Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Mary with Child and Four Saints (Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, Saint Paul, Saint Mary Magdalene, and Saint Jerome), c. 1516–1520.
Oil on wood, 138 × 191 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Virgin and Child with Saint Stephen, Saint Jerome, and Saint Maurice, c. 1520.
Oil on canvas, H: 110 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Virgin and Child with a young John the Baptist and Saint Anthony the Abbot (“Madonna delle rose”), c. 1520–1523.
Oil on wood, 69 × 95 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
The Three Ages, from its analogies of type and manner with the Baptism in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, would appear to be the earlier of these two imaginative works, but in fact dates from later.[16] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite silveriness; clear, moderate daylight, though this relative paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may be a little disconcerting at first sight for those who have known the lovely pastoral only from warm-toned, brown copies. It is still difficult to battle with the deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his school, without the accompaniment of rich brown tones. The shepherdess has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks approach the blond cendré hue that distinguishes so many of Palma’s donne, as opposed to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generally affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed pipes, which she still holds in her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned – a reversal, this, of the Rustic Concert in the Louvre, traditionally attributed to Giorgione but now credited to Titian, where the women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque amorini; the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor himself, while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged round him on the ground – obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of the figures, each aiding the other to express the moment of pause in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks, and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers’ own, and they profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint notes of music borne on the still, warm air.
The Sacred and Profane Love in the Borghese Gallery is one of the world’s greatest pictures, and without doubt the masterpiece of the early or Giorgionesque period. Today surely no one will contradict Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so incomparably sums up. It could never have been created at the beginning, when its perfection would be as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other early pieces, which such a classification as this would place after the Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity for a detailed description. Afterwards Titian painted perhaps more wonderfully still, with a more sweeping vigour of brush, a higher authority, and so brilliant and diversified a play of light. He never attained a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more admirably suited the technical means to the goal. He never so completely reflected the rays received from Giorgione, coloured with the splendour of his own genius, as he did here. The delicious sunset landscape has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines of a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian donna who sits sumptuously robed, flower-crowned and even gloved, at the sculptured classical fountain is the noblest in her loveliness, as she is one of the first in a long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy the greatest brushes of the cinquecento. The little love-god who, insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and troubles its surface, is Titian’s very own, owing nothing to any forerunner. The divinely beautiful Profane Love – or, as we shall presently see, Venus – is the most flawless presentment of female loveliness unveiled, save only the Venus of Giorgione himself in the Dresden Gallery. The radiant freshness of the face, with its glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign loveliness of the Dresden Venus or the disquieting charm of the Giovanelli Zingarella (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all on the surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high light is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian ever achieved. Only in the late Venus of the Pardo, which so closely follows the chief motif of Giorgione’s Venus, does he approach it in frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classical is it in spirit, because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[17]
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Virgin with Child, Saint George, Saint Zachary, and the Infant Saint John, called “The Virgin with the Cherries”, c. 1516–1518.
Oil on wood transposed onto canvas, 81 × 99.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular of all Venetian pictures – least of all that strange one brought forward by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the Artless and Sated Love, for which they have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show no more than languid desire to solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures described by Marcantonio Michiel (the Anonimo of Jacopo Morelli), in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the Inferno with Aeneas and Anchises and Landscape with the Birth of Paris, Franz Wickhoff[18] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of Barbarelli’s best known works. The Three Philosophers he calls Aeneas, Evander and Pallas, the Giovanelli Tempest with the Gypsy and the Soldier he explains anew as Admetus and Hypsipyle.[19] The subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and popularly called, or rather miscalled, the Dream of Raphael, is recognised by Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione. He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it), the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in peaceful sleep.
Passing on to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to work on the world-famous Sacred and Profane Love, and shows us the Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus – that wearisome imitation of the similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea – the sumptuously attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love – sits at the fountain in unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes Venus in the form of the