Celebrating the fifth centenary of the Italian-Renaissance master's birth, the first major Titian retrospective in fifty years premiered this summer in the Palazzo Ducale of the painter's native city, Venice, before going on to Washington's National Gallery of Art on October 28. Spanning the artist's illustrious seventy-year career, and despite the absence of many key works, the exhibition provides an encompassing survey of Titian's quite remarkable stylistic development.
Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) was born in or shortly before 1490 in Pieve di Cadore, a small Alpine town to the north of Venice. By the time he was twenty, he had shuttled through the Venetian ateliers of the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccato, then of painters Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and finally of Giorgione di Castelfranco. He had become an independent artist whose freschi on the street façade of the German Merchant's Building near the Rialto had surpassed those on the canal side, painted by Giorgione. Around 1510, Titian's works so closely resembled those of Giorgione that their authorship was even then often confused. To this day the debate continues regarding certain masterpieces such as The Concert Champetre, Three Ages of Man, and Noli Me Tangeres.
In 1513, Titian declined an invitation to the papal court in Rome in order to petition the Venetian Council of Ten to enlist him in the painting of a battle scene in the Great Council Hall of the Ducal Palace. He was granted the assignment along with a promise that the government's next available artist's pension would be his. When Giovanni Bellini died in 1516, Titian received his former master's sinecure, thereby becoming, in effect, the first painter of Venice.
In 1516, he accepted a commission for the high altarpiece of the Franciscan church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. This work, Assumption of the Virgin, firmly established the young artist as the republic's leading painter. Instead of a traditional, static image that symbolically evokes a doctrine, Titian envisioned an awe-inspiring, dynamic portrayal of Mary's corporeal ascent. Her spiraling body, supported by cherubs, sails above a group of gesticulating apostles, rising upward toward God the Father beside whom floats an angel waiting to crown the Virgin.
Every aspect of the huge painting (it measures 6.9 x 3.6 meters) is orchestrated to harmonize with the pre-existing Gothic Structure of the church, where it remains in situ. The frame is conceived as a triumphal arch whose gilded, foliate decorations and capitals repeat the forms and materials of the choir screen through which the spectator approaches the apse. From a distance, the painting's dominant aspect is its chromatic structure: A crimson pyramid comprising two lateral apostles below and Mary above presents a powerful geometric element within the cool green and subdued brown polychrome of the church interior. The three distinct horizontal levels - apostles, Mary, and God the Father - link the composition with the curtain of windows behind the apse, creating a contrapuntal rhythm of light and shade that locks the image into its setting.
At the same time, Titian had secured commissions to paint certain mythological scenes for the decoration of the camerino of Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, for which Giovanni Bellini had already painted The Feast of the Gods. Alfonso had hoped for other works by Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo for this room, but these painters
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