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| Titian Diana and Callisto 1556-59 oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Titian Diana and Actaeon 1556-59 oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Titian Death of Actaeon (Punishment of Actaeon) ca. 1560 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Titian Rape of Europa (Abduction of Europa) ca. 1559-62 oil on canvas Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston |
"At the end of the sixth decade and the beginning of the seventh this phase of Titian's style found a culmination in a set of large mythologies painted for the new monarch of Spain, Philip II: the Diana and Callisto, the Diana and Actaeon (Edinburgh, National Gallery, Ellesmere Loan; both sent to Spain in 1559), the Punishment of Actaeon (London, Earl of Harewood [now in the National Gallery], c. 1560), and the Rape of Europa (Boston, Gardner Museum, 1559-62). Each is composed with regard to the structure of the others, making complementary relations of a characteristically classical kind, but in which the variations are of an absolutely bold, commanding largeness. This largeness is the present scale of Titian's functioning in all respects. In each picture a humanity of superb sensuous presence, grand in proportion and in posture, and above concern with artifice of rhetoric or grace, enacts the theme: their appearance and their quality of action make drama actual, with the effect neither of theatre nor of ordinary reality, but of an event in the existence of Olympian beings. Their physicality seems a palpable, not just a visually demonstrated fact, and it is as if inspired, charged with vitality on a consonant grand scale. The power of their substance radiates through the flesh and beyond the contours of its form and action, and on their surfaces the brush works with light and colour to give the effect (as in a Phidian statue) of a breathing porosity, mingling with the circumambient air. But this surrounding air is made to seem no less a textured, live existence, as is the landscape that it fills. All the matter in the picture, its grandly physical humanity included, is woven into a purely pictorial unity, essentially optically determined. No new aesthetic principle has been invented to create these works. The difference between them and the work of Titian's past is in the magnitude with which the image is conceived and felt and with which the means of art are made to operate, and in a magisterial daring so perfectly controlled that it is consonant with classicism. In their scale of idea and artistic means and in their daring these works have an awesomeness that, without the pessimism or the melancholia, is akin to the terribilità of Michelangelo. But unlike the later Michelangelos, which deny all but spirit, these late Titians remain exemplars – almost the most encompassing in range and at the most exalted level – of classical style."
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| Titian The Entombment 1559 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian The Crucifixion 1557-58 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Civica Francesco Podesti, Ancona |
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| Titian Martyrdom of St Lawrence begun 1548, completed 1559 oil on canvas Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta (I Gesuiti), Venice |
"Obviously, the idea that inspires the magnitude and reach of this late style is generated by much more than the intellect. The power of spirit and emotion in it may be measured in the religious paintings that relate to the royal mythologies in time. In the Entombment (Madrid, Prado, 1559) an emotion that is as much love as it is tragedy is orchestrated, more than it is described, in a design of light-shot colour, expanding out of darkness like a firework in a night sky. Darkness sets the tone of tragedy in the late religious pictures, and against the dark the light and forms conjoin intensity with scale to create emotion. In the Crucifixion (Ancona, S. Domenico, 1557-8) the forms are almost icon-like in their austerity; the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (Venice, Gesuiti) is contrastingly elaborate. Painted mostly about 1557, but begun in 1548, just after Titian's trip to Rome, the Martyrdom retains the Roman accent of rhetoric and archaeology of its first design; but almost more than by the overt action, drama is made in it by painted fire and nocturnal light."
"In general, the paintings of the sixth decade convey an atmosphere which, while it exalts the senses, at the same time seems an exaltation of the power of reason. But there is the symptom in them of another power which need not violate reason but seems to transcend it. This emerges in the middle sixties, the cause, effect, or both, of an inspiration so overwhelming in force and scale that by it art exceeds what had hitherto, except for the latest Michelangelo, been its limits. The paintings of Titian's last ten years no longer seem just to describe, or paraphrase, or symbolize the factors that make physical or spiritual being work but to incorporate them absolutely. What Titian seems to deal with now are essences and powers, no more than ever as abstractions but as constituents of the visible and palpable world."
"An Annunciation, painted alla prima about 1565 as an altar-cover for the Venetian church of S. Salvatore (in situ), is among the first of Titian's transcendent late works. In it the descent of the Spirit is accompanied by an eruption of young angelic forms from a darkened heaven; below, an unexpectedly masculine Gabriel moves with bulking power towards Mary. Light makes brilliant saliences of form out of the dark, and within the darks makes restless crepitation: the image is dense with the accumulation in it of the energies of substances and lights, and vibrant with the grandeur and profundity of emotion that is equally idea. Two closely contemporary paintings are reworkings in this new stature of earlier ones: the St Margaret (Madrid, Prado, c. 1565-6) of a theme of 1552 (Escorial); the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (the high altar of the Escorial, 1564-7) of the picture in the Gesuiti. The St Margaret is much in the temper of the Annunciation, but still more gives the effect of expanding grandeur to the actor's form. She seems the image of a tragic goddess, of immeasurable dignity, rather than a Christian saint. Her figure shines in a landscape where, though it is night time, nothing rests. Across a lake, a city in the distance is mysteriously alight, almost as if it might be on fire, scattering sparks upon the water and up into a clouded sky. In the St Lawrence of the Escorial the light is less mysterious in origin but still more transforming and evasive of rationality in its effects. It is violent, agitating, and unbeautiful, and gives the cruel scene an atmosphere of unclear dream. The archaeological and theatrical apparatus of the earlier St Lawrence is quite gone. Titian envisions the image as torment and nightmare, and makes roughnesses and haunting ugliness replace the strong rhetoric he had used for the theme before. A work of c. 1570-1, the Crowning with Thorns (Munich, Pinakothek), is a recasting of a still earlier painting, that in the Louvre. Here, too, rhetoric has been abjured, and the image is given with a forthrightness that is close to harshness, evening willing (as in the Martyrdom, too) a daemonic element of caricature. The setting is again a darkness, from which a single blazing chandelier calls forth dense and sombrely rich-coloured forms. The brush moves to express the force with which the image is conceived and optically evoked, and its very roughness generates, more than before, tactile and visual splendour. In these latest years Titian's art suggests the image of a setting sun, most marvellous just before it sets."
"Most of the latest works cannot be put in a sure chronological order, and it is even more likely for them than for the pictures of preceding years that they were done over a span of time, some of them more or less concurrently. Of the Tarquin and Lucretia (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) it is known that it was despatched to Philip II in August 1571, and that it is thus contemporary with the Munich Crowning. Given the conjunction of theme and patron Titian is not so libertarian or subjective in the Tarquin, but he still engenders force in both the visual and dramatic matter of the image in a measure that exceeds his past. The different modes of touch that Titian uses in the two contemporary works should indicate how much his liberties of hand were purposeful; and there is a still further stage of freedom that he could exercise at will. Several paintings, only loosely datable within Titian's last decade, are conceived with minimal concern for plastic forms or contours: instead, their surfaces are half-dissolved into soft-textured light, to which a running, broken brush stroke gives churning brilliance. The Tarquin theme, for example, was also treated on a smaller and informal scale in this mode (Vienna, Akademie); the different handling exactly means to elicit from the subject a differently private and more lyric pathos. A picture on a larger scale, the Flaying of Marsyas in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Kroměříž (Kremsier) of c. 1570 or later, is painted in a compromise between this mode and that of the Munich Crowning. The result is a yet more extraordinary, emotion-generating vibrance. In the Marsyas the surfaces of bodies make a silvered incandescence and the atmosphere, almost unbreathably dense, is like dulled fire. The image seems both palpable and limitless, depicting existences in landscape space but denoting that what we see here is a fraction of the cosmos. In this intensely present yet immeasurable world the enactment and the actors seem to make time as well as space coalesce, and it is uncertain whether they are beings conjured into now from mythical antiquity or persons from the present, almost caricatures, in antiquarian disguise. There is a wry comedy within the cruelty, ugliness and strangeness within the magisterial beauty, and terror accompanies the sense of the sublime. The daemon who inhabits Titian, making union between him and the cosmos, is old Pan."
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| Titian The Annunciation ca. 1565 oil on canvas Chiesa di San Salvatore, Venice |
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| Titian St Margaret ca. 1565-66 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian Martyrdom of St Lawrence ca. 1564-67 oil on canvas Monasterio El Escorial |
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| Titian The Crowning with Thorns ca. 1570-71 oil on canvas Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
"An Annunciation, painted alla prima about 1565 as an altar-cover for the Venetian church of S. Salvatore (in situ), is among the first of Titian's transcendent late works. In it the descent of the Spirit is accompanied by an eruption of young angelic forms from a darkened heaven; below, an unexpectedly masculine Gabriel moves with bulking power towards Mary. Light makes brilliant saliences of form out of the dark, and within the darks makes restless crepitation: the image is dense with the accumulation in it of the energies of substances and lights, and vibrant with the grandeur and profundity of emotion that is equally idea. Two closely contemporary paintings are reworkings in this new stature of earlier ones: the St Margaret (Madrid, Prado, c. 1565-6) of a theme of 1552 (Escorial); the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (the high altar of the Escorial, 1564-7) of the picture in the Gesuiti. The St Margaret is much in the temper of the Annunciation, but still more gives the effect of expanding grandeur to the actor's form. She seems the image of a tragic goddess, of immeasurable dignity, rather than a Christian saint. Her figure shines in a landscape where, though it is night time, nothing rests. Across a lake, a city in the distance is mysteriously alight, almost as if it might be on fire, scattering sparks upon the water and up into a clouded sky. In the St Lawrence of the Escorial the light is less mysterious in origin but still more transforming and evasive of rationality in its effects. It is violent, agitating, and unbeautiful, and gives the cruel scene an atmosphere of unclear dream. The archaeological and theatrical apparatus of the earlier St Lawrence is quite gone. Titian envisions the image as torment and nightmare, and makes roughnesses and haunting ugliness replace the strong rhetoric he had used for the theme before. A work of c. 1570-1, the Crowning with Thorns (Munich, Pinakothek), is a recasting of a still earlier painting, that in the Louvre. Here, too, rhetoric has been abjured, and the image is given with a forthrightness that is close to harshness, evening willing (as in the Martyrdom, too) a daemonic element of caricature. The setting is again a darkness, from which a single blazing chandelier calls forth dense and sombrely rich-coloured forms. The brush moves to express the force with which the image is conceived and optically evoked, and its very roughness generates, more than before, tactile and visual splendour. In these latest years Titian's art suggests the image of a setting sun, most marvellous just before it sets."
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| Titian Tarquin and Lucretia ca. 1571 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Titian Tarquin and Lucretia ca. 1570-75 oil on canvas Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna |
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| Titian Flaying of Marsyas ca. 1570-75 oil on canvas Kroměříž Archdiocesan Museum, Czech Republic |
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| Titian Nymph and Shepherd ca. 1570-75 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Titian Pietà 1576 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
"Most of the latest works cannot be put in a sure chronological order, and it is even more likely for them than for the pictures of preceding years that they were done over a span of time, some of them more or less concurrently. Of the Tarquin and Lucretia (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) it is known that it was despatched to Philip II in August 1571, and that it is thus contemporary with the Munich Crowning. Given the conjunction of theme and patron Titian is not so libertarian or subjective in the Tarquin, but he still engenders force in both the visual and dramatic matter of the image in a measure that exceeds his past. The different modes of touch that Titian uses in the two contemporary works should indicate how much his liberties of hand were purposeful; and there is a still further stage of freedom that he could exercise at will. Several paintings, only loosely datable within Titian's last decade, are conceived with minimal concern for plastic forms or contours: instead, their surfaces are half-dissolved into soft-textured light, to which a running, broken brush stroke gives churning brilliance. The Tarquin theme, for example, was also treated on a smaller and informal scale in this mode (Vienna, Akademie); the different handling exactly means to elicit from the subject a differently private and more lyric pathos. A picture on a larger scale, the Flaying of Marsyas in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Kroměříž (Kremsier) of c. 1570 or later, is painted in a compromise between this mode and that of the Munich Crowning. The result is a yet more extraordinary, emotion-generating vibrance. In the Marsyas the surfaces of bodies make a silvered incandescence and the atmosphere, almost unbreathably dense, is like dulled fire. The image seems both palpable and limitless, depicting existences in landscape space but denoting that what we see here is a fraction of the cosmos. In this intensely present yet immeasurable world the enactment and the actors seem to make time as well as space coalesce, and it is uncertain whether they are beings conjured into now from mythical antiquity or persons from the present, almost caricatures, in antiquarian disguise. There is a wry comedy within the cruelty, ugliness and strangeness within the magisterial beauty, and terror accompanies the sense of the sublime. The daemon who inhabits Titian, making union between him and the cosmos, is old Pan."
"The Marsyas seems Titian's most technically radical late work, and the most complex in its inhabiting idea. There are two other paintings of the last half-decade that are on the same transcendent level: the Nymph and Shepherd (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) and the Pietà (Venice, Accademia), the latter finished posthumously, but not in any essentials, by Palma Giovane. In the pastoral the landscape catches fire from the last rays of a setting sun, while light on the rough-hewn figures of the nymph and shepherd is opalescent, contrasting [with] the descending dark. The sense of the picture is again panic, though in a quieter tone than in the Marsyas, and it makes a profound affirmation of the magnitude of meaning to Titian of sensuous life. The Pietà – at first meant by Titian to have gone into his burial chapel in the Frari – is less a painting about Christian death and tragedy than a splendid and impassioned affirmation of both art and life. Its true protagonist is the Magdalene, salient in a radiance of green against a gold-shot background, who walks out of the picture into the real world, shouting, palpable, magnificent, and one with us in life. She illustrates a cry of grief, but makes the effect the pronouncement of a victory. In the end Titian's destiny was thus opposite to Michelangelo's. Titian never abandoned the values that the classical ethos had inspired in him in his youth. In age, he only made them grander, and perfected the cohabitation that is in the essence of the classical style between nature and idea."
– S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (1970)