The Eleven

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He was not tall, unobtrusive, but he held your attention with his feverish silence, his dark cheer, his alternately arrogant and oblique manner — grim, as they said. At least that was how he was seen later in life. None of that appears on the Würzburg ceilings, on the south wall of the Kaisersaal to be precise, in the wedding procession of Frederick Barbarossa, in the portrait Tiepolo left of him, when the model was twenty years old: he is there, so they say, and you can go see him, perched among a hundred princes, a hundred constables and ushers, as many slaves and merchants, porters, putti and animals, gods, merchandise, clouds, the four seasons and the four continents, and two incontestable painters, the ones who assembled the world that way in its exhaustive recension and are nevertheless of the world, Giambattista Tiepolo himself and Giandomenico Tiepolo, his son. So he is there as well, tradition has it that he is there, and that he is the page who bears the crown of the Holy Empire on a gold-tasseled cushion; you can see his hand under the cushion, his slightly tilted face is looking down toward the ground; his whole bent torso seems to accompany the weight of the crown: tenderly, suavely he gives way under the Empire.

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