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Titian: The Grand Old Master of Venice
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18090 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
2,324 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
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 facade 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
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