National Gallery, London
The artist’s epic series of paintings drawn from the poet Ovid hang together for the first time in three centuries, and tell a tale of sex, power and subversion
The women are the stars in Titian. Men barely get a look-in – and that look-in can be fatal. In his painting Diana and Actaeon, a young man out hunting has chanced on the goddess Diana and her court bathing naked in a woodland hideaway. As he pushes aside a soft pink hanging, he sees inside this female realm. His punishment is shown in another painting here: he will be turned into a stag and torn apart by his hounds. In Diana and Actaeon we see what he sees: women kneel and crouch, turn in horror and rush to cover. Titian’s brush shapes their flesh in ethereal yet weighty flicks of colour that capture form while being smokily suggestive. He called these paintings “poesie”, poetic pictures, with good reason, for they hover in a cloud of carnality and dreams.
This theatre of human flesh hasn’t been experienced in the way you can in this show for more than 300 years. It is Titian’s answer to the Sistine Chapel. In the mid 16th century he started a series of big oil paintings on canvas for King Philip II of Spain, ruler of a global empire that stretched from Flanders to Peru. They were to illustrate the Greco-Roman myths as told by the ancient Latin poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses: Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster; Venus pleading with her lover Adonis not to leave her. Titian paints these stories as very adult fairytales.
King Philip II can have had no inkling Titian was sending him portaits of sex workers under a mythical guise
Titian: Love, Desire, Death is at the National Gallery, London, 16 March-14 June.
Continue reading...
