In Titian's sumptuous "Mars, Venus and Cupid" from the 1550s, the bearded war god embraces Venus' fleshy nude body as she reclines on satin cushions in a moody rural landscape. She caresses his head and kisses him as Cupid hovers above.
"There's nothing more sexy in the 16th century than a painting like this. It's amazingly sensuous," says Lynn Federle Orr, curator of European art at San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums.
The photocopy she's looking at doesn't begin to convey the luminous colors and atmospheric effects of this and other spectacular pictures by Titian, Tintoretto, Giorgione and Veronese in "Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power From the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna," which opens Saturday at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.
The exhibition, which is only being shown in San Francisco, features 50 works by those giants of Venetian painting and lesser-known but important artists such as Palma Vecchio, Jacopo Bassano and the early Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. The pictures come from the 19th century Viennese museum that houses the art and other collections assembled over the centuries by emperors and dukes of the Habsburg dynasty. The works of the seminal Venetian oil painter Giovanni Bellini, who taught Titian and Giorgione, were not deemed in a condition to travel.
Living in a spectacle-loving city built on the water, the Venetian painters were acutely attuned to the colors and shifting atmospheres of their environment, the mist and fog, the light shimmering on the water.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/20/PKSF1LH4KE.DTL#ixzz1bdNeAdX5
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