"There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in
art--than that of Titian." These words of the distinguished art critic,
Claude Phillips, express the verdict of more than three centuries. It is
agreed that no other painter ever united in himself so many qualities of
artistic merit. Other painters may have equalled him in particular
respects, but "rounded completeness," quoting another critic's phrase,
is "what stamps Titian as a master."[1]
To begin with the qualities which are apparent even in black and white
reproduction, we are impressed at once with the vitality which informs
all his figures. They are breathing human beings, of real flesh and
blood, pulsing with life. They represent all classes and conditions,
from such royal sitters as Charles V. and Philip II. to the peasants and
boatmen who served as models for St. Christopher, St. John, and the
Pharisee of the Tribute Money. They portray, too, every age: the tender
infancy of the Christ child, the girlhood of the Virgin, the dawning
manhood of the Man with the Glove, the maidenhood of Medea, the young
motherhood of Mary, the virile middle life of Venetian Senators, the
noble old age of St. Jerome and St. Peter, each is set vividly before
us.
The list contains no mystics and ascetics: life, and life abundant, is
the keynote of Titian's art. The abnormal finds no place in it. Health
and happiness are to him interchangeable terms.
Yet it must not be supposed that Titian's delineation of life stopped
short with the physical: he was besides a remarkable interpreter of the
inner life. Though not as profound a psychologist as Leonardo or Lotto,
he had at all times a just appreciation of character, and, on occasion,
rose to a supreme touch in its interpretation. In such studies as the
Flora, where he is interested chiefly in working out certain technical
problems, he takes small pains to make anything more of his subject than
a beautiful animal. The Man with the Glove stands at the other end of
the scale. Here we have a personality so individual, and so possessing,
as it were, that the portrait takes rank among the world's masterpieces
of psychic interpretation.
In his best works Titian's sense of the dramatic holds the golden mean
between conventionality and sensationalism. In the group of sacred
personages surrounding the Madonna and Child there is sufficient action
to constitute a reason for their presence,--to relieve the figures of
that artificial and purely spectacular character which they have in
the earlier art,--yet the action is restrained and dignified as befits
the occasion. The pose of both figures in the Christ of the Tribute
Money is in the highest degree dramatic without being in any way
theatrical. The tempered dignity of Titian's dramatic power is also
admirably seen in the Assumption of the Virgin. The apostles' action is
full of passion, yet without violence; the buoyant motion of the Virgin
is unmarred by any exaggeration.
The same painting illustrates Titian's magnificent mastery of
composition. Perhaps the Pesaro Madonna alone of all his other works is
worthy to be classed with it in this respect. It is impossible to
conceive of anything better in composition than these two works. Not a
line in either could be altered without detriment to the organic unity
of the plan.
The crowning excellence of Titian is his color. The chief of the school
in which color was the characteristic quality, he represents all the
best elements in its color work. If others excelled him in single
efforts or in some one respect, none equalled him for sustained
grandeur. A recent criticism sums up his color qualities succinctly in
these words: "He had at once enough of golden strength, enough of depth,
enough of éclat; his color, profound and powerful _per se_, impresses us
more than that of the others, because he brought more of other qualities
to enforce it."[2]
Titian's works easily fall into a few groups, according to the subject
treated. In mythological themes he was in his natural element. Here he
could express the sheer joy of living which was common to the Venetian
and the Greek. Here physical beauty was its own excuse for being,
without recourse to any ulterior significance. Here he could exercise
unhindered his marvellous skill in modelling the human form along those
perfect lines of grace which give Greek sculpture its distinctive
character. It is in his earlier period that his affinity with the Greek
spirit is closest, and we see it in perfect fruition in the Medea and
Venus.
Titian's treatment of sacred subjects is in the diverse moods of his
many-sided artistic nature. The great ceremonial altar pieces, such as
the Assumption of the Virgin, and the Pesaro Madonna, are a perfect
reflection of the religious spirit of his environment. Religion was with
the Venetians a delightful pastime, an occasion for festivals and
pageants, a means of increasing the civic glory. These great decorative
pictures are full of the pomp and magnificence dear to Venice, full of
the joy and pride of life.
Yet in another mood Titian paints the life of the Holy Family as a
pastoral idyl. A sunny landscape, a happy young mother, a laughing baby
boy, bring the sacred subject very near to common human sympathies.
Some of Titian's professedly sacred pictures are in the vein of pure
_genre_, painted in a period when this department of art had not yet
attained independent existence. We see such works in the St. Christopher
and the St. John. These direct studies of the people throw an
interesting light upon the painter of ideal beauty: they show an
otherwise unsuspected vigor.
The Christ of the Tribute Money stands alone in Titian's sacred art. The
technical qualities are thoroughly characteristic of his hand, but a new
note is struck in spiritual feeling. Virile, without coarseness; gentle,
without weakness, the chief figure is perhaps the most intellectual
ideal of Christ which has been conceived in art.
Titian's landscapes, though holding an accessory place only in his art,
are counted by the critical art historian with those of Giorgione, as
the practical beginning of this branch of art. He knew how to express
"the quintessence of nature's most significant beauties without a too
slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts."[3] His
imagination interpreted many of nature's moods, from the pastoral calm
environing Medea and Venus to the stormy grandeur of the forest in which
St. Peter Martyr met his fate.
It is undoubtedly as a portrait-painter that Titian's many great
qualities meet in their utmost perfection. His feeling for textures, the
delicacy with which he painted the hair and the hands; his skill in
modelling; his instinct for pose; the infinite variety of his resources,
made an incomparable equipment in the secondary matters of portrait
painting. To these he added, as we have seen, the two highest essentials
of the art, the power of giving life to his sitter, and the gift of
insight into character.
Nature made him a court painter; he loved to impart to his sitter that
air of noble distinction whose secret he so well understood. Yet he was
too large a man to let this or any other natural preference hamper him.
Something of himself, it is true, he frequently put into his figures,
yet he was at times capable of thoroughly objective work. He stands
perhaps somewhere between the extreme subjectivity of Van Dyck and the
splendid realism of Velasquez. The noble company of his sitters,
emperors, kings, doges, popes, cardinals and bishops, noblemen, poets
and beautiful women, still make their presence felt in the world. Theirs
was a deathless fame on whom the painter conferred the gift of his art.
Titian's temperament was keenly sensitive to the influences of his
environment, and in his extraordinary length of days, Venice passed
through various changes, political, social, artistic and religious,
which left their mark upon his work. One cannot make a random selection
from his pictures and pronounce upon the qualities of his art. The work
of his youth, his maturity, his old age, has each a character of its
own. It is this rounding out of his art life through successive stages
of growth and even of decay that gives the entire body of his works the
character of a living organism.