Titian’s Poesie for Philip II and the Rise of Early Modern European Mythological Painting: Some Very Brief Observations

Abstract

Titian’s Poesie for Philip II and the Rise of Early Modern European Mythological Painting: Some Very Brief Observations PAUL BAROLSKY The years 2020 and 2021 were a truly remarkable time in the art historical world. For the first time since the sixteenth century Titian’s glorious mythological paintings , the poesie painted for Philip II of Spain, were brought together to be seen as a group in exhibitions mounted in London , Madrid, and Boston. This small cluster of images consisted of Danaë in the Wellington Collection, London, Venus and Adonis in the Prado, Madrid, Perseus and Andromeda in the Wallace Collection, London, Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon jointly held by the National Gallery, London and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, and The Rape of Europa, in the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Boston. The reunion of these pictures was, as one curator put it, “a dream that is suddenly happening.” The exhibition was also the occasion to do something extra special, and the Prado did just that. The museum not only displayed the six pictures by Titian. It also exhibited them along with a wide variety of mythological works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several from the Prado’s own extremely rich collection. It was an opportunity seized upon by the astute curators, Miguel Falomir and Alejandro Vergara, to move from consideration of the six paintings by Titian to a broader view of the emergence of modern monumental European mythological art. The exhibition was accompanied by a beautifully designed, copiously illustrated catalogue in English: Mythological Passions: Titian, Veronese, Allori, Rubens, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velázquez. The Prado book is a highly significant contribution to our arion 29.3 winter 2022 98 titian’s poesie for philip ii understanding of early Modern European painting. Mythological art, Falomir writes, “encouraged experimentation,” and the works by Titian in the Prado exhibition “were among the most audacious of their day.” Falomir also made a bold and compelling claim when he observed, speaking of Titian’s Venus and Adonis (Fig.1), that the painter’s depiction of “Venus ’s vain attempt to detain Adonis by embracing him,” usually said to be based on Ovid’s tale in Metamorphoses, is not, in fact, part of the story in Ovid’s poem. Rather, as Falomir points out, Titian “invented the episode.” The fact that his Venus is entirely undressed magnifies our sense of her lust, since her nudity is a clue to her abandon. When Vergara describes this picture, he aptly uses the word “luscious.” Titian is a bit of a tease when, showing Venus’s Fig. 1. Venus and Adonis (1554). Titian. Museo del Prado, Madrid © Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, NY. Paul Barolsky 99 backside, he coyly conceals much more. In another painting of Venus and Adonis, this one by Rubens and now in the Hermitage, Adonis is, like Venus, undressed. Only a bit of drapery flutters over his thigh toward his genitals. This choice detail is enriched by the reach of baby Cupid who, hanging onto Adonis’s upper leg, draws our attention to that which is concealed. Falomir also suggests that when various sixteenth-century painters rendered the image of Danaë ravished by the golden shower of Jupiter, “their idea of the myth owed less to Ovid’s verses than to Titian’s brushes.” This is so because Ovid does not “picture” the event. The painter makes visible what the poet merely suggests (Fig. 2). There can never be an absolute correspondence between word and image because what is described in a text does not appear to the eye. It must be imagined by the painter. When Titian painted the story of Jupiter penetrating Dana ë, he was surely thinking primarily about painting and not about literature. He was remembering Correggio’s painting Fig. 2. Danaë (1551–53). Titian. Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London. 100 titian’s poesie for philip ii of Danaë that he would have seen in Mantua (Fig. 3). Although painters had previously depicted Jupiter descending to Danaë as a golden shower whether earlier in the Renaissance or in ancient Greece, Correggio with a great imaginative leap pictured a lush cloud above a voluptuous Danaë in a...