Week 4, Allegorical and Mythological Painting in Venice

From Portrait to Allegory.

 Titian, Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence, c. 1565, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 76 x 69 cm.

Giovanni Bellini, Sacred Allegory, 1490-1500, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Oil on panel, 73 x 119 cm.

 Giorgione, Tempest,, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, Oil on canvas, 82 x 73 cm.

 Bonifazio di Pitati, Dives and Lazarus, 1540s, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, Oil on canvas, 204 x 436 cm.

Bridging the gap between Venetian portraits studied last week and the more complex realm of allegory is Titian’s unique image of his family and a group of animals! This is an intriguing painting which invites a range of interpretations and thought about its purpose. However, before proceeding further, it is a good idea to clarify what allegory is: allegory derives from the Greek allegoria which means “speaking otherwise.” Allegory has also been defined as an extended metaphor. The symbolic meaning is usually expressed through personifications and other symbols, as with our three animals here, which, according to one salient reading, symbolise aspects of time. Related allegorical forms are the fable and the parable, which are didactic, comparatively short and simple allegories. The “Allegory of Prudence” was famously decoded by Erwin Panofsky who argued convincingly that the picture’s function was a “lid” to cover a receptacle containing Titian’s will which involved his son Orazio and heir Marco, both of whose portraits, along with Titian’s, he said were shown here. Despite some counter-proposals, and reservations about the resemblance of the heads to Titian’s family, Panofsky’s reading of the painting as an artistic testament has gone almost unchallenged.[1]  

Venetian Painting and the Hidden Subject.

Titian, The Vendramin Family Venerating a Relic of the True Cross, 1540-45, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 206 x 289 cm.

If as Berenson maintained, the large scale teleri or narrative paintings were equivalent to the modern daily newspaper available and intelligible to a wide audience, then the pictures painted for a small, discerning clientele might be compared to specialist periodicals read by experts able to understand their arcane language. [2] Paintings such as Titian’s Allegory of Prudence, Giovanni Bellini’s Sacred Allegory, Bonifazio di Pitati’s Dives and Lazarus, and most especially Giorgione’s Tempesta, were not destined to be understood by a wide public, so we might assume they were meant to be understood by a private group, or even a single patron, who could recognise the hidden meanings buried within them. However, it didn’t follow that the artists themselves were “elitist” in outlook since many of them painted pictures, teleri, history and religious altarpieces for the public in Venice. In the case of Bellini, his Sacred Allegory which continues to thwart readings and baffle art historians to this day, clearly originated in the public religious altarpiece of the sacra conversazione which was discussed in the second week. A number of the figures in this mysterious picture, the enthroned Madonna, the putti, and two saints (Sebastian and Job) have been “carried over” from the San Giobbe altarpiece; it remains to ask why Bellini turned his altarpiece through 90 degrees and put it in a landscape with lake and clouds which resembles more of a fantasy or a dream.[3] According to Salvatore Settis, this perspective device can be traced back to a drawing of the Adoration of the Magi by Giovanni’s father, which obviously would have been known to his son.[4] Settis also claims that Bellini’s allegory is pagan despite its Christian content, a religious though secularized allegory to suit the taste of a private patron, pious yet immersed in the classical revival and its pagan origins. This is also the kind of patron that would have commissioned the more equally, if not more enigmatic Tempest, which has inspired religious and allegorical interpretations during the long history of its reception. Though the contract for the Tempest is lost, the patron has been identified as Gabriele Vendramin in whose house it was seen by the connoisseur Michiel in 1530.[5] We encounter the problem of likeness again here since one scholar (Settis) states that Gabriele appears in a magnificent group portrait of his family by Titian that hangs in the London NG today, and another (Penny) reports that Gabriele does not appear in this painting at all as he had died. None of this has much bearing on the interpretation of the Tempest but Settis claims that the painting “brings a biblical story into the ‘writing room’ of a noble Venetian merchant complete with ‘hieroglyphs’ and subtle allusions to his knowledge of classical, secular literature.” [6]

From Allegory to Mythology.

Tintoretto, Bacchus, Venus and Ariadne, 1576-77, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Oil on canvas, 146 x 167 cm.

 Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-22, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 175 x 190 cm.

After Titian, Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1486-1534), late 16^th or early 17^th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, oil on canvas, 50 x 34 ¾ inches, 127 x 98.4 cm.

At this point a distinction needs to be made between mythology and allegory. A painting like Tintoretto’s Bacchus and Ariadne in the Ducal Palace is an allegory; Titian’s painting of the same name in London is a mythology. Why? Tintoretto’s Ariadne is a personification of Venice who is crowned by Venus on the seashore, and visited by Bacchus, a combination which suggests “Venice made immortal by divine favour.”[7] By contrast Titian’s figures in his Bacchus and Ariadne do not represent any abstract ideas, but show a key moment in the classical tale- Ariadne’s meeting with Bacchus on the island of Naxos. As Hope points out, Tintoretto’s mythological allegories in the Ducal palace were to furnish European painters like Rubens operating on the international stage with many ways of conveying the political situation; but the mythologies of Titian and later imitations of Veronese inaugurated a whole new genre which originated not in Rome, but in Venice. Leading painters who visited Rome like Rubens and Poussin would be deeply influenced by the bacchanals that they saw in the Eternal City, but the genre is of Venetian origin.

Titian’s Mythologies: Painted Poesia.

 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523-24, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 175 x 193 cm.

Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods, 1514, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Oil on canvas, 170 x 188 cm.

Titian’s mythologies begin with the bacchanals he painted for Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, and culminate in what Titian called the poesia for Philip II, and the late highly personal paintings of mythological content that elude labelling altogether.[8] It doesn’t follow that the early and late paintings comfortably fit into the convenient genre label of “mythology,” which has caused problems for art historians trying to reconstruct Titian’s oeuvre.[9] Do Titian’s mythologies continue a genre which Ernst Gombrich believed was started by Botticelli, though there is confusion about the early master’s evolution too? Although the traditional way of seeing Titian’s bacchanals is as painted reconstructions of written texts by Philostratus- ekphrasis- Puttfarken proposed that they were dramatic enactments, and therefore should be contextualised within Aristotelian debates in Venetian literary culture, which was at the core of his new reading of Titian’s art.[10] Through his careful elucidation of Philostratus’s text, Puttfarken revealed the significance of a comment in which painters and poets are praised, which would have resonated with Venetian painters where colour was of paramount importance.[11] To stress poetry or painting whose colour evoked beauty and sensuality, as well as the exuberance of movement, would be to take the art of painting far beyond literature or narrative into some other realm that resisted classification. Though Titian did not call his paintings for Alfonso poesia, he clearly was striving for an art that was distinctive: painting is not the mute handmaiden of literature here, but “speaks” with its own voice and celebrates its status through colour, light and the drama of the situation, all of which are triumphantly united in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. Puttfarken consciously evokes the paragone concept here -competition between different arts like sculpture and painting- which would be appropriate for the Alfonso commission if Titian’s colourful bacchanals were meant to be seen in a room that also housed sculptural reliefs, but the presence of reliefs by the sculptor Lombardo in Alfonso’s camerino is still a matter of scholarly debate.[12

Late Thoughts on Painting: Titian’s Mythologies in Old Age

Titian, Venus and Adonis and detail, 1554, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 180 x 207 cm.

 Paolo Veronese, Venus and Adonis, 1580-82, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 212 x 191 cm.

Titian, The Death of Actaeon, 1562, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 179 x 189 cm.

François Clouet, The Death of Actaeon, 1550s, Museu de Arte, São Paulo, Oil on panel, 78 x 110 cm.

Anyone standing before Titian’s late mythologies like the Nymph and Satyr (Vienna) and the Death of Actaeon (London) will surely be struck by their modernity. Though classical in the sense that they are painted mythologies, the patchy brushwork, the sense of fragmentation, the overriding effet, as opposed to sharply defined composition, puts us in mind of some of the best masters of modern art.[13] This drastic change of style in Titian’s later years has perplexed art historians who have struggled to explain it by resorting to equally modern ideas such as a style born of old age, a late style based on psychological factors, and other ingenious explanations.[14] In terms of the allegory/mythology problem, the emphasis on style and technique has bolstered the view that rather than a manufacturer of pictures with deep meanings, Titian was an unlettered, avaricious painter who produced mythological pictures for cash.[15] A consequence of this revisionary thinking is that approaches to Titian’s late paintings have changed. If “meaning” is to be divined in the late pictures, it is terms of the facture, the brushstroke, which is either a marketing ploy - a less finished picture implies holding out for more cash- or the sign of the “tragic”, lonely painter in old age, a sort of Prospero of the brush. Whatever we think of the motivation behind Titian’s Death of Actaeon, there is nothing really like it in the whole mythological canon. To illustrate this point with just one example: if one compares other paintings of Diana which are known to be allegories, such as Clouet’s Bath of Diana with Titian’s Death of Actaeon, the difference could not be more striking. Clouet’s is a highly finished and erotic allegory on the relationship of the French king, Henri II and his mistress Diane de Poitiers; but the Titian is an unfinished, almost philosophical meditation on death and fate directed by the artist’s brush which seems to draw order out of chaos only to collapse it again in a welter of broken brushstrokes. In the presence of such a highly personal creation that probably stayed in Titian’s workshop, such words as “mythology”, “allegory,” or even “genre” seem totally inadequate. Is Titian’s Death of Actaeon a picture with a hidden meaning, or is it a “tragic” painting in the sense that it uses emotion and effects to push the boundaries of painting? Perhaps the last word should be left to the late Thomas Puttfarken whose final book cautions us. . “Some unfinished paintings are again too indeterminate to be of much use in this context. One of these is the Death of Actaeon.”[16]

Slides.

1.      Titian, Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence, c. 1565, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 76 x 69 cm.
2.      Titian, “Sacred and Profane Love” and details, 1514, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Oil on canvas, 118 x 279 cm.
3.      Giovanni Bellini, Sacred Allegory, 1490-1500, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Oil on panel, 73 x 119 cm.
4.      Giovanni Bellini, San Giobbe Altarpiece, c. 1487, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
5.      Oil on panel, 471 x 258 cm.
6.      Jacopo Bellini, Nativity, 1440s, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Leadpoint, 290 x 427 mm
7.      Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, 1508-09, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on canvas, 124 x 145 cm
8.      Giorgione, Tempest, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, Oil on canvas, 82 x 73 cm.
9.      Bonifazio di Pitati, Dives and Lazarus, 1540s, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, Oil on canvas, 204 x 436 cm.[17]
10.  Paris Bordone, Venetian Women at their Toilet, c. 1540-45, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, Oil on canvas, 94 x 141 cm.[18]
11.  Paolo Veronese, Mars and Neptune, 1575-78, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Oil on canvas, 250 x 180 cm.
12.  Tintoretto, Bacchus, Venus and Ariadne, 1576-77, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Oil on canvas, 146 x 167 cm.
13.  Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-22, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 175 x 190 cm.
14.  After Titian, Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1486-1534), late 16^th or early 17^th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, oil on canvas, 50 x 34 ¾ inches, 127 x 98.4 cm.[19]
15.  Reconstruction of Alfonso’s Camerino, (National Gallery, 2003).
16.  Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods, 1514, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Oil on canvas, 170 x 188 cm.[20]
17.  Giovanni Bellini, Young Bacchus, c. 1514, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Oil on wood, 48 x 37 cm.
18.  Titian, Isabella d'Este, Duchess of Mantua, 1536, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on canvas, 102 x 64 cm.
19.  Detail: Bacchus.
20.  After Titian (Dosso Dossi?), Bacchus, Private Collection, oil on canvas, 92.5 x 74.5 cm.[21]
21.  Antonio Lombardo, The Forge of Vulcan, 1508-11, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Marble, 83 x 107 cm.
22.  Antonio Lombardo, Contest between Minerva and Neptune, c. 1508, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Marble, 83 x 107 cm.
23.  Titian, detail from Bacchus and Ariadne, Bacchus’s followers and Ariadne.
24.  Titian, The Worship of Venus, 1516-18, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 172 x 175 cm.
25.  Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523-24, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 175 x 193 cm.
26.  Titian, Venus and Adonis and detail, 1554, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 180 x 207 cm.
27.  Paolo Veronese, Venus and Adonis, 1580-82, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Oil on canvas, 212 x 191 cm.
28.  Titian, The Death of Actaeon, 1562, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 179 x 189 cm.
29.  François Clouet, The Bath of Diana, 1550s, Museu de Arte, São Paulo, Oil on panel, 78 x 110 cm.
30.  Technical details: A (X- radiograph); B (detail of hound); C (detail of plant); D (detail of Diana’s dress and water).
31.  Technical detail: X-ray of Death of Actaeon.
32.  Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, 1576, State Museum, Kromeriz, Oil on canvas, 212 x 207 cm.
33.  Titian, Shepherd and Nymph, 1575-76, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Oil on canvas, 150 x 187 cm.

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[1] Erwin Panofsky, “Titian’s Allegory of Prudence: A Postscript” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, (Penguin, 1965), 181-206. For a good discussion of Panofsky’s interpretation- and others- see Stephen Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation” in Critical Terms for Art History , ed. R. Nelson and R. Shiff, (Uni of Chicago Press, 1992), 87-100. N Penny (Titian 2003, no. 34) expresses caution over the likenesses and even states that the painting might be placed “in a group of works completed or improvised after the artist’s death.” The curators of The Age of Titian (Edinburgh, 2004, no. 64) noted Penny’s comment and its implication that the animals were not originally intended by Titian, but they noted reasonably that they could have been introduced by Titian himself as his composition evolved. Though sceptical about the third head as Marco, the curators draw attention to the similarity of the central head with a wax roundel of Titian holding a portrait of Orazio.  (exhibited in the same show, no. 202.) The Scottish curators also disagree with Penny’s claim that the Allegory was largely painted by Titian’s assistants.

[2] After weighing the evidence that paintings in Venice were meant to be read allegorically, with religious messages buried in pagan mythologies or other subjects, Thomas Puttfarken concluded that there was little evidence to support this. He quoted the obscure satirist Persius in Aretino. “I will give you on the subject of Michelangelo the comment which a learned and holy man has to offer, so they say, on the satirical poet Persius, whose obscurity is improperly obscure: ‘If you do not want to be understood, I do not want to understand you’…Similarly, I wish to say that if Michelangelo does not want anyone to understand his inventions, apart from a small number of intellectuals [dotti], then I, who am not one of the intellectual few in questions, leave thinking about them to him.” Puttfarken’s argument is that whilist the masses could not be expected to understand arcane messages in pictures, not even the more educated ones, even Florentine wanted to do this. He concludes: “What little evidence there is seems to suggest that most patrons commissioned pictures primarily for visual and mental enjoyment, not for didactic purposes.” Puttfarken is completely opposed to the concept of the “humanist advisor” in renaissance art, i.e. an educated person who gives the artist ideas, or even draws up an intellectual programme. See Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist, (Yale University Press, 2005), 141f. "This self-indulgent attitude on the part of an important patron would largely seem to make redundant the well-established type of literary or humanist advisor, and this may not be a bad thing." (143).

[3] For my discussion of Bellini’s Sacred Allegory as a dream image in relation to work on renaissance painting and dreams, see “Hubert Damisch: Psychoanalysis, Art History and the Early Modern” in Modern French Visual Theory: a Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford, (MUP, 2013), 89-106, 94-97. Oskar Bätschmann (Giovanni Bellini) moved the picture back into the sphere of official allegory by stating that the Madonna could be a symbol of Venice itself. If true, this opens up a new line of interpretation concerning the relationship of “fantasia”, dreams and allegory in renaissance Venice.

[4] Salvatore Settis Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, trans, Ellen Bianchini  (Uni of Chicago Press, 1990),  130f. I claim no expertise on Giorgione nor the Tempest. On the painting see the Giorgione scholar, Dr Frank DeStefano's essay, and other articles on his blog.

[5] On Vendramin as the owner of the Tempest, see Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest, 142f.

[6] Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest, 146-7. On the Vendramin portrait, see Penny’s entry in Titian, 2003, no. 29. Penny states that Gabriele had died by the time the picture was painted, though he may have been instrumental in the picture’s development. NG link to Titian.

[7] For this interpretation, Charles Hope, “Poesie and Painted Allegories” in The Genius of Venice 1500-1600, (London, RA, 1983), 35-38, 37.

[8] On Titian’s bacchanals for Alfonso, see John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara: A Study of Styles and Tastes, (Phaidon Press, 1956); and the discussion of the bacchanals gloriously reunited in the Titian exhibition of 2003,  101-111.

[9] Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting, 133f.

[10] Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting, 136.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Puttfarken does not link the paragone idea with the possible “mixed media” display of the camerino. It was reported by Bruce Boucher and Anthony Radcliff (Genius of Venice, no. 57) that Hope challenged the idea that these reliefs of Lombardo were in the camerino. Hope conceded that they were in the building, but in the studio di marmo, a room above the moat of the castle at Ferrara, though that doesn’t mean they didn’t find their way into the camerino, or have influenced Titian. One figure in Lombardo’s so-called “Forge of Vulcan” may be based on the Laocoön, and the figure in the relief has been suggested as an influence on one of Bacchus’ followers in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne.

[13] There is a fascinating BBC discussion between Francis Bacon and the (then) Director of the NG, Michael Levy, on Titian’s Death of Actaeon, link.

[14] For a summary of views on Titian’s so called “late style,” see Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy 1500-1800, (Yale University Press, 2007), 92f. Interestingly, well before modern commentators, Delacroix was making the same connection between Titian and old age. “Si l'on vivait jusqu'à cent-vingt ans, on préférerait Titien à tout. » (“If we lived to be 120, we should end by preferring Titian above anyone.” Journal, 1st January, 1857.

[15] On Titian and avarice, Sohm, The Artist Grows Old, 84-88.

[16] Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting, 189. Interestingly, as noted by Sohm (The Artist Grows Old, 93) Hope also chose not to consider the Death of Actaeon.

[17] There is a truncated copy of this in the London NG. According to the NG. “This work has been considered to be a sketch for the large picture of the same subject in the Accademia, Venice, but is in fact derived from that work, which enjoyed considerable celebrity.” The Accademia says that there is a huge fire at the back of the original; the present writer observes that the beggar could be St Roch.

[18] The Age of Titian, no. 48. First recorded by Ridolfi in 1648 in a palace in Venice. Waagen admired it but judged it too gaudy.

[19] Georg Gronau. Letter to Mr. Drey. December 10, 1925, attributes it to Titian, identifying it with the original version of the portrait, subsequently presented by Alfonso d'Este to Charles V.

[20] A copy exists which was exhibited in Edinburgh in 2004 (no. 17). This has been occasionally attributed to Poussin.

[21] The Age of Titian, no. 18. Att to a whole range of painters: Dosso, Agostino Carracci and the Cavaliere d’Arpino.