Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Titian
Italian; 16th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
94%
Venus and the Lute Player. c1570. Oil on canvas
It's all about how seamlessly, how completely this painting concentrates itself right in the face of the goddess. The musician's gaze meets the lakeshore where a hill starts cresting towards Venus. His lute shoots up the opposite way to parallel the fall of a distant mountain back towards her. A sword at his hip, dipping outside the frame, points there, as does a page of music, a mass on the bed, some clasps on his cloak, the cherub's widow's peak. Even the curtain, at its tip, lists just barely towards Venus's visage. And at the point where all these collide, there's listlessness, ambivalence—the goddess projects the painting's full force right off of its edge with a casual glance. She's art's proleptic grace and the deferral of its promise all in one figure. (The tension between Titian's handlings of paint in her body versus her background is a point of interest, too.) (2023)