The Cambridge Companion to Titian (review)

Volumes devoted to Italian artists in the Cambridge Companions series include Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Giovanni Bellini, with a volume on Raphael in the pipeline. This anthology devoted to Titian consists of specially commissioned essays on various aspects of his oeuvre. Most of the essays address specific issues that reflect their authors' own scholarly interests, but, as editor, Patricia Meilman contributes two general pieces: an introduction to Titian's career and a chronological discussion of his major religious works. In addition, Caroline Karpinski provides a useful outline of Titian's lifelong involvement with printmaking and printmakers. Of the genres and media employed by Titian then, only portrait painting and drawing are not addressed.

Only a few of the essays can be summarized here. Starting with Ridolfi's celebration of Titian's relationship with Ariosto, David Rosand addresses the question of ut pictura poesis, the painter's relationship to his literary sources, how he functioned as poet, and his (poetic) pictorial inventions. Rosand focuses on Titian's exploration of the time-honored subjects of love and sex in two mythologies created thirty years apart: Bacchus and Ariadne of 1520–23, based on an ekphrasis by Catullus (the third canvas that Titian contributed to Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara's camerino), and Venus and Adonis of 1553–54, (the second poesia sent to Philip II of Spain for his room of mythologies), in which Titian radically revised his Ovidian source. Rosand explores these tense encounters of charged sexuality and agitated emotion between a mortal and an immortal, the latter being male in the earlier work and female in the later. Whereas both female objects of desire are shown from the back, volta di schiena, the male lovers are given radically opposed stances toward their partners: Bacchus leaps towards intimacy while Adonis, contrary to Ovid, is made to flee it.

Carolyn Wilson revises our reading of some of Titian's early pictures of the Virgin and Child with St. Joseph (which were not called Holy Family in the sources), arguing persuasively that these works were informed by the rise of the cult of Saint Joseph as articulated in Isidoro Isolano's Summa de donis Sancti Joseph of 1522. By the 1520s churches had been named for Saint Joseph across the Veneto, and several heavily patrician confraternities had been established in his name. As one might expect, the Saint's help was invoked in practical affairs, such as foreign invasion, military attack — especially by the Muslim Turks — and the plague. Wilson's essay contributes to a greatly improved understanding of the role of this Saint in Venetian spiritual life and hence in such a painting as Titian's Nativity with a Shepherd in the National Gallery, London.

Deborah Howard's essay addresses Titian's use of pictorial architecture throughout his career, from the Santo frescoes to his last Pietà. She includes a particularly interesting discussion of the architectonic structure of his Annunciations, from those in Treviso and the Scuola di San Rocco to that in San Salvatore, where the artist abandoned his usual depiction of tangible architectural space to embrace a semblance of heavenly space. The architectural structure of the Presentation of the Virgin, now in the Venice Accademia, is connected to Vasari and Sansovino's stages sets and Genga's theatrical experiments for the dukes of Urbino in Pesaro.

Mary Garrard discusses Titian's relationship with Nature and the descriptions of his work and Nature's as parallel achievements, a theme that pervades Venetian sixteenth-century sources. Dolce claimed that Titian walked in step with Nature, Aretino that the artist's work promoted the idea of a "new Nature," Speroni that it was "better to be painted by [Titian] than to be engendered by Nature," a comment that placed the artist beyond both art and Nature. Garrard argues that Venice and Florence understood the Nature-art relationship very differently; while Venetians...