Clip: Sebald: Vertigo

Perhaps prompted by the pitiful pictures in the Krummenbach chapel, my mind turned to Tiepolo once again, and the belief I had held for a long time that, when he travelled with his sons Lorenzo and Domenico from Venice across the Brenner in the autumn of 1750, he decided at Zirl that, contrary to the advice he had been given to leave the Tyrol via Seefeld, he instead made his way westward via Telfs, following the salt wagons across the Gaicht Pass, through the Tannheim valley, over the Oberjoch and through the Iller valley into the lowlands. And I beheld Tiepolo, who must have been approaching sixty by that time and already suffered badly from gout, lying in the cold of the winter months at the top of the scaffolding half a metre below the ceiling of the grand stairway in the palace at Würzburg, his face splattered with lime and distemper, applying the colours with a steady hand, despite the pain in his right arm, onto the wet plaster of the immense, miraculous painting he was creating little by little. With imaginings such as these, and thinking about the Krummenbach painter who had, perhaps in the very same winter, toiled just as hard to represent the fourteen small Stations of the Cross as Tiepolo with his magnificent fresco, I walked on, the time being now about three o’clock, through the fields below the Sorgschrofen and the Sorgalpe, till I struck the road shortly before reaching the Pfeiffermühle. From there it was another hour to W. The last of the daylight was fading by the time I got to the Enge Plätt. To my left was the river, to the right the dripping rock faces through which the road had been blasted at the turn of the century. Above, in front and presently behind me th ere was nothing but the unstirring black pine forests.