Frescoes in the Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza (1757)

In 1757, Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico were invited to Vicenza to fresco rooms in the modestly scaled Palazzina in the Villa Valmarana ai Nani and in the adjoining guest quarters, the so-called 'foresteria'. Their patron was Count Giustino Valmarana (1688-1757), a scholar and theater enthusiast. The villa takes the name "ai nani" ("of the dwarfs") from the travertine figures set up in the garden, which portrays in the fashion of the time the different social classes in the form of grotesquely deformed dwarfs.

Tiepolo frescoed the vestibule (portego) and four ground-floor rooms of the villa (the Palazzina), while his son executed the decoration in the adjacent guest house (the Foresteria). In addition to the frescoes in the Foresteria, Giovanni Domenico also painted figural elements in the Palazzina, in part after his father's design, in part on his own. As for the large-figure scenes, there was apparently no strict division of labour between the Palazzina and the Foresteria. The elder Tiepolo painted one room in the Foresteria, and his son was drafted to paint specific figures in the Palazzina. Despite his considerable share in the painting and its originality, Giandomenico remained in his fathers's shadow.

Giandomenico's lively genre scenes featuring peasants and merchants were intended to form a marked contrast with Giambattista's noble and tragic themes in the Villa, borrowed from famous works of Greek, Roman, and Italian literature. The Iliad of Homer (c. 750-650 BC), the Aeneid of Virgil (70-19 BC), Orlando furioso by Ariosto (1474-1533) and Gerusalemme liberata by Tasso (1544-1595) were the sources for the different scenes which, because of the small, almost intimate proportions of the rooms, are narrated with a certain simplicity and using a limited number of figures.

The characteristic element of the frescoes in the Villa Valmarana is the way in which the representations have been conceived as theatrical scenes, in which the various heroes act as if on the stage.