Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (review)

Of the many catastrophes to have befallen works of Italian Renaissance art, among the worst was the fire that ravaged the sacristy of Venice's Santi Giovanni e Paolo in 1867. Still known by its dialect name, San Zanipolo is the principal Dominican church in that city, like Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Both are treasure-houses of Renaissance art, despite the accidental and, sad to say, intentional demolition of some of their major monuments.

From 1530 until fire destroyed it, the greatest painting in San Zanipolo was the St. Peter Martyr Altarpiece by Titian. Regarded as the master's crowning achievement long before his death in 1576, to cinquecento critics the picture was to Venetian assertions of supremacy in the art of painting what Michelangelo's and Raphael's accomplishments in the Sistine Chapel were to Central Italian claims to the same distinction. Moreover, the altarpiece inspired generations of artists well into the nineteenth century, as witness a handsome copy made by the young Géricault while the painting was on view in the Louvre, along with other Italian spoils of Napoleon's wars. When Titian's work returned from exile in a condition too ruinous for public viewing, the Dominicans stored it in the sacristy and thus unwittingly consigned it to the flames.

Patricia Meilman's book, Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice, is a monograph on this appalling loss from the corpus of European painting. As one might expect from a revised dissertation, the apparatus occupies almost half the book's 260 pages and offers material not available elsewhere. A fully illustrated excursus discusses twelve drawings that have always been associated with the painting. After an even-handed treatment of opinions supporting attributions of these drawings to Titian himself, Meilman rightly argues that none can be sustained. Following the excursus, the first of four appendices provides transcriptions of all the known documents; the second presents the full texts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critical commentaries. Even more valuable are Meilman's third and fourth appendices, which supply the history of restorations and an exceptionally interesting as well as useful list of all known significant painted copies, both extant and lost. These valuable research tools are welcome additions to the literature.

The main body comprises three parts of three chapters each. Part One, "The Environment," discusses the artistic and religious milieu of Titian's picture. Part Two treats the altarpiece itself, beginning with a chapter on the cult of Peter Martyr in Venice. The second chapter faces two intractable conundrums confronting all students of Titian: (1) the documents reveal but do not explain a long series of misunderstandings and/or misrepresentations between the artist and the patron, which was a committee (a recipe for trouble if there ever was one); and (2) the possibility that Titian actually had to compete with rivals to win the assignment. In the third chapter, "Titian at Work," Meilman relates her understanding of how Titian got the painting out of his mind and onto the picture surface. As its title, "Modifications," suggests, Part Three offers a series of arguments designed to show how Titian's painting changed the course of history: first, in its representational tours de force; second, as the paradigmatic exemplum of Venetian painting in cinquecento art theory; and, third, as a reference-point for religious art made in response to the Council of Trent.

The book's central methodological difficulty is the subject itself, for how can one write about a picture that the reader cannot see and for which there are no preparatory drawings? Unfortunately, the conceptual architecture would not reveal this overarching reality to the uninformed reader, because Meilman simply imposes the "contextual" template outlined above and thus gainsays the problem. Moreover, while Part One might provide a useful overview for undergraduates, the material synthesizes secondary sources already familiar to experts; it offers no serious recastings of well-studied problems; and it does not mention some other studies...