“Titian and His' World.” “The Entombment of Christ,” The Vision of Saint Eustace', Pisanello

Kimbell Art Museum


The Kimbell is pleased to display one of Titian’s most compelling masterpieces, “The Entombment of Christ,” on loan from the Museo del Prado, Madrid. It will be on view today through June 12. ‪#‎MustSee‬



In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (/ˈmɑrsiəs/; Greek: Μαρσύας) is a central figure in two stories involving death: in one, he picked up the double flute (aulos) that had been abandoned by Athena and played it;[1] in the other, he challenged Apollo to a contest of music and lost his hide and life. InAntiquity, literary sources often emphasise the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment.



Apollo flayed the satyr Marsyas alive for his hubris.


Iris Murdoch’s Favorite Painting
Iris Murdoch, who would be ninety-six today, thrilled to paintings of every stripe, but she was compelled by one work in particular: “Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas.”

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National Gallery



Our Head of Framing, Peter Schade, has managed to source the perfect Venetian 16th century frame for Titian's 'An Allegory of Prudence'. We are now looking for your help to acquire it:http://bit.ly/1yy5PD3
Peter will be appearing tonight from 7:15pm on BBC Radio 4 to talk about the appeal. Tune in to find out more, and to hear about the great work of our framing team.




In Hesiod and most other accounts, Theseus abandoned Ariadne sleeping on Naxos, andDionysus rediscovered and wedded her. In a few versions of the myth,[6] Dionysus appeared to Theseus as they sailed away from Crete, saying that he had chosen Ariadne as his wife, and demanded that Theseus leave her on Naxos for him; this has the effect of absolving the Athenian culture-hero of desertion. The vase-painters of Athens often showed Athena leading Theseus from the sleeping Ariadne to his ship.

Titian's depiction of the Greek god of wine Bacchus emerging with his followers and falling in love with Ariadne, became part of our story when it joined the Gallery back in the 19th century. 'Bacchus and Ariadne' is now on display in Room 2.



Titian's powerful painting 'Bacchus and Ariadne' shows the moment the god of wine Bacchus first saw, and fell in love with, Ariadne.


In 'The Vision of Saint Eustace', Pisanello appears to have used both drawings from pattern books, as well as studies from life for the animals and birds which appear in the landscape: http://bit.ly/1gx5GO1








British Museum

Titian died ‪#‎onthisday‬ in 1577. Here's an early drawing from the Venetian artist http://ow.ly/AKspI

Titian, St Eustace or St Hubert, a drawing

Italy, around AD 1515

The scene is set in a hilly landscape with classical ruins and a viaduct or aquaduct in the background. A figure in contemporary sixteenth-century costume kneels and prays before a stag with a crucifix between its antlers. The identification of the saint is unclear, as Saint Eustace was a Roman martyr who, while secretly hunting on Good Friday, converted to Christianity on seeing this stag. (Pisanello's Vision of St Eustace in the National Gallery, London depicts the same episode). Later, however, his story was also attributed to St Hubert, the patron saint of hunters in the Ardenne region of France in the eighth century.

Titian (about 1487-1576) was the dominant exponent of Venetian painting for most of the sixteenth century. There are very few certain pen and ink drawings by Titian from his early career. The attribution of many of his early drawings is problematic but most scholars agree that this airy drawing is by the young Titian.

This image has been squared in black chalk for transfer, though no painting or engraving of this scene is known. An interesting and varied pen stroke has been used to suggest the shadows. The deeper the shadow, the more cross-hatched the pen stroke. This is particularly evident on the stag and the shadows of the bank immediately before of the saint. His horse is drawn more rapidly with longer but vigorous pen strokes for its body and tail. The ruins are summarily sketched in with parallel strokes but the definition of the rise and fall of the slopes in the middle ground is subtle.

J. Martineau and C. Hope (eds), The Genius of Venice (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1983-84)

C. Hope, Titian (London, Jupiter books, 1980)

H. Wethey, Titian and his drawings (Princeton University Press, 1987)

A World of Color

‘Titian: His Life,’ by Sheila Hale

By JOSEPH LUZZI

Published: December 28, 2012

If only Titian had left us the scathing letters and soul-baring sonnets of his contemporary Michelangelo, whose image as a tortured genius has enchanted biographers since the Renaissance. In their place we have just a smattering of Titian’s business correspondence and a few official statements. His friendship with the ferocious satirist and pornographer Pietro Aretino is the stuff of speculation. So too are his relations with the models and companions who appear in masterpieces like the “Venus of Urbino,” which transforms one of Venice’s highest-priced courtesans into a goddess of love, taunting us with her half-smile while resting her hand in a forbidden realm. 

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Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

A rare glimpse inside: Titian's "Self-Portrait" of 1562.

TITIAN: His Life By Sheila Hale

Illustrated. 832 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $39.99.

A void surrounds this artist who lived into his late 80s, painted more than 500 works and rubbed shoulders with kings and popes. He once described to his wayward son the “pain and distress, . . . sacrifices and sweat” he had endured to set him on the path to riches. Titian dictated these words to a scribe in 1568, a few years before he died; they represent perhaps the only raw emotion he recorded for posterity. 

Sheila Hale’s “Titian” takes on the heroic task of reconstructing this largely undocumented life, but she devotes much of her book to other matters, especially Venice’s growing commercial empire. While meticulous and fluid, her account succumbs to a parade of forgettable patrons and politicians. A better title for a book that is too long by a third might have been “Titian and His World.” 

At its best, Hale’s biography captures the energy and colors of everyday Venetian life as brilliantly as a Canaletto painting. The author of a well-received guidebook to Venice, she locates La Serenissima at the center of a global network whose spirit suffused Titian’s palette. In the haunting “Flaying of Marsyas,” one of Titian’s visual poesie (poems) based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Apollo’s removal of the satyr’s skin reflected a harrowing development in Venice’s foreign affairs: the flaying of the military officer Marcantonio Bragadin by Turkish troops in 1571. Yet Titian was too subtle an artist to sacrifice beauty in the metaphorical depiction of a current event. Hale points out that his Apollo, holding his knife “as though it were a painter’s brush,” radiates a delicacy and innocence at odds with his gory task. Perhaps the otherwise unliterary Titian was evoking Dante, who begged, as Hale notes, Apollo to “enter my breast and breathe there as you did when you tore Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.” This rare ability to fuse the political and the poetic explains why the European elite were so keen on commissioning a man who was, according to Hale, “the greatest portraitist of the ­Renaissance.” 

Hale creates vivid narratives of Titian’s relations with his fellow Venetian artists and with the other creative titans of his age. She recalls the passage in Giorgio Vasari’s influential “Lives of the Artists” in which Michelangelo, after visiting Titian’s studio in Rome in 1545, praised the painter’s use of color but said it was “a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well.” She suggests that Vasari may have made up the remark to distinguish the clean lines and sculptural volumes of Florentine painting from the more freely drawn color-driven canvases of Titian’s Venice. 

Titian was actually an accomplished draughtsman, as Michelangelo must have recognized. But by using blurred outlines, applying paint with his fingers, layering color for atmospheric effect and employing a palette so warm you can almost feel its heat, he stood apart from the more controlled and design-conscious Florentine school embodied by Michelangelo’s muscular women in the Sistine Chapel. Hale sums up the high stakes in Vasari’s dichotomy: Michelangelo, the master of Florentine disegno, painted the world as it should be; Titian, with his “Venetian spontaneity and use of color,” gave us the world as it is. 

The image that emerges from Hale’s book is that of a sober brush for hire, more concerned with the bottom line than his — or anyone else’s — soul. Hale’s most arresting character is not Titian but Aretino, the subject of an extraordinary portrait in which Titian captures the crimson-robed “scourge of princes” (the poet Ariosto’s term) in all his robustness. Another sharply drawn figure is Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who became an important patron and unlikely friend of the Venetian painter. Hale charts how the militantly Roman Catholic Charles developed from someone with little aesthetic sense into a passionate connoisseur who died with his eyes fixed on Titian’s “Adoration of the Trinity,” a painting with enough spiritual intensity to have humbled even El Greco. 

That Hale should have such trouble penetrating Titian’s veneer is no surprise, given the painter’s talent for concealment. A late masterpiece, the “Self-Portrait” from 1562, allows us a rare glimpse inside. Rendered in three-­quarter profile to accentuate his social standing, Titian stares ahead without meeting our eyes. He is dressed in a simple but expensive black doublet, topped with a white linen collar. His gold chain reflects the heights he has climbed from his modest origins in the rural Veneto, and his rheumy gaze is set in a determined stare, with none of the self-doubt that fills the mature self-portraits of a painter like Rembrandt, so beholden to Titian’s influence. Hale writes that the “Self-Portrait” appears to have been painted with no commission, “perhaps as an epilogue to a career that might be terminated by death at any minute.” It presents us with a man who is sure of himself but difficult to know.

Despite its length, Hale’s biography leaves much of Titian’s complicated personality in the shadows. Perhaps this is the way he would have wanted it. Always a step ahead of both patrons and public, he made his art available to the highest bidder — but, like the man himself, it never surrenders its mysteries. 

Joseph Luzzi, associate professor of Italian at Bard College, is the author of “Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy.”