Word: titians
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...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...
...irresponsible. Yet museums still feel obliged to lend paintings as hostages to others to ensure reciprocal loans. Only this can explain, for instance, why the National Gallery refused to move its Feast of the Gods (the figures by Bellini, the deep and magically sonorous landscape background by his apprentice Titian) a few city blocks to the Phillips Collection's "Pastoral Landscape" show in 1988, whose centerpiece it should have been, but had no compunction about flying it back and forth across the Atlantic in 1990. There is something opportunistic about such policies, and this show will be remembered...
...Titian exhibit short on masterpieces...