The Glorification of the Barbaro Family by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

This is The Glorification of the Barbaro Family, painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo around 1750, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a fragment of a much larger ceiling fresco made for a single room in the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, a room whose decoration famously cost more than the entire building had.

Look up with the painting. At the apex, the winged figure of Fame blows a golden trumpet whose diagonal line cuts across the whole composition. Below, members of the Barbaro family recline on clouds, gazing upward as if they have already been received into heaven. The warm gold behind the figures grades into a cool blue void at the center, Tiepolo's signature trick for making a flat plaster ceiling feel like infinite open sky.

The Barbaro were one of Venice's great patrician families, patrons of Veronese and Palladio before Tiepolo. By 1750 they wanted an illusion that would outlast them, a painted argument that their name belonged among the eternal. They paid for the best ceiling painter in Europe and got exactly the advertisement they commissioned. The fresco was removed from the palace in the 19th century and eventually found its way to New York.

Next time you walk under a painted ceiling, ask whose money put it there. That is the real subject above you.