TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091790/0917400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8KB | 158 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 86

An Appetite for Human Character


Titian found the mind's construction in the faces of his
subjects

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Tiziano Vecellio, Titian to us, was one of the most famous,
adored and formidable artists who ever lived -- the classic
Dead White Male, so to speak. And when he was a Live White
Male, which is to say for the best part of a century -- he was
born in 1488 or 1490 in Pieve di Cadore, a hill town in
northern Italy, and was carried off by the plague in his
beloved but insalubrious Venice in 1576, still painting, at the
patriarchal age of nearly 90 -- he posed dreadful problems for
other artists. The length of his career condemned all his
Venetian contemporaries to be the second choice of patrons. This
must have been especially hard on Tintoretto, born 30 years
after Titian, who had every right to expect to inherit the
great man's mantle. Titian refused to die until Tintoretto was
nearly 60.

    No painter before Titian had ever achieved such
international success: not Michelangelo, and certainly not the
blocked and endlessly worrying Leonardo. The work of this "king
of painters and painter of kings" attracted every serious
patron in Italy and half the military leaders and crowned heads
of Europe. The roster of his clients and portrait subjects
reads like a list of international society in the 16th century:
the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Alfonso d'Este, Duke Federigo
of Mantua, Ippolito de' Medici, several ancient and cunning
Popes, doges, admirals, art dealers, intellectuals. Even those
who were deadly enemies, like Francis I of France and the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V, had in common the fact of having been
painted by Titian. The story of Charles V picking up a brush
that Titian had dropped and handing it back to the painter may
be apocryphal, but it sums up the sense of deference and even
awe that Titian's celebrity, fixed by his talent and
assiduously pumped up by his promoter, Pietro Aretino, produced
in his clients.

    From his first Bellini-like and Giorgionesque paintings,
through the classical certainties of his middle age -- such as
the John the Baptist, a veritable column of vigor and
controlled theatrical gesture -- and on to his late work,
Titian never ceased to develop. Perhaps to a modern eye, late
Titian is the most moving of all, for it goes beyond the
pictorial rhetoric that made his success. It is broken,
impressionistic and no longer interested in the classical ideal.
From its smoky melancholy come Lear-like outcries of
pessimism, whose fullest expression is reached in The Flaying
of Marsyas, perhaps the last of his paintings.

    Nevertheless, for most of his career Titian's pictorial
elocution was so smooth, so inventive, so grand in its effects
and masterly in its execution that it created a sense of
helplessness in others. He was the 16th century's unrivaled
topographer of male power and female beauty, as Rubens (whose
conception of artistic prowess was modeled on Titian's) was in
the 17th. Titian pushed the description of masculine character
farther than any portraitist before him.

    The idea that a portrait should be the "mirror of the soul"
as well as a formal utterance about appearance and rank was not
born with Titian; Leonardo, Botticelli, Durer and Van Eyck were
all his elders, and in his youth he worked with Giorgione, the
most shadowed and inward looking of Venetian quattrocento
painters, on the fresco decorations of the Fondaco dei
Tedeschi. Giorgione's ambition to paint people in the act of
thinking, to invent signs for internal reflection as well as
external show, was carried forward by Titian into works such as
the Louvre's Man with a Glove.

    The projection of character reached new levels with Titian,
just as the dramatic exploration of character and foible,
already a mainspring of English plays before the early 17th
century, had to wait for Shakespeare to disclose its full
power. "There's no art/ To find the mind's construction in the
face," complained Duncan in Macbeth, but he was a primitive
Scot; after Titian, there emphatically was such an art. The
fierce, glaring authority of Doge Andrea Gritti; the plump
self-assurance of the Florentine historian Benedetto Varchi;
the saurian cunning of old Pope Paul III, huddled in his velvet
cape; and the inflexible determination of the military
commander Francesco Maria della Rovere, whose carapace of
bombshell-black armor is painted with a freedom and virtuosity
that looks forward to Velazquez and, beyond him, to Manet --
to scan these portraits is to realize what an appetite for
human character Titian had, and what a gallery of it he created.


    There were, however, limits. Character, for Titian, was
something mainly possessed by men. His women are by no means
insipid or vacant, but they never have the singularity of being
that leaps from his best male portraits. They are always cast
in the passive voice: the madonnas with their union of
tenderness, patrician grace and a certain country solidity, and
the nymphs and goddesses (Venus especially), those Venetian
odalisques whose weighty gold-pink flesh may not conform to
modern conventions of beauty but excited Titian's contemporaries
to rapture. There too Titian embodied the assumptions of his
time, place and class. What terser image of sociosexual
politics in 16th century Venice could one ask for than Titian's
Danae, princess of Argos, seduced by Zeus in the form of a
rainburst of gold coins?

    The last full-dress Titian show took place more than a
half-century ago in Venice in 1935. This summer its successor
is on view in the Doges' Palace, and it will travel, in a much
truncated form, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
opening Oct. 28. The incompleteness of the Venice show, which
is more a generous sampler than a true retrospective, and the
even more fragmentary character it will have in Washington,
testifies that the day of the big single-master show is
closing.

    A quick checklist of absences would be as large as the show
itself. It would include the Louvre's Entombment, the Bacchus
and Ariadne from London, the Rape of Europa from Boston, the
Borghese Gallery's Sacred and Profane Love, the Naples portrait
of Pope Paul III and his two grandsons (surely the most
piercing political image in Western art, until Goya's portrait
of the family of Charles IV). And then there are the
masterpieces that remain in Venice, such as the Pesaro Madonna
in the Frari.

    There is a growing consensus that to send such things around
the world, or even to move them at all, verges on the
irresponsible. Yet museums still feel obliged to lend paintings
as hostages to others to ensure reciprocal loans. Only this can
explain, for instance, why the National Gallery refused to move
its Feast of the Gods (the figures by Bellini, the deep and
magically sonorous landscape background by his apprentice
Titian) a few city blocks to the Phillips Collection's
"Pastoral Landscape" show in 1988, whose centerpiece it should
have been, but had no compunction about flying it back and
forth across the Atlantic in 1990. There is something
opportunistic about such policies, and this show will be
remembered as a signal that the very form in which it is cast
is dying, the victim of anxiety, insurance costs and a shift
in museum priorities.