"I Luoghi dei Tiepolo in festa": The University Museum celebrates

02/24/2026

The European network of "Tiepolo Places" celebrates the birthday of Giambattista Tiepolo on 5 March. The University Museum is joining in the celebrations – and gives attention to Martin von Wagner's inspiration from the Venetian.

Creative copy: 18-year-old Martin von Wagner translated an etching by Giandomenico Tiepolo (right) into a red chalk drawing. (Image: André Mischke / Martin von Wagner Museum / Universität Würzburg)

The Tiepolo family - Giambattista and his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo - left works in many places. Their altarpieces in churches and chapels, their frescoes in villas and palaces, their drawings and paintings in galleries and graphic collections are spread all over Europe.

The "Luoghi dei Tiepolo" (Tiepolo Places) were founded five years ago with the medium-term goal of establishing a Council of Europe cultural route that would one day link all these places. The Martin von Wagner Museum at the University of Würzburg is a founding member and has been on the board of this network from the very beginning.

Every year, the now over forty members - municipalities, churches, museums, cultural associations, representatives from business and tourism - organise a wealth of events around Giambattista Tiepolo's birthday on 5 March: Guided tours, readings, lectures, concerts, theatre performances, excursions and other initiatives.

The young Wagner and the great Venetian

As every year, the Martin von Wagner Museum is also represented in the 2026 "Luoghi dei Tiepolo in festa" programme. On Thursday, 5 March, the actual day of honour, the Director of the Modern Department, Professor Damian Dombrowski, will talk about what Tiepolo meant to the young Martin von Wagner.

The fact that the latter was schooled by the great Venetian has hardly ever been discussed, as the focus has been too much on the later classicist Wagner. Yet it was only natural for a budding artist to turn to the most important painter of his century - especially when he was able to study him not only in his major works (namely the frescoes of the Residenz), but also in his graphic oeuvre.

Drawings and prints not only by Giambattista Tiepolo, but also by his son Giandomenico and their most important Würzburg collaborator Johann Georg Urlaub were present in large numbers in Johann Peter Wagner's collection when his son Martin took his first artistic steps. What has survived of this collection can now be found in the Würzburg University Museum.

Early Würzburg years at the centre of the lecture

In order to outline the inspirational relationship between Tiepolo and Wagner, Dombrowski traces the production of drawings from the early Würzburg years: from 1785 to 1797, from the first copies after Tiepolo, which the eight-year-old Wagner made, to the beginning of his studies at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Tiepolo is more present here than previously thought.

The framework for this lecture is our current special exhibition "IDEA AND LINE | Italian Drawings from the Collection of Martin von Wagner" and the accompanying publication "An Artist's Choice: Italian Drawings from the Collection of Martin von Wagner".