Page:Biographical catalogue of the principal Italian painters.djvu/215

 lU TITIAN. were supposed by his friends to have been all by the hand of Giorgione. Titian, however, developed a style of his own, in which the peculiarities of the Venetian School are seen in their greatest perfection; and besides high technical qualities, his solid impasto and glowing colour, he is distinguished for a pleasing and noble representa- tion of the human character ; but the creatures of his pencil are beautiful, independent of spiritual conceptions; they rather indicate the glorification of the life in the body; a thoroughly material beauty. When Titian was in Rome, in 1546, Michelangelo visited him in company with Yasari, in the Belvedere, where he was painting a picture of Jupiter and DanasB ; and Yasari relates that Michel- angelo praised the picture, and ob- served that had Titian's power of drawing been as great as. his natural gifts, he would have produced works which none could have surpassed. Titian's portraits entitle him to hold the highest rank in that branch of the art; such is their amazing reality, they seem to be a pictorial and ele- vated biography of the individual; as pictures, they have a breadth and grandeur unrivalled. Titian was great also as a landscape- painter,, although he properly treated this department as subsidiary to his historical subjects ; yet in some of his pictures the great excellence of his backgrounds makes it difficult to give to his figures that primary importance which they require, as in that remark- able picture, in SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the Death of St. Peter Martyr (painted in 1528), where the dreary wood and the subdued atmosphere contribute to the horrors of the scene: or in the picture of Jupiter and Antiope, in which the grand and beautiful land- scape harmonizes equally with the subject. Titian's early and later works show the same contrast that we find in the works of many other great painters ; ranging from excessive finish to excessive negligence of execution. The most finished, perhaps, and beau- tiful of his early works is the Gristo della Moneta, or Tribute-money, in the Dresden Gallery, painted at Fer- rara, in 1514. The mild expression in the Saviour's reproving glance con- trasts finely with the subtle craftiness of the Pharisee holding the coin ; the harmony of the flesh-tints, and tlie extreme delicacy with which the beard and hair are treated, are very remark- able; but the draperies are not so successful, the folds are minute and hard ; the red robe of Christ is espe- cially so, it appears to have been painted from wetted paper. This pic- ture contrasts strikingly with the Deposition from the Gross, in the Academy at Venice; an example of the opposite extreme of his execution. The best pictures, executed at his riper period, show a happy medium of style between these two ; the Entombment, in the Manfhni Galleiy (repeated in the Louvre), says Kugler, "displays the highest beauty of form, and the most dignified expression in gesture, combined with the liveliest emotion, and the deepest and most earnest feel- ing." The Assumption of the Virgin, in the Academy at Venice, painted in 1516, is likewise a work of great ex- cellence, the effect of the upper por- tion, as a whole, is extremely imposing, and the glow of colour is magnificent; but in the group of the Apostles below there is something heavy in the pro- portions of the figures, and constrained in their attitude. Perhaps the most celebrated historical works of Titian, are the Death of St. Peter Martyr, already mentioned ; the Entombment, of the Manfrini Gallery, or the Louvre ; and the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, painted for Philip II. of Spain. In