, entitled “La Metafisica dei Sensi” (“The Metaphysics of the Senses”, 1968).
Goffredo Parise was a habitual guest, and it seems that the protagonist of his novel “Il Prete Bello” (“The Beautiful Priest”, 1954) was inspired by senator Giustino Valmarana.
But among the visitors of Villa Valmarana ai Nani we can also find sovereigns, politicians, industrialists and intellectuals, such as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, King Albert II of Belgium and his wife Paola Ruffo di Calabria, Gianni Agnelli, Albert Camus, Paul Morand, Truman Capote, Salvator Dalì, Peggy Guggenheim, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Frank Sinatra, Luchino Visconti.

Important scholars devoted to the Tiepolos

The frescoes painted inside Villa Valmarana ai Nani by Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo have been studied by many scholars, such as P. Molmenti (1881), H. Modern (1902), E. Sack (1910), G. Fiocco (1926), W. Arslan (1936), H. W. Hagelmann (1940), M. Goering (1942), R. Pallucchini (1944).

In particular, in 1941 the art critic Antonio Morassi definitevely acknowledged the authorship of the frescoes, starting from the profound differences between the subjects represented in the Palazzina and in the Foresteria.

He realizes that the year written in the cartouche of the fresco called “Mondo Novo”, painted in the Foresteria, is 1757 and not 1737 (as wrongly believed until then). Giandomenico Tiepolo was born in 1727, hence he could not have been working together with his father Giambattista in 1737. In 1757, instead, he was 30 years old and capable to paint that masterpiece.