Original subtitles

Good morning. In the last lecture, we spoke at length of Titian and the characteristics of his

paintings in comparison with the paintings of Giorgione. We said nothing at that time

of Titian's life other than his training with Giovanni Bellini. So, a brief bio. First,

his name is, properly, Tiziano Vecellio, and he was born in Pieve di Cadore, north of Venice and closer

to the Austrian Tyrol, then to Venice. His attachment to his birthplace never waned throughout

his long life. He returned constantly when he had an opportunity to visit his hometown. He was born

about 1488, 1490, and he lived until 1576. Long enough a life, but he used to be given 10 extra years

before it was pretty much ascertained that he was born about 1488, 90. In English-speaking countries,

he has always been called Titian, T-I-T-I-A-N. It's an anglicized form, obviously, from the Latin,

his Latin form of the Latin form of his name, which is Titianus, just as we derived the English Raphael

Raphael from the Latin form of his name. When Titian was nine, he went with his brother or a brother to

Venice to be apprenticed to a mosaicist, a master of mosaic art. Certainly, though he changed from

mosaic art to painting, the color of mosaics wasn't a bad beginning for a young artist. He then studied

painting with Gentile Bellini before finding him old-fashioned, according to a friend, and entering

the studio of Giovanni Bellini. By 1508, when he was working with Giorgione on the frescoes for the

Fondaco de Tedeschi, those lost frescoes, Titian was an independent master. As we noted in the last

lecture, Titian was the great, among the greatest of portrait artists. The painting you're looking at,

the splendid young man with cap and gloves of about 1512 to 15, now in the National Gallery in London,

is proof enough of that. Not long after Titian painted The Gentleman in Blue, whom we looked at,

which may be a self-portrait that we looked at at the end of the last lecture, he painted this

masterful portrait that shows a greater maturity yet. The young man with cap and gloves is an intimate,

fluidly painted reverie that recalls Giorgione's work but has a breadth of form that looks ahead to

Titian's mature painting. It's a striking work, which combines ideas from Giovanni Bellini,

the sitter faces out of the picture, does not look at the viewer, and from Giorgione, the mood is

deeply poetic, very nostalgic, and yet it's inspirited, if I can put it that way, by Titian's own

contribution. The vividly realized strength of character in this self-possessed young man.

Coloristically, it's superb. Simple but brilliant contrasts of his black satin cloak. Anyone who can

paint black like that is a great colorist. His white shirt, which is edged in red, his rose-colored sleeve,

and his auburn hair, all of this just beautiful coloristic ensemble. And in breadth of form,

as I say it, anticipates his mature style. Look for a moment at the background, which is fairly clear in

this image. There is a wall behind him at the right, and at the left there is a kind of column or pier,

which has on it a sculpture and what looks like a coat of arms and so forth. Nonetheless, we have,

if it is a coat of arms of this young man, we have never identified the sitter here. Look also at the

sill, which I didn't mention yet, the sill on which he rests his hand, which holds the glove,

almost like two hands on that light gray sill, which divides our spaces. And he doesn't project

beyond it. He pushes, as it were, the picture plane, but unlike the man with the blue sleeve,

from the last lecture, he doesn't push into our space in an illusionistic way. It is a haunting

painting in many ways, extraordinarily handsome both in subject and in painting.

The so-called Gypsy Madonna was painted about 1510. It's now in Vienna in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,

the Art History Museum. The Gypsy Madonna takes her name, I think, from the costume in part,

and also from the multicolored hanging that is partly behind her in the center and off to the right.

The composition is very similar to the Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini in the composition,

both of the Madonna and child in this triangular form, with the child here standing on a partial

sill or ledge of some sort, and also because it opens to the landscape on one side. Bellini almost

invariably opens his landscape onto both sides equally, but here it is asymmetrical. There are

other significant differences between this and the Madonnas of Bellini. Titian's Madonna is fuller,

more ample in form, especially in the drapery that gathers around her right arm. This is just a

wonderful, wonderful, wonderful area here, massing up of different colored draperies at this area,

which gives great volume and great force to that area. And the color, particularly here of the silver

blue drapery of her cloak, is quite comparable to the drapery in front of Giorgione's sleeping Venus,

drapery which we attributed to Titian. The mood here is also different from that of Bellini's Madonnas.

The introspective melancholy of Giovanni Bellini has been replaced by a rather placid quality, almost

neutral. Her eyes are downcast and it's quiet, but it doesn't have that deeper introspection that we

saw in Giovanni Bellini. It is a very beautiful painting with an exquisitely beautiful landscape

in the background. Bellini's influence is also still strong in an altarpiece of Saint Mark enthroned with

saints, with other saints. The figure of Saint Sebastian, for example, in this to the right, the nude figure,

is a less classicizing version of Bellini's Saint Sebastian in his Saint Job altarpiece. But Giorgione's

style played a role here too, and one might be reminded of Giorgione's Castelfranco Madonna

in the placement of Saint Mark. You remember in the Castelfranco Madonna, the Madonna was very high,

a throne on top of an altar. And here we have Saint Mark elevated on a pedestal like a living statue,

and flanked by the other saints, who are also statuesque and, and to some degree isolated. Nowhere

outside of Venice and its dominions would you expect to find an image of Saint Mark elevated in the manner

that the Madonna is usually elevated in. But nothing was too good for the patron saint of Venice, and here he,

here he holds forth as though he were alone on that pedestal. This painting, probably painted about 1511-12,

was originally for the church of Santo Spirito in Isola, Isola means island, and that was a monastery,

Santo Spirito, in the lagoon southwest of Venice. Now plague victims were buried often in mass graves

outside of cities, and in Venice that meant on other islands of the lagoon. Since the four saints

here are Cosmas and Damien on the left, who are doctors, and Saint Roque and Saint Sebastian on the

right, who are both invoked against the plague. It seems likely that the altarpiece was occasioned by the

plague, and quite possible that it was also, that it also served as Titian's personal memorial to his dead

colleague, Giorgione, who died in the plague. Now it would have been commissioned by someone else,

but that wouldn't permit, would not prohibit Titian from putting in his own, as it were, private,

private commemorative note to Giorgione. I might note that when Santo Spirito, the church in the lagoon was

abandoned in the mid-17th century, this painting was transferred to a church on the Grand Canal,

the famous church of Santa Maria della Salute, which was a church newly built to commemorate deliverance

from yet a more recent plague. And there may have been, well have been, a knowledge of the plague

relationship, as it were, of this earlier altarpiece when it was moved. About his famous sacred and profane

love, which you see now, painted probably about 1514, 1515, and today in the Borghese Gallery in Rome,

about this painting, the first thing, and maybe the last, that must be said is that it is extraordinarily

beautiful. It is just breathtakingly beautiful. That agreed, the allegorical subject presents

complexities that have inspired scholars to insights and overreaching in equal proportion.

Sacred and Profane Love is one of the key paintings of the Venetian Renaissance, very beautiful

and equally enigmatic. The unusual ratio of width to height of about 2.4 to 1 may suggest that it was

designed for a specific site, either on furniture or on architecture in the paneling of a room.

Titian also underscores the proportions of the canvas by flanking this long, low sarcophagus with

two female figures seated at either end of it who incline slightly toward each other. All of that,

all of that emphasizes the width. And of course, the nude figure rises nearly the full height of the

panel. And then you've got the marvelous horizon behind it, literally the horizontals of the sky,

emphasize the same low-lying quality of the composition. The many interpretations of this

painting, a painting which I suppose at first glance is straightforward, we have a nude lady and a

clothed lady, but what's it about? But even a list of the interpretations that have been suggested are

beyond the scope of this lecture. It's, it has, as I say, inspired a great many words. The most widely

accepted, or at least the best known basic theory of the iconography of the meaning, is that of the

great scholar Erwin Panofsky has developed in essays by him over decades. He kept coming back to this

painting. But I'm only giving you the, the most obvious parts of it. The nude woman is basically

Venus. Cupid is nearby in the middle there of the sarcophagus, leaning into the sarcophagus is apparently a

kind of spring or well. And Venus, however, holds a flaming lamp, not, not her usual attribute here. In

Panofsky's interpretation, which is a, an interpretation derived from Neoplatonic ideas, and we've touched on

these apropos Michelangelo in particular. In Panofsky's Neoplatonic interpretation, she, the nude with the lamp,

represents sacred or divine love. The sumptuously clothed woman is profane love, by which is meant

secular or human. This is the most skeletable, skeletal explanation imaginable, leaving numerous

aspects of the painting unmentioned, and yet it's the most that can be said with any confidence that you

won't get into an argument with someone. It is, it is just about as far as you can go in the

interpretation of what we see. I might add, however, if you look at the lower part of the sarcophagus,

near the clothed woman, you see quite clearly a horse. The horse is very close in pose to, in, to one or two

of the life-size bronze horses on, on San Marco, on the front of San Marco. And I think clearly inspired

imposed by them. He just borrows it and uses it here as a relief. The painting has been persuasively

demonstrated to have been commissioned for the celebration of a wedding, of the marriage in 1514,

of a distinguished Venetian official whose name was Niccolo Aurelio, to a woman from Padua named Laura

Bagarrotto. Now, such nuptial paintings as this were frequently incorporated into the furniture of a bridal

chamber, which may, obviously, I think, does explain the unusual dimensions of the painting.

I, I show you a painting which demonstrates Titian's unflagging inventiveness, because I think that

continuous inventiveness over a long, long life of painting is one of the marks of his particular

genius. Here, here we are in a painting of the Madonna and Child with Saints George and Dorothy,

painted probably about 1515. And he invents a complex but focused variation on the very familiar

theme, to us now, of the Madonna and Saints, using half-length figures. Though not behind a sill or other

barrier, it's as though they were in a shared space with the viewer. They're not cut off by a low wall or

sill. It's a wonderfully composed group, which is why I particularly wanted you to see it. Quite subtle,

in the interlocking poses of the figures. They're, they're placed in a draped,

tent-like interior with a vent behind Saint Dorothy opening to the sky. The Madonna, in a lustrous red and

ultramarine costume, exchanges solemn glances with the Christ child. The child's hand reaches for the

roses in Dorothy's basket that she carries in her right hand. And he, the child overlaps in that gesture,

overlaps her ample figure, which in turn, her figure overlaps that of the armored Saint George,

whose devout gaze toward the Madonna completes the composition's unstressed triangle. And a wonderful,

interlocking, and overlapping composition. The early history of this painting, which once belonged to

King Philip II of Spain, before 1593, but the earlier history is not known, and it would be of

particular interest because of the saints who attend the Madonna. Both George and Dorothy are

early Christian martyrs whose very existence is dubious. Don't let that bother you, by the way.

Real or not, they inspired some great art. Saint George is, of course, famous as the patron saint

of England, but Dorothy is scarcely known. In this painting, Saint George is such a strong and

descriptively specific figure that one suspects that he's a portrait, conceivably of the donor,

whose name would therefore probably have been George. Dorothy is identified by the basket of roses

that she offers the Christ child. The story is that as she was led to martyrdom, a lawyer,

a lawyer mocked her and asked her to send him roses or apples from paradise after she got there.

Well, roses duly arrived and he was converted to Christianity. The Franciscan church of Santa Maria

Gloriosa dei Frari, the most celebrated church in Venice after San Marco, was founded in the mid-13th

century. It is one of the great Italian Gothic churches, completed about 1443, and it houses

many monuments and many tombs of Venetian notables and many artistic treasures, dominant among which

is the Assumption of the Virgin, painted between 1516 and 1518 by Titian. The doctrine of the bodily

Assumption of the Virgin was of particular importance to the Franciscans because it was defended by Saint

Bonaventura, the 13th century Franciscan theologian. Titian, not yet 30 years old, was commissioned to paint

an enormous altarpiece for the Cappella Maggiore, the major chapel, the chancel and apse of the church with

its high altar. The importance of the commission attests to his early reputation. 100 yards long,

the church has a large enclosed choir before you reach the transept. You see that choir with its wooden

walls or its marble walls, but a gate on the axis permits us as visitors to see the Assumption

through the choir in the nave at the far end, right through it, and framed by it as it were in this

photograph. That is the entire picture, but far down in the apse. Nothing can prepare the first-time

visitor to the venerable Franciscan Church of the Frare for the impact of Titian's masterpiece.

Painted in the adjoining monastery, it was designed to harmonize perfectly with the Gothic

Apsidal Chapel, and we are looking at it now. This great soaring four-story Gothic arch of the

apse, and in front of it, on a Renaissance altar, the Assunta, the Assumption by Titian. That the

painting was executed in a room in the adjoining monastery was undoubtedly necessary, necessitated

by its huge size. It's 23 feet high, half again as tall as Bellini's St. Job altarpiece,

but it would also have facilitated determining the necessary scale of the altarpiece and the painting

with the architecture. We have four stories of tall, lancet Gothic windows rising from the floor to the

vault of the apse, flooding the space with light. Although the stone carver of the Renaissance altar

in which the painting is, is known, it's assumed that Titian designed the altar as well as the painting.

This enormous structure required that four windows behind the altar be walled up before the painting

and its frame could be set in place. Despite the contrast in style between the apse and the altar,

it became an integral part of the architecture, effectually redefining it. The space is towering,

and Titian obviously was determined to dominate that space. To that end, he designed over life-sized

figures in dynamic poses and brilliant colors. It is a three-tiered composition that offered an entirely

new approach to the Assumption of the Virgin to this subject. The lowest level holds the empty tomb,

which is almost completely obscured by the agitated apostles who shrink back, or strain forward,

or look up in awe, or reach out in farewell toward the Virgin. The Virgin dominates the second tier,

accompanied and sustained by a wonderful glory of angels beneath and beside her. And God the Father,

attended principally by one large angel, closes the composition at the top. I want you to observe a

few things. For instance, the curve of the clouds on which she stands is completed by the arched top of the frame,

so that it's one complete circle. The energized silhouette of the apostles' heads and hands just

follow this line. What a wonderful line, like a very dramatic musical score,

melody going across that area. Look at the outstretched arm of the apostle in red, this full-length

apostle with his back to us. Together with the little angel's leg that comes down here,

it connects the bottom tier with the middle tier, and also echoes the position of the Madonna's

upstretched arms, a position which was almost completely new. Mantegna had done something

slightly similar. Basically, this is Titian's invention. She is not praying. The Assumption of

the Virgin was traditionally painted in a very static manner, with the seated Virgin,

hands folded in prayer, carried passively up to heaven. But Titian's standing Virgin almost seems

to swirl upward. The powerful torsion of her body, and her upraised arms, and her upturned head,

tilted airborne toward the tilted airborne form of God, is astonishing. The fact that this form,

this figure of God the Father, is not just horizontal across the top, but is on a diagonal,

almost as though banking, gives the picture a top, it caps it, without stopping the motion. There's

still a sense that this motion will continue literally to heaven. The triumphal arch of the frame

is expansive, even while it closes the picture like a dome, like the dome of heaven, in fact. The

composition is equally created through color. The intense red costumes of the Madonna and two of the

apostles, here below, make the angles of a wonderful, enormous pyramid here. And the three tiers, the

three separate levels, one is reminded of Raphael's disputa, except that Raphael's work seems static in

comparison with Titian's invention. It would be hard to imagine a more perfectly conceived tribute to the

Frari's dedicatee. She's not just Saint Mary in this church, she is Santa Maria Gloriosa, the glorious Saint

Mary. This painting is the supreme masterpiece of the Venetian High Renaissance, fully comparable in its

ideal poise and dignity to Raphael's frescoes in the Stanzai. It even echoes some of the dramatic

power of Michelangelo's Sistine figures, and that is remarkable because Titian hadn't been to Rome yet,

and could only have known those works through prints or through drawings. The assumption is joyous,

it is dynamic, the glorious reds of its principal figures resound to the end of the nave, and yet the

stupendous composition achieves a monumental balance, a perpetual tension between motion and stasis that is

unforgettable. When this painting was triumphantly unveiled on 19 May 1518, Titian had already been

approached by Alfonso d'Este, the duke of Ferrara, to contribute to the decoration of his alabaster

chamber in Ferrara, for which Giovanni Bellini had, as we've seen, so recently painted his Feast of the Gods.

Raphael and Fra Bartolomeo had also been approached by the duke, as I mentioned in an earlier lecture,

but Fra Bartolomeo had died. Raphael had seemed in no hurry to commit to the project, and then he died,

so Titian assumed their commissions as well. They occupied him until late 1522 or early 1523.

His three great paintings for Ferrara amplify and re-orchestrate Venetian lyricism as invented by

Bellini and by Giorgione. Titian's most important innovation in these mythologies was that they

contained many figures in complex interaction. The ambitious choreography of these actors is realized

to perfection. We'll look at two of these paintings, the Bacchus and Ariadne, which you see now, and then

the Andrians, which I think are among the most beautiful and influential achievements of the Venetian

Renaissance, and they mark a new stage in Titian's art. Bacchus and Ariadne, now in London in the National

Gallery, was the last to be delivered, probably, but we'll look at it first. It's a painting like the

other two Titians for this spot, the Alabaster Chamber, based upon the descriptions of now lost

ancient paintings by the Greek author Philostratus the Elder. The descriptions were by him in his

imagines. Alfonso wanted these subjects recreated for his collection. Here we see Ariadne on the left,

wandering disconsolately on the shore of Noxus, having been abandoned by Theseus, who has sailed off.

Bacchus arrives suddenly and noisily, you might say, with his extraordinary entourage. It is love at

first sight, at least it is for Bacchus. Ariadne's crown, she was the daughter of King Minas of Crete,

and Bacchus has already caused her crown to be thrown into the heavens, and it is a constellation

up in the upper left-hand corner, the constellation of Ariadne. This is a mythological moment.

And by the way, he had to do exactly what Botticelli had had to do when faced with doing the birth of

Venus. There wasn't anything except a description of such a subject. One had not been painted in modern

times, and so Botticelli had had to find something to base it on, and as you may recall, he had tried

using the baptism of Christ to form his compositional basis. Well, here we had the same thing,

and Titian, I think, has probably had his mind on the arrival of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.

A young divine figure suddenly arrives and the young woman is startled and slightly frightened by his

arrival and pulls back. It's a teenage Bacchus that we have here, leaping impetuously from a chariot drawn

by cheetahs, you see them here between the two of them, by cheetahs as Venus turns away in surprise,

as Ariadne, pardon me, turns away in surprise, although looking at him with interest. The train of

tendons following Bacchus includes two wonderfully contrasting figures, this bearded satyr here who

is struggling to rid himself of a serpent. Well, this was certainly inspired by that by the Laocoon,

of which Titian would have seen copies. And he is also, there's a wonderful contrast with this

this struggling figure, and that is the the utterly charming child faun who is dragging a calf's head

behind him. A French writer at the turn of the at the early part of the 20th century spoke of that

little figure and called him cette petite délicieuse faune, this delicious little faune, and it's

exactly the right the right adjective for him. The painting has a youthful charm, a certain combination

of grace and willful awkwardness that suggests first love. The splendid color of the painting

harmonizes this love song. The singing color incidentally reemerged after a strenuously debated

restoration more than 40 years ago in London. The Times of London was flooded with letters for months

about the propriety of restoring the painting. The British care about such things, or at least they did

then. The Andrians, the probably the second of Titian's trio to be finished for the Alabaster Chamber,

is one of the most memorably choreographed paintings of the Renaissance, and it had enormous influence

upon other painters including Rubens who copied it. Choreographed is the right word, for much of the

composition in the Andrians is danced by the characters. The Andrians were inhabitants of the

Aegean island of Andros, and they became drunk from the river of wine that flowed there, I can well imagine,

and Andros was therefore in antiquity a center of the cult of Dionysus, or Bacchus, Dionysus Bacchus,

and in this picture there is much drinking, much amorous behavior abetted by the drinking,

and some sleep induced by the drinking. The last category includes a sleeping old man on the hilltop

at the right who's probably considered a place god, a god of the of the locale, and then the robust

female nude at the lower right who is based upon the already famous classical image of the sleeping

Ariadne in the Vatican, a famous famous ancient statue. She however was much more clothed than

Titian's version of the same figure. The visual poetry is stunning. I ask you to choose if you can,

from among the nude faun here to the left who is pouring wine into a kylix held by this woman at center,

and this wonderful act of pouring the wine in the circle that is completed of the arms.

The inebriated fellow who is balancing a crystal pitcher of wine aloft against the sky,

one of the most beautiful inventions imaginable here, and spectacularly painted, and how very

difficult to paint as well. Or the dancing couple here to the right, who only have eyes for each other.

It is one charm upon another, just utterly poetic. The paintings for the Alabaster Chamber begin a new

phase in Titian's career, introducing him as among the greatest poets in paint of any era, with a complete

command of all that painting can do to produce sheer seductive beauty for the eyes. The historically

imposed limitations of our course means that we must leave Titian with 50 years of painting still to come,

just as we had to admit the second half of Michelangelo's career. We will, however, have an opportunity

to glance at some of their later art, both Michelangelo and Titian, in our last two lectures,

in which we will attempt a bit of summary and look at what lay ahead. Thank you for your attention.