Titian: Love, Desire, Death review – endless female flesh
Art is never just art. From Duchamp’s Fountain to the Parthenon Sculptures, art works are never just paintings, sculptures, or film: they always have something to say – about politics, literature, or themselves – or are tied to something else by the people that see them. From the writings of Horace, to Dryden’s famously qualified praise in his ode To Sir Godfrey Kneller, and right up to A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories, writers have never been able to resist the pull to describe the non-verbal arts in words and, in so doing, question their relationship to them.
And so, when, in the introductory text to an exhibition at the National Gallery of the 16th century Venetian painter, Titian, the curators have chosen to print, in large font, the opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time.
it is clear that these “bodies changed into new forms” are not just the transformed figures of Ovid’s tales – the unfortunate Actaeon is quite a literal example of bodily transformation – but the transposed stories themselves; Titian has lifted them from poetry to paint, and is engaged in a type of reverse ekphrasis.
Titian himself called the paintings he painted for Phillip of Spain his “poesie”, both because of their poetic subjects and his belief that they were the visual equivalent of poetry. He is, throughout these paintings, telling – not just illustrating – the classical stories. The paintings collected here are Danaë (1551–3), Venus and Adonis (1554), Perseus and Andromeda (1554-6), Diana and Actaeon (1556–9), Diana and Callisto (1556–9), Rape of Europa (1562), and Death of Actaeon (1559–75).
The already striking Perseus and Andromeda is made all the more special by the fact it is one of the first paintings to be lent by the Wallace Collection since its decision to loan works in late 2019. As Dr Gabriele Finaldi, the Director of the National Gallery, said, this is the “first time in four centuries” that “all of the artist’s late ‘poesie’ mythologies will be seen together”. Unfortunately, the exhibition is closed from tomorrow – but at least, reproduced here, you can get some sense of what it’s like to view them in real life.
In a film with contributions from art historians and classicists – Mary Beard among them – to introduce the exhibition, the curators draw attention to the more problematic elements of Titian’s focus on the female form; it is not just the intricacies of female flesh that he is drawn to, it is female flesh that is under pressure, tormented, and made vulnerable. And, in all these moments of vulnerability, Titian deploys his trademark eroticism.
Of the seven paintings in the room, only two depict female strength (and these are from the same Diana and Actaeon story). The other paintings depict overt rape, the ostracisation of a victim of rape, a woman desperately hanging on to her lover, a woman chained up awaiting a man’s rescue, and a woman being showered in magical gold that makes her pregnant. So far, so Ovid.
These paintings are masterpieces whatever their subject – Danaë, in particular, is so arresting as to dominate the room. But, in order to laud the brilliance of Titian alongside his choice of subject matter, the exhibition has to be honest about what this subject matter is. The curatorial text throughout the exhibition makes much of the fact that these paintings are visual stories: they are compared to films and each painting has an explanation of the corresponding passage in Ovid before commenting on the painting itself. Titian, evidently, was interested in telling stories through paint, but not as interested as he was in the verisimilitude of his renderings of female flesh.
A noticeable example of this is Perseus and Andromeda: the white, naked brilliance of Andromeda’s body dominates the picture to such an extent that a literal sea-monster pales into obscurity. Narrative is quickly subsumed by visual shock and female naked flesh; the body of Perseus falling through the sky is practically unnoticeable in comparison. Some of the darkness in the painting that makes Andromeda so striking is a result of deterioration of the pigments, but – even in the painting’s original state – it is hard to see how the nondescript shapes of the monster would compete with the attention given to Andromeda’s body.
We know that Danaë has been cut-down from its original size, so it would be unfair to place all of the blame on Titian. But, evidently for the later collector who trimmed down the work, it was only her body that was worth keeping. Whether this reflects the attitudes of those who cut the painting, or the attention paid by Titian to Danaë’s body over the rest of the canvas is a debate that could go on ad infinitum. Both parties form part of an artistic tradition that sees the female body as a passive subject rather than agent. Indeed, even in such a moment of strength as killing Actaeon, Diana is only partially dressed.
In trying to appease the modern taste of judging centuries-old works by contemporary standards while simultaneously denying the validity of doing such a thing, the curators back themselves into a corner: they acknowledge the flaws of Titian’s paintings, but the narrative-focused argument they make instead falls flat.
This is not so much a wholesale criticism of the exhibition as a recognition of the fact that it made me think about Titian, his subjects, and art more generally. So, do enjoy these seven perhaps/definitely/definitely not (delete according to preference) problematic masterpieces, and let thoughts about them drown out those of global pandemic. At least it will give you something to talk about in isolation …