Art: Metropolitan's Titian

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In the official mind of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art only two men have ever really used paint. One was Rembrandt the Dutchman. The other was Titian the Venetian. Of some 300 closely-held authentic Titians, the Metropolitan until last week had only two. Then it bought a third from Duveen Bros., Inc. and called it "the most important purchase of a single piece of art ever made by the museum." Asked the price of this jewel, the Museum's Director Herbert Eustis Winlock replied, "We never talk prices. They don't mean anything." A good guess: $300,000.

The new Titian was Venus and the Lute Player. Lord Duveen, after buying it from the third Earl of Leicester in 1932, lent it to Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition and to Venice's great Titian exhibition where it hung with the famed Venus of Urbino (TIME, May 13).

Venus and the Lute Player, finished when the world's longest-living (99) painter was about 83, is in Titian's "yellow & blue" period with overtones of the preceding "red & green." No diet-disciplined Hollywood beauty, the great-hipped, heavy-stomached Venus lies on a violet couch while a Cupid crowns her with flowers, and a boyish nobleman serenades her with a lute. The paint job is superb, the composition dramatic. Credited with being the first intimations of 18th Century Impressionism are the blue mountains, the wide vague plain in the background.

So impressed was the Metropolitan with its purchase last week that, against all precedent, it hung the new Titian at once, in a permanent place of honor at the head of the main stairs.