Le Siècle de TitienLe Siècle de Titien: L'age d'or de la peinture à Venise by Gilles FageReview by: Wendy Stedman SheardArt Journal, Vol. 53, No. 1, Art and Old Age (Spring, 1994), pp. 86-89Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777544 .

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exhibition review

Le Si cle de Titien WENDY STEDMAN SHEARD

Gilles Fage, ed. Le Sitcle de Titien: Lage d'or de la peinture d Venise, exh. cat. Coor- dinated by Varena Forcione, with essays and catalogue entries by 22 contributors. 2nd ed. Paris: Editions des R6union Mus6es Nationaux, 1993. 755 pp.; 332 color ills., 397 b/w. Fr 390.00

Exhibition schedule: Grand Palais, Paris, March 9-June 14, 1993

How much of Venetian sixteenth- century painting is owed to the art and mind of Titian? This exhibi-

tion's nearly three hundred paintings, draw- ings, and prints from approximately one hundred museums, libraries, churches, and private collections, executed by Titian and thirty other artists, including Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, Lorenzo Lotto, Dosso Dossi, Pordenone, Girolamo Savoldo, Ro- manino, Jacopo Bassano, Andrea Schia- vone, Tintoretto, and Veronese, offered an unparalleled opportunity to assess Titian's influence on painters working in Venice, Padua, the Veneto, and elsewhere within Venice's mainland empire, as well as in Ferrara. The presence of ninety-six draw- ings and twenty-two prints was crucial to demonstrate a means of transmission of Titian's influence that did not depend upon direct experience of his paintings, many of which after mid-century were sent directly from his studio abroad to Emperor Charles V or King Philip II of Spain and thus were not seen by the Venetian public.

Although the eighty-four works here attributed to Titian working alone or in col- laboration far outnumbered the representa- tion accorded any other artist, a respectable sampling of work by the painters already mentioned, as well as a few others-some, like Giulio and Domenico Campagnola rep- resented only by drawings or prints- provided a rich context that encouraged viewers to ask what it was that other artists wished to, or were able to, take from the master. In trying to characterize sixteenth- century Venetian painting as a whole, the exhibition differed from the monographic Titian show of 1990, whose American venue

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FIG. 1 Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Man in Armor, ca. 1510, oil on canvas, 34/4 x 26 inches (cat. 391 Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.

was the National Gallery of Art in Washing- ton. That show celebrated the 500th anni- versary of Titian's birth, even though his precise birth date is unknown. Of the fif- teen paintings and three drawings attrib- uted to Titian that were borrowed from the Louvre for Le Sidcle de Titien, only two paintings, Man with a Glove (cat. 54) and Madonna of the Rabbit (cat. 160), had been in the 1990 show, and the latter painting in the meantime has been freed from its disfig- uring coating of dirt. A decisive role in formulating the image of Titian at the Grand Palais was played by paintings that are al- ways to be found in Paris, but now, newly cleaned and brought together as a group in the company of so many spectacular cog- nates, they were the focus of renewed atten- tion that encouraged the public's curiosity about the Louvre's future reinstallation of its Venetian Renaissance paintings. In fact,

the exhibition's emphasis on newly restored and cleaned works was to a considerable degree responsible for the brilliant dclat of its overall effect. Seven of the Louvre's Titians in addition to the Madonna of the Rabbit, as well as Bonifacio Veronese's Holy Family with Saints (cat. 62), Palma Vec- chio's Adoration of the Shepherds (cat. 59), and sixteen recently cleaned pictures from other museums, were publicly displayed here for the first time.

Titian's highly productive career spanned nearly eight decades, compared to the slightly more than one decade that fate permitted his slightly older contemporary Giorgione, who died in the autumn of 1510. And yet, paradoxically, sixteenth-century Venetian painting cannot be understood without confronting Giorgione's contribu- tion. In one sense, this exhibition suc- ceeded in doing so, through its emphasis on

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pictorial subjects and themes that Giorgione had introduced into Venetian painting. Its several romantic portraits, sometimes de- picting men who were not merely fashiona- bly melancholy, but actually ill or even an- guished (Dosso's Portrait of a Man from the Louvre; cat. 79), or preoccupied with death (Lotto's Portrait of Mercurio Bua from the Galleria Borghese in Rome; cat. 158), as well as many paintings that treat themes of music, pastoral life, chivalric revival, time, or love, could be interpreted as acknowledg- ments of Giorgione's role. By implication, then, any definition of Venetian sixteenth- century painting could be seen to depend on its new pictorial types, subjects, themes, psychological realism, and responses to the century's changing ethos, as well as on in- novations in style and technique.

Yet the difficult question of separat- ing the oeuvre of Giorgione from that of Titian at the point where they converge, during the few years just before Giorgione's death, was glossed over by the exhibition's ploy of assigning a few of the most hotly debated paintings to Titian, without any indication in their label texts that their attri- butions could be validly questioned, and by locating these works in a room that was physically removed from the space, close to the exhibition's beginning, occupied by works attributed to Giorgione. Viewers thus were discouraged from forming their own conclusions about attributions. The rhetoric of the installation demanded that they ac- cept the conclusions of the exhibition's orga- nizers, as embodied by the catalogue en- tries and essays concerning Giorgione and the early works of Titian, written by Ales- sandro Ballarin. The three most egregious instances of obscuring the actual absence of consensus on attribution were Susanna and Daniel, also known as Christ and the Adul- teress, a title still preferred by some scholars (Glasgow Art Gallery; cat. 42a, with a sep- arated fragment as cat. 42b), Virgin and Child with St. Anthony and St. Roch (Prado, Madrid; cat. 44), and the Louvre's own world-renowned Concert champ tre (cat. 43).

In the Giorgione room itself (room 2), however, admirers of this painter could ex- perience the intoxicating pleasure and men- tal stimulation of traveling back and forth between the Laura, the Man in Armor with His Servant, and the Boy with an Arrow (all three from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; cats. 27, 26, and 29); two pene- trating portraits by Giorgione, the Young Man (Staatliche Museen, Berlin; cat. 16) and Portrait of a Man (San Diego Museum of Art; cat. 28), and another portrait proba- bly by him of a lovesick young man wearing a reddish snood (Sz6pmiiv6szeti M6zeum,

Budapest; cat. 25); an exquisite, quintes- sentially Giorgionesque landscape with Boschian menace in its boulders and myste- rious vignettes (II Tramonto; National Gal- lery, London; cat. 20)-to be compared with the very early, and deceptively simple, Holy Family (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; cat. 15), which is surely by Giorgione, and with the Virgin and Child in a Landscape (Hermitage, St. Petersburg; cat. 17), which, to my eye, is not. Time has been unkind to the paint layers and underly- ing wood support-unusual in that it is not canvas-of The Concert (formerly called The Three Ages ofMan; Pitti, Florence; cat. 21), as has been revealed by its recent resto- ration. Nevertheless, this work can be sin- gled out as one of Giorgione's most char- acteristic inventions, to be profitably compared with Titian's version of it (also from the Pitti; cat. 45) as paradigms of each painter's approach to this intimate genrelike, yet densely allegorical and po- etic, new type that combines the themes of music, love, and time, and in so doing per- fectly expresses the spirit of the opening years of the century in Venice. La Vecchia (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice; cat. 24), comparable to The Concert in its fusion of portrait, genre, and allegory, pushes the latter picture's themes of time and death even further, adding the ironic touch of the old woman's lovesick gesture.

It then came as a shock to see, grouped together at the far end of the room, three paintings that almost no one except Ballarin accepts as autograph, and nothing in their labels differentiated their status from that of the pictures just mentioned. Two of them, The Singer and The Flute Player (both Galleria Borghese, Rome; cats. 30 and 31), betrayed their alien nature by too-large size alone-they dwarfed all other paintings by or attributed to Giorgione-as well as by their absurdly caricatural faces and exaggerated rhetoric. The third, a Concert from a private collec- tion (cat. 29), although by an artist who was capable of imitating some of Giorgione's mannerisms, in its morphologies and exag- gerated, broad portrayal of drunkenness falls far outside the limits of Giorgione's temperament. This conclusion was easily confirmed by comparing this repellent, charmless picture to Giorgione's exquisitely poetic Concert from the Pitti at the other end of the room-the fundamental difference between them had nothing to do with any intervening passage of time that might be postulated.

Similarly, Ballarin attributes to Giorgione as autograph works without any qualification the Knight and Page (Uffizi, Florence; cat. 22), the Double Portrait

(Museo di Palazzo Venezia, Rome; cat. 23), and the Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; cat. 18). Of these, only the third has any chance of being autograph, but its disturb- ing contrast between the flatness of the countenance and the build-up of pigment in the helmet diminishes this chance. To be sure, Giorgione did introduce into Venetian painting around 1500 a new double-portrait type featuring a man in armor (sometimes anachronistic armor) with his enamored page, inspired by the chivalric revival then in full swing that brushed a romantic gloss over the homoerotic implications of the situ- ation being depicted. In fact, a superb ex- ample of this type is Sebastiano's Portrait of a Man in Armor (fig. 1). Yet it has not been recognized as a double portrait because the artist, perhaps suffering from a failure of nerve, covered up the yearning face of the black page on the left with a thick layer of brilliant green paint. Giorgione's original invention is best demonstrated by the Knight and Page at Castle Howard, which was not included in the exhibition.

This invention is typical of Gior- gione's creative methods in bringing to- gether disparate sources, some literary and others visual, in a fashion that deliberately obscures them. What some of these sources were is interestingly explained by Ballarin, for example in his entry on the Uffizi Knight and Page; indeed, his investigations of some of Giorgione's inventions have yielded provocative results that illuminate Gior- gione's relationship to the surrounding ar- tistic, intellectual, and literary culture. Where his approach fails, in my opinion, is in his apparent inability to comprehend the difference between connoisseurship of pic- torial inventions, which depends upon one's understanding of an artist's characteristic way of formulating visual images in relation to ideas, and connoisseurship of individual pictures, which requires a sure grasp of exactly how that artist typically concretizes the resultant inventions using a unique manner of handling the materials of paint- ing. Unfortunately, Ballarin's choice of pic- tures to be attributed to Giorgione in this exhibition is often deprived of the benefit of this latter capacity. He appears to be exam- ining the artist's inventions as concepts di- vorced from tangible realizations-surely a worthwhile project. But then, ironically, he treats other artists' adaptations of them as if they were autograph works by Giorgione. Because of this deficiency, only half of Gior- gione's artistic personality is credibly dealt with by Ballarin.

After the initial cinquecento decade, in spite of the longevity of some of Gior- gione's favorite themes, his intimate poetry

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FIG. 2 Titian, Danae, ca. 1550, oil on canvas, 50% x 70% inches (cat. 1771 Prado, Madrid.

tended to be overwhelmed by the whirlwind of Titian's titanic personality and his cha- meleonlike adaptability to the century's changing demands. A remarkably early ex- ample of his new drama of impasto and scintillating brushwork is Titian's Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St. Peter of 1503-7 (Ko- ninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; cat. 40). Along with greater dy- namism and visibility of facture, the role of color in conveying volume and plasticity without the form-separating device of drawn contours, is already more pronounced. Yet Giovanni Bellini had anticipated the cre- ation of plastic form by a fusion of light and color, evident in his Virgin with Blessing Christ Child of 1510 (Brera, Milan; cat. 1), and the very late Derision ofNoah (ca. 1515; Mus6e des Beaux Arts et d'Archlologie, Besanqon; cat. 3), which Roberto Longhi called "the first modern painting" (quoted p. 271). Nevertheless, in its manic energy, the veritable fireworks display Titian cre- ated out of the Virgin's red dress in his Virgin and Child with St. Catherine, St. Dominic and a Donor (Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Mamiano de Traversetolo; cat. 47), a work nearly contemporary with Bellini's Virgin, makes Bellini's red seem serene and contemplative by comparison. The larger size of Titian's picture, 54? by 73 inches as against 33? by 451/4, points to the dramatic jump in size and scale that occurred within every category of painting-his St. John the Baptist of the 1530s (Gallerie dell'Ac- cademia, Venice; cat. 170), 78:4 inches high, and Crowning with Thorns of 1540- 42 (Louvre, Paris; cat. 171), just over 118 inches, continued the trend. The recent

cleaning of the latter picture has restored its incandescent hues of yellow, blue, rose, white, green, and gunmetal gray, which

gleam and flicker against the dark building behind Christ, assuring that painting's sta- tus as one of the exhibition's most acclaimed sensations.

A Carpacciesque Portrait of Two

Young Men painted shortly after 1500

(Louvre, Paris; cat. 5)-famous in the nineteenth century because both Eugene Delacroix and Edgar Degas made copies of

it-preserves the old formula, in which pa- trician youths stare impassively into space. Here, however, one man breaks the barrier of ideality by peering surreptitiously at the viewer. Very different in feeling, Titian's monumental half-length portraits that bring out the aggressiveness and self-importance of powerful European rulers, like his profile portrait of King Francis I of France of around 1538 (Louvre, Paris; cat. 169), were a significant departure from his earlier ro- mantic portraits such as the spell-binding Portrait of a Young Man of about 1515 (Hal- ifax Collection, York; cat. 52), which still retains an air of homage to Giorgione, five

years dead. Typical of Titian's interna-

tionally oriented state portraits is his Por- trait of Alfonso dAvalos, Marchese del Vasto of 1533 (on loan to the Louvre, Paris; cat.

166), in which d'Avalos, later captain gen- eral of Charles V's army in Italy, wears a

spectacular suit of armor inlaid with gilt filigree and, around his neck, the Order of the Golden Fleece. A sitter's disdainful ar-

rogance did not have to wait for Titian to

portray it in the 1530s, however-one need

only remember Andrea Solario's Portrait of

a Man with a Carnation of the mid-1490s (National Gallery, London)-yet that work, too, was painted in Venice.

Although most paintings included in the exhibition were religious subjects and portraits, its fifteen mythologies, four paint- ings of Venus or nymphs, and eight of musi- cians or concerts represent the century's marked increase in secular paintings other than portraits. Until Giorgione transformed the recumbent nude from a furniture deco- ration on the insides of trousseau chests that acted somewhat like an amulet or magic charm to produce a marriage's fecundity, erotic appeal had been virtually unknown in Venetian painting. The turning point was Giorgione's Sleeping Venus of 1507 (Staat- liche Kunstsammlungen Gemdildegalerie, Dresden)-a painting that Ballarin denies to Giorgione!-not lent to the exhibition because of its fragile condition. Another painting from Dresden, Palma Vecchio's Nymph in a Landscape of about 1518-19,2 would have supplied a missing link partic- ularly appropriate to Paris, since it is a direct ancestor of Edouard Manet's Olym- pia, as well as a trenchant example of how Giorgione's poetic invention was translated into a more direct and uncomplicated picto- rial type eagerly sought by collectors. Palma omitted from his Nymph the cupid holding a bird originally next to the feet of Giorgione's Venus, which had the effect of removing Palma's nude from the epitha- lamic context that made sense of Giorgione's cupid-cum-bird.3 In fact, Palma's nude re- clines on her discarded chemise while look-

ing directly out at the spectator-a prece- dent that audaciously anticipates Manet's Olympia. Thus, the disappointing absence of Palma's Nymph from Le Sihcle de Titien obscured the important role he played in the evolution of the reclining nude type. Al- though Palma's Nymphs at Their Bath (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; cat. 58), probably painted in the early 1520s, is indeed significant because it demonstrates the rapid diversification of the pastoral nude tradition, that picture lacks the element of direct confrontation, or psychological inti-

macy, that renders the Dresden Nymph so

original, and, perhaps, so surprising. Thus, no example of this earliest

pastoral or sylvan nude pictorial type was included in the exhibition. Certainly the Concert champitre cannot be considered

one, despite the presence of two nude fe- males. This painting constitutes the very definition of an early cinquecento poesia, Giorgione's new category of poetic subject that Titian was never comfortable with after

his Sacred and Profane Love of ca. 1514

(Galleria Borghese, Rome; not in the exhi-

bition), and which he in fact repudiated by

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his invention of a new type of mythological and sometimes ekphrastic poesia painting embodied by his three bacchanals for Al- fonso d'Este of Ferrara. Just how alien to Titian's erotic painting the Concert cham- p~tre is, was amply, if unintentionally, dem- onstrated by a veritable mini-exhibition within the larger exhibition. This was the large room in which no less than five of Titian's major erotic works were displayed in the company of the leviathan-but ruined-Jupiter and Antiope (also called the Pardo Venus; Louvre, Paris; cat. 165) from the hunting lodge of Philip II, which measures 77 by 151V2 inches. In this room the diversity and range of Titian's erotic painting were dazzlingly apparent.

The most overtly erotic painting, and certainly among the most ravishingly beau- tiful in form, color, and facture of the entire exhibition, is Titian's Dande of ca. 1550 (fig. 2), also painted for Philip II five or six years after Titian had completed the version owned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples).4 The

Danie is among the paintings that were cleaned expressly for this exhibition, al- though it was erroneously omitted from the catalogue's list of newly cleaned works (p. 10). How incredibly this picture not only anticipates, but realizes fully, the erotic mysticism of Titian's late paintings of the 1560s to his death in 1576 becomes evident when it is compared to two works dating from that late period, Venus and Adonis (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; cat. 256) and Venus Blindfolding Cupid (Galleria Borghese, Rome; cat. 258), a painting from which the discolored var- nishes and dirt that still clouded it in 1990 have happily been removed.

The Dande's supercharged, highly personal quality diverges from the more public, depersonalized sexual titillation of Venus and Cupid with an Organist (Prado, Madrid; cat. 176), even though both were executed at around the same time, and the comparison brings out the earthy and vo- luptuous lushness of the latter, expressed in parallel fashion by the landscape behind the parapet, as well as its elements of humor. In Dande, the artist's choice of a moment of submission to divine sexual pos- session triggered Titian's translation of imagined trans-human ecstasy into hues of red, white, gold, and brown, layered, dragged, and shaped with such agitation and passion that the viewer feels assaulted and catapulted into the same realm of the imagination. Still another sense of eroticism inhabits Venus at Her Toilet (fig. 3), a work of the mid-1550s that differs from the Prado pictures in mood, structure, and, presuma- bly, in intention. This Venus is an isolated

FIG. 3 Titian, Venus at Her Toilet, ca. 1555, oil on canvas, 49 x 411/2 inches (cat. 1781 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Collection.

being, rapt in contemplation of her face in a mirror held up by one cupid while another crowns her with a floral wreath. Her interior life seems worlds apart from the sensations of Dande and from the mild detachment o-5f the Venus who listens to Cupid's whispering as the organist stares at her genitals. This Venus sits upright, monumentally calm, not passively reclining and receptive. Exactly what she experiences remains mysterious, hidden from the viewer by her neutral expression--is the mirror image distorted to convey a threat of future disintegration? Is "Venus" an unapproachable goddess or a successful courtesan wrapped in a provoca- tive fur-lined cloak? On this occasion, de- liberately refusing to communicate the woman's inner world, Titian plays with the disjunction that separates desirable flesh and momentary sensuous experience from the myths, ideas, and abstractions of the mind, as, in both dimensions, he tantalizes the viewer.

How Titian's dramatic narratives, convincing and specifically formulated pa- thos, gestural energy, and painterly colorito continued to inform paintings of the late

cinquecentb around the time of his death and even afterward became clear in the exhibition's concluding rooms, where reli- gious paintings of overwhelming urgency and fervency represented the highly indi- vidual styles of Schiavone, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto, and Veronese. The recent Bassano exhibition at the Kimbell Art Mu- seum in Fort Worth,5 while it chronicled this artist's impressive career that was car-

ried on in a small town in the Veneto, still scarcely prepared one for the concentrated intensity of Bassano's paintings of the 1570s and 1580s, on view at the Grand Palais, dealing with the Passion and death of Christ.

For organizing an exhibition that made available such an extraordinary abun- dance and variety of Venetian Renaissance painting, drawing, and graphic work alongside reflections of it in the art of other masters who worked in north Italy, Michel Laclotte, director of the Louvre, deserves the gratitude of the many museum goers who, to judge by the crowds at the Grand Palais, remain keenly interested in this phase of art, one that was to affect in such crucial fashion the future of European, per- haps especially of French, painting. -

Notes 1. Susanna Biadene, ed., Titian, Prince of Painters, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1990). 2. Jlane Martineau and Charles Hope, eds., The GeniuLs of Venice, 1550-1600, exh. cat. (London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson with Royal Academy of Arts, 1983), 196 (ill. p. 66). 3. Jaynie Anderson, "Giorgione, Titian and the Sleeping Venus," Tiziano e Venezia (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1980): 337- 42. 4. Biadene, Titian, Prince of Painters, 267-69, cat. 40.

5. Beverly Louise Brown and Paola Marini, eds., Jacopo Bassano, c. 1510-1592, exh. cat. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Kim- bell Art Museum, and Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna, 1993).

WENDY STEDMAN SHEARD writes about Italian Renaissance art. In 1994 she will co-direct with

John T. Paoletti an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers to be held at Wesleyan University.

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