Word: titians
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...table is not an isolated case. In its upper reaches, the art market has been afflicted with a kind of collective hysteria, a St. Vitus's dance of zeros across the checkbook: $5,544,000 for a Velasquez; a Titian, The Death of Actaeon, sold to Paul Getty for a little over $4,000,000; last week a Renoir, purchased for $16.80 a century ago, fetched $1,159,200 at a London auction. The list could be prolonged almost indefinitely, and will be: before the '70s are out, the first $10 million painting will probably have gone under...
...been so forked by the crisis of how to relate to it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when art transactions were simpler and the founding of massive collections was an undisguised form of plunder, the problem was not consciously manifest. But in America today, nobody needs another Titian-not at these prices. The right to art by force of arms, which produced much of the Louvre's collection, has been superseded by an equally debatable "right" to art by force of buying power. Hence such misfortunes of cultural ecology as the steady leakage of major paintings across...
Another Berenson-directed investment, and this time one that would pay off as one of the greatest Italian paintings the world would ever see, was Titian's Rape of Europa. Few paintings have served as such imaginative inspiration to other artists; it is known that Rubens and Sir Joshua Reynolds had copies from the original in Venice; this painting also influenced Van Dyck and Rembrandt, as well as the Spanish school (e. g. Velazquez). The picture is of a white bull carrying away the swirlingscafed Europa on his back; blue vs. red is the dominant color scheme typical of Titian...
...Bellinis to be seen anywhere in Europe. Every detail, from the folds of the saint's robe to the squirrel on a branch behind him, was imagined and recorded by Bellini as the concrete signs of God's grace investing the world. Bellini came 50 years before Titian, but 100 years before him Paolo Veneziano demonstrated to Venetians, in works like The Birth of St. Nicholas, that paintings did not have to be as flat and hieratic as the Byzantine style dictated, producing pictures with depth and visual drama that have their own particular authority...
Those given to pessimism may reflect that after the Apocalypse, when Palazzo Strozzi, Santa Sophia and Chartres are dust and every Titian in the world has been reduced to radioactive tinder, Stone Mountain may yet survive...