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26
An early work, painted by Titian about 1515, is known as Sacred and Profane Love. The
subject of this enigmatic picture has never been satisfactorily explained. Two women who look like
sisters sit on either side of an open sarcophagus, which is also a fountain in the glow of late
afternoon. One is clothed, another is nude save for a white scarf. The shadowed landscape behind
the clothed sister leads up to a castle, toward which a horseman gallops while rabbits play in the
dimness. Behind the nude sister the landscape is filled with light, and huntsmen ride behind a hound
about to catch a hare, while the shepherds tend their flocks before a village with a church tower,
touched with evening light. Cupid stirs the waters in the sarcophagus-fountain. The picture becomes
a glorification of the beauty and redeeming power of love. Sometimes it is interpreted as the
passage from virginity through the water of suffering, a kind of baptism, to a new life in love.
Titian made a series of mythological paintings for a chamber in the palace of the duke of
Ferrara. One of these, the Bacchanal of the Andrians, of about 1520, is based on the description by
the third-century Roman writer Philostratus of a picture he saw in a villa near Naples. The
inhabitants of the island of Andros disport themselves in a shady grove. The freedom of the poses
(within Titian's triangular system) is completely new. Titian has taken the greatest visual delight
from the contrast of warm flesh with shimmering drapery and light with unexpected dark.
Like his mythological pictures, Titian's early religious paintings are affirmations of health and
beauty. The Assumption of the Virgin, 1515-18, is his sole venture into the realm of the colossal. It
represents the moment when the soul of the Virgin was reunited with her dead body. Above the
powerful figures of the Apostles on earth, Mary is lifted physically into a golden Heaven on a
glowing cloud by numerous child angels, where she is awaited by God the Father. The bright reds,
blues, whites of drapery, the rich light of the picture carry Titian's triumphant message through the
spacious interior of the Gothic Church of the Frari in Venice.
In the Madonna of the House of Pesaro, 1519-26, Titian applied his triangular compositional
principle to the traditional Venetian Madonna group. The symmetry is broken up by a radical view
from one side. The scene is a portico of the Virgin's palace. At the steps plunging diagonally into
depth Titian painted the kneeling members of the Pesaro family and an armoured figure who gives
the Virgin as a trophy a Turk, taken in battle. The columns are seen diagonally, their capitals are
outside the frame. At the top clouds float before the columns, on which stand child angels with the
Cross. The colours are rich and deep.
Titian's portraits do not often sparkle with colour as the male costume of the sixteenth century
was black. In his Man with the Glove Titian's triangular principle is embodied in the balanced
relationship of the gloved and ungloved hands to the shoulders and the youthful face. The carefully
modelled hands and features are characteristic of Titian's portraits. Even in this picture, dominated
by black and by the soft greenishgray background, colour is everywhere dissolved in the glazes,
which mute all sharp contrasts.
A subject that occupied Titian in his mature years is the nude recumbent Venus - a pose
originally devised by Giorgione. In 1538 Titian painted the Venus of Urbino for the duke of
Camerino. The figure relaxes in ease on a coach in a palace interior whose inlaid marble floor and
wall hangings make gold, greenish, soft red-and-brown foil for her beautiful body, the floods of her
warm, light brown hair. Pure colour rules in the picture of Titian's middle period. In his later years
form appealed to Titian less; substance itself was almost dissolved in the movement of colour.
In 1546 Titian painted a full-length Portrait of Pope Paul III and his Grandsons. Undoubtedly,
this painting was carried to a point that satisfied both artist and patron. The brushstrokes are free
and sweeping. But the question still arises whether the picture is really finished. The sketchy
technique characteristic of the backgrounds in Titian's early works was applied by the artist to the
whole picture. Veils of pigment transform the entire painting into a free meditation in colour.
Colour indeed, is the principle vehicle of Titian's pictorial message.
In the works of his extremely old age, form was revived and colour grew more brilliant.
Titian's late paintings of pagan subjects are unrestrained in their power and beauty. The devices of
rapid movement and excellent colour, ignoring details were used to increase emotional effect in the
very late Crowning with Thorns, probably painted about 1570, six years before the artist's death.