For sheer dazzling gorgeousness, precious few man-made objects hold their own against the paintings of Titian, the long-lived and enormously productive sixteenth-century Venetian, creator of the celebrates Assunta, the Baccus and Ariadne, the Venus of Urbino, and dozens of other masterpieces. The man loved paint. No painted loved it as much until the Dutch-born American Willem de Kooning came along in the twentieth century.
Titian reveled in color and texture and the play of light. Most of all he loved natural beauty — specifically good-looking women, undressed. His paintings throb with all kinds of ardor, and their gravitational pull changed art history; four centuries later, you can still feel the tug. Many of the best aspects of twentieth-century art come directly from Titian. Some of the worst do too. The man was important.
His early masterpieces, painted in the 1510s and the first part of the 1520s, have the clarity and super-saturated brilliance of a cloudless day. In his later work, painted until his death in 1576, the sharpness is gone but you see something new, the artist focusing his creative force not on the objects to be depicted but on the painting itself, on the wide-open problem of how to cover a flat rectangle with color.
The new idea underlying his later work emerges in such paintings as the Entombment (c. 1925) in the Louvre, with the startlingly close integration of its elements. The figures fill the frame. Energy echoes up and down a tight contrapuntal line of faces. The rust-orange theme-color leaps from garment to garment, then up to the sky; the dramatic close-in, low-down viewpoint pulls you in and makes the tight structure possible. You achieve such a painting not by working bottom-up — not by imagining the Virgin and Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus individually, then forming them into a group, then imagining the group from different angles. You work top-down. Here is a canvas; how do I fill it with force? For Titian (to overstate his approach only a little), paintings don’t exist to depict people, people are the raw material for paintings.
Earlier this year the Gardner Museum in Boston mounted a fascinating little show of Titian and the seventeenth-century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens (but mainly Titian). The exhibition is over, but the melody lingers on, and so do the star attractions: Titian’s Europa (1561) and Ruben’s Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (c. 1629). The Gardner owns both.
The Gardner Museum brought in from the Uffizi in Florence the Titian portrait that inspired Ruben’s Arundel. But the exhibition centered on a more spectacular juxtaposition: Europa and a painstaking full-size 1628 copy by Rubens (now owned by the Prado in Madrid).
Rubens is a great figure in his own right, but his Rape of Europa is hideous — in a fascinating way, that brings out Titian’s brilliance. For a few months the Gardner found a marvelous new way to illuminate its proudest possession.
Jupiter (the story goes) covets a beautiful princess named Europa. So he turns himself into a bull, gets the princess to hop aboard, and runs straight out to sea as she holds on for dear life. When they reach land, they gallop across the continent that is named in her honor.
Of course if you wanted to steal a princess, it’s unlikely you would start by turning yourself into a bull or, come to think of it, a ruminant of any kind. You’d want to hold onto your princess, and a bull can’t. This is important; the maiden has to cooperate or all bets are off, which means in turn that there is nothing grim or violent about the painting. As Titian sees it, Europa is terrified but ecstatic. Isabella Stewart Gardner, the American collector who opened her fancy villa to the public in 1903, described the piece beautifully: “Every inch of paint in the picture seems full of joy.”
So Europa clings to the bull’s horns and the beast splashes forward with a knowing smile; Titian has painted the suavest bull you’ll ever meet. Two cherubic winged putti hover like traffic-copters overhead, and a third trails the bull through the water as Europa’s companions call helplessly from the fast-receding shore.
The picture centers on a great vibrant arc of energy, sweeping from the sea- putto at the lower left up through Europa’s body, round the arch of her back- tilted neck, throat, and face to billow upward in a scarlet flutter of drapery to the pair of sky-putti and out the upper-left corner. The putti wheel and soar, the drapery floats, hooves splash, and the colors dazzle — they shouldn’t work together, yet they do. The copper-rosy sunset and scarlet cape are set off by the cool blue sky, and also by the turquoise water. Titian has built an astonishing unity out of a driving, soaring, screaming, splashing, billowing tumult.
And Rubens underlines Titian’s achievement by attempting the same feat and failing. The Rubens copy is literal, syllable-by-syllable, but the syllables don’t add up and the composition disintegrates. Titian makes Europa and her cape the curved keystone of an arch — a tense, springy arch full of energy, like a strung bow. But in Ruben’s version, the sky-putti stretch slightly farther to the right, the cape slightly farther left — and as a result the arch is gone; the bow snaps. Ruben’s sky-putti don’t soar — they hang in mid- air, but only temporarily, because the one on the right has clearly been shot down and is plummeting. And so Europa’s alarmed expression seems to mean, ” Look out for falling putto!”; the poor creature could easily hit her in the stomach. Rubens exchanges Titian’s outrageous palette for something a little more tasteful, restrained — a cape of cool crimson instead of warm scarlet, a sky washed clean of copper-rose; the results are boring and vaguely repulsive.
The Rubens and the Titian made a brilliant juxtaposition, a curatorial tour de force. But for some reason the curators don’t want to admit it. Titian and Rubens: Power, Politics, and Style is the name of the catalogue and the show, lest we get the wrong idea that the topic here is the mere art of painting. It seems that King Philip II of Spain commissioned a group of six paintings from Titian, leaving the subjects up to the artist. Philip ruled lands in Asia, Africa, and America as well as Europe — and so “the image of Jove leaping continents with Europa clinging to his back,” writes Hilliard Goldfarb in the catalogue, “carried a political implication for Philip quite apart from any sensual response it provoked.” This appears to be the exhibit’s central thesis — an interesting observation that has nothing to do with art; that adds nothing to our understanding of Titian’s achievement in Europa or of Ruben’s copy.
To seek the origins of twentieth-century art, dive into Titian. You discover as you go deeper that he approached women and men on very different terms, and that this difference is reflected in the art of our own era. It is a topic that fascinates us, supposedly — but we tend to be too squeamish to face it squarely.
Titian is supposed to be the “epic poet of sensuality,” as Kenneth Clark puts it, “an absolute master of flesh painting.” And Europa — this half- naked girl overwhelmed by a bestial male and loving it — is widely regarded as an erotic masterpiece. But I can’t be the only man in the world to find Titian’s women utterly unalluring. You might guess that we non-responders are put off by the artist’s fondness for the (so to speak) full-figured look, but that’s not the problem. Look at another hefty lady from the same era, Correggio’s Antiope in the Jupiter and Antiope of 1524. She lies sleeping with her head thrown back and lips slightly parted, abandoned (her face says) to ardent dreams, her intriguing mind set off by the cool, vulnerable stillness of her sleeping body as Jupiter tiptoes over for a look. Correggio’s figure is everything Europa is not: mysterious, alluring, beautiful.
The art critic Arthur Danto discusses in a brilliant short piece Titian’s Danae (a painting that is celebrated for demonstrating, among other things, that certain words simply cannot be pronounced). Danae, like Europa, is seduced by the ever-resourceful Jupiter, got up this time as a shower of gold. Alongside Danae, reports Danto, “the art of Florence” — Michelangelo’s art — “looks chill, abstract, contrived, cerebral.” And sure enough, there is nothing chill or cerebral about Danae or Europa. Nothing cerebral or even halfway intelligent. And exactly how fetching can a wholly non-cerebral woman be? Correggio’s Antiope thinks and is lovely. In Europa, the bull is smarter than the girl.
The issue goes deeper than erotic content, for Titian was a master of bodies but not faces. His faces tend to be beautifully rendered and completely predictable. His naked young ladies smile seductively, his mourners grieve, his saints are saintly, his revelers revel — so what else is new? They lack not merely erotic allure but spiritual depth.
Titian, says Danto, is warm; Michelangelo is abstract and chilly. But Michelangelo’s Virgin at San Lorenzo has more spiritual depth (pondering quietly with her far-away eyes) than all Titian’s paintings rolled together. And Michelangelo accomplished this feat at least a dozen times — created faces that are endlessly deep, infinitely moving, artistically perfect.
Some of Titian’s portraits do have convincing depth; they tend to depict men, for example the celebrated Man with a Glove (c. 1520) in the Louvre. Such late works as the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence (c. 1567) or the Munich Crowning with Thorns (1571) bring the extremes of good and evil together in a portentous, electric atmosphere that is dense with meaning. But the spiritual content of these greatly revered late paintings is conjured up by technical wizardry, by Titian’s amazing ability to paint light — not by psychological activity.
“The Venetian conception of painting went with an entire transformation in the materials of the artist,” writes Danto of Titian and the Venetian approach he epitomized, “with canvas esteemed for its texture and paint for its physicality and brushes for their gestural responsiveness.” “Pollock and de Kooning and the New York School,” he writes, “are in their philosophical address to art Venetian to the core.”
True. Titian predicts modern art. The greatest art of the twentieth century reflects his strengths and weaknesses. The best cut-outs of Henri Matisse, the best paintings of Stuart Davis and de Kooning are lyrical and ardent, with novel, gorgeous colors. They are overwhelmingly beautiful, and on the whole lack spiritual depth (although de Kooning’s best paintings, abstracts from the late 1940s and early 1960s, are deeper, it seems to me, than Titian’s best).
Modern painters have certainly shared Titian’s preoccupation with the naked female. His work marks the beginning of the long decline of the male nude. By the twentieth century, male nudes were virtually extinct: Lucian Freud and Alberto Giacommetti and a few others were interested, but Matisse and Pablo Picasso painted mainly women; even such masters as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and de Kooning depicted women, to the extent they depicted anybody. Titian’s truest modern disciple is Amedeo Modigliani, who was even more obsessed than the master with naked females. Modigliani painted nudes even warmer, more vivid, more spectacularly palpable than Titian’s — nudes who stare out at us with blank eyes in empty faces.
If Europa fails as pornography, at least it succeeds as art. That’s something. Perhaps it even succeeds as pornography. Having glanced at Titian’s differing approaches to men and women, we ought to glance at men’s and women’s differing approaches to Titian. The Gardner’s director Anne Hawley contributes the sharpest comment in the Titian and Rubens catalogue. On the wall directly beneath Europa, she notes, Mrs. Gardner mounted fabric from one of her favorite ball gowns. “She clearly identified herself with the picture and perhaps with Europa herself; could Gardner be suggesting that she has left her dress and dissolved into the picture as Europa?”
If the female lead is unattractive, it stands to reason that women in the audience will be less bothered than men. And it could be that women have always cared more for the erotic element in Titian than men have. Could be that men who find these paintings erotic are responding less to the art than to the female response it provokes. We know at any rate that in the Alcazar in Madrid, home of Spanish royalty, Europa, was displayed in a gallery that was closed to women — suggesting that men have long been disturbed by the female response to this painting.
But why read about Titian when you can look at his paintings? Europa is often called the finest European painting in America. Whether it is or not, it is beautiful and profoundly significant. It points the way to abstract art, and beyond abstract art. The artists who count most today bring the gestural freedom, inventiveness, and spectacular energy of abstract painting back home to representational pictures; they still look to Titian as a guide. He was a big man. There is no end of his influence in sight.
A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, David Gelernter wrote “Unresolved Evil: On Justice and the End of the Unabomber” in the April 6 issue.
