Word: titian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately, De Chirico had nei ther the technical proficiency nor the mastery of drawing to reach his declared goal: a delayed place in the Renaissance tradition. His mythological scenes, in imitation of Titian, were leaden and vacuous; his nudes, meant to emulate Rubens, had the consistency of overboiled gnocchi; homage kept turning into parody. In the meantime De Chirico railed furiously at the modern movement; Braque and Matisse were "malodorous" and surrealism was a brainless obscenity...
...British lion has been unable to compete with Americans, Japanese, and assorted European collectors in the all too open international art market. As a result they have begun to concentrate on simply hanging onto whatever treasures they already have. They rallied round to raise $4 million, thus saving a Titian. But another masterpiece ?Velásquez's portrait of his assistant Juan de Pareja, for example, was snatched from them in 1970 by a $5.5 million offer from New York's Metropolitan Museum. This Christmas, though, Britons had an art-treasure story with a happy ending that was almost Dickensian...
...common as seagulls; the rarities are old. A special aura clings to the late works of old men who can sum up a lifetime's deposit of knowledge in a final burst of invention. One thinks of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, of Titian at 90 or Bernini at 75; or, in our century, of Henri Matisse, who died in 1954 at the age of 85. The last two decades of his life were increasingly spent on making works in paper. Ensconced in the south of France, first at Nice and later in the town of Vence...
...treaty between Spain and England, for which Charles I duly knighted him), Rubens the court portraitist served as splendid cover for Rubens the agent. He spoke five languages fluently, knew almost everyone of significance in the worlds of politics, scholarship and art, and was the proper heir to Titian's role as "prince of painters and painter of princes." (By a slightly eerie coincidence, Rubens was conceived in the provincial Westphalian town of Siegen in 1576-the year Titian died in Venice.) He was born poor and in exile from Antwerp; he would die with immense wealth, with kings...
Rubens was not an esoteric artist. The world did not veil itself from him in ambiguities. Perhaps no other painter since Titian displayed such an assured possession of his own experience, and beside it, even Picasso's notable lebenslust seems rather cramped. In a sense, Rubens was to the 17th century in Europe (he died in 1640) what Picasso was to the first half of the 20th. But Rubens' influence then went on, which Picasso's shows no sign of doing, for another 200 years. First there were his ex-students, Anthony Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens...