Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese
The Louvre
September 17-January 4, 2010
The 16th century--the Cinquecento--marks the golden age of Venetian painting. Today the canvases of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese may seem like the ultimate Old Master art, yet this exciting exhibit (subtitled Rivals in Renaissance Venice) aims to show how contemporary these works once were: experimental, bold, and even shocking.
Titian (c. 1488-1576) was the supreme figure in Venetian art from 1515 on. His extremely long life meant that the younger painters Tintoretto (1518-1594) and Veronese (1528-1588) overlapped creatively and professionally with him for nearly 40 years.
By significantly grouping two or three canvases, curator Frederick Ilchman has lovingly re-created, through carefully chosen juxtapositions, the heated atmosphere of artistic creation in the 16th-century republic, showing how these younger men forged their own distinct painterly styles by responding to Titian and each other, and demonstrating in the process how competition inspires the achievements of even the greatest artists.
At the start of the show we see two religious pictures, one by the young Titian and the other by his teacher Bellini. These are examples of a popular Venetian genre, known as a Sacra Conversazione, a "sacred conversation" among the Virgin, Child, and saints. Bellini's panel has a ravishingly beautiful palette, but the holy protagonists gaze out at us rather than at each other and seem frozen, aloof, disconnected.
Titian, by contrast, invites us into a silent narrative. On the right, St. Dominic and the donor seem to have just arrived, drawing the gazes of the Virgin and Child toward the fervent supplicants. We see Titian building on the broad and firm foundation of his teacher while developing a highly original way of conceiving and dramatizing his subject. We are especially taken by the handsome, idealized Saint Dominic, and the sensitive face of the donor qualifies as an early Titian portrait of distinction.
For it was in the field of portraiture that Titian marked out his claim to fame. With his magical ability to paint men and women of high rank not as they were but as they wished to be, Titian endowed his sitters with the nobility, power, and dignity that a ruler must have but that may have eluded many of them in real life. He thereby established the conventions of aristocratic and kingly portraiture.
A prime example of Titian's portraiture is the closeup of the 74-year-old Paul III, the last of the Renaissance popes, the reluctant reformer of the church, and the patron of Michelangelo's
Last Judgment. Sitting on his throne, he seems to have just turned to look at us from atop a mountain of crushed velvet, his dark, arresting eyes full of reason and the will to power.
After confronting Titian's portrayal, one cannot conceive a more monumental, direct, or forceful image of this paragon of spiritual and worldly power. With this work, the artist won international fame the sort of which had never before been conferred on an
artist. Other great portrait painters such as El Greco and Velázquez learned a great deal from him, but it is arguable if any later painter ever surpassed this portrait.
Titian's mid-career success around 1645 with the international elite opened up opportunities in Venice for younger men. First among these was Tintoretto, whose smoldering self-portrait announces his arrival as an ambitious, confident risk-taker. While Titian brooded over his compositions for months and even years, Tintoretto marketed himself as a kind of anti-Titian, painting large canvases at great speed while cutting prices and even giving his work away to the various Venetian confraternities that were so much a part of the Serene Republic's social network.
One of the important patrons he sought out was the brilliant satirist, writer, and publicist Aretino, offering this close friend of Titian a painting for his ceiling with the self-referential Flaying of Marsyas, a learned and cheeky calling card that announced his challenge to the older master.
As a way of further differentiating himself, Tintoretto began a long study of Florentine design, going so far as to display in his studio the motto "the draftsmanship of Michelangelo, the coloring of Titian." Tintoretto's Baptism of Christ, with the towering, muscular bodies of Christ and the Baptist, is a brilliant example of this synthesis.
