Early Titian - Opinions by S.J. Freedberg (I)

Titian
Birth of Adonis
ca. 1507-1508
oil on panel
(from a cassone)
Musei degli Eremitani, Padua

Titian
Legend of Polydorus
ca. 1507-1508
oil on panel
(from a cassone)
Musei degli Eremitani, Padua

Titian
Orpheus and Eurydice
ca. 1508
oil on canvas
Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

"We have observed that from the middle of the sixteenth century Titian's polemic admirers, and probably Titian himself, felt it necessary to add to his vast glory, aiding the work of time that, by then, had outmoded the accomplishment of Giorgione and obscured his role in forming the young Titian's art.  The nature of Titian's relationship with Giorgione is fairly clear, however, and there is no doubt that essential elements of Titian's style derive from the older master.  . . .  The earliest certain works by Titian, of 1507-8, have evidently been formed from a conception of expression and vision that derives from the experience of Giorgione.  The two cassone panels with the Birth of Adonis and the Legend of Polydorus (Padua) and the Orpheus and Eurydice (Bergamo) depend on Giorgione's imagery, and on his demonstration of an integral communication made by human actors and their landscape setting.  They derive another unity from Giorgione of the whole pictorial texture that results from his demonstration of what we have called his optical mode.  Yet these pictures are specifically unlike Giorgione: they are less cautious in small forms and less deliberated in their larger design, and the optical element in them is also less controlled.  On the contrary, Titian's visual responses are set down in a way that intensifies their energy and brilliance."    

attributed to Titian (by Freedberg)
Lucretia
ca. 1508
oil on canvas
Royal Collection, Hampton Court

"The Lucretia at Hampton Court, of about the same time, shows the latter quality on a larger scale, in luminous drapery and in the textured radiance of the nude female figure.  Here the liberty to generalize and reshape form largely and cursively is after Giorgione's example, but Titian's purpose in its use diverges markedly from Giorgione's.  Titian shapes the nude to give new stress to its physicality and to its sensuality; his subjective liberty of representing is not used, like Giorgione's, to abstract from sensuous existence but to affirm it.  Titian, too, deals with the idea, not just with the objective record of appearance, but that idea is of the magnified intensity of sensuous experience –  of physical being and its vitality, revealed to the powers of sight."  [The Lucretia was acquired in the late 1620s by Charles I when he purchased a large portion of the Gonzaga Collection from Mantua.  Curators at the Royal Collection currently attribute the painting to Titian's older brother, Francesco Vecellio, and date it to about 1530.]  

Titian
Rustic Idyll
ca. 1507-1508
oil on panel
Harvard Art Museums

Titian
St George
ca. 1507-1508
oil on panel
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice

"Among all the juvenilia of Titian the St George (Venice, Cini Collection, also 1507-08) may demonstrate this most remarkably.  The image of the Saint is generated from the precedents of Giorgione, and evokes a mood related to his; but this is differently immediate and vital.  The armour of the Saint is taken as occasion for a turbulence of light, which saturates surrounding colour and infuses the contrasting darks.  The brush records the brilliance of light and the texturing vibration that it makes on surfaces with a rough energy of hand.  Beyond what it reveals of physical being, light is in itself sensuous experience for Titian, and he sees it as alive and yet more complexly charged with energy than the bodily factors of existence are.  This light, and the colour it creates, is more than a record of a visual fact.  It begins in the seeing of reality, but that seeing is then charged with the energies, the passion, and the poetic power to enlarge experience that is in the artist.  Part of the subjective component in this mode of vision is in the manual action by which it is set down, and this is, more than in Giorgione, revolutionary in its liberty."

attributed to Titian (by Freedberg)
Adoration of the Shepherds
(the Allendale Nativity)
ca. 1506
oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"This is the poetic enlargement of a sensuous experience, and a partial transmutation of it in an ideal sense, but the root in that experience and tie to it are evident as never in Giorgione; and they are an indication of Titian's earliest artistic origins.  Where (as I see it) Giorgione detached himself from an early education in Bellini's shop, and found his threshold for a new style in an intellectualizing late Quattrocento classicism in Emilia, Titian's threshold was, directly, his Bellinesque education, primarily concerned with the depiction of physical and visual reality.  The Allendale Nativity (Washington, National Gallery, 1506?) is, I believe, a step yet farther back in Titian's history towards his beginnings in Bellini's style.  In the Allendale Nativity, only symptoms distinguish its manner of painting from Bellini's, but these show the peculiar intensity of visual response that we find in Titian later.  Perhaps still more significant, the structure of the picture seeks on the one hand a liberty, and on the other a cohesiveness, that belong to the mentality of Cinquecento style."  [Curators at the National Gallery currently attribute the so-called Allendale Nativity to Giorgione rather than to Titian.]

Titian
Madonna and Child
ca. 1508
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Titian
Christ and the Adulteress
ca. 1509
oil on canvas (cut down)
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

Titian
Christ and the Adulteress (fragment)
ca. 1509
oil on canvas
(cut away from original canvas)
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

"In the Christ and the Adulteress (Glasgow, c. 1509) Titian's new command of larger form is evident, but his intention for it is conspicuously unlike Giorgione's.  No earlier work so powerfully asserts sheer physical existence, for the substance of the figures is described with almost exaggerated fullness, and they are made to move with heavy urgency, almost lunging towards one another.  And, in addition, Titian has developed a remarkable technique for recording their surfaces of drapery and flesh, more controlled than his handling in the smaller works of pervious years and more literally illusionistic.  The garments show strong fields of colour, saturated with intense light, and this is a reaffirming of a quattrocentesque strain, but the very force of the illusion transcends normal expectation and experience of reality.  And there is a dualism in the working of this light-saturated colour: even while apprehending what it objectively describes, the eye and mind perceive it also as a separate, non-descriptive power, as an abstract and subjective aesthetic effect.  Titian's purposes are not yet synthetically resolved.  What is in the effortful and vital physicality of the Adulteress, and in its strain of painterly illusionism, explores conceptions on the basis of which a baroque style might be made; but the simultaneous value of abstraction in the colour tends more towards that ideality of a classical style.  The character of structure in the picture tends the same way.  The figures move too urgently to accept the discipline of contrapposto, but they are connected in a formally deliberated cursive rhythm, and set out in a scheme of mobile reciprocal balances that accords with the compositional innovations of the classical style.  No precedent survives for such an extended classicizing order as this that we can give certainly to Giorgione, but there is a close analogy to the design of Sebastiano del Piombo's Judgment of Solomon (Kingston Lacy, Bankes Collection, 1508, probably antecedent to the Adulteress), in the invention of which Giorgione may have been involved.  But since the classical order of larger design follows out of that of the single figures, Titian's accomplishment in the Adulteress evolves out of a discipline he had learned, especially through the frescoes on the Fondaco, from Giorgione's classical style."

Sebastiano del Piombo
Judgment of Solomon
1508
oil on canvas (unfinished)
National Trust, Kingston Lacy, Dorset

attributed to Titian (by Freedberg)
Christ carrying the Cross
ca. 1509-1510
oil on panel
Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice

attributed to Titian (by Freedberg)
Christ carrying the Cross
ca. 1509-1510
oil on panel
(lunette a later product of Titian's workshop)
Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice

"An ancient confusion exists about the authorship of the Christ carrying the Cross (Venice, S. Rocco), which Vasari gives in different places to Giorgione and to Titian.  It seems to us to indicate a moment of Titian's evolution just following the Adulteress, in which he moves more deliberately and still more imitatively into the orbit of Giorgione's style.  Muting his aggressive energy, Titian seeks more discipline as he matures, and accepts Giorgione's authority for the means by which it may be achieved.  In the Portacroce Titian comes close to Giorgione's purity of form and approximates the tone of feeling he evolved towards 1508.  The assimilation of Giorgione is to the point of giving good grounds for confusion, but Titian's personal accent, of a specificity unlike Giorgione's in description and in mood, is still there."  

attributed to Titian (by Freedberg)
Pastorale
(Pastoral Concert)
ca. 1510-1511
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"The Portacroce, of 1509 or 1510, dates from within Giorgione's lifetime, and it is evidence of a still learning, literal, dependence on that master.  The Pastorale (Paris, Louvre) represents to us another, more advanced stage of Titian's relationship to Giorgione: it is no longer imitation, but a demonstration of creation in Giorgione's style, according to his most advanced precept and in a stature that resembles his.  The painting should be, by my calculation, of late 1510 or 1511, just following Giorgione's death, and it is as if Titian were determined in it to deny Giorgione's mortality, perpetuating the life of his idea.  In every respect of the working of the hand and eye in it the Pastorale is Titian's, and so is the repertory of forms and their precise morphology; but the idea and emotion – more truly the idea is an emotion – are one with Giorgione.  The theme recalls the essence of the early Tempesta (apart from any possible overlay of identifiable literary meaning, either in that picture or in this), but it has been articulated with a resonance and depth like those of Giorgione's latest years.  Not only Titian's own maturing but a willed consonance in him with the departed master's thought has finally produced in Titian a classical restraint upon his powers of asserting presence, and imposed continence – even Giorgionesque indirection – on his expressive mode."  [Scholarly consensus currently suggests the Pastorale or Pastoral Concert was most plausibly begun by Giorgione and completed after his death by Titian.]

Anonymous Photographer
Installation View at the Louvre
(Titian's/Giorgione's Pastoral Concert hung beside the Mona Lisa)
1929
L'Illustration (Parisian newspaper)

Giorgione
La Tempesta
ca. 1505
oil on canvas
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice