In 1994 there appeared one of the great cultural and intellectual histories of our time, “The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance.” Because its author, Sir John Hale, had suffered a stroke just after completing the manuscript, the book’s final revisions and polishing were undertaken by his wife, Sheila Hale. Now almost 20 years later, Sheila Hale has brought out her own magnum opus, this magnificent account of the incomparable Venetian artist Titian and the world he lived in.
“Titian: His Life” is, in fact, just the book for the bleak winter months ahead. Not a universal genius like Leonardo or Michelangelo, Titian was instead strictly a painter, a master colorist, whose canvases are vibrantly alive with movement and warmth. Certainly there can be few more sensuous paintings in the history of art than his depictions of classical subjects: “Bacchus and Ariadne,” “The Three Ages of Man,” “Sacred and Profane Love,” “The Rape of Europa,” and “Diana and Actaeon,” to mention just a few, although one wouldn’t want to overlook his several masterpieces of overtly erotic portraiture, such as “Danae,” in which a beautiful woman languorously opens her nude body to Zeus in the shape of a shower of gold. Titian, Hale informs us, was the first artist to paint live female models who were lying down.
(Harper) - In “Titian: His Life,” Sheila Hale describes how the artist came to dominate 16th-century art.
But the Venetian master could readily switch from producing classical pinups for a duke’s love-nest to painting religious scenes of the deepest conviction: His harrowing “Entombment of Christ” shows Jesus’s body in shadowy darkness, Mary utterly bereft. In his “Pieta,” Jesus’s lifeless body has turned all the world into a leached-out, monochromatic gray. By contrast, Titian’s “Presentation of the Virgin” transforms a standard history painting into a touching and very human Kodak moment: At first, one sees just a crowded group of people, milling about a vaguely antique city — until the eye is drawn to a little girl dressed in blue, ever so delicately raising up the hem of her dress, as she ascends the marble steps of the temple. And of course Titian angels are still frequently used on Christmas cards.
A memory: When I was 22, I spent four days in Venice, living in a youth hostel and looking at art. Of all the wonderful paintings I saw then, the one that has stayed with me most is Titian’s “The Assumption of the Virgin,” said to be the largest altarpiece ever painted in Venice. The centerpiece of a Franciscan church, it depicts Mary, struck with wonder and perhaps a tinge of fear, being raised up to heaven by putti-like angels. While her dress this time is an eye-catching (and uncharacteristic) tomato red, her cloak is her usual rich dark blue, and it swirls and flutters as she lifts her arms toward God the Father (who peers down from a golden cloud), even as an astonished crowd of very realistic apostles stares up in consternation, shock and confusion. The 19th-century sculptor Canova called the “Assunta” the greatest painting in the world. As Hale writes, “There cannot be many other works of art that combine such architectonic solidity with such dynamism, or which are in such perfect harmony with the buildings for which they were created.”
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