Word: titian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ease of working in oil also invited painters to experiment with rapid, summary brushwork, often to produce passages of sketchy, indeterminate form. This was the technique that Tintoretto above all made his own. Thirty years younger than Titian, the son of a dyer - hence the name - Tintoretto was the only one of the Big Three born in Venice. He very briefly apprenticed with Titian but was driven out of the workshop, according to some sources, because Titian was jealous of Tintoretto's evident gifts. For whatever reason there was bad blood between them ever after, and there ensued many instances...
...Titian was the pivotal figure in all this. Born on the mainland in 1488, he was brought to Venice as a child and eventually apprenticed with the most poised and elegant of Venetian masters, the brothers Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. In the Bellini workshop he would have learned to render the many formats of Christian iconography - the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion - in the serene, harmonious manner that was Bellini's trademark...
...Serene, but a little static and ceremonious. The Virgin and Child with Saints, a panel painting from the Bellini workshop that was done in the years around 1505 when Titian worked there, is typical. Six gently realized figures are aligned simply in a row toward the viewer, barely acknowledging one another. The genre is called a sacra conversazione - sacred conversation - but nobody in this picture seems to be on speaking terms. Less than a decade later, in Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine, Saint Dominic, and a Donor, Titian, by then in charge of his own studio, brought the Virgin...
...Titian could do it all. He could make the conventions of Renaissance art more intimate and candid, or he could enlarge them, launching the Virgin theatrically into the heavens or planting her throne high among spectacular settings of classical arches and columns. It matters that he came of age just as artists were abandoning wood panels in favor of stretched canvas - especially in Venice, a maritime power where ship canvas was everywhere - and turning away from fresco or egg tempera to the relatively new and more pliant medium of oil paint. Drag a loaded brush over the textured surface...
...when the 60-year-old Titian was one of the best-known painters in Europe, the 30-year-old Tintoretto staked his claim to dominance with Miracle of the Slave, a tour de force crowd scene (not included in the Boston show) that he shrewdly unveiled while Titian was away from Venice so that the old man couldn't mobilize local opinion against it. With Tintoretto, the harmony and serenity of Bellini are entirely a thing of the past. Figures whirl, somersault and lunge like darts in and out of the picture. The palette is iridescent, and at close range...