“A Proposal for the Concert Champêtre: Sebastiano?” in Venetian Painting Matters, 1450–1750, Jodi Cranston, ed. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 35-56. (original) (raw)
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Giorgione's art gives cause for irritation. Unlike the work of his contemporaries, the subjects of Giorgione's paintings and those of his circle repeatedly elude definitive identification. Neither can his pastoral paintings readily be associated with any specific antique or contemporary story (Figs. 1 and 2), nor can his idealized portraits of boys or women be securely identified as figures drawn from classical mythology or Christian iconography (Fig. 3). 1 Current art historical literature is not the first to address this difficulty. Even the early reception of Giorgione's painting was compelled to confront this issue as soon as it inquired after the narrative or allegorical content of his works. Perhaps the most eloquent witness to this fact can be found in the Artists' Lives of the Florentine Giorgio Vasari, who, referring to Giorgione's frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, remarked that he himself had never understood them and had never found anyone who knew precisely what they depicted. 2 Contemporary art history has offered various suggestions on how to deal with this difficulty. William R. Rearick, for example, asserted in a recent study on the pastoral that Giorgione's paintings consciously opposed traditional subjects and that they had no other content than their own aesthetic appearance: ".. . the Venetians neither knew nor seemed to care about the meanings of these famous paintings. For them it was sufficient that the works be beautiful." 3 Salvatore Settis, who has criticized such an approach as reductive and ahistorical, responded to this difficulty with his own subtle and sophisticated thesis, that of the "hidden subject." According to Settis, Giorgione's paintings do have traditional themes, whose unusual depiction however should be credited to the specific interests of his patrons. One of these paintings' fundamental functions was the entertainment provided by the interpreta
2001
participated as a display of the "harmonious corporate organization of the city." Fenlon views this participation in the context of the expansion of celebration, which had once been limited to a display of ducal authority, and which in the sixteenth century was increasingly placed into the hands of lay men and women. By incorporating lay members of the scuole into the procession, "civic and liturgical acts which were usually associated with ducal authority were able to broaden their audience, which could participate not only passively (by observing) but also actively by walking in the procession, chanting litanies, and singing laude" (169). Fenlon's essay sets into motion an expanded view of the world in which Titian worked. His valuable contribution to our understanding of this context is essential to our understanding of Titian himself. While the texts in this volume are sensitive and respond to some timely interests in art and music history such as David Rosand's "Inventing Mythologies: The Painter's Poetry", and Laurie Schneider Adams' "Iconographic Aspects of the Gaze in Some Paintings by Titian", the overall usefulness of the volume is impaired by the lack of good images. Both figures and plates are black and white, and many are a mere 2"x 3". Further, the works not included in the volume are often referred to merely by location, without other references as to where these images have been published. In spite of this problem, however, the high quality of this Cambridge Companion's essays make a significant contribution to Titian studies, and it will surely be a good reference point for scholars working on Venetian confraternities.
2016
Throughout his career, and especially in the last three decades of his life, Titian issued from his workshop a sizeable number of variants and replicas of different compositions. This vast circulation of paintings was boosted by a huge request from collectors across Europe, and helped Titian to establish himself as a widely celebrated artist. Over the years, the master developed an unconventional working method that privileged the unevenness of the pictorial surface over uniformity and homogeneity, thus emphasising the process of art-making. Indeed, it is especially for his peculiar, idiosyncratic handling of the brush that he was renowned, and his paintings sought after. Furthermore, this technique matched up with the cult of the personality that Titian himself fostered. At the same time, however, several of the variants and replicas produced in the late years raise the problem of how the collaboration with assistants affected the notion itself of authorship and originality. How did his innovative technique, which highlighted his virtuosity and individuality, harmonise with the documented, extensive contribution by his collaborators? Moreover, if each variant or replica received a unique, distinctive pictorial treatment, can we still draw a clear line between originals and derivations? By presenting a previously unpublished version of Titian’s Agony in the Garden, whose composition is known through a painting executed for Philip II and now in the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, this study seeks to discuss and establish a new theory of the nature of authorship in Titian’s late collaborative works. The new painting is here acknowledged as a joint work by the master and his collaborators, and stands as an example of how the novel aesthetics developed by Titian tolerated and perhaps even encouraged the incorporation of different hands into many of his late works.