Look Upward, Angels

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo wanted people to look up to his art. He painted his most famous work on ceilings. Venetian by birth and rococo by temperament, the 18th century master loved to loft dangling goddesses, altitudinous angels and rafters of neck-craning cherubs. His specialty, naturally, was clouds, and his best work adorns sundry ceilings from Madrid's royal palace to Wurzburg's bishop's Residenz. Last week Tiepolo unexpectedly raised the roofs in London.

An enterprising and inquisitive art expert from Christie's auction house, David Carritt, 37, a protege of the late Bernard Berenson, followed up a report that a French international banker, who owned a London town house around the turn of the century, had bought and installed five Tiepolos, which, he believes, once graced the Paris home of Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild. "I'm always looking for Tiepolos," says Carritt, who visited the house, owned since 1923 by Egypt and now the United Arab Republic's embassy. In a twinkling, Carritt called the overhead oils authentic, potentially worth $700,000.

The central panel, "Time Abducting Beauty," is a paragon of Tiepolo's pagan allegories rich with Olympian overtones. Unquestionably it is the best Tiepolo in Britain, Carritt said, but despite popular demand, the public will not see it. At week's end TJ.A.R.'s President Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered his London embassy to have the Tiepolo paintings dismantled and shipped to Cairo. Nasser's reported plan: to exhibit them in the Egyptian capital, then offer them for sale to the world's museums. Said a curator of Britain's National Gallery: "It's a nasty blow, but since they're diplomatically immune, I suppose all we can do is salute when they go by."

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