Evanston: TITIAN: The Last Days
Evanston: TITIAN: The Last Days
I have been watching heavy falling snow, while listening to John Taverner’s sacred choral music. That might be counted as multi-tasking--but not much. I don’t believe in multi-tasking; but I even carried it a bit farther because I was thinking about the book on Titian I finished yesterday.
There are connections between Taverner and Titian, among them that both music and book came to me through the Internet. I saw a review of the book, ordered it from Amazon, and it arrived a few days later. The album was mentioned in an iTunes email of new classical releases, and I downloaded it immediately. The time differential may soon disappear. WOLF HALL, the Booker prize winning novel I have just started reading, is my first purchased ebook on my iTouch.
Both artists were inspired by religious themes, though Titian certainly not exclusively. And they were contemporaries, both born around 1490. Taverner died in 1545 and Titian in 1576.
Titian is said to have been the most famous--and wealthiest--painter in his time, so it seems possible that Taverner knew of him; but unlikely that Titian ever heard or heard of Taverner.
I am not a particular admirer of Renaissance painting, although I recognize that until the last century and a half, painting had to do much that is now done by photography and film: historical record; propaganda; portraiture; even pornography. None of Titian’s paintings would be called pornographic today, but several, including THE VENUS OF URBINO, were intended to appeal to the prurient interests of the nobles in whose palaces they hung.
Mark Hudson’s book on Titian is mis-subtitled. It is not about Titian’s last days, it is about all his days, from his birth at an uncertain date to his death in Venice during a plague epidemic. Mr. Hudson skillfully combines history, biography, art criticism, and his own search for vestiges of Titian in today’s Venice. He even managed to get inside Titian’s home, which still stands, part workshop and part rented apartments.
When in the early 1500s Titian began his apprenticeship in the studio of Gentile Bellini, Venice’s then most famous painter, art was a craft like any other. The painter’s guild was divided into textile painters, painters of leather, gilders, painters of furniture, mask makers, book painters, makers of playing cards, and pittori di santi--literally ‘painters of saints’. I have written elsewhere that Christianity is responsible for great music and bad paintings.
Bellini, then over seventy, was quickly surpassed by Titian, who became in his twenties rich and famous, which he would remain for the rest of his life, his paintings and presence sought by Popes and Emperors, as well as the lessor noble and merely wealthy.
While only sixty of the book’s three hundred pages are devoted to Titian’s last days, Mark Hudson early on suggests that, “There have been a few artists who have pushed themselves to a final distillation of their ideas that is at once a summation of everything they’ve done before and an embarkation into stark new territory that seems to break with everything in the past. Goya did it in the Black Paintings, Beethoven in the late string quartets. Titian did it in a handful of his final works.”
Some of those final paintings are illustrated in the book, and the others I found on the Internet.
They do vary from Titian’s earlier work, and some of them, such as THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS, are almost unbearably brutally modern, although ironically it is possible that this is due to Titian’s age. He claimed to be in his nineties, and was at least in his eighties when he painted them; and some of their rough technique, which results in power and immediacy, may be the result of his simply not being able to see or hold a brush steady.
As an admirer of Titian, Mr. Hudson wrote a good and interesting book to further his own career and to cause some of us to think differently about Titian.
He has succeeded on both counts, and taught me a good deal more about Venice and the Renaissance along the way.
The snow is still falling heavily. We are due to get as much as a foot. Before it gets deeper, I’ll walk to the lake.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010