Monday,
June 19, 2006
The Secrets of Colorful Venetian Masters:
Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian
The
ANNOTICO Report
"Bellini,
Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting," is an
unsurprisingly drop-dead-gorgeous exhibition that opened Sunday at the National
Gallery of Art in
The
secrets of the Venetians were in the Layering and the Pigmentation.
The
Layering was delicate, multiple, and varied. For example, X
ray and Infrared analysis shows that beneath the ravishing ultramarine
blue is a layer of bright crimson. The eye cannot see the red while looking at
the painting, but its presence alters the reflection of light from the blue
robe, yielding extraordinary depth and richness.
The
Pigmentation was Intense, Variety of Materials, and Hues not seen
before. Giorgione also mixed in pulverized glass further tweaking the
inner illumination that comes from oil paint. The oil in which colored pigments
are suspended already traps ambient light; adding tiny bits of glass further
shatters, interrupts and reflects it.
It
all began around the time Christopher Columbus was bumping into
Within a few decades Venetian painting had erupted into the incomparable
chromatic spectacle we know today.
A COLORFUL CAST OF
VENETIAN MASTERS
By
Christopher Knight
Times Staff Writer
June 19, 2006
Within a few decades Venetian painting had erupted into the incomparable
chromatic spectacle ! we know
today. The marvelous story is told in "Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the
Renaissance of Venetian Painting," an unsurprisingly drop-dead-gorgeous
exhibition that opened here Sunday at the National Gallery of Art. Against deep
sage-green walls, the 52 paintings fairly glow with colored light, as if
illuminated from within. And with artists of the astounding caliber of those
named in the title accounting for more than 40% of the show, the effect can
make you giddy.
National Gallery curator David Alan Brown and his colleague Sylvia Ferino-Pagden of
The focus is tight. The show and its sumptuous, readable catalog look at
the genesis of the Venetian Renaissance.
Giorgione's "Adoration of the Shepherds," circa 1500, is the earliest
work. Giovanni Bellini's 1514 "Feast of the Gods," reworked by Titian
in 1529, is the latest. The stark difference between them in subject matter from sweet and pious Christian theme to
romping Classical myth, from the Gospels to Ovid is one instance of the breadth of
Venetian painting in the first decades of the century.
The half-millennium was an important date on the church calendar, celebrated
with pomp and circumstance. Artists from elsewhere were drawn to Venice Leonardo da
Vinci visited from
But despite the affluence of the great trading power, the so-called Golden Age
of Venetian painting did not take place during a period of calm stability. An! ything but.
War was common, and
Or, to put it another way, for color.
Since the late 1960s, color in contemporary art has often been regarded with
suspicion or even outright disdain negatively tagged as frivolous, foreign,
feminine. Those scornful terms might trace their lineage back to early-16th
century Venetian painting.
Yet with life so clearly fragile, one artistic response is to go to the other
delirious extremity. Sumptuous indulgence becomes a hedge against mortality,
however futile. Faithful patrons commission lavish and abundant religious
icons, feverishly hoping to invoke mystical protections.
The exhibition opens ! with
an enormous black-and-white aerial view of
The remarkable woodcut locates Mercury, god of commerce, and Neptune, the sea
god, on the north-south civic axis, pretty much describing the whys and
wherefores of Venetian power. The sinuous contours of the islands and canals
are gently abstracted, bending the actual topography into the profile of a
graceful dolphin.
The seven galleries that follow are divided thematically, rather than by artist
or chronology. That organizational choice makes for some fascinating
propositions.
Take Bellini. He turned the traditional devotional subject of the Virgin and
Child (with or without saints) on its side. His paintings typically horizont!
al rather than vertical, as most private or public
altarpieces are firmly grounded the
spiritual subject in an expansive landscape vista.
The world spread out on either side of salvation's personification in Mary and
Jesus, fading into the eternal distance. The ethereal came down to earth in
this format, while the earthly was infused with a preternatural aura.
In a 1510 "Virgin With the Blessing Child,"
a green silk cloth edged in pink and with no visible means of support frames
the Byzantine-style Queen of Heaven, locating her in a sublime realm. But
Bellini's surrounding landscape faithfully records the plain foothills north of
Titian's 1514 picture of the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen
Christ exemplifies the mind-boggling complexity such a them!
e could attain. He places the post-Crucifixion meeting
in a sprawling landscape.
The shapes of the standing man and the kneeling woman rhyme with those of a
tall tree and full shrubbery behind them. Her body strains forward in concert
with the leaning direction of the tree, while his body curves and spirals like
the twisting path that rises above the shrubs toward the city on the distant
hill.
"Noli Me Tangere"
Do not touch me Jesus said to a startled Mary Magdalene,
asserting that the reality of his presence after death was beyond mortal flesh.
Titian's composition embeds both the narrative and its spiritual implication
within the radiant materiality of nature, illuminated by a diffuse and
golden-azure light.
Mounted on the wall-label next to the canvas, a small X-ray image reveals
earlier stages of Titian's composition as he worked out the final painting. The
changes are dramatic, especially in the figure of Jesus and the tree. You can
see how! , in the studio, the artist knitted the elements of the picture
together to bring the desired effect into view.
Technical analysis in the conservation lab is a revealing feature of this
exhibition, with numerous pictures accompanied by similar labels. (There's also
a separate study room.) Infrared examination can expose under-drawing, and
X-rays can reveal hidden layers of painting.
Pigment analysis is also remarkable. A minuscule sample of the blue mantle worn
by the Virgin in Giorgione's breathtaking "Adoration of the
Shepherds" shows, through electron-microscope analysis, the delicate
layers of intensely colored glaze the artist applied. Surprisingly, beneath the
ravishing ultramarine blue is a layer of bright crimson. The eye cannot see the
red while looking at the painting, but its presence alters the reflection of
light from the blue robe, yielding extraordinary depth and richness.
And that's not all. The analysis shows that Giorgione also mixed pulv! erized
glass into the red paint, further tweaking the inner illumination that comes
from oil paint. The oil in which colored pigments are suspended already traps
ambient light; adding tiny bits of glass further shatters, interrupts and
reflects it.
Other thematic galleries are devoted to the pastoral landscape, with its vision
of a lost world of peace and harmony that can be regained through art, and to
portraits of men shown not in standard power poses but acting out romantic
roles poet, dashing soldier, lover
or musician. The most affecting is Titian's famous "Man With
a Glove," where a keenly observed realism fuses with an idealized nature.
The man's bright, white shirt emerges from his pitch-black doublet to form a
sharp, narrow V-shape topped by a ruffle that encircles his throat. It's a
lily, symbol of virtuous purity, and his head is the stamen.
Willem de Kooning asserted that "Flesh was the
reason oil painting was invented," and Venetian artists
! used that same idea to invent a new subject:
the erotic female nude. (Remember:
Better, this painting (and scores like it), meant for the
privacy of a gentleman's bedroom, set the stage for Giorgione's devastating
portrait of a tired, doleful crone.
His haunting "Old Woman" represents the inevitable loss of natural
beauty as more than just a matter of sagging skin, grayed hair and stumps of
teeth; the loss also resonates as a chromatic deficit.
"Old Woman" is virtually the only painting in the show without any
rich, sumptuous color. All neutrals black, gray, burnt umber, shades of tan the astounding portrait consecrates the
poignant woman instead with a cap and fringed shawl of purest white. Nature's
loveliness f! ades,
Giorgione proposes, but the beauty of art is what endures.
Among the show's several curatorial coups is the inclusion of Titian's justly
famous erotic masterpiece, "Pastoral Concert (Concert Champjtre)," once attributed to Giorgione and
never before seen in the
Only a handful of paintings by the brilliant and mysterious Giorgione are
known, and attributions are regularly subject to heated scholarly dispute. But
five Giorgione paintings are here including the great "Three
Philosophers," with its hypnotizing vision of an earnest young man vainly
trying to use drafting tools to measure nature's magic.
Giorgione represented that thrilling enchantment with a fluttering cascade of
leaves hovering in s! pace at the entry to a dark
cave. (Yes, it has an erotic kick.) Opposite, the philosophers are wrapped in
dazzling robes of emerald, crimson, silver-blue and gold. Color that beggars
description envelopes their maturing world of thought and attitude, and it
makes the young man's T-square as useless to humanity as an appendix.
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