Art: Brush With Genius

THE BIG DRAW OF PARIS THIS spring is the show titled "The Century of Titian," which fills the Grand Palais until June 14. It is not about Venice as a city; it contains nothing topographical, nothing designed to evoke the scenography of the past -- no furniture, pseudo decor, multimedia "educational" clutter. Painting reigns supreme, on austere walls. All in all, this is the most comprehensive exhibition that has been devoted to the work and influence of a single Renaissance painter in living memory -- a feast for the eyes and a landmark in modern museum history.

It is also the swan song of its curator, Michel Laclotte, soon to retire as president and director of the Louvre. Like some benign capo, he has called in all his markers at once in a virtuoso display of accumulated borrowing power. His contributing art historians, from Alessandro Ballarin to Konrad Oberhuber, provide clear and scholarly catalog essays; no serious French catalog would dream of using the jargon so popular now in American academe.

The big problem in seeing Titian whole has always been the popularity he enjoyed in his lifetime. His work was commissioned by kings, princes and potentates from London to Mantua, from Vienna to Madrid. Thus dispersed, the works were hard to reassemble. Yet Laclotte and his team have brought together no fewer than 55 major paintings by Titian himself, along with about 200 drawings and prints. For comparison, there are a further 200 or so works by the Venetian artists who shaped him -- Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini -- and by those who were inspired by him. The latter group, ranging from Veronese, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano in Venice to Savoldo in Brescia and Dosso Dossi in Ferrara, is large, since Titian was one of the half a dozen or so most influential painters who ever lived. Among Venetian artists of the cinquecento, only Lorenzo Lotto, that great independent, resisted the pressure of his style.

No one will ever again have the chance to walk into a room and see 18 Giorgiones all in a row -- well, maybe 15, if you want to quarrel about attributions -- or to contemplate, in the same place at the same time, so many of the sublime works of Titian's old age, from The Flaying of Marsyas to the Ancona Crucifixion. The drawings and prints alone, which show the mutual development of Titian and Giorgione in intimate detail, reveal the use made of their designs by engravers like Domenico Campagnola and demonstrate Titian's own astonishing power and inventiveness as a maker of multiple-block woodcuts.

Consequently, to go through this show only once produces surfeit. It demands repeated visits, and at the end of each you are called back, not only by the splendor of the works but also by a sort of postcoital regret provoked by the contrast between the achievements of 16th century Venetian art and the sad entropy of our own fin de siecle.

Since his talent was the motor that drove the Venetian High Renaissance, the show's title, "The Century of Titian," is not empty hype. Few artists have ever dominated a period, and a cultural frame, the way Titian did. His public career as an artist began with the new century, around 1505; it lasted until 1576, when he was carried off by the plague, still painting, at the age of about 90.