Word: titians
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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 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...
...Venice from Verona - hence the name - and quickly became the third point in a triangular test of wills. Unlike Tintoretto, who struggled to find his mature style, Veronese shot out of the box as a boy genius - but a shrewdly humble one. Let Tintoretto play the role of Titian's perennial antagonist. Veronese would be the admiring pupil. Titian returned the favor by promoting Veronese whenever he could, especially for commissions that Tintoretto might be after...
...full of groupings that allow you to compare how all three artists handled similar subjects. At various times, each of them produced a rendition of the Supper at Emmaus, the story from the New Testament in which the risen Christ reveals himself to a pair of astonished disciples. Titian's came first, in 1533-34, a picture of masterly calm and balance that borrows the stabilizing horizontal format of Leonardo's Last Supper. In 1542 the young Tintoretto took on the same subject and made it a scrum, full of lunging bodies and energies exploding outward to the edges...