Art: An Appetite for Human Character

Tiziano Vecellio, Titian to us, was one of the most famous, adored and formidable artists who ever lived -- the classic Dead White Male, so to speak. And when he was a Live White Male, which is to say for the best part of a century -- he was born in 1488 or 1490 in Pieve di Cadore, a hill town in northern Italy, and was carried off by the plague in his beloved but insalubrious Venice in 1576, still painting, at the patriarchal age of nearly 90 -- he posed dreadful problems for other artists. The length of his career condemned all his Venetian contemporaries to be the second choice of patrons. This must have been especially hard on Tintoretto, born 30 years after Titian, who had every right to expect to inherit the great man's mantle. Titian refused to die until Tintoretto was nearly 60.

No painter before Titian had ever achieved such international success: not Michelangelo, and certainly not the blocked and endlessly worrying Leonardo. The work of this "king of painters and painter of kings" attracted every serious patron in Italy and half the military leaders and crowned heads of Europe. The roster of his clients and portrait subjects reads like a list of international society in the 16th century: the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Alfonso d'Este, Duke Federigo of Mantua, Ippolito de' Medici, several ancient and cunning Popes, doges, admirals, art dealers, intellectuals. Even those who were deadly enemies, like Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, had in common the fact of having been painted by Titian. The story of Charles V picking up a brush that Titian had dropped and handing it back to the painter may be apocryphal, but it sums up the sense of deference and even awe that Titian's celebrity, fixed by his talent and assiduously pumped up by his promoter, Pietro Aretino, produced in his clients.

From his first Bellini-like and Giorgionesque paintings, through the classical certainties of his middle age -- such as the John the Baptist, a veritable column of vigor and controlled theatrical gesture -- and on to his late work, Titian never ceased to develop. Perhaps to a modern eye, late Titian is the most moving of all, for it goes beyond the pictorial rhetoric that made his success. It is broken, impressionistic and no longer interested in the classical ideal. From its smoky melancholy come Lear-like outcries of pessimism, whose fullest expression is reached in The Flaying of Marsyas, perhaps the last of his paintings.

Nevertheless, for most of his career Titian's pictorial elocution was so smooth, so inventive, so grand in its effects and masterly in its execution that it created a sense of helplessness in others. He was the 16th century's unrivaled topographer of male power and female beauty, as Rubens (whose conception of artistic prowess was modeled on Titian's) was in the 17th. Titian pushed the description of masculine character farther than any portraitist before him.