Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/813

 TITIAN

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TITIAN

tlcrstfoldt, "Venus und Violante" in "Monatsheft fiir Kunstwissenschaft", Oct., 1910), but which none the less remains by the contrast of its two figures, the s|ilondour of the motif, the depth of the landscape, the riiythm and mystery of the composition one of the inilierishable elegies of all paintings and which even (liorgione does not equal in his "Concert".

Giorgione died in 1511 and the aged Bellini in 1515, leaving Titian after the production of such master- piices without a rival in the Venetian School. For Iliad, the official master, and as it were the painter laureate of the Republic Serenissinie. As early as 1516 he succeeded his old master Bellini as the pen- sioner of the Senate. Fifteen years later began the relations with Charles V, Francis I, Alfon.so and Isa- bella d'Este, the Hou.ses of Ferrara and Ifrbino, which made him the first of the princely painters of the Re- naissance and the one whose position was most international and most glorious of all. How- ever he rarely left Venice. Married to a tenderly loved wife, sohdly established in his habits of work, and like all Venetians strongly attached to the life of Venice, he regarded nothing as being worth a sep- aration from his home, his stu- dio, or his country. Except for a visit to Rome in 1545, and two or three visits to Augs- burg between 1548 and 1551 to meet the emperor, he never left Venice save to return to Cadore. Even the li\'eliest curiosity regarding his art, the ardent desire to learn, which to the end of his life im])clle(l him to acquire all that he could concerning art, as he had already devoured all the sub- stance of Bellini and Giorgione, could not induce him to leave his work and his easel. Venice was in this respect a most favour- able centre, a meeting-place for artists from all parts of the world, from North and South, Germany and Florence. Leonardo da Vinci passed through the city in 1500, Diirer stayed there in 1506, Fra Barto- lommeo in 1.508, Michelangelo in 1.529; and the com- merce of the active city, especially in books and prints, the permanent society of artists and men of letters, could not leave Titian ignorant of what was being done in the world. No invention of art was unfamiliar to him, and all his life he displayed the same eagerness to enrich his style with new elements, the same consuming anxiety for perfection.
 * ^i\ty years he was to be the absolute and imdisputed

During this period (1516^30) which may be called the period of his bloom and maturity, the artist freed himself from the traditions of his youth, undertook a class of more complex subjects and for the first lime attempted the monumental style. Ilis most note- worthy work in this style, the ".Assumption" of the Church of the Frari fl518), now in the Academy of Venice, is not, despite its celebrity, a very decided work. In more than one sense it is one of his coldest productions. The solution of the problem attempted — that of uniting in the s.ame composition two or three Bcenes superimposed on different levels, earth and heaven, the temporal and the infinite — was continued in a scries of works such as the ret able of San Doine- nicoat .Vncona (1.520), the retable of Brescia (1.522), the ret .able of San Niceolo (1.523, at the Vatican), each time attaining to a higher and more perfect concep- tion, finally reaching an unsurpa.s.sable formula in the Pesaro retable, (1526), in the Church of the Frari at

Prado Gall'

Venice. This perhaps is his most perfect and most studied work, whose patiently developed plan is set forth with supreme display of order and freedom, of originality and style. Here Titian gave a new con- ception of the traditional groups of donors and holy persons moving in aerial space, the plans and different degrees set in an architectural framework. To this period belongs a still more extraordinary work, "The Death of St. Peter of Verona" (1530), formerly in the Dominican Church of S. Zani- polo, and destroyed by an Austrian shell in 1867. There now exist only copies of this sublime picture (there is an excellent one at Paris in the Ecole des Beaux Arts). The association of the landscape with a scene of murder — a rapidly brutal scene of slaying, a cry rising above the old oak-trees, a Dominican escaping the ambush, and over all the shudder and stir of the dark branches — this is all, but never per- haps has tragedy more swift, .startling, and pathetic been de- picted even by Tintoretto or Delacroix.

The artist continued simul- taneously his series of small Madonnas which he treated more and more amid beautiful landscapes in the manner of genre pictures or poetic pas- torals, the "Virgin with the Rabbit" in the Louvre being the finished type of these pic- tures. Another marvellous work of the same period, also in the Louvre, is the "Entomb- ment", surpassing all that has been done on the same subject. This was likewise the period of the exquisite mythological scenes, such as the famous "Bacchanals" of Madrid, and the "Bacchus and Ariadne" of London, perhaps the most bril- liant ]iroductions of the neo- ]).inaii lulture or "Alexandrian- i>iii" of the Renaissance, many times imitated but never sur- passed even by Rubens himself. Finally this was the period of perfect mastery when the artist composed the half-length figures and busts of young women, such as "Flora" of the Uffizi, or "The Young Woman at Her Toilet" in the Louvre (also called, without reason, "Laura de Dianti" or "The Mistress of Titian"), and which will always remain the ideal image of harmo- nious beauty and the grace of fife at one of the periods which best knew the happiness of existence.

During the subsecjuent period (1.530-50), as was foreshadowed by his "MartjTdom of St. Peter", Titian devoted himself more and more to the dra- matic style. From this time date his historical scenes, of which unhappily it is difficult to jiidge, the mo.st characteristic having been much injured or destroyed; thus the "Battle of Cadore", the artist's greatest effort to master movement and to exjjress even tumult, his most violent attempt to go out of himself and achieve the heroic, wherein he rivals the "War of Pisa", "The B,attle of Anghiari", and the "Battle of Constant ine", perished in 1577, the year of Titian's death, in the fire which destroyed all the old pictures adorning the Doge's Palace. There is ext.ant only a poor, incomplete copy at the Uffizi, and a mediocre engraving by Font ana. In like manner the "Speech of the Marquis del Vasto" (Madrid, 1.541) was partly deslroyeil by fire. But this por- tion of the m.'ister's work is .adecjuately represented by the "Presentation of the Bles.sed Virgin" (Venice, 1.539), one of his most popular canvases, and by the great "Ecce Homo" (Vienna, 1541), one of the moat