March 13, 2009
Art Review | 'Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese'
Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters
By HOLLAND COTTER
BOSTON — You can pretty much kiss goodbye, at least for now, the prospect of more exhibitions like “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” which opens Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts here. Transatlantic loans of the kind that make this show the breathtaker it is are a big drain on strapped museum budgets. Boston was lucky to partner with the Louvre on this project, but such masterpiece gatherings are likely to be rare in years to come. Catch them while they’re hot.
Hot is the word for this show. Devotional ardor radiates from monumental church paintings. In a gallery of female nudes with skin so incandescent as to barely need lighting, eroticism floats like a scent. For the first time in European art we see paint itself used as an impassioned material, the instrument of fervid hands and inflamed personalities.
The show is about three such personalities: Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian; Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto; and Paolo Caliari, called Veronese. All three shot off sparks as they reforged painting as a medium. And all three had feverishly competitive overlapping careers.
These masters of 16th-century Venetian painting were no Holy Trinity. They were a discordant ménage-a-trois bound together by envy, talent, circumstances and some strange version of love.
This is the story the exhibition tells through 56 grand to celestial paintings — no filler here, not an ounce of fat — sorted into broad categories (religious images, portraits, belle donne) and arranged in compare-and-contrast couplings and triplings to indicate who was looking at whom, and why, and when. And that story is set against a larger historical narrative that goes something like this.
Before the 16th century Italian art was dominated by two cities, Florence and Rome, and by two kinds of painting: fresco and egg tempera — water-based, fast-drying, smooth-surfaced — on wood. Venice lay outside this mainstream. Fresco wasn’t viable in the city’s humid atmosphere; tempera had problems too. Then, at the end of the 15th century, oil painting, still little known in the rest of Italy, was introduced, and Venetian art caught fire.
Giovanni Bellini (1431-1516) was the cusp figure. A single painting by him of the Virgin and Child with four saints, dated around 1505, opens the Boston show. It is done in both tempera and in oil on wood. Another painting on the same theme and of a slightly later date hangs beside it. This one is by Titian (1480-1576), a Bellini pupil. It is in oil on canvas, which demonstrates a revolution in progress.
Bellini’s figures, probably painted in part by assistants, are still quattrocento cutouts with colors filled in. Their connections to one another are vague; no one seems to quite know how he or she ended up in the same picture. Titian’s grouping is an organic merging of shadow and light; figures gaze at one another, rapt. Bellini’s palette hovers, soft and pale, in the ether; Titian’s is loam-dark, with the red of the Virgin’s robe as startling as a spill of roses or rubies turned up in the earth.
The oil-on-canvas format had other far-reaching practical consequences. With it artists could produce fresco-size pictures, much in demand for courts and churches, that were portable. Painters no longer had to relocate to Rome or Madrid for big-dollar gigs. They could work at home and mail the art in.
Also, oil paint was physically different from other paint. Because it was slow drying, artists could rethink and revise as they went. (The show has a fascinating section on pictures buried under other pictures.) And its controllable density and weight allowed each stroke to leave a distinctive and volatile trace, like the ink line in handwriting.
As a result people began to pay attention to brush styles, not just as indicators of skill but as evidence of an artist’s emotional presence. At a certain point Titian stopped signing his pictures. The way he used paint was identification enough, even as it changed over his long career, from Bellinian polish to an expressive rawness — see his scraped and scratched late “Entombment” — that Goya and countless later artists would emulate.
At the same time, such a personalized, implicitly egocentric mode went against a Venetian social ethic. Officially, La Serenissima placed supreme value on harmony and equanimity. Public art commissions were scrupulously distributed among many artists; assignments were by committee, not charisma.
Titian, and the oil medium he mastered, turned the page on that. When it came to adorning the city’s churches and all-powerful confraternities, as well as for painting state portraits or soft-porn fantasies for private delectation, he was the artist of choice.
And his reputation spread. Kings and pontiffs lined up for his services — his famed portrait of Pope Paul III, coiled like an aged cobra in his velvet cape, is in the show — and patiently awaited his reply. It could be slow in coming. Titian worked on Titian time. Like any grand divo he set the tempo. He had the stage to himself.
Then in the mid-1540s he didn’t. Tintoretto charged onto the scene, with a new style, aesthetic and personal. Whereas Titian was known for gentlemanly comportment, the newcomer — his father was a dyer, hence the nickname — purveyed an abrupt, aggressive glamour. You can see it in his early self-portrait. All dark curls and glowering eyes, he looks like a greaser prince.
The portrait is dated 1546. Tintoretto was around 30 and on his way to becoming a star. By the time he painted “St. George, St. Louis and the Princess” for a government building on the Rialto, he was one. Formally the picture is a sparkler, as rich with reflected light as Venice itself. It was also a scandal. Saints preening like boys in the piazza. A princess riding a dragon, for heaven’s sake. Loved and loathed, the picture had everyone buzzing, and had Titian losing some sleep.
The two artists became almost instant enemies. Titian used his influence to steer commissions away from his young rival. Tintoretto made it his business to be the un-Titian of Venetian painting, often adopting the older artist’s style only to exaggerate, even mock it.
Such attacks can be uncomfortable to encounter first hand, as we do in the side-by-side hanging of Titian’s tranquil, tender “Supper at Emmaus,” with its forget-me-nots strewn on the table, and Tintoretto’s pointedly squirmy, sloppy version of same scene from a few years later. Some say that Tintoretto’s art often looks best from a distance and disappoints up close. Here, as if with Titian as a target, he seems to be making an extra effort to look not-good. (The contribution of assistants helped with this.) And surely there is testimony to deep attachment in so negative an homage.
Finally into the arena strode a third giant, and a somewhat gentler one, Veronese (1528-88). Named for his native city and still in his teens when he hit Venice, he was quickly acknowledged to be a prodigy, fully formed. Titian became the artist he was through long growth, Tintoretto by sifting and synthesizing influences. Veronese was Veronese from Day 1.
Ingratiating in manner, he was a painter of fine texture, sweet color and courtly reserve. Patrons who found Tintoretto too outlandish gave Veronese their business; the elderly Titian took him under his wing. And from the 1540s to the 1580s Venetian painting became a three-way dance among these three men, a tricky choreography of emulation and rejection, dependence and separation.
You can follow the moves in a cluster of steamy paintings of nudes at the center of the show, installed in a gallery with crimson walls and tasseled curtains. The Titians — the “Danae” from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, “Venus with an Organist and Dog” from the Prado, “Venus With a Mirror” from the National Gallery of Art in Washington — are stop-and-stare fantastic.
Scarcely of less interest, though, are the Titian riffs around them. Tintoretto turns the “Danae” into a clever joke, then, as if realizing he’s wasting his talent, paints an image of “Susannah and the Elders” so surrealistically sensual it all but clears the room. Veronese bends over backward to work out his own Titianesque Venus. He gets the anatomy wrong, but the details are so brilliantly right — the jewels, the embroidery, that gorgeous block of bare flesh — you don’t care.
But the most moving display of influence comes at the end of the show and in the reverse generational direction, when the revered master is seen taking lessons from one of his juniors.
Tintoretto, for all his showmanship, had a capacity for egoless empathy when it came to depicting religious subjects of tragic import. A little-seen “Deposition of Christ,” hauled out of storage in Venice and restored for this exhibition, is a fine example, with its swooning diagonals, sudden colors and pale faces picked out in light.
The picture is thought to date from the mid-1550s. At the end of the decade, in 1559, comes a painting on a related theme, the “Entombment of Christ,” composed of similar diagonals, with the same sudden colors and with a comparable, if slightly brightened, play of light and shade. But this one is by Titian, by then moving into the final stretch of his career.
Could he have seen the painting of his rival and absorbed its power? If not, he had certainly seen other Tintorettos. The first thing you notice about Titian’s “Entombment” is how loose and impulsive the brush style is, how broadly conceived the forms; how close the picture is, in its sweep and almost heedless verve, to Tintoretto. Could it be that a style once used by the younger to ape the older has not only hit its mark but stuck there, that Titian has made it his own?
That is one of many speculative fires ignited by the show, organized by Frederick Ilchman, assistant curator of European painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, and by Jean Habert and Vincent Delieuvin, curators at the Louvre. There are many more fires.
Some will be fanned into life by Renaissance scholars in the future. Others, like the account of the origins of oil painting as a subjectively loaded and commercially privileged medium, cast a searching light on a market-addled present.
Such perspectives are among the rewards that exhibitions bring, at least if they are astutely thought out and lovingly realized. The economy may no longer favor international loan shows like this one, but our own museums, with their rich collections, can, working cooperatively, produce spectacular things. Whenever such gifts arrive, wherever they come from, treasure them.
“Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice” opens on Sunday and remains on view through Aug. 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave.; ticket information, (800) 440-6975, mfa.org.
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