Video

Against Titian

Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art, 2018

From far below, we look up at an older man with standing on a cliff edge or rocky ledge with his arms raised as he turns his head to gaze up to a second man and winged, child-like angels surrounded by clouds in the sky above in this square painting. All the people have pale, peachy skin. The man on the ledge, Saint John, half crouches with knees bent so his body is angled to our right, and he turns his head back to our left to look up to the clouds. Both hands are raised with palms facing up. Saint John has a short, curly white beard and hair, and we see the bottom of his chin, nose, and eyes under heavy brows. He wears a light, rose-pink tunic with crimson drapery across his shoulders billowing around his body. Next to him on the rocky ledge is a book with a scarlet-red cover to our left and a brown eagle to our right. The eagle slightly lifts its wings and looks to our left in profile, mouth open and tongue visible. Tufts of grass and plants grow near Saint John’s feet. The aqua-colored sky fills most of the composition behind Saint John, and a bank of silvery gray clouds lit with pale yellow swirls across the top half of the painting. At the center of the clouds, the second man has a long, white beard and white hair, and wears a muted plum-purple robe. He raises his right hand, to our left, palm down with the first two fingers and thumb extended. Six winged, nude young children nestle near this second man or flutter among the clouds.

Delivered on November 4, 2018, Stephen J. Campbell addresses the conflicted reception of the Venetian painter Titian outside his home city during a crucial phase in the formation of his reputation—his achievement of celebrity as a Hapsburg court painter and his inclusion in an emerging canon of Venetian and central Italian artists. While Titian’s production for Hapsburg patrons in Spain and other non-Italian destinations shows him performing as the quintessential artist of the Italian "modern manner," by the mid-sixteenth century his work for sites in Italy pursued a different course: artistic and critical reaction suggests that it was found to be inscrutable or alienating. Campbell’s lecture proposes that this reception resulted from a tacit disavowal on Titian's part of contemporary critical accounts—by Lodovico Dolce, Pietro Aretino, and Giorgio Vasari—that increasingly sought to define his work.

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