The Tiepolo room

The Tiepolo room

I do not know who Simon Stock was, or how he became a saint, or why the Louvre bought, in 1983, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Apparition of the Virgin to St Simon Stock (Denon, room 725), but over the course of my visits, I have come back to this painting again and again. Probably because, first, Tiepolo seems in need of encouragement, as he is a little neglected in this small, rather awkward room that one crosses at an angle, after passing through a peculiar vestibule empty of any artworks but with a beautiful view of the Tuileries Gardens. (We are in a side aisle of the great hall of the Pavillon des Sessions, disfigured today, where Rubens’s Marie de’ Medici cycle once held court.) Second, I imagined the monumental ceiling for which this painting was presumably a preparatory sketch, with its imposing perspective that makes the viewer feel the trance of the apparition. Now, upon inquiry, the ceiling is to be found in the chapter room of the Scuola Grande dei Carmini in Venice, where I used to stop regularly during the distant, happy period when I would go to Venice and stay on Campo Santa Margherita, precisely the site of the Scuola dei Carmini. This Tiepolo, unconsciously, had remained with me.