Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)
Italian (Venetian); 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.) (TFS, 2023)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
87%
Christ Shown to the People (Ecce Homo). c1570-1576. Oil on canvas
Titian's production of this image by way of so many marks and blotches (pittura di macchia, is what it's called) has given his painting's surface a unity that belies (but not in a bad way) the amount of depth and variance that there is in the scene. The face of Pontius is a continent of shapes and hues, but the presence everywhere in it of Titian's hand makes it seem a singular thing. Same with the columns in the background, the sheer garment over Christ's right half, the (likely unfinished, but still great) flames up top. And then there's the arrangement: a simple bottom left-to-top right diagonal that the attendant's elbow pushes up so that Pilate's hand can throw it back down. There are plenty of Titians that get away with more than this one does and are better for it, but few that are quite so comported. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Frick Collection
74%
Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat. c1520. Oil on canvas
One prefers later Titian with all his violence and tossed paint, but the young artist is worth liking as well, if for small reasons. This portrait of his is sleek, stately, measured, cinched. The brush is there only just so in the fur around the sitter's arms and in the gold at his chest; those shadows on the wall behind him push back against his pose, but they do not consume. Such is meagre fare in general Titian-terms, though it's more than enough to make for a good serviceable Renaissance portrait as far as these things go. One minor feature elevates things a bit: the grey threshold before the sitter, which angles down towards the right edge of the canvas. Why did Titian not paint a clean horizontal? Maybe it's because the sitter himself tilts a bit in the opposite direction; maybe it's unaccountable. Either way, that slope musses up the picture's otherwise perfect balance, and that's for the better. (TFS, 2025)
Vienna, Austria: Akademie der bildenden Künste, Gemäldegalerie
...%
Tarquin and Lucretia. c1570. Oil on canvas
... (TFS, 2025)