Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Sacred and Profane Love, c.1514.
Oil on canvas, 118 × 279 cm.
Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Pastoral Concert, c.1509.
Oil on canvas, 105 × 137 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The Pastoral Concert gives us the idea that we should retain of this master better than any of his other works. It gives us an idea, too, of his gentle, innocent soul and of his powerful, yet delicate, style.
Titian was destined to surpass his predecessors, including, even, Giorgione, and to realise their noblest aspirations. He was born around 1490 and died in 1576 and, during his long career saw the commencement of the Venetian school and its decline. He himself marks the zenith of its glory, being the most complete and brilliant.
Owing to his universality, he was able to express himself in all branches of art, and to all of them he added something new. On account of the place he gave to nature in his works, he may be considered the veritable creator of modern landscape painting, and on this account he commands our special attention.
The little town of Pieve di Cadore, his birthplace, is built against one of the lesser chains of the Carnic Alps. The highest peaks of the mountains rise in the form of a majestic amphitheatre above the little town, whilst the turbulent, foamy Piave makes its way with great difficulty through the sunken rocks.
Brought up amid such rugged scenes, the young man’s precocious vocation was encouraged by his family, and, at an early age, he was sent to Venice to serve his apprenticeship as a painter. Sebastiano Zuccato taught him the elements of the art of mosaics, and he adopted a certain breadth of style, which is evident in his frescoes and can be seen in all his work. The teaching which he subsequently received from Gentile and Giovanni Bellini enabled him to soon add to it the wonderful finish of execution which distinguishes his early pictures. But the influence of Giorgione, his young comrade and rival, was destined to do more towards his development than that of these two masters. Like Giorgione, he loved nature passionately and, while understanding the grandeur of it, also admired it in its smallest details. One of his early works, known as Sacred and Profane Love, proves both his love of nature and the great influence exercised over him by Giorgione. In this charming work, everything, including the very indecision of the title, reveals the similarities that the talent and taste of these two artists offered at the commencement of their careers. But this was only a momentary period in the long existence of the painter. His starting-point was always the direct study of reality. He soon discovered how to choose from the most characteristic features, those which appealed most to him and to the character of the episode he intended to paint. It is by his sense of life and the picturesque that his originality is especially striking, and it is in consequence of this that he imparts freshness to every subject he touches. With Titian, not only is the role of the scenery important, but it is a striking commentary on the dramatic setting to which it serves. Religious subjects supplied Titian with peaceful and dramatic idylls.
Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco), The Tempest, c.1507.
Oil on canvas, 82 × 73 cm.
Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–1523.
Oil on canvas, 176.5 × 191 cm.
The National Gallery, London.
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), The Baptism of the Christ, c. 1585.
Oil on canvas, 137 × 105 cm.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Mythological subjects gave this great artist more scope for manifesting his originality as such subjects were more in accordance with his own temperament. For a long time the school of central Italy had been addicted to portraying the legends of fable. Instead of the set compositions in which his predecessors introduced the pieces of information they had been able to collect, Titian went to the very source of these old legends in order to revive them. To him they were eternally fresh, because they appeared to him as ever existing emblems of the energies, the splendours or the graces of nature. It was nature itself that inspired him, and its forms, colours, and harmonies, studied directly, and then depicted and idealised by his genius, give more truth and poetry still to his interpretations. Taking, in this way, subjects that were real, his vivid imagination transposed them freely and intelligently. But it was all nature that supplied him with his subjects, and he would never have been satisfied to take from his own country alone the picturesque elements that he introduces so lavishly in his compositions.
Some occasional resemblance between a certain landscape of Titian’s and some aspects of his natural locality were always very vague. We found reminiscences rather than portraits. This district, shut in by high mountains, has rather a wild Alpine look, such as one never sees in Titian’s pictures. He has never given us the weird aspect of some of these peaks, with their jagged summits and the snow with which they are crowned. We see these sometimes in his drawings, particularly in the Rape of Europa. These are scenes that he probably noticed when travelling, and remembered; but he does not introduce them into his paintings. Throughout his whole life he never failed to return, at short intervals, to his native town. On returning from Venice, Titian saw other districts with more varied scenery, richer and more suitable for human habitation, and consequently more likely pleasing to him. When about half-way, near Ceneda and Serravalle, he could see, looking towards the Alps, the most picturesque of perspectives, with cultivated valleys, beautiful trees and the sea. This must have seemed an ideal district, as here was everything that is needed to lend charm to a landscape.
Giovanni Bellini, Sacred Allegory, 1490–1499.
Oil on wood, 73 × 119 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
One of Titian’s merits, one of the signs of his genius and of the sureness of his taste, was that he avoided the extreme peculiarities, and eccentricities of nature; the Dolomites, for instance, or the fantastic rocks which tempted his predecessors, even Leonardo da Vinci himself. His great preoccupation was with order and harmony instead of the rare or curious things that would immediately attract the eye and detract from what he considered the essential, preferring subjects more suitable to the episodes he was treating and to the impression he wished to produce.
From Jupiter and Antiope, Bacchanals, The Worship of Venus, and from many of Titian’s other works, we can judge the variety and the breadth of his mythological compositions. The details are all so natural and so exact, that it seems as though the artist must have been a witness of the scene, and that, with his usual skill and spirit, he had just taken a sketch of it with his ready pencil. The magnificence of Titian’s invention has never been more evident than in the famous Bacchus and Ariadne. In this picture he has accumulated around the principal group all the splendours of nature suggested by his powerful imagination. In this radiant country everything seems to tell of the joyful exuberance of life. Under a deep blue sky can be seen vast perspectives of distant