Word: titians
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...Marie-Therese Walter, 1931, whose erotically swollen blimp of a nose is based on an effigy he owned of the fertility goddess Nimba from the Baga. The sight of these two sculptures confronting each other is as much a spectacle of parity as a Rubens beside its prototype, a Titian...
...taste, produced after 1925. Today his work goes for big prices and is assiduously promoted. It is therefore not surprising that the Biennale should devote several rooms to him. However, the qualities of La Pittura Colta go far beyond, or below, De Chirico's fussy homages to Rubens, Titian or Fragonard. Its exponents, such as Carlo Maria Mariani, Stefano di Stasio or Omar Galliani, never use such "warm" sources. As shown by Mariani's Ercole che Riposa, they prefer the cold touch of marble and the frigid contortions of mannerism. Their dream of beauty is a simpering Apollo...
This enormous late work casts its ghostly and turbulent shadow over the whole gallery where other Titians, Veroneses and Moronis hang. Its subject is probably the most repulsive in the classical lexicon: the implacably vain Apollo has beaten the satyr Marsyas in a music contest judged by the nine Muses; now he collects his forfeit, which is to skin Marsyas alive. Renaissance humanists turned this myth into a fable of reason triumphing over darker instincts, and it was in that sense that Titian meant to paint...
...decide which is more horrible, the matter-of-factness of the Venetian lap dog, familiar from many a Carpaccio, licking up the satyr's blood, or the prim, detached attentiveness of Apollo as he peels the skin. Yet the whole unlikely scene is anchored by one riveting device: Titian must have seen boar hunts in the woods around his native Cadore, and the satyr is strung on the tree like a wild pig ready for dressing, every stiff hair on his matted legs contributing its realism to the myth. On the right is another of Apollo's victims...
...Titian got wilder as he grew older, and his range, well represented in this show, now seems a wholly epic form of human character. It moves from the tenderness of his child portraits and the demure, precise eroticism of early works like Salome through the powerful confidence of his portraits and the majestic diction of the Escorial's recently cleaned Christ on the Cross, and so on to the late works...