PLATE VIII.—THE HOLY FAMILY(In the National Gallery, London)This superb painting is one of the gems of our National Gallery, and represents Titian at his best as a great colourist. It is painted in oil on canvas.
PLATE VIII.—THE HOLY FAMILY(In the National Gallery, London)This superb painting is one of the gems of our National Gallery, and represents Titian at his best as a great colourist. It is painted in oil on canvas.
PLATE VIII.—THE HOLY FAMILY
(In the National Gallery, London)
This superb painting is one of the gems of our National Gallery, and represents Titian at his best as a great colourist. It is painted in oil on canvas.
In spite of the distress prevailing in the city some effort was made to give the great painter a State funeral, but under the conditions existing, it was impossible to carry out the programme, and he was buried with comparatively little ceremony in the great Church of the Frari which, in addition to having one of the finest works of his hand, is further enriched by the famous altar-piece by his old master Gian Bellini. They say that his residence was entered shortly after his death by some of the riff-raff of Venice, to whom the plague had given a welcome measure of licence, and wasdespoiled of many of its treasures. Doubtless the painter's house held much that was worth the small risk involved in an hour when the authorities were hardly able to cope with duties to the sick and the disposal of the dead.
In considering the life of Titian we see that much good-fortune went to its making. He was born at the best period of the Renaissance, he was the inheritor of the freedom for which other painters had striven. He painted a world that was as new to artists as were the far-off realms to the Spanish adventurers who were discovering new countries and new trade routes, and paving the way for the ultimate decline of Venice. At the outset of his career Titian's work was full of the joy of life, it was the expression of an age that seemed to have come of age, of a city that had turned to canvas and marble rather than to booksfor a reflection of the new life. While the painter progressed, overcoming the various difficulties of expression that confronted him, making daring and successful experiments in composition, handling colour as it had never been handled before, this feeling of enthusiasm that belonged to the age was expressed in all his work. Then again he had the great advantage of claiming for sitters the most distinguished men of his time, the statesmen and rulers who were making history at the expense of the map of Europe, the men who held spiritual or temporal power, and the women they delighted to honour. Naturally enough these conditions gave added scope to the painter's talent; and his subjects were worthy of his brush. He could seek out what was best and most characteristic in his sitters, and express through the medium of his art not only the likeness but the personalityunderlying it. Had his work been more fortunate, had it been preserved in anything like its entirety, we should be able to read the history of his times in a clearer light, for though the written word can tell us much, the cleverly wrought picture has still more to say, and we can rely upon canvas, if Titian painted it, to refute or to confirm the verdict of the historian.
Happily, too, Titian's art grew with his age. Practice and experience ripened it, and some of his finest pictures were painted when he was past the span of life that the Psalmist has allotted to man. He covered every field, no form of painting seems to have come amiss to him. Altar-pieces, portraits, historical pictures, mythological and allegorical subjects, one and all claimed his attention from time to time, and though we are all entitled to express our preference, there will be few to say that he failed inany style of work. Perhaps he was least successful in allegorical subjects, and in the portraits of women, but, if this be so, his failure is merely relative, he attained such heights in mythological subjects and men's portraits, that the other work is not so good by comparison. If he gave us no picture devoted entirely to landscape it is worth remarking that the appeal of nature was an ever growing one. The impression given him by the mountains round Cadore was never lost. From the time when he completed Gian Bellini's last picture down to the time when the plague came to Venice and found him with an unfinished picture on his easel, the attraction of the countryside he knew so well was always with him, and he lost no opportunity of expressing it. Gian Bellini had opened the walls that shut in the Madonna and the Saints of the earlier masters, he had given the world glimpsesof exquisite landscape through which the romance woven round his figures seemed to spread. Titian opened the gates still further, giving a larger, wider, and more splendid view, convincing his contemporaries and successors that landscape could never more be overlooked.
He would seem to have made few studies, a sketch by Titian is one of the rarest things in art, he did not see in line but in colour. With Titian as with Velazquez after him it is hard to separate colour from line, and in colour he was the acknowledged master of his own time and the guide of the ages after him. Some of his great contemporaries, not Venetians of course, declared that Titian was a poor draughtsman, but it is well to remember that among the Venetians, art was an affair of painting, among the Florentines it embraced sculpture and architecture; the mere handlingof paint, however splendid the results, would not suffice Florentine ambitions. It might even be said that much Florentine painting is little more than tinted drawing. We go to Titian for colour even to-day, when time and exposure and repainting have taken so much from the wealth that he gave to his pictures, and we can see that as he grew to ripe age he sought to obtain his colour effects by less obvious means than those that served him at the outset. It is hard for any but an artist to realise the secret of the cause that produced the later results, but, if it be left for the artist to explain it is easy for the layman to appreciate. With Titian, Venetian painting reached the zenith of its achievement, after him through Tintoretto and Veronese, the descent is slow but sure, and we are left wondering whether any fresh revival of the world's enthusiasm, any new discovery of the world's youth isdestined to bring into art the spirit of enthusiasm that gave a Titian to the world. There are few signs in our own time, but then we do not live in an age of great crises religious or political, or, if we do, we are too near to the changes to recognise them.
Perhaps there are some who find amusement in the suggestion that Titian's action emancipating art from the thraldom of the Church was a great and glorious one, not unattended by danger and difficulties. To these sceptics one can but reply by quoting the decree of the Council of Nicaea datedA.D.787 and never repealed. Here we find the attitude of Authority towards art set out in plainest fashion. "It is not the invention of the painter which creates a picture," says this remarkable decree, "but the inviolable law and tradition of the Church. It is not the painter but the Holy Fatherswho have to invent and dictate. To them manifestly belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution."
A few great artists in later times had made their protest, definite or indefinite, against the attitude of the Church, but Titian rescued art as Perseus rescued Andromeda.
The plates are printed byBemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and LondonThe text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh
Transcriber's note:Illustrations were moved to paragraph breaks, everything else (including inconsistent hyphenation and spelling) has been retained as printed. Click on the plates to see larger images.
Transcriber's note:
Illustrations were moved to paragraph breaks, everything else (including inconsistent hyphenation and spelling) has been retained as printed. Click on the plates to see larger images.