Word: titian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nevertheless, for most of his career Titian's pictorial elocution was so smooth, so inventive, so grand in its effects and masterly in its execution that it created a sense of helplessness in others. He was the 16th century's unrivaled topographer of male power and female beauty, as Rubens (whose conception of artistic prowess was modeled on Titian's) was in the 17th. Titian pushed the description of masculine character farther than any portraitist before...
...idea that a portrait should be the "mirror of the soul" as well as a formal utterance about appearance and rank was not born with Titian; Leonardo, Botticelli, Durer and Van Eyck were all his elders, and in his youth he worked with Giorgione, the most shadowed and inward looking of Venetian quattrocento painters, on the fresco decorations of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Giorgione's ambition to paint people in the act of thinking, to invent signs for internal reflection as well as external show, was carried forward by Titian into works such as the Louvre's Man with...
...projection of character reached new levels with Titian, just as the dramatic exploration of character and foible, already a mainspring of English plays before the early 17th century, had to wait for Shakespeare to disclose its full power. "There's no art/ To find the mind's construction in the face," complained Duncan in Macbeth, but he was a primitive Scot; after Titian, there emphatically was such an art. The fierce, glaring authority of Doge Andrea Gritti; the plump self-assurance of the Florentine historian Benedetto Varchi; the saurian cunning of old Pope Paul III, huddled in his velvet cape...
There were, however, limits. Character, for Titian, was something mainly possessed by men. His women are by no means insipid or vacant, but they never have the singularity of being that leaps from his best male portraits. They are always cast in the passive voice: the madonnas with their union of tenderness, patrician grace and a certain country solidity, and the nymphs and goddesses (Venus especially), those Venetian odalisques whose weighty gold- pink flesh may not conform to modern conventions of beauty but excited Titian's contemporaries to rapture. There too Titian embodied the assumptions of his time, place...
...last full-dress Titian show took place more than a half-century ago in Venice in 1935. This summer its successor is on view in the Doges' Palace, and it will travel, in a much truncated form, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, opening Oct. 28. The incompleteness of the Venice show, which is more a generous sampler than a true retrospective, and the even more fragmentary character it will have in Washington, testifies that the day of the big single-master show is closing...