Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Elizabeth Cropper, dean
of the Center for Advanced Study
in the Visual Arts,
and on behalf of the trustees
of the National Gallery,
I want to welcome you all here
this afternoon.
It's my very great pleasure
to introduce Stephen J.
Campbell, the Henry
and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld
professor of art history
at Johns Hopkins University.
I'm fairly certain that Sydney
J. Freedberg, in whose memory
this annual lecture has been
endowed by his family,
would be pleased by Stephen's
appearance on the podium today.
Not only does Stephen Campbell
share Sydney Freedberg's
lifelong passion
for Italian Renaissance art,
but like Sydney, Stephen has not
been afraid to take
on big projects,
even while delving into some
of the lesser known, even
eccentric artists of the period.
Nothing, I think we all agree,
will ever
be comparable to Sydney
Freedberg's
monumental Pelican volume,
Painting in Italy,
1500 to 1600, first published
in 1971.
But together with Michael Cole,
Stephen Campbell embraced
the same grand challenge just 40
years later, publishing
Renaissance Art in Italy,
1400 to 1600, and more recently,
appearing in a Japanese edition,
I would say.
So I think this volume is
likely to have a very large
influence
beyond its original
English-speaking audience.
In his Pelican volume,
Sydney Freedberg found room
for Pordenone and Foppa, Lotto
and Moretto, as well as Titian
and Tintoretto.
For Freedberg, such artists,
however important,
remain provincial.
But Campbell has come
to understand them as
eccentric in the true sense
of being away from the center
and not conforming
to classical ideals.
Stephen's current interests are
the dynamics of art production
and the geography of style
continues to find resonance,
however, in, for example, Sydney
Freedberg's view of a city
like Cremona as,
quote, "A pregnant example
of the process of formation
of artistic style
by intersection."
A very good Sydney Freedberg
sentence.
[LAUGHTER]
Stephen Campbell received
his PhD from the Johns Hopkins
University
after studying at Trinity
College Dublin
and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Like other Hopkins graduates
of note, he's combined
his academic teaching
and publication
with participation
in exhibitions and other museum
projects.
After his book on Cosme Tura
in 1997, came the exhibition
on Tura at the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum in 2002.
After The Cabinet of Eros:
Renaissance Mythological
Painting and the Studioli
of Isabella and Alfonso
d'Este in 2006
came the invitation to help
organize the exhibition that
just opened at the Getty Museum
on the Renaissance nude.
Other publications on Rosso,
Fiorentino, Bronzino,
the Carracci, Giorgione,
and many others are just too
numerous to describe here.
But I will mention that his 2017
Bettie Allison Rand Lectures
at Chapel Hill devoted
to Mantegna
will soon appear, as will
his ambitious volume
on The Endless Periphery:
Towards a Geography of Art
in Lorenzo Lotto's Italy.
His Freedberg lecture,
"Against Titian,"
today is closely related
to the long- term interest
in analyzing
the critical geography
of the history
of Italian Renaissance art
that this book represents.
Please join me in welcoming
Stephen Campbell.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much, Elizabeth.
It's so exciting to be here
in Washington
to do this lecture.
It's also a very exciting week
to be in Washington
for other reasons.
[LAUGHTER]
It's really great to see so
many old friends,
recent friends, and colleagues
from Baltimore, and from DC,
and from a lot of other places.
It's really terrific.
And just before beginning,
I need to thank Catherine
Freedberg for enabling this very
important series of lectures
in which Titian has featured
more than once.
And which, as Elizabeth pointed
out, Sydney Freedberg,
it is an artist Sydney Freedberg
has written about a great deal
and is one of the most
persuasive and intelligent
commentators on Titian
I think that we have.
So thanks to Catherine
Freedberg.
Thanks also to Elizabeth Cropper
and to the deans of CASVA, Peter
Lukehart and Therese O'Malley
for this invitation.
And I'd like to thank, also,
Jennifer Rokoski
for her organization.
I feel like I'm supposed
to start playing now instead
of speaking.
[LAUGHTER]
In a letter of 1553
to the sculptor-architect Jacopo
Sansovino, Pietro Aretino took
aim at the recently fashionable
debate on whether painting
or sculpture was
the superior art.
"This is a question that has
been fought over
not only more times than there
are marbles and pigments
in the world, but more than
there are fanciful notions
among those who carve and paint.
Asking for my judgment in such
a matter--"
which apparently Sansovino had--
"is a madness that only madness
would endorse, since I little
venture into making judgments
on that which
is impossible to judge,
as long as there's being disegno
in painting and sculpture.
To oblige you in this
would be like trying to make
a comparison
between divine providence
and human folly."
In other words, Aretino thought
the paragone-- so-called
paragone debate-- was a waste
of time.
And now, he was complaining
about a state of affairs
that he had helped to bring
about.
While the previous century had
seen the development of a body
of words and concepts
through which artists
communicated to each other
and to their publics about what
they were doing, the role
was non- specialist
in the production of art theory
and criticism
and the popularity of art
as a topic
across many different kinds
of writing
had led
to the monotonous circulation
and repetition of formulas,
like the so-called paragone.
When critical terms have become
familiar and banal,
to what extent are they really
useful for understanding
ambitious art?
In art- historical writing
for the last few decades,
the precepts of 16th- century
art criticism
have been an essential key
to understanding
artistic practice.
But sometimes to a point where
anything that can't be described
in these terms is simply not
available to inquiry.
Such a state of affairs
has beset the study of Titian
in particular.
His painting has often been
treated as if it were no more
than a painted illustration
of what his contemporaries wrote
about it.
And the analysis of which,
terms such as these--
colore, colorito, venezianità,
poesia, and so on--
have circulated repetitively.
Since the late 1500s,
Titian has been the artist
of the natural and the sensuous,
facilitating a later
academic construction of Titian
and his art that persists
to the present day.
So he's the artist
of the mirror, who holds
the mirror up to nature,
and also the artist
of the sensuous
and nude in academic theory,
as you can see in Hans Makhart's
decoration
for the Kunsthistorisches Museum
in Vienna.
And by the mid- 1500s, Titian
would have found himself
conscripted into a different
kind of critical paragone, one
that understood multiple
practices of Italian art
in terms of a narrowing array
of regional styles--
the Roman, the Venetian--
held to be polemically
opposed one to the other.
Titian lived through a phase
of what we call canon formation,
his aftermath we still live
with,
which culminated in the rise
of institutional authority,
the academies,
and the assignment
of absolute trans-historical
value
to certain artistic proper
names.
With the publication of Vasari's
Lives in 1550, expanded
in the addition of 1568,
artists throughout Italy
were faced with the possibility
that where they trained
and where they worked might be
a liability to their reputation.
Vasari's invention
of the Renaissance
had geographical, as well as
historiographical, consequences.
Because for this most partisan
of writers, geography was
destiny.
Readers were
aware of the regionalist
ideology at work in the Lives,
and among the first of the local
rejoinders was Lodovico Dolce's
Aretino, published in Venice
in 1557, a scathing attack
on the Florentine Michelangelo,
championed by Vasari, that
insisted on the superiority
of Titian.
Among artists, the documented
16th-century response
to Vasari's Lives
in northern Italy
was almost uniformly hostile.
Both El Greco, and the Bolognese
Annibale Carracci in their notes
in the margins of Vasari
decried the Tuscan writer
as a liar, taking him to task
for his belittling treatment
of great North Italian artists
like Correggio.
I'm putting Correggio
on the screen for a second,
because he comes back a number
of times in the lecture.
The great dome in Parma
Cathedral.
And Vasari alleges
that Correggio was always--
could always only ever be--
provincial because he never went
to Rome.
Annibale's anti-Vasarian
initiatives had the broadest
impact--
and, well, himself and the other
Carracci-- because they were
grounded in a new approach
to artistic theory and practice
and to an understanding
of Italian arts in a far more
geographically inclusive sense.
The Milanese painter and writer,
Gian Paolo Lomazzo perhaps went
furthest to formulate
the principles of a more
inclusive trans-regional account
of Italian art, some would say
in a characteristically
mannerist way.
In the allegorical conceit
of his idea of the temple
of painting, Lomazzo imagined
Italian painting as a system,
or structure, of mutually
reinforcing parts,
sometimes
analogous to a human body,
but predominantly as a round
temple supported by seven
columns, each corresponding
to one of the seven governors
of the arts:
Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo,
Titian, Mantegna, Polidoro da
Caravaggio, and Guadenzio
Ferrari.
Now, reading Lomazzo's Idea
a few years ago,
I was surprised to see
an element of hesitation
regarding the relative merits
and canonical status of Titian
as opposed to Correggio.
Lomazzo wonders whether he
should, after all, have included
Titian as one of his seven
governors.
"I must not neglect to mention
here," he says,
"that some painters have
criticized me for not having
chosen Antonio da Correggio
in Titian's place."
Now, the hint that there is
something
provisional or discussable
about Titian's inclusion
points us towards a broader
ambivalence about Titian
in late 16th-century Milan.
In another ambitious work
of Milanese art criticism,
Gregorio Comanini's 1591
dialogue, Il Figino, On the Ends
of Painting,
Titian
and other Venetian artists
are conspicuous
by their complete absence.
Discussions of Raphael,
Michelangelo, and Lombards
like Arcimboldo, you see here,
are abundant.
The silence of Comanini
corresponds to a deeply
conflicted recognition
of Titian's exemplary status
on the part of younger artists
in Milan where Titian was
primarily represented
by his 1542 Crowning With Thorns
for Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Now, to be sure, at least two
of Lomazzo's
Milanese contemporaries,
Simone Peterzano of Bergamo
and Giovanni da Monte
from Crema, claimed to be pupils
of Titian.
It is worth asking why they
advertise this connection
since there is
no visual evidence of training
under Titian
or any signs of discipleship
or affiliation
in the works themselves.
We know that Giovanni, an artist
who would end his career
in the service of the Emperor
Maximilian II,
copied Titian's famous series
of the Caesar's in the Ducal
Palace of Mantua.
That seems to be as far as it
gets.
His major works all seem
to attach themselves
to another artist from Veneto,
dead since 1539,
but who cast a long shadow
across Northern Italy
through the ongoing impact
of works like these.
So when we look at Giovanni da
Monte here,
I think we're encouraged
to think about Pordenone, who
is, at that time,
would have been regarded
as a rival of Titian.
In Hapsburg Milan, associating
yourself
with the favorite artist
of Charles the V and Philip II
could win you commissions.
Just another glimpse
of this astonishing, tumultuous
world of illusionism
and violence, you know,
of Pordenone.
So Peterzano places
the signature, Simon
Peterzanus/Titiani Alumnus--
in his-- that's Simone
Peterzano, the pupil of Titian--
in his circa 1575 Lamentation
for the Veronica Chapel at Santa
Maria della Scala.
The tight brushwork
and unbroken fields of color
in particular
are a complete departure
from Titian's characteristic way
of painting since the 1540s,
and in fact,
are reminiscent of local Lombard
painters,
like Moretto or Savoldo,
with their silvery palette and
smooth handling.
There is no attempt in Peterzano
or Del Monte's work to emulate
the blazing, fiery tones,
or the loose brushwork of Titian
by mid-century.
As a passion subject,
Peterzano's Lamentation might
especially seem to call
into question the authority
of Titian's most visible work
in Milan.
Admittedly, modern Titian
scholars have themselves been
uneasy about this painting,
either
because its violent subject
matter is supposedly
uncongenial to a painter whose
forte was the female nude--
people have actually written
this--
or because it suggests a too
tentative dialogue with Central
Italian art.
The carceral masonry,
with the scowling bust
of Tiberius on a lintel,
provides the setting
for the iconic moment of torture
to which the Milanese
confraternity of the corona--
they're dedicated to the crown
of thorns--
were dedicated.
Christ, appropriately,
is modeled on the preeminent
classical archetype
of suffering, the Belevedere
Laocoön.
I'm always staggered by the legs
and what they do to the legs
of the Laocoön.
This is Titian three years
before he goes to Rome.
This painting is full of disegno
already.
It is perhaps not surprising
that the 16th- century
artistic reception of Titian's
Crowning with Thorns
also revealed a distinct pattern
of unease.
However, it was less
the violence of the work
than its general inscrutability
that was the problem.
When artists responded
to the painting, they generally
found that something needed
to be fixed,
that certain relationships
needed to be clarified,
and that the emotional register
of the image, even
the legibility of its narrative,
was strangely indeterminate.
It is as if there was
another set of concerns at work,
quite
incidental
to the tragic representation
of a scriptural event.
How are these two most forwardly
placed figures--
a soldier in chain mail, whose
right arm
encircles the shoulders
of a helmeted man in green--
to be understood in terms
of the logic of the narrative?
They seem, above all, to present
a disruption or suspension
in the violence enacted
against the person of Christ.
The helmeted figure,
his expression scarcely legible
an area of shadow, tentatively
handles the reed, a soldier's
mockery of a regal scepter
in Christ's hand.
The man in green, in so far
as his pose is legible,
seems to be genuflecting.
It is not clear whether we are
to understand the other figure
as restraining him
or if his turning away
of his head
is supposed to convey repugnance
at the bloody spectacle.
The left hand of the figure
in chain mail seems to tie fast
the bonds around Christ's
wrists,
resulting
in a disturbing spatial anomaly.
The soldier's elbow was level
with his tie,
but Christ's wrists
are withdrawn to his body
and should be out of reach
of the soldier's hand.
There's a sense
that the composition has been
produced through a process
of addition
by a grafting
of heterogeneous elements
and that this is a kind
of montage
without a final synthesis.
It is in manifest in a lack
of resolution about the actions
that are depicted
and about the emotional tenor
of the work,
as if it seems to block
or interrupt one kind of appeal
to the beholder--
the iconic suffering face
of Christ--
with another-- the
inward-leaning, introspection
of the picture's interior
by figures viewed from the back.
As much as this is the attitude
of torturers
intent on desecrating the image
of God on Earth,
it could equally be described
as a kind of embodied empathy,
a desire
for immersive connection
with the Man of Sorrows,
analogous to that
of a devout beholder
before the image.
I think this takes us
to the heart of one of Titian's
leading preoccupations
throughout his career,
and Titian as a maker of icons
of images of Christ,
as Christopher Nygren has
recently written about.
Contemporary artists,
understandably, found
this incongruity
to be bewildering.
Andrea Schiavone's
woodcut response to Titian,
an important document
of the work's reception
in Venice, is a clear attempt
to rationalize the composition
and to make sense
of the odd behavior
of the soldiers
in the foreground.
The entire composition has been
rotated to the side,
opening an interval of space
between the two men,
now cast as commentators,
on the group of Christ
and his tormentors.
Carlo Urbino's Organ Shutters
for Santa Maria Della Passione
in Milan from the 1560s
also constitutes a thoroughgoing
revision of Titian,
rendering
the anatomies and spatial
relations more intelligible
and including
the contemplative-looking
soldiers now on the side,
removed from the main action.
Giovanni da Monte, his Crowning
with Thorns, 1583,
is also a critique
of the painter's alleged mentor,
not just in its sober color
and chiaroscuro,
its hulking Pordenone-like
figures and the clarification
of the space that they occupy,
but again,
in its rationalization
of dramatic motive.
There seems to be here
a clear distinction
between cruelty and compunction
on the parts of Christ's
tormentors.
More telling still
is the response of Antonio Campi
in his 1580 Adoration
of the Shepherds.
In a composition that draws
nothing from Titian in terms
of style or technique,
Campi has recast
the anomalous soldiers
in The Crowning with Thorns
as a pair
of companionable shepherds.
And even Titian,
in his own late revision
of the composition,
felt he had to resolve
this arrangement here.
We've got the omission
of the figure of the man
in green.
Titian,
in late 16th-century Lombardy,
was evoked talismanically
as a famous name and one
with Hapsburg approval,
but not as a model that would
sustain pictorial practice.
In purely practical terms,
his approach to space
and composition, as well as
his brushwork, could not easily
be assimilated
to an increasingly systematic
and pedagogically oriented
theory of arts.
Even Lomazzo qualified
his praise of Titian
by mentioning his defects
as a draftsman.
And so, too, did Archbishop
Federico Borromeo, the founder
of the Amrbosiana Museum
and Academy a decade later,
notwithstanding his enthusiasm
for the Titian Adoration
Of the Shepherds
he'd acquired for the Academy
and its museum.
Borromeo celebrates his prized
Titian as a horn of plenty,
he says, from which painters
could seek out and absorb
the principles of painting:
variety of expression,
figures of animals in a variety
of shapes, panoramic landscapes,
accurate examples
of architecture,
the optical illusion
of distance.
He even goes on to assert,
on who knows what basis,
that even Michelangelo had
ranked Titian higher
than himself.
Yet this does not prevent
the archbishop from making what,
for him, was probably
a pedagogically necessary
observation, that Titian is
deficient in disegno
and that the Virgin and Child
are represented with, quote,
"less
than perfect artistic skill."
Titian finally
is pronounced to be better
at "the lowness
and natural movements of animals
and camp followers."
The archbishop, moreover,
exhibited works in Titian's
late manner,
as exemplars of bad practice,
like this studio version
of the entombment of Christ.
Of the relationship
between facilitas and incuria,
carelessness, describing what he
saw as the exhaustion
and depletion of Titian's
late style,
in part to Titian's desire
for gain.
"He apparently painted these,"
says Borromeo, after he'd become
complacent
and sated with his own glory,
or rather drained
by his exertions.
While the facilitas of his work
and the confident drawing
deserve praise,
in other respects,
it was done so listlessly
that one would say that even
Titian himself was fully
aware of his own sloppiness
when he was painting them."
A large number
of disappointed or perplexed
clients from the 1540s onwards
would have agreed with Federico
Borromeo, and not just
because Titian was perhaps
not well served by,
you know, second-rank studio
versions of his works.
The 1543-45 Pentecost for Santo
Spirito in Isola
had to be repainted
following complaints
from the canons of the church,
a lawsuit, and an appeal
to the pope.
Patrons of an altarpiece
for the Cathedral of Serravale
complained about the quality
of the work
they received in 1547.
Down in Naples,
Titian's Annunciation of 1557
for the Pinelli Chapel in San
Domenico was attacked
for its drab color,
the faulty proportions
of the angel,
and his indistinct facial
features.
And we know this from a treatise
written in defense
of the painting
by the Bartolomeo Maranta,
written sometime after 1562.
Yet it was not just a lack
of studio quality control
in the work that inhibited
Titian's impact.
This has to do, I would propose,
with the increasingly alienating
character of Titian's art
from about 1540 onwards.
I am going to suggest
that this estranging quality,
which I'll be mapping out,
is the result of Titian's
uneasy relation to the role
he was increasingly called upon
to perform, to be
not just the chief painter
of Venice, but as it were,
to be Venetian painting, as this
was increasingly characterized
in a rising literature of art
from 1540s onwards.
He himself in earlier works
for the terra firma,
like the Gozzi Altarpiece
for Ancona
with its topographical view
of the city on the lagoon,
had impressed
his characteristic idiom--
this sort of flaring color--
with signs of Venetian identity.
In 1544, Aretino wrote
his famous description
of the city of Venice,
"as if it were
a painterly invention
and flaring light and flaming
color by nature itself,
calling upon Titian, whose brush
is nature's very soul to render
it."
Yet the more his contemporaries
invested in his work
as a definitive formulation
of Venetian painting,
the more Titian retreats
into a kind of self reflexive,
even solipsistic, placelessness.
The works preempt
their own history
of non-reception,
of incomprehension,
and sometimes
outright rejection.
Now, here I need to recap some
of the key preoccupations
of Titian's works
in the years preceding the Milan
Crowning with Thorns, above all,
so we can understand how
these preoccupations are
transformed in the 1540s
and 1550s.
From the very beginning,
Titian's rendering of bodies
in space
has a self-reflexive dimension.
Intensely engaged
with the nature
of perceptual engagement
between painting
and its viewers, his naturalism
could in fact be described
as a kind of meta-naturalism.
This is manifest in the degree
to which Titian's pictorial
structures seem to exacerbate
the contrast between two modes
of perceptual engagement with
painting, what a literate person
of the time might have called
prospettiva, perspective--
the creation of the illusion
of deep space--
and relievo, the idea-- the sort
of sculptured effect,
figures emerging from the plane
of the picture itself.
Some art historians might say
the optical and the haptic.
The Presentation of the Virgin,
painted for the Sala
dell'Albergo of the Scuola della
Carità, for all its fulfillment
of site-specific requirements,
is characteristic
of Titian's tendency to organize
his compositions in terms
of attention between prospettiva
and relievo.
The former concerns
the correlation effect of space
with the viewer's position
before the image,
the way that the composition
imposes a necessary viewing
distance, as David Rosand
showed,
so that it can be apprehended
as a whole.
Rosand demonstrated a long time
ago that this painting was
designed to be seen by beholder
standing in front
of the Vivarini, Giovanni
d'Alemagna, image of the Virgin
here, from this point.
It works with the perspective
of the room--
not that you'll be convinced
by that photograph,
but it does work.
That dimension and experience
in the work is underscored
by the spacing and distancing
effects of the gazes of figures
within the picture itself.
In the case of the presentation,
the viewer's position
is reciprocated by the obelisk
in the background
to the painting, widely
understood in Renaissance
literature
on hieroglyphics as symbolizing
a ray of light.
On this axis,
a viewer with obelisk
is at right angles, cuts
across the major horizontal
in the painting, that defined
by the Virgin's
ascent of the temple steps
and the gazes of the majority
of the figures
to left, which all run parallel
to the picture plane.
Not only does Mary follow
the vector of vision of most
of the witnessing figures,
she herself emits rays
of heavenly light,
as you can see
from this nice restoration
photograph here.
So that, you know, perspective
understood as the rendering
of the motion of light
traveling in straight lines
and to the eye of the beholder.
Yet Titian also includes figures
and motifs that self-
referentially embody
the principles of relievo,
the capacity
of pictorial illusion
to appeal to our sense of touch,
and which calls for a closer,
more immersive engagement
with the image,
even at risk of a loss
of the grasp
of the whole and its narrative
and theological logic.
These are the statuesque market
woman selling eggs.
And then-- it's not very visible
here, but this carved torso,
this truncated cuirass sculpture
in the narrow space
between the wall of the steps
and the picture plane.
While such motifs signal
the haptic dimensions
of the image, they're here
dissociated
from any effective or devotional
relation to the subject,
as if standing for the appeal
of painterly artifice alone.
This, despite some, you know,
incredibly ingenious
iconographical explanations.
Now, this careful balancing
of the optic and the haptic
comes under pressure
in The Crowning with Thorns--
so what I've been suggesting--
with its suppression
of perspectival interval,
an emphasis on the close,
and an incipiently tactile
engagement of the two figures
with the body of Christ.
Such a conception of painting
in terms
of its sensory dimensions
and in terms of a division
of perceptual experience,
is present from the outset
in Titian's earliest works.
This is probably among the very
earliest,
1506, where, once again, we get
the interval of the gaze that
holds figures apart,
sort
of reverential formal distance,
also there's a kind of stasis.
And then, look down here,
we have this Bacchanalian
relief, characterized not only
by an appeal to touch,
by an actual dramatization
of tactile interaction
among the figures.
It seems to be figures cavorting
at a ritual in honor of Eros,
Cupid, who is, you know,
in an amazing stroke here
is reaching up and caressing
the keys of St. Peter.
And this is the rock of St.
Peter, of course.
And of course this is--
the pope here is--
it's Alexander VI.
It's the Borgia pope,
so maybe there's some kind
of an intended slight, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
But we can go further,
and we can talk
about this fabulous picture,
Sacred and Profane Love.
The two women-- one looking
at the other--
invites you to complete
a triangulation of gazes.
You have to stand apart
to really grasp the relationship
of one to the other.
So you complete that triangle.
Meanwhile, there's something
going on down here
that makes you want to draw
forth, and it's something much
more turbulent,
sort of collision,
of bodies with each other.
And just to underscore this,
we have Cupid being a narcissus,
and plunging his hand right
into the surface of the water
up here, pretty much as Alberti,
embracing by art
the surface of the picture.
And again, we have
this other detail.
Here we have a spout, which
is channeling water
in our direction,
sort of engulfing us.
The painting is engulfing us
with itself.
And then here, a somewhat
controversial painting.
It was amazing to see this
in Washington
10 years ago in the show
that David Brown organized,
The Pastoral Concert, where we
get a gendering
of these effects.
Tactility is, you know, right
at the surface of the picture.
We get these very-- these
appeals to our sense of touch
in these brilliantly rendered
female figures who turn away.
Well, we can't make eye contact
with them.
We can't see these figures'
faces at all.
And then the two males
are seated
on a diagonal, prospectival
diagonal, that takes us
into space where we meet
this musical shepherd, who
completes the concert as we see
here.
And just one more.
The famous-- it's one
from Getty,
drawing of the Landscape
with a Sleeping Woman, where
once again, a strongly embodied
female figure-- again,
with no face,
with a canceled facial
expression.
And right up
here in the foreground
and back
on this orthogonal recession,
we have these male figures
of shepherds located
within pictorial depth, which
they embody,
which they symbolize.
By the 1540s, in the wake
of projects
like The Presentation
of the Virgin,
Titian was clearly poised
to dominate the art of painting
in Venice and with invitations
to the papal and imperial courts
far beyond Venice.
Contemporaries increasingly
proclaimed him to be one
of the three greatest artists
of the era.
Out
of those other joint claimants,
Michelangelo and Raphael,
only one was now living.
All local challenges
to his supremacy had either left
Venice, like Lotto and Bordone,
or they had died, as was
the case with Pordenone
in 1539, followed by Savoldo
in 1548.
Some leading artists
from Central Italy
had come and gone.
Vasari himself was briefly
active in Venice in 1541 to '42,
but what should have been
his most prominent and visible
commission did not progressed
beyond the design stage,
a ceiling decoration
for the Augustinians
at Santo Spirito in Isola.
When he left Venice,
the commission was entrusted
to Titian, who may also have had
access to the three designs
for ceiling paintings
that the Aretine artist had
submitted.
It's been a sort of convention
to see Titian as somehow shocked
into an awareness of Central
Italian art
by the recent presence
of the Tuscans,
leading him
to a competitive striving that
led him away
from his natural strengths
of an artist.
Titian's so-called Mannerist
crisis.
It seems much more likely
the Titian was now claiming
the legacy of the lately
deceased Pordenone, a specialist
in violent subjects
with turbulent disruptions
of the pictorial surface.
And see-- there's Pordenone
and the Organ Shutters in Venice
at the Scuola di San Rocco,
and this defiance of the picture
plane, this sort
of massive, muscular bodies
hurtling forward, as we see,
above our heads--
or we would've seen
above our heads
in the Santo Spirito paintings.
And the sense of embodiment
reinforced by, again,
the obscuring, or occlusion,
of the figures' faces.
The National Gallery, you can
see this upstairs, the Saint
John on Patmos,
a ceiling painting commissioned
by the Scuole di San Giovanni
Evangelista--
1544 to '48.
I think the gallery dates it
later.
I'm following Sydney Freedberg.
One of the group of works which
Sydney Freedberg saw
as an expropriation, rather than
an assimilation of Pordenone
and Correggio.
The extreme-- he says,
"The extreme of Titian's
Romanism past before his actual
experience of Rome itself."
And I think this was
a wonderful observation.
He calls Titian's experiments,
with the foreshortened body,
an illusionism, a la Pordenone
or Correggio-- he first thought
as Romanism.
But it's got nothing to actually
to do with contact with the art
of Rome itself, which is where
Titian goes in 1545.
And this is the last occasion,
I think, in Italy where Titian
will actively engage with one
of his Italian contemporaries,
like Correggio here, Saint John
in Patmos.
There was also no sense
that foreshortenings were
considered to be uniquely
Central Italian.
Paolo Pino, a writer
in the Veneto, tells us what--
you know-- tells his Venetian
contemporaries and everybody how
they should employee these.
He says they are the perfection
of art.
"And employ large figures
in your works, because in those,
you can best organize
the proportions of living
figures.
And in all your works,
let there be at least one figure
all foreshortened,
mysterious and difficult,
because by this means,
you'll be seen as worthy
by those who understand
the perfections of art."
The 1540s is also the decade
when Titian expanded
his operations in the peninsula,
much as Pordenone had done
in the previous decade.
He succeeded in placing
major works, not only in Milan,
as we saw, but also in Florence,
in Urbino, and most importantly,
in Rome, where the artist spent
most of 1545 working
for the Farnese.
And where he met Michelangelo,
whose later he alluded to
in the Danae for Cardinal
Alessandra Farnese.
The rivalry of Michelangelo
and Titian has been overplayed
in scholarship, to my mind,
and I'm inclined to resist
its current status as a master
key to Titian's late work.
Titian regarded Michelangelo
as a colleague
and shortly before going
to Rome, he enlisted his support
in a suit over a a benefis
for his son.
But in subsequent years,
he must have become aware
that he and Michelangelo were
being set up
as polarized systems
of artistic values.
It was Aretino in this decade
that was largely responsible
for the fateful characterization
in terms of colore
and rather literal conceptions
of naturalism, qualities
to which he was to be
distinguished from Michelangelo.
The famous distinction-- or was
it a paralyzing opposition--
first occurs in a letter
from Aretino to Paolo Manuzio
in 1542 where the former praises
the writer Sperone Speroni,
but claiming that he draws
like Michelangelo and colors
like Titian.
The paragone of Michelangelo's
disegno and Titian's colore
was immediately taken up
by Francesco Sansovino in 1543
and by Pino
in his dialogue of 1548,
that we just heard from.
For Pino, the three parts
of painting--
disegno, colore,
and invenzione-- all found
their most effective, perfect
expression in the artistic trio
Michelangelo, Raphael,
and Titian.
All of Italian art
for the literati
was now conceivable in shorthand
terms under three proper names.
And so it will be too
for Lodovico Dolce in 1557,
and in many ways, for Vasari.
And from the 1550s,
the distinction
between the individual styles
of these artists
became aggravated by more
polemical, regionally polarizing
comparisons.
Titian's status as the most
internationally prominent artist
in Italy was confirmed
with his visit
to the imperial court
at Augsburg in 1548,
and the solidation
of his privileged relationship
to the Hapsburg family.
The stakes were high,
but being an Italian
abroad was one that Titian
performed
with characteristic aplomb
and ambition,
producing not only
magnificent state portraits
but monumental history
paintings, which were
commentaries on Italian art
in the larger sense.
With the latter, Titian showed
himself to be capable as holding
his own as the equal
of other artists in Italy--
equal of any other artist
in Italy, not just Pordenone
now, but also Michelangelo.
For the Chateau of Mary
of Hungary at Binche,
he produced compositions of epic
horror and violence,
the so-called Four Great
Sinners, which far more
assertively than previous works
from the decade
show Titian displaying
his command of the Michelangelo
effect, with works devoted
to the agonistic, muscular nude.
The Four Great Sinners signal
Titian's sense of his new role
as the emperor's Italian artist.
The role seems to have prompted
a systematic evaluation
and recapitulation of the work
of contemporaries,
but only in works destined to be
sent out of Italy to the courts
of the Hapsburgs
and their clients.
His great adoration
of the Trinity, or La Gloria,
was made for Charles V
in 1552-1554
and taken by the emperor
to his post-abdication
retirement hermitage
at the Abbey of Yuste.
The composition was recorded
and circulated in an engraving
made under Titian's supervision
by Cornelis Cort court.
It could thus be compared
with other works
by leading artists reproduced
and circulated in the same way,
notably Michelangelo's
controversial Last Judgement.
What is particularly
striking about the composition
is the confident use Titian
makes of the work
of fellow artists in ways
that the polemical construction,
then taking shape of Titian
as the champion of the Venetian
tradition,
really doesn't allow for.
While La Gloria does not quote
directly from Michelangelo's
great Vatican fresco, it clearly
solicits comparison with it.
Moreover, Titian borrows
unashamedly from Lorenzo Lotto's
Carmine altarpiece,
a painting which would soon
be savagely maligned
for its weird color in Dolce's
Aretino.
I'm thinking in particular
of these figures
on these mass clouds
over the landscape
here, as you see in Lotto.
And even in his heavily veiled
figure the Virgin here,
quoting a popular composition
by Savolodo, which exists
in several versions
of the Magdalene, Titian's
ambition here could now
be described
as an emulative one,
a virtuosic re-performance
of the best
of his fellow practitioners
in Italy.
The painting also underscores
Titian's own distinction
as a portraitist,
certainly a basis on which he
could claim to surpass
contemporaries
like Michelangelo.
Up here, you will see Philip II,
and Isabella of Portugal,
and Charles V himself.
Yet such engagement
with the work of contemporaries
is increasingly rare in Titian's
commissions
for locations in Venice
and Northern Italy,
a circumstance already apparent
in some key works of the 1540s.
In Italy, there are no works
like the Adoration
of the Trinity, where Titian
engages with all, that
for him, was noteworthy
in contemporary Italian arts.
The field in Italy
was now dominated
by regionalizing preoccupations
that foreclosed this kind
of engagement
for Titian, increasingly
constituted as the Venetian
rival
to the Tuscan Michelangelo.
Partisan regional lines were
drawn with the appearance
of Vasari's Lives in 1550,
and of course, more forcibly
with a 1568 edition, and then
between these, Dolce's Aretino
1557, with its characterisation
of Titian as the ear of Raphael,
embodying all the qualities
of perfect painting, lacking
in Michelangelo-- truth
to nature, pleasurableless,
and charm--
piacevolezza.
And convenevole sprezzatura
"effortlessness,
but with propriety."
While Pino in 1548, as we saw,
had praised
foreshortened figures
as a key manifestation
of the power of art,
that position is radically
revised by Dolce, whose Aretino
remarked that foreshortenings
undermine the pleasure
of viewers,
and that painting was invented
primarily in order to give
pleasure.
This means that even Pordenone
is unavailable as a resource
for Venetian artists,
if they are to follow Dolce,
since the signature effects have
been re-coded as Roman,
as Michelangelo-like.
In his works for Italy,
such a polemical polarization
in Venice and Rome
begins to exert its pressures
on Titian's decision making.
The problem now was this.
Emulation of Rome
and to an ancient and modern
canon
was necessary for any artist,
especially any Italian artist,
with a claim
to a more than local status.
Yet engaging
with the modern manner of Rome
would, from the 1550s onwards,
only be seen as an attempt
to pit himself
against Michelangelo, to settle
for a situation
where Titian would be defined
by comparison
with his contemporary.
That Titian sought to avoid
comparison with his colleagues
is indicated in rare comment
on his own painting recorded
by the Spanish royal secretary,
Antonio Perez, where he explains
that his broad brush
work and impasto was a new path.
This is just what Dolce says
about Titian's painting.
"Every stroke of the brush
belongs with those strokes
that nature is in the habit
of making," talking about, you
know,
the sort of erotic mythologies,
you know, very, very sensual
paintings, which come to stand
now for Titian after Dolce.
So this is a very famous comment
on Titian--
supposing-- quoting Titian
in his own words.
It's well known,
but I think it's worth thinking
about again.
"I'm not confident,"
said Titian, "of achieving
the delicacy and beauty
of the brushwork
of Michelangelo, Raphael,
Correggio, and Parmigianino;
and if I did,
I would be judged with them
or else be considered to be
an imitator.
But ambition, which is as
natural in my art as
in any other, urges me to choose
a new path to make myself
famous,
much as the others acquired
their own fame from the way
that they followed."
But of course, there's
more to this new path
than loose brushwork.
Increasingly
branded as the painter who walks
in step with nature,
Titian from the 1540s
revisits
some longstanding preoccupations
of his own painting
in which the parameters
of pictorial illusionism
were explored
to an extraordinary degree.
At the same time, Titian's art
for Italian locations turns away
from the protocols of emulation
and towards an experimental and
self-referential concern
with the making of sacred art.
The effects of suspended drama
in the Milan Crowning
with Thorns are even more
apparent in the Ecce Homo,
now in Vienna.
Painted for the Palazzo Talenti
d'Anna and inscribed Titianus
Eques Fecit 1543, down here.
Now, one reason to counter
this painting,
by Blake de Maria,
has placed questions
of cultural national identity
at center stage,
and not without good reason.
The patron, Zoanne d'Anna was
the member of a Dutch merchant
family, the van den Haanens,
which had settled in Venice
in 1537.
And his father, endowed
with an imperial knighthood,
would become a full citizen
of the republic in 1545.
The painting is thus seen
to negotiate the dual identity
of Zoanne d'Anna
as both an aspiring new Venetian
and an imperial subject.
His connection to the empire
signaled heraldically
with the prominent Hapsburg
eagle on a soldier's shield.
If the thesis
that the patrons investment
in becoming Venetian
is at all a factor
in the production
of this painting,
it might be asked how,
at this date, being Venetian
could be professed
by pictorial means?
Is there a model for expressing
identification with Venice
that a Netherlandish expatriate
or a painter rising in Hapsburg
circles could draw upon?
Certainly the horizontal format
and the incorporation
of portraits
in a sacred narrative
recall the characteristic form
of community statement
represented by paintings
for the Venetian
confraternities,
like The Presentation
of the Virgin that we looked
at a few moments ago.
Yet Titian has also now
conspicuously drawn
on northern European art.
The results cannot simply be
described as a hybrid
of Venetian scuola painting
and transalpine prints.
The mood or dramatic effect
differs pointedly from both.
Albrecht Dürer had adopted
the convention of showing Christ
presented by Pontius Pilate, who
utters the words, behold
the man, to a gesturing jeering
crowd, whose coarse features
signals of a condition
of baseness or bereftness
of grace.
Such an appearance does not
characterize
the heterogeneous array
of beholders of Christ's
humanity
that Titian has introduced,
several of them
portraits of leading
political figures or family
members, perhaps.
The emotional disposition
of the crowd in response
to Christ and to Pilates words
ranges
from their unruly pointing
and gesticulation,
to a detached composure
appropriate to portraits,
to cases where it's simply
difficult to name.
There is a curious sense
with the group on the steps
that they have paused
in their very advance
towards Christ.
And once again, in no case
is the countenance of any one
of these more
dynamic participants visible.
They are screened by the arms
of other figures, who themselves
turn their backs on us.
One such figure, the soldier
with the monogrammed shield,
seems poised on the very edge
of the painting, as if leaning
and backing outwards
into the beholder's space.
As the most strongly modeled
and volumetrically persuasive
figure in the picture,
he corresponds
to the haptic rilievo effects
in Titian's earlier work.
However, while serving
as a transitional element
between the beholder's world
and the pictorial space,
he is now--
also now a perspectival device,
backing away from Christ,
as if to prescribe
the disposition of the beholder
regarding the entirety
of the scene.
Like the two soldiers
in the recent Milan altarpiece,
he appears to model
a relationship with painting
that is not
that of gestural pathos
or an emotionally affective
expression--
it looks like a fraught attempt
to compress
contemplative distance
with something
like immersive engagement.
It's an impossible situation,
you might think.
The painting, unlike
Dürer's print, is void
of the usual emotional cues
to the beholder.
The one overt manifestation
of affect that is not blocked
from our view is that
of the youth seated on the step
below Christ, a more grown-
up version of the oblivious
little boy in Dürer perhaps.
You can see that the--
in this case, the dog,
is actually barking
at the crowd.
The dog is at least
aware of the crowd.
The boy's posture
and facial feature
suggest he is
startled or frightened,
but by what?
He's not been looking
at the drama unfolding
behind him.
It's not to be assumed that he's
even aware of it.
Something is splitting apart
here, gestural and physiognomic
rhetoric, the manifestation
of affetti is detaching itself
not yet fully from the logic
of narrative.
Rhetorical forms, that is,
the expressive pantomime
of gesture and expression
for which Mantegna, Leonardo,
and Raphael had all been
admired, have become divorced
from rhetorical function
or narrative context.
Once again-- it's a very poor
illustration-- an imitation
by Schiavone from the 1560s
suggests a critique
and a corrective clarification.
There are no portraits,
no shield-bearing soldier,
and the boy on the steps
turns to look at Christ.
I don't know where this painting
is.
It was on the market recently,
and it's been very poorly
published.
If anybody knows,
I would appreciate you letting
me know.
The painting is an amalgam
of visual codes--
Christian iconography, gesture,
physiognomy, portraiture,
heraldry--
that maintains the effect
of a composite rather than
anything approaching a unity.
Titian's staging of the Ecce
Homo, a foundational moment
in Christian revelation and one
that authorized
the very tradition
of Christian images
of the suffering Christ,
involves a dialectic
of pictorial effects.
On one hand, relations found
in the kind
of bodily participation,
the soldier with the shield,
rather than in vision
alone are contrasted
with the visual prospectival
staging of the event.
The cumulative effect
is of a kind of atrophy
and liquidation of narrative
and effective formulas
around the paradoxically
humiliated but potent image
of Christ.
Titian's painting is a serious,
and in fact, quite
radical attempt to reconceive
the language
of religious narrative painting,
refusing the unities
of a narrative economy,
represented by something
like Aristotle's Poetics
or by the normative history
paintings by Raphael.
Thus the Ecce Homo could,
for these reasons,
more effectively be described
as an anti-drama that liquidates
pictorial rhetoric.
It signals renunciation,
not to a degree of struggle,
I think, on Titian's part.
In the ensuing years,
Titian and his Italian works
becomes Venetian increasingly
by opting out of any dialogue
with artistic contemporaries
or predecessors.
There are no more paintings
like the ones made for Santo
Spirito or the Scuola Grande di
San Giovanni Evangelista.
After 1550, it is the younger
painter Jacopo Tintoretto who
supplied this kind of work.
And it was Tintoretto who laid
claim to the pictorial goal
of reconciling the colore
of Titian
and the disegno of Michelangelo.
Titian himself, I'm proposing,
renounced that very dichotomy.
It is significant
that in his 1562 defense
of Titian's Naples Annunciation
Maranta had accounted
for its anomalies
by characterizing them
as "metafora pitturale,"
or pictorial metaphors.
In other words,
it's the one non-naturalistic,
non-naturalizing account
of Titian's painting that we
have,
that sees Titian's practice
in allegorical terms.
Titian's metaphoric departures
from observable reality
in the service
of religious meaning
are paralleled by Maranta
to Michelangelo's
poetic and allegorical approach
in The Last Judgment, a painting
roundly condemned by Aretino
and by the Aretino character
in Dolce's dialogue.
In its lack of delicacy
and diligence,
in its licentious approach
to traditional iconographies,
Titian's reworking
of the composition for San
Salvador, in which a vase
of roses bursts into flames,
is even more
explicitly
in the metaphoric register,
flouting Aretino's
pronouncements on decorum,
naturalism, grazia,
and even intelligibility.
Titian has reversed
the tradition of postures
of the angel on the Virgin.
You have to think of how they
normally appear in paintings,
right?
The virgin, with her arms
crossed on her chest, and then
the kind of hailing gesture
of the angel
having been reassigned.
A pantomime of young angels
above make sure that we notice
this.
They're doing the same thing.
The Virgin's gesture is echoed
by a nude male angel
above Gabriel.
Over the Virgin, a female angel
makes
the traditional cross signs
of acquiescence.
So much for decorum, naturalism,
and grazia.
Why did Titian take so long
to finish The Martyrdom of Saint
Sebastian for the Church
of the Crociferi in Venice?
Commissioned by Lorenzo Masolo
following Titian return
from Rome in 1546,
it appears to have been
completed and installed
several years after the client's
death in 1557
when his widow, Elisabetta
Querini, assumed responsibility
for the commission.
Was the delay the result
of an initial lack of follow
up--
follow through on her part
or the unfinished condition
of the site?
Or was it hesitation by Titian
himself?
He'd been called upon to depict
a subject with an ancient Roman
setting.
This made turning to exemplars
of Roman art and architecture
inevitable, and the pressure
on the artist to confront
this imperative
must have been intensified
by his visit to Rome in 1545.
Titian turns to a work
of classical sculpture housed
in Venice, part of a collection
that had become
a civic expression of Venice
itself,
the Grimani Dying Gladiator.
His adaptation, however, has
the appearance
of an improvisation
on the canvas
rather than any attempt
to transmit the foreshortened--
the volume of the sculpture.
The foreshortening
of the saint's right leg
is optically correct when looked
at close up, but from reviewing
distance of a few feet,
it disturbingly truncates
the limb.
The saints tormentors are even
more cursory in their rendering.
Their relative positions
in space
are hard to read and create
no perspective, while they obey
no consistent system
of proportions.
The work turns its back on some
of the elementary principles
of disegno,
while in the demonstration
of colorito
in its near monochrome
and shadowy obscurity,
it seems to be reaching
at extremes.
Darkness seems to envelop
figures
and to render them indistinct,
just as the fiery illumination
dissolves boundaries
and make surfaces appear
without boundaries.
Again, the contrast
with the works Titian sent
to Spain in the 1550s
is striking.
These all show a far more
assertive command of anatomy
and foreshortening,
as well as a confident
assimilation
of antique sculptural models.
They employ a luminous, flaring
polychromy, no matter how dark,
tragic, or violent the mood.
It is ironic, then, that Philip
II, hearing of the completion
of Titian's altarpiece,
requested a new version--
he would even
be happy with a copy--
for his new Basilica
of the Escorial
dedicated to Saint Lawrence.
The Crociferi's willingness
to sell their version
to the king
suggests from their point
of view the commission had been
something less
than a resounding success.
Titian insisted on making
an entirely new painting;
perhaps there was a tentative,
or experimental, or simply
negligent quality in the Venice
work
that made it unsuited to a self-
presentation
in the international arena.
In any event, the version sent
to the Escorial in 1567
makes some concessions
to its highly visible context
and to Titian's role
as the king's Italian painter.
The murky obscurity
of the original version
has been relieved.
Gone is the perspective
of Corinthian columns at the top
of a flight of steps,
replaced now with a lofty arch
giving onto a moonlight sky.
Figures are more tightly
resolved and strongly modeled,
more distinguishable to a richer
palette of colors.
Titian has taken more pains
over the saint's anatomy.
Instead
of a perfunctory foreshortening,
his right leg and hip are now
flexed so as to parallel
the picture plane.
For a work destined to be sent
outside Italy,
Titian has produced
a composition that seems more
confidently Romanizing
than his original version
for Venice,
and yet these revisions bring
further tensions.
The opening up of the space,
two bodies that assert a kind
of sculptural volume,
is a clear departure
from the previous work.
Yet that effect is generated
through disruptions that risk
compromising the work's
narrative and effect of unity.
Like, who is that?
[LAUGHTER]
What is that person doing?
[LAUGHTER]
Boy in bright green--
seems to be redhead
in bright green, pushing his way
through the crowd.
His purpose seems less
to clarify the narrative
than to force a breach in what
might otherwise be read
as congestion of bodies.
He is, I would propose, related
in function to the foreground
figures in the Crowning
with Thorns and Ecce Homo.
The purpose of all
these figures,
undefined in terms of narrative
function,
is to manifest
a pictorial effect.
The effect
is
conceivable
as the forced coalescence
of prospectival distancing,
the interval between the viewer
and the painting, that enables
us to grasp the work as a whole,
with that of closeness
or immersion in the painting,
or, in this case, imagining
a physical motion
through the picture,
as if one could push
through its very substance.
The arch that displaces
the colonnade of the original,
in fact, suggests an opening
in the surface of the painting,
enabling Titian to evoke
bodily access by the observer
to the resistant and materially
dense interior
beyond the surface.
The engraving that Cornelis Cort
produced in 1571,
part of a series designed
to publicize the Titian canon
throughout Europe,
is a corrective synthesis
of the Escorial and Crociferi
versions.
And the engraver
goes to considerable lengths
to clarify and solidify
anatomical details on surface
modeling left inchoate
or obscured by shadow
in Titian's original.
And yet it is telling
that as the Venetian school
comes into existence
through such publicity
and would achieve
immeasurable success
in the subsequent history
of academic arts,
it failed to make
a strong impression on Titian's
erstwhile Hapsburg supporters.
Titian's failure to produce
a high altarpiece
for the Escorial
with the Saint Lawrence of 1567
was followed
by equally-unsuccessful bids
from El Greco
and by failed negotiations
with Veronese and Tintoretto,
where his trial pieces were
delivered in 1583.
Philip II turned his attention
to Federico Zuccari
and to Pellegrino Tibaldi,
artists far less constrained
by regional identification,
whose career had been shaped
by travel
and
by a trans-regional orientation
of which Lomazzo would have
approved.
In conclusion, Titian's
Italian work by the 1550s
and the few works
in the preceding decade
is seeking to distance itself
from the critical binaries
upheld by his commentators
and from any claimed to be
performing its synthesis.
His work seems to overcome
an altogether different dualism
that had manifested itself
in his earlier works.
Pictorial relief-- the illusion
that elements in the painting
stand out
from the pictorial surface
and extend into the world
the viewer- is compressed
into an uneasy coexistence
with perspective, where visually
active bodies are
separated and distinguished
in immeasurable space.
Space becomes dense and form
evanescent.
And the haptic-optic compression
of the late works
goes at refusal
of physiognomic codes
of conventionalized response,
a refusal
of standardized emotional terms
of engagement.
It is as if what must now see
or be the agent of perception
is the entire body and not just
the eye.
Closeness indicates a level
of absorption, which takes us
beyond the normal decorum
of response.
And that is nowhere more
the case than
with the extraordinary violence
of the later pictures,
notably The Flaying of Marsyas.
The tragic sense is curiously
understated here, mainly
because several
of the protagonists
are engaged at a level
of closeness in which the horror
of the spectacle
is not apparent.
Their relation is one of wonder
or curious immersion
in a surface or a texture.
Getting close, getting absorbed,
indicates a suspension of action
and of violence.
This is the artist's own
perspective, from which light
and error become flame-like
and matter seems to liquefy,
to resemble molten silver--
molten gold or silver, or even
blood.
The codes of gender
shift between protagonists.
All these suggest
a destabilizing flux of vitality
within the visible world, which
is his pictorial task to reveal.
This is no longer anything
to do with Venice or being
Venetian.
That was now the role
of Tintoretto or Jacopo Bassano,
and perhaps, above all,
of Veronese.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
