 |
| Titian Sacred and Profane Love ca. 1515-16 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
"The so-called Sacred and Profane Love (Rome, Borghese, c. 1515-16) is Titian's splendid exposition of a maturity entirely achieved. What marks it off against the just preceding pictures is the evidence in it of entire clarity and consistency of purpose, and certainty in the selection of artistic means. After a decade of search in multiple and sometimes contradictory directions, Titian has settled for the basic proposition of classical style that had been expounded by Giorgione, but with precise self-knowledge of the differences of personality and vision – and, not least, of hand – with which he could interpret it. . . . The whole surface of the Sacred and Profane Love is an alternation of fine suavity and sparkle. The theme – arguable in detail but not in essence – is a juxtaposition, or more exactly a complementary relation, between the celestial and the earthly Venuses, and Titian exploits all he can within the theme that is potential for the classicizing idea of mutually responsive part and counterpart, using not only the form and meaning of the figures to this end but all the elements of setting. The clothed and unclothed figures make two competing yet related radiances."
 |
| Titian Madonna of the Cherries ca. 1515-16 oil on panel, transferred to canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
 |
| Titian The Tribute Money ca. 1516 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
 |
| Titian Vanity ca. 1515 oil on canvas Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
 |
| Titian Flora ca. 1515-17 oil on canvas Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
 |
| Titian Woman with a Mirror (so-called Laura Dianti) ca. 1515-16 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
"A series of half-length female figures with variant pretexts of subject come from the chronological vicinity of the Sacred and Profane Love, and they still more explicitly confirm the limits of Titian's ideality. The different subject matters of the Vanity (Munich, Pinakothek, c. 1515), the Flora (Florence, Uffizi, c. 1515-16), and and the so-called Laura Dianti (Paris, Louvre, c. 1515-16) overlay a common content: the female face and form that Titian has improved cosmetically to illustrate an obvious and accessible beauty. His revisions do not cancel the strong sense of presence of the model, so that these images verge on portraiture, in format as well as in psychological effect."
 |
| Titian Portrait of a Man ca. 1515 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Titian Portrait of a Knight of Malta ca. 1511 oil on canvas Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
 |
| Titian The Concert ca. 1512 oil on canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
 |
| Titian Portrait of an Older Man ca. 1513 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
 |
| Titian Portrait of a Youth ca. 1515 oil on canvas Frick Collection, New York |
 |
| Titian Portrait of a Young Man (the Temple Newsam portrait) ca. 1516-18 oil on canvas Earl of Halifax Collection, Garrowby, Yorkshire |
"In his actual portraiture, the bond that holds Titian to reality serves him to clear advantage. His portraits done within Giorgione's lifetime, even while accommodating themselves to Giorgione's late formula, had already revealed Titian's closer adherence to the psychological and physical identity of his sitters. If the Knight of Malta (Florence, Uffizi, c. 1511) is in fact Titian's, as I believe, it is a maximum concession to the late Giorgione's mood, not unexpected in the neighbourhood of the Pastorale. But even here the sense of physical presence and of psychological acuity are distant from Giorgione. In the Concert (Florence, Pitti, c. 1512), the theme that unifies the three portrayed figures is related to Giorgione, but also to Titian's Pastorale, but unlike either the circumstance is real and specifiable, and the persons more exactly so. The pointed, brisk descriptive mode resembles Titian's manner in the Noli me Tangere. As in his religious paintings, the element of Giorgionism in Titian's portraits rapidly diminishes. The Portrait of an Older Man (Copenhagen, Statens Museum, c. 1513) is still touched by a distant recollection of Giorgione's mood, but ambience is more precise than in the Concert, and description is as literal. By the time of the Youth in the Frick Collection (New York, c. 1515) the Giorgionesque mood is the most pallid of polite concessions, and the portrait relies mostly on Titian's exact command, achieved towards 1515, of optical veracity. The Young Man formerly at Temple Newsam (now [at the time of writing in the 1960s] in the Irwin Collection, London, c. 1516-18) is the more positive expression of the growing individuality of Titian's portrait art."
 |
| Titian Assumption of the Virgin ca. 1516-18 oil on panel Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice |
 |
| Titian Assumption of the Virgin ca. 1516-18 oil on panel Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice |
 |
| Titian Assumption of the Virgin 1883 postcard, printed in Venice Hallwyl Museum, Stockholm |
"Despite their evidence of new mastery and maturity in the repertory of the classical style, the works that may be grouped around the Sacred and Profane Love have an excess of reticence, which might more accurately be called a want of something more in them than formal and technical inspiration. The emotional dimension behind Titian's genius required more to stimulate it than these restricted themes, in which his energy was dispersed into effects of sophistication or of virtuosity. This character in them was reinforced by the fact that these pictures, and most of the others of the years since 1511, had been conceived as household objects, made for a private audience, who were presumably the descent of that group of refined connoisseurs who had been the chief patronage of Giorgione. An opportunity of different extent and ambitiousness, addressed to a public audience, came to Titian some time in 1516, when he was given the commission for the giant apsidal altar of S. Maria dei Frari, depicting the Assumption of the Virgin; this was the first challenge that was adequate to the whole range of artistic resource Titian had by now acquired. The picture was in all likelihood designed in 1516 but its time of execution is indefinite, and it was set up only in March 1518."
"The Assunta grandly exploits the possibilities of its large scale, but that is only part of the expansion of creative force which occurs in all its dimensions, not just that of size. Its temper differs sharply from that in the pictures of the last half-decade, overleaping them to summon up again the passion and the force of statement that had been Titian's in his earliest years, before his partial subjugation to Giorgione. The subject is taken as occasion for high drama, conspicuously unlike the precedents for it in Venice. The Virgin ascends with outflung gesture, draperies wind-blown, carried on clouds populated by a turmoil of young angels. Above, God the Father descends to meet her in a gliding turn; below, the Apostles comment on the miracle with urgent movement and gesticulation. Titian conceives the theme as an actual, physically present happening, enacted by intensely vital, emphatically real beings. Not only size but the internal scale of the figures is magnified to affirm their presence. The main forms are powerfully hewn by strong chiaroscuro light, and emphasized by bold red colour: Titian's repertory of optical devices is used here chiefly to assert the power and authenticity of substantial presences. The scene convinces by the sheer emphasis of re-creation in it of the look and energy of life, and the emphasis is doubled, not diminished, by the arbitrary scale. The architectural setting of the picture has been taken, furthermore, as a pretext for a situation that will read to the spectator as an illusion. Set high on the axis of the apse of the church, the altarpiece seems a window through which we look towards the heavens to perceive the actual event of the Assumption. Devices of perspective and foreshortening are exactly adequately employed to convince us that what we see occurs in a space that extends from our own, and is connected with it. "
– S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (1970)