Titian: A Life
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.
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.” [To read more, see below]
