Venice may be little more than a quaint tourist attraction today, but in the 15th century, it was one of the most powerful and important cities in the Western world. One of the few Italian city-states to retain its independence after the Renaissance, although it steadily began to lose its political power in the 16th century, it remains a significant and influential center of Western art to this very day. Among the great Venetian painters who contributed to Venice’s status and in helping create what would become known as “the Venetian style,” none is more celebrated than Titian. And with good reason.
Tiziano Vecelli, better known to us in the English-speaking world as “Titian,” was a student of the Venetian artist Giorgione da Castelfranco, better known today as “Giorgione,” a student of the pioneer of the Venetian style Giovanni Bellini. As in the development of intellectual ideas, the third iteration of a synthesized idea, following the positing of a thesis and then an antithesis, can help the idea reach its full potential (we know this simple principle as “the third time’s the charm”), so too often in art. With Titian, the third generation of the great Venetian Renaissance artists, the Venetian style reached its apogee. Under Titian, everything that became characteristic of the Venetian school of art — the strikingly sensuous use of color, the harmony and balance of composition, the full, voluptuous depiction of the human figure, and the exaltation of the beauty of nature as well as of the human form — attained a state bordering on perfection.
Some of the splendors of Titian, though far from all, are being showcased at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” exhibit in Boston through Jan. 2. Rather than a general artist retrospective, this themed exhibition is one for our times, centered on some of the animating political, sociological, and ideological currents of our age: gender, power, identity, and much else that has become characteristic of the postmodernist school of social awareness. Instead of focusing on the beauty of the Venetian style, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its international partners (this exhibit will next travel to London and Madrid) have created an exhibit that uses the beauty of Titian and the Venetian style to focus on some of the uglier aspects of human life. It does this by creating a narrative out of six paintings Titian painted for King Philip II of Spain between 1551 and 1562 together with commissioned responses to these paintings by less-heralded contemporary artists and reflections from contemporary thinkers and scholars. The purpose of these contemporary artists’ and scholars’ words and art, in the words of the curators, is to “challenge dynamics of gender and power” and highlight the theme of sexual violence in Renaissance art.
The six paintings on display in “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” are known today as the poesie (or “painted poems”) and are Titian’s re-imaginings of epic stories from classical Greece and Rome and retellings from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The centerpiece of the exhibit is Titian’s The Rape of Europa, a 70-by-81-inch oil on canvas painting in the Gardner’s permanent collection. The Rape of Europa depicts an episode from Greek mythology in which Zeus disguises himself as a bull in order to seduce Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king of Tyre. According to the mythological story, Zeus transformed himself into a white bull and wandered into Europa’s father’s property. When Europa saw the bull, she became enamored of it and hopped onto its back, whereupon the bull sprinted to the sea and swam with Europa all the way to Crete. Once there, Europa became Zeus’s wife, gave birth to the children who would become the legendary King Minos and the demigod (and later judge of the underworld) Rhadamanthus, and became the eventual namesake of an entire continent.
Certain mythological accounts title this story The Seduction of Europa, and Rembrandt titled his 1632 painting of this episode The Abduction of Europa. For Titian, however, even the term “abduction” did not quite capture the gravity of this encounter. To him, this was an outright rape, and he therefore titled his 1562 painting of the scene accordingly: Il Ratto di Europa. Although Titian intersperses the painting with several of the defining features of the Venetian school of art, such as voluptuous human and angelic figures and the distillation of light through the evocative use of color, this is not a painting in the vein of his teachers Bellini and Giorgioni’s The Feast of the Gods (1529) and Pastoral Symphony (1508) depicting an idyllic Arcadian landscape in which the gods and humans intermingle seamlessly with placid nature. Instead, the human figures in the painting, with Europa in the foreground and startled onlookers in the background, are in great distress, clearly distinct from the pleasant, nonthreatening nature. Europa, clothed in a fraying white dress and frantically waving a salmon-colored sheet, is lying prone on the back of the bull, struggling to break free of its control and signaling to the cherubic angels above her for help.
There is a dynamism in The Rape of Europa absent from the works of Titian’s Venetian predecessors and evident in Titian’s earlier works such as his magisterial (and also mythological-themed) Bacchus and Ariadne (1523). In The Rape of Europa, a later work of Titian’s, he has clearly borrowed from and refined the techniques of representing agitated humans moving through Arcadian nature. The light of the painting, however, is less sumptuous and bright than it is in Bacchus and Ariadne and in other representative works of the Venetian school. It is instead predominantly bluish and colder, with its portrayal of nature less lyrical and playful than it is shadowy and disquieting. It is as if Titian is subverting some of his own favorite styles and themes, as well as those of his Venetian masters.
The other Titian poesies on display in the exhibit, such as Danaë (1553) and Venus and Adonis (1554), share many of these stylistic similarities with The Rape of Europe. None, though, is as startling and as simultaneously monumental as the late-Titian masterpiece The Rape of Europa.
That Titian continues to speak to us and to artists today just as much as he did to Rubens and Velazquez is evidence of his enduring influence as a transformative artist and of his deserved reputation as one of the most essential painters in the history of Western art. That his art can be used to reflect upon issues of sexual violence speaks to his enduring relevance. But that his art can be used in a virtue-signaling manner coupled with the worst of wokist and postmodernist rhetoric and jargon — “gender,” “identity,” “agency,” and “power” — speaks to a more unwelcome trend in the politicization of art.
While art can be used to reflect upon contemporary political and sociocultural concerns, we should remember that the primary purpose of art is to cultivate an appreciation for the transcendent works of human beauty, truth, and greatness, and thus to inspire us to strive for beauty, truth, and greatness in our own lives, rather than to be able to come away from an exhibit saying, “Whoa, that Titian guy was pretty woke!”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Salzburg and the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
