Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting (review)

In the early modern period, art was deeply embedded in the social ritual of everyday life: at first, primarily the religious sphere, and then, eventually, the secular one as well. Altarpieces and private devotional works were created to incite piety, mythological stories decorating the palace trumpeted the patrician's erudition, and portraits celebrated their upscale sitters' alleged virtù and beauty. It is thus especially unfortunate that Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists in 1550 and 1568, should have chosen to ignore the social embeddedness of art and, influenced by classical authors, focused instead on the individual creators, writing as if Renaissance art was an end in itself. Given Vasari's immense influence, art historians have, until recently, focused too often on producing catalogues raisonnés and monographic exhibitions, rather than exploring the functions served by the works in their original locations.

Such a context makes the beautiful exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting by David Alan Brown of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna a step in the right direction. Featuring paintings not only by those mentioned in the title, but also, among others, Sebastiano del Piombo, Lorenzo Lotto, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, and Paris Bordone, the exhibition is organized by theme, not by artist. The period chosen, one of extraordinarily rapid artistic innovation, runs between 1500, when most of these artists came to maturity, and 1530, when many had died or left Venice. During these years, production increased significantly, new formats became popular, the potential of the new oil medium and canvas support were explored, new colorants introduced, and new secular subjects invented, including the specifically Venetian themes of pastoral landscape and female eroticism.

The exhibition's themes consist of the sacred icon of the Virgin and Child, alone and with Saints, and pictures for private devotion, including several altarpieces; Christian istorie, or religious narrative; secular poesie, the allegorical and mythological stories with which princes and patricians decorated their personal spaces; erotic images of provocative, lightly clad women of dubious virtue; and, finally, a magnificent selection of male portraits.

Generous loans enabled the display of some extremely famous paintings. In the first room, Lotto's wonderfully animated Virgin and Child with Saints Ignatius of Antioch and Onophrius (1508, Galleria Borghese) faced Bellini's beautiful but static Virgin with Blessing Child (1510, Brera) — the Quattrocento type from which it derived and which it updated in the new manner. After viewing the astonishing pairing of Giorgione's Three Philosophers in Vienna with Titian's Concert Champêtre in the Louvre, one moved into a room in which Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians in the Prado and Bellini's Feast of the Gods in Washington were exhibited side by side. While these works have been displayed together before, the installation in Washington was the first to take into consideration the spalliera, or wainscot, over which the paintings were originally hung in Alfonso I d'Este's alabaster chamber in Ferrara. The works' location some five feet above the ground reveals why Titian felt the need to unify the two compositions by extensively repainting Bellini's landscape, and how this reworking helped to minimize the difference in figure-scale between the two canvases.

The category of half-length belle donne included the pairing for the first time of Giorgione's Laura (Vienna) with Titian's Flora (Uffizi). In the midst of these sensual, breast-revealing adolescents, the presence of Giorgione's so-called La Vecchia — ugly, aged, low-class — seemed particularly anomalous. Given the low esteem in which women in general were held in this patriarchal culture, and that portraits of withered old crones were unknown in this culture of ideal forms, the work can only be read as an allegorical portrait-cover signifying the transience of time, rather than as...