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use dawns-p.14

TITIAN’S LANDSCAPES

By

Yen-min Chou

A MASTER THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History of Art

1999

ABSTRACT

TITIAN’S LANDSCAPES

By

Yen-min Chou

Titian was called “the Homer of Landscapists,” signifying his unique and
landmark status in landscape development and his high level of achievement.
More than any of his predecessors, Titian was devoted to landscape paintings
and drawings. The main purpose of this thesis is to thoroughly investigate of
Titian’s landscapes.

Titian created the pastoral works, which may not be only inherently visual.
To some degrees, these are associated with pastoral literature. To find the link
between Titian’s landscapes and Virgil’s poetry is one important concern of this
research.

Another concern relates to Titian’s stylistic changes at different periods.
Especially in his landscape drawings, he created new ways of composing and
looking at the beautiful natural scene. Based on a chronological analysis, these
changes can be clearly exhibited. Titian’s spiritual refinement, along with his

stylistic development, is also investigated.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
Introduction
Chapter 1 Titian’s Landscapes and Ancient Literature
Chapter 2 A Chronology of Titian’s Landscapes
Chapter 3 Subject and Meaning of Titian’s Landscapes
Conclusion
Appendices

Bibliography

iii

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Titian: the Three Ages of Man, c.1509.
Figure 2 Titian: the Worship of Venus, c.1518-19.

Figure 3 Titian: The Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and
St. Catherine, c.1530.

Figure 4 (detail) Titian: The Madonna and Child with St. John the
Baptist and St. Catherine, c.1530.

Figure 5 Boldrini (woodcut after Titian): Landscape with Milkmaid
and Youth Sowing, c.1540.

Figure 6 Titian: Pastoral Symphony, c.1508-10.

Figure 7 Roman sarcophagus with Muses (left half of front). Vienna,
Archaeological Museum.

Figure 8 Raphael: Apollo and the Muses. Detail of the Parnassus,
fresco, c.1509.

Figure 9 Marcantonio Raimondi: the two Muses. (Engraving)
c.1517-20.

Figure 10 Titian: Arcadian Musicians in 3 Landscape, c.1510.

Figure 11 Giovanni Bellini: The Madonna and Child in a Landscape,
c.1505.

Figure 12 Giorgione: the Tempesta, c.1505-08.

Figure 13 Titian: ldyll: a young mother and a halberdier in a
wooded landscape, c.?

Figure 14 Titian: Sacred and Profane Love, c.1514.
Figure 15 Titian: Bacchanal of the Andrians, c.1518-19.
Figure 16 Giovanni Bellini: The Feast of God, c.1503.
Figure 17 Titian: The Madonna and the Rabbit, c.1530.

Figure 18 Titian: Charles V, c.1548.

iv

Figure 19
Figure 20
Figure 21
Figure 22
Figure 23

Figure 24

Figure 25

Figure 26

Figure 27
Figure 28
Figure 29
Figure 30
Figure 31
Figure 32
Figure 33
Figure 34

Figure 35

Titian: Venus and Adonis, c.1551-54.
Titian: St. Magaret, c.1554-58.

Titian: The Rape of Europa, c.1559-62.
Titian: St. Jerome, c.1571-75.

Titian: Group of Trees, c.1514-1515.

Titian: Shepherd Asleep with His Flock in an Alpine Setting,
c.1520-1525.

Titian: Fortified Village in a Landscape, c.1525-1530.

Titian: Shepherd Playing a Flute and Leading His Flock,
c.1530.

Titian: Tree and Distant Castle, 1530.

Titian: Trees Beside a Pool, c.1530.

Titian: Castle on a Mountain, c.1535.

Titian: Satyr in a Landscape, c.1535.

Titian: Horse Running from a Pool, c.1565.

Titian: Roger and Angelica in a Landscape, c.1565.
Titian: the Nymphs and Satyrs in a Forest, c.1565.
Titian: Nymph and Shepherd, c.1570.

Giogione: the Three Philosophers, c.1506-08.

Introduction

When we consider the history of Italian Renaissance painting, one
wonders why no pure landscapes appeared during this period. From the social
viewpoint, Richard Turner suggests that landscape painting as an independent
genre was not highly esteemed during the Renaissance, whereas figure painting
was of the highest order. An artist during the Renaissance would have rather
abandoned his gift of landscape to be a second rate figure painter.1 Kenneth
Clark, on the other hand, explains this phenomenon from a technical viewpoint.
He considers Brunelleschi’s linear perspective to have had a great influence on
the development of the landscape. He tells us that with a linear perspective the
sky is difficult to reduce and measure, and the middle distance is another
difficulty “that baffled earlier landscape painters.”2

Turner and Clark’s interpretations do furnish some substantial answers to
this question, but probably there is a more profound reason that further explains
why landscape was held in lower esteem and why skills in rendering it were not
developed during this period. This reason is associated with Renaissance
philosophy. lnheriting Greek ideas, people of the Renaissance believed that
humans are central in the universe, and man was regarded as a microcosm of
the world. This thought, combined with the Christian idea that men are created

by God in his image, was strongly imprinted on the mind of Renaissance men

 

‘ Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (London: J. Murray
Press, 1949), 117 & 130.
2 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: J. Murray Press, 1949), 31.

 

 

and reflected in the flowering of iconographical painting. For them, to paint
figures, especially religious ones, was to probe the human soul. The great minds
in this period, such as Michelangelo and Petrarch, unanimously focused their
attention on religious figures and their souls. Michelangelo said that he was
eager to see God the Father, and indeed he saw him through the Sistine
Chapel’s divine task. In the same vein, Petrarch regretted that he had praised
the natural scene, for the human soul was the only thing he should admire.

Compared to Florentine and Roman artists of the Italian Renaissance,
Venetian and Netherlandish artists devoted a greater amount of space to
landscape in a painting. Later well-developed, pure landscape appeared in
Holland in the seventeenth century. Thus, we wonder if topography influenced
the artist’s aesthetic perspective, for both the Veneto and the Netherlands
belong to regions near the sea, where poetic and beautiful visions can be seen
everywhere. The tones and colors of the water provided inspiration for their
artists to embellish their paintings with landscape.

More than any of his predecessors, Titian grasped the noblest spirits and
moods of nature in his landscapes. He devoted large spaces of his canvases to
landscape and sometimes almost subordinated the figures to nature. In his
drawings, he freely drew fascinating landscapes for their own sake. Due to his
extraordinary contributions to landscape, it is important to explore his landscape
paintings and drawings in a thorough investigation.

In the first chapter, I will explore to what degree landscape literature,

especially Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, could have influenced Titian’s

landscapes. The second chapter concerns the chronological development of
Titian’s landscape paintings and drawings and his stylistic changes. The third
chapter will probe Titian’s interior spiritual world through an analysis of the

subject and meaning of Titian’s landscapes.

Chapter 1 Titian’s Landscapes and Ancient Literature

“Landscape feeling,” which is a pathos that comes from people’s
responses to natural beauty and their capability of embodying this beauty in
images, existed in Greek and Roman literature long before the landscapes of the
Renaissance. Here, the argument will be presented that landscape feeling
existed in literature prior to being found in landscape painting.

When E.H. Gombrich discusses the priority of landscape feeling and
landscape painting, he claims: “We are almost tempted to reverse the formula
and assert the priority of landscape painting over landscape feeling.”3 The
evidence that tempted Gombrich to assert this is based on two anecdotes from
the Renaissance. One story relates that Pietro Aretino, a sixteenth century poet,
discovered the beauty of Venetian sunsets through the medium of Titian’s color.
Another anecdote is about the invention of landscape painting, that tells us that
in the sixteenth century, a gentleman returning from a long journey described this
journey to his painter friend and the painter spontaneously improvised a
landscape painting. The gentleman's sense of a beautiful scene was thus
aroused by this painting.“ While these are curious anecdotes, Gombrich’s
evidence is not enough to reverse the order that landscape feeling preceded
landscape painting. The first example only explained that Aretino was sensitive

enough to appreciate Titian’s sunset landscape, but does not prove that the

 

3 EH. Gombrich, “Renaissance Artistic Theory and the Development of Landscape
Painting,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (1953), 354.
" Gombrich, 352.

 

beauty of the Venetian sunset had never been felt by Aretino before. The
second anecdote simply proves the contradictory fact that no matter how plain or
vivid the gentleman’s description was, the artist’s imagination was inspired by his
words, a kind of oral literature. This could be used to prove that landscape
painters needed some literary or verbal sources to visualize their landscape
language. One may conclude that the painter’s visualization of landscape was
apparently based on landscape literature.

An important derivation for Titian’s landscape painting, besides directly
observing nature and absorbing other artists’ vocabularies, was landscape
feeling from literature.5 There is an affinity between the literary sources and
Titian’s landscapes that will be explored here. Before Titian, that is, prior to the
sixteenth century in Italy, the literati of the ancient world and the Renaissance
had already constructed plenty of landscape beauty and feeling in literature,
which became the sources for Venetian artists to create their landscape
paintings.

As Josiah Gilbert suggests, before in the visual arts, there was a long
tradition in literature, which dealt with poetry about poets’ passionate delight in

the grandeur of natural scenes.6 He points out that in Greek poetry, such as that

 

5 Due to the fact that no pure landscape paintings existed during the Renaissance
period, it would be impossible to discuss Titian’s landscapes apart from his
figures,

and there is a thematic unity between his landscapes and figures. Therefore,
whenever Titian’s landscape painting is discussed in this thesis, it means his
painting with landscape, or his painting in which landscape dominates the scene.

‘5 Josiah Gilbert, Landscape in Art before Claude and Salvator (London: J. Murray,
1885), 7.

 

by Homer and Sophocles, landscape had been used to illustrate human action or
to enhance the effect of dramatic performances. Theocritus, furthermore, wrote
pastoral poetry using the rural scene and the songs of shepherds. Roman

poets, such as Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil, brought landscape feelings or
pathos to poetry by means of pictorial effect.7 Gilbert accomplished a pioneering
study of the landscape literary tradition but did not really probe into the relations
between landscape literature and landscape painting, which is the focus of this
chapter.

Titian could have become familiar with landscape literature in multifarious
ways. Titian himself was actually “alien to forming words,“3 but he obtained the
sources of classical literature through translations or frequent contacts and
conversations with other intellectuals; outstanding among these were the
architect and treatise writer Serlio; Dolce, the prime translator of classical texts;
and the publisher Marcolini.9 Vasari also tells us that in sixteenth century
Venice, there was a literary humanist circle, the members of which, such as
Pietro Aretino and Jacopo Sansovino, who were intimate friends with Titian,

indulged in reading ancient literature. They were enthusiastic readers of the

 

7 Gilbert, 8-19.

3 Titian's letter to Gonazga in 1528, quoted from Giorgio Padoan, “Titian’s Letters,”
Collected in Susanna Biadene ed. Titian: Prince of Painters (Munich: Prestel Press,
1990), 45.

9 Giorgio Padoan, Titian’s Letters. ed. by Susanna Biadene, Titian: Prince of Painters
(Munich: Prestel Press, 1990), 45. Padoan says: “the formation of Titian’s personal
culture comprised conversations with intellectuals of various persuasions as well as
first-hand acquaintance with antique sculptures, drawings, prints, illustrated

books of mythology in Italian translation, and, naturally, the paintings of other
masters."

 

 

 

poetry of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and Ovid, and discussed them in this circle.10
Titian was an enthusiast of this fashion and would have been familiar with these
works. No wonder David Rosand wrote: “The painter [Titian] recognized,
perhaps more truly than any other reader of the Latin poet, the tragic depths of
those ancient tales, the pathos underlying the brilliance of the lines.”11 A point
that should be added to Rosand’s comments is that Titian also recognized the
possibility of translating the potentially tremendous poetic landscape feeling of
the Latin poetry into a pictorial form.

Despite the fact that one can never prove that Titian read landscape
literature, one cannot resist speculating about the association of Titian’s
landscapes and landscape poetry. We apparently can feel there is an intimacy
between them. Therefore, I propose here that Titian’s pastoral landscapes were
primarily inspired by Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, whereas Ovid’s
Metamorphoses was the inspiration for Titian’s mythological figural paintings.
What Enivin Panofsky says in his treatise Titian and Ovid may also be applied to
the relationship between Titian and Virgil:

He must have felt an inner affinity to an author profound

as well as witty, And it was precisely this inner affinity

which enabled Titian to interpret Ovid’s texts both literally
and freely, in a spirit of uninhibited inventiveness.12

 

1° Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters (New York: Heritage Press, 1967),

240. Vasari discussing their friendship, wrote: “he (Titian) has been favored beyond
the lot of most men, In his house he has been visited by what ever Princes,

Literati, or men of distinction have gone to or dwelt in Venice.”

‘1 David Rosand, Titian (New York: Abrams Press, 1978), 42.

‘2 Enivin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly lconographic (New York: New York

University Press, 1969), 140.

 

 

 

Similarly, as we shall see, Titian interpreted, translated, and paraphrased Virgil's
text, but never lost the independent spirit to supplement and change its essential
significance.

The flourish of the pastoral landscape in Venetian art paralleled the revival
of ancient pastoral literature.13 This was in the opening of the sixteenth century,
when Jacopo Sannazaro’s L’Arcadia was published in Venice in 1504. In his
poems he took classical pastoral sources as his model and his challenge. He
tells of the voyage of Sincero, a Neapolitan shepherd, to the far-off place of
Arcadia, where he lives among the simple shepherds, sharing the unhurried
tempo of their daily lives. All these events are interspersed with descriptions of
landscape. Pietro Bembo’s GIi Asolani, which was published in 1505, describes
on three successive afternoons six young men and women withdrawing to a
beautiful garden. They sit by a cooling fountain and discuss the qualities of love.
These descriptions in literature nourished pastoral imaginations in the visual arts.
The development of pastoral literature can be traced back to Theocritus, who
was the first one to invent the form of pastoral poetry; then Virgil became his
Roman heir. Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, in turn, “were the sources for later

Italian poets.“ Scholars usually attribute the inspiration of Titian’s lyrical

 

‘3 The pastoral ideal had been revived in the fourteenth century by Boccaccio. In the
later fifteenth century, Lorenzo il Magnifico sketched an elaborate picture of the
Golden Age in the Selve, and the plea of the shepherd Corinto. In Florence,
however, painters did not respond to these poetic suggestions. Rather, in Venice,
an enthusiasm for pastoral poetry continually developed and Venetian artists
transformed the pastoral ideal into visual forms.

See Turner, 95-6.

“ Wethey introduces these two poets: “Virgil (70-19 8.0), a country youth born near
Mantua, inherited pastoral poetry from Theocritus. Theocritus, a Greek bucolic

landscapes to Giorgione, whose love of idyllic nostalgia and music and whose
pictorial poetry on the canvas lead to Titian’s pastoral landscapes.15 The tradition
of visual art, however, could not be isolated from its cultural atmosphere, and
pastoral landscape was concomitant with pastoral literature in the Renaissance.
Therefore, in addition to Giorgione’s influence, we should not neglect the
possible impact of pastoral literature on Titian’s landscapes.16

Virgil’s Eclogues center on the theme and quality of music, poetry, and
love, which are three important elements in Titian’s landscape paintings. All
these elements are integrated into a framework of nature in both of their works.
Virgil describes the Golden Age when shepherds living in Arcadia with gods and
goddesses learn how to play music, to sing, and to write poems. Nature is the
stage in which they drive their flocks, perform their love, passionately enjoy their

life and the beauty of nature, and share their happiness and sorrow with nature

 

poet, probably born in Syracuse about 315 8.0., first invented the form of pastoral
poetry in his ten short poems. He extolled the beauties of life in the country,
particularly among the shepherds, whose idyllic existence was passed in song and
love. Virgil further developed the pastoral poem, that is, verses celebrating the

lives and loves of shepherds, who cared for their flocks, sang songs, and played
simple musical instruments, originally pipes. Virgil’s famous works in this genre
were the Eclogues and the Georgics, which in turn were the source for Petrarch and
for later Italian poets.” See Harold E. Wethey, The palntirlgs of Titian (London:
Phaidon Press, 1969-75), 42.

‘5 For example, Charles Ricketts says: “the development of that lyrical mood which we call the
Giorgionesque manner in art is best illustrated by works done by Titian, mainly after Giorgione’s
death.” See Charles Ricketts, Titian (London: Methuen & Co., ltd. Press, 1910), 7.

‘5 Even though Theocritus’ Idy/ls was the prototype of Virgil’s pastoral poetry, the
spirit of Titian’s pastoral paintings is closer to Virgil's than Theocritus’, for Virgil
differs from Theocritus in many ways. For example, there are more cowherds than
shepherds in Theocritus’ pastoral poems, and Theocritus is more often
light-heartedly ironic. Theocritus set his Arcadia in the shade of the pine trees,
rather than the shade of oaks in Virgil’ poetry. As we shall see the trees in most of
Titian's pastoral landscapes are oaks rather than pine. For the ideas of life, love,
and world, Titian was more tied to Virgil than Theocritus. See M. Owen Lee, Death
and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989),

 

 

 

as well. These incidents, scenery, emotions, and feelings are shown, for
example, in Titian’s Three Ages of Man.

Love and the cycle of life and death are the central themes in the Three
Ages of Man (figure 1) as well as in the Eclogues. In the painting, the landscape
contains three groups of figures, which are situated at a winding road along with
two major compositional diagonals. At the beginning of the winding road, there
are three putti sleeping and playing under a stump on the right of the picture. On
the left under the shaded woods, a nude male embraces a young lady, who
grasps two flutes and wears a laurel crown. Beyond, an old man holding skulls
sits on a slope in the middle ground. At the end of the winding road, the house is
surrounded by sparse trees against the dusk of blue sky. Panofsky explains the
three ages of man as symbolizing the future, present, and past: Infancy
represents potentialities of the future; adulthood, the actuality of the present; and
old age, the memory of the past.17 On the other hand, Harold Wethey regards
this “charming poetic evocation of the beauty of life when love is young, to be
followed by the inevitability of death,” as the bucolic nature of the theme and the
belief in a Golden Age.18 Panofsky’s notion is too general to refer to the specific
meanings of the two young lovers and the lyrical landscape. On the other hand,
Wethey’s interpretation seems closer to Titian’s original idea. When we go to

Virgil’s pastoral poetry describing the Golden Age to search for a comprehensive

 

9-10.
‘7 Panofsky, 95.
‘8 Wethey, 18.

10

identification and the link of a thematic unity for these three groups of figures,
this painting becomes more understandable.

The young couple is painted larger than the other two groups of figures
and placed close to the viewer in the foreground, showing they are the central
concern in the Three Ages of Man. The flutes, the poetic landscape, and the
young couple’s wistfully exchanged glances in the picture indicate that music and
love are the important elements in this painting. The subjects of the male with a
sturdy nude body and the shaded woods are reminiscent of Virgil’s god-like or
hero-like shepherds in Arcadia. The girl looks up into the youth’s face with
adoration and a slightly sad expression testifying to her complicated love for him.
Perhaps it is because their love is hopeless that makes them so sad; as narrated
in the Eclogues when Corydon is in love with his master’s favorite, Alexis, he
knows that “little reason had he for hope.”19 Nevertheless, he meets her in his
daydreams and cuts branches of laurel and myrtle with mingled fragrance for
Alexis, which explains the crown that the girl is wearing in the painting. One
possible interpretation of the two sleeping putti on the right of the painting is that
they signify that the youth and his lover are in a daydream, and the third putto
tries to awaken them.

A parallelism to contrast human emotions and nature is employed by both
Virgil and Titian. Virgil suggests these parallels in phrases such as “A shower is

sweet to growing crops,.../ VIflllow is sweet to breeding herds,/ none but Amyntas

 

’9 Virgil, Eclogue ll (L3), The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, trans. by C. Day Lewis
(London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 7.

 

ll

is sweet to me.”2° Perhaps this kindled the painter’s inspiration. As a result, in
the Three Ages of Man we see the three figure groups accompanied by three
different forms of vegetation within the well-developed landscape. The emotions
and moods of these figures are closely attached to the symbolic meanings of
these natural growths. The stumps and saplings around the putti reflect
children’s fragility and inexperience on the one hand, and the potentiality of their
growth on the other hand. The young couple escorted by the fully mature trees
symbolize their vigor and a state of climatic perfection, and the dark silhouettes
of the trees give a sorrowful atmosphere to their hopeless love. The old man,
painted as a prophet or a philosopher, looking down at the skulls, is engaged in
the reflection on death. The broad plain where he sits and the trees with sparse
leaves in the background furnish him a contemplative surrounding. Nature is
emotionalized and sways with the rhythms of human emotions.

Are they positive or pessimistic moods, and are there any conflicts
between lyricism and reality in the Three Ages of Man? These same questions
have been asked by Virgilian scholars in discussing the Eclogues. Charles
Segal thinks that some scholars over exaggerate the positive side and neglect
the darker tones in the Eclogues.21 For me, Virgil’s work is positive for he
passionately embraces life. Titian’s spirit conformed to Virgil’s; both of them

stress love, which links life and death in a powerful unity. The seemingly

 

2° Virgil, Eclogue Ill (L1-4), 15.
2‘ Charles Segal, Poetry and MLth in Ancient Pastoral (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1981), 10.

 

sorrowful melody of the protagonists in their works is always surpassed by
feelings of love.

Birth and death in Virgil’s world are not pessimistic, nor are they in Titian’s
work. When Virgil talks about a child’s birth, he says it comes with the blessings
of the natural world:

Child, your first birthday presents will come from nature‘s wild...

Bouquets of gipsy lilies and sweetly-smiling acanthus.

Silk-soft blossom will grow from your very cradle to lap you.

But snakes will die, and so will fair-seeming, poisonous plants.22
In Virgil, then, with the fullness of parental expectation and unshakable destiny a
child, who makes good things of nature grow and bad things die, is born. In the
Three Ages of Man, the way Titian celebrates infancy is to depict three chubby,
innocent putti: one pushing the stump away and mischievously playing, and the
other two sleeping, like the saplings waiting to grow up.

The episode of death that Virgil describes in the Eclogues is about the
shepherd Daphnis’s death, full of affective pathos. He states:

Daphnis graced all nature-when he died,

Com-god and Song-god left us too.

Daphnis shines at heaven‘s dazzling gate,

under his feet sees clouds and plants.

Shepherds, nymphs and Pan are glad for this,

forest and campaign quickened with joy...

Wooded hills, crags, orchards cry to heaven

jocund hymns-A god is he!23

Although Daphnis’ death was bemoaned, his ascent to heaven and his

attainment of divine status were, in effect, imbued with divine blessings.

 

22 Virgil, Eclogue lV (L20), 18.
23 Virgil, Eclogue v (L.1-8), 22-23.

Similarly, Titian portrays a speculative mood for the theme of death but without
horror in the Three Ages of Man. The size and placement of the old man with
the skulls in the canvas attest that death is not the thematic focus, but merely a
transition in the whole human cycle. The end of life is not death but a return to
nature, as the winding road in the picture smoothly leads the viewer from the
scene of birth, growth, and death, to the ultimate destination-nature. Love links
these components together in Titian, whereas Virgil concludes at the end of the
Eclogues: “all-conquering is Love.”"’“ The cycle of life and death, and the
existence of nature are all for the sake of love, as we see in the Three Ages of
Man, where the youth’s love is the emphasis and all the putti, old man, and
nature play their supporting roles.

It is no coincidence that Titian chose the cult of Venus and apples as the
subject matter in his Worship of Venus, (figure 2) corresponding to the
descriptions of a paragraph in the Eclogues. Nonetheless, Titian paraphrases a
single episode of the mother and child plucking apples in the Eclogues into a
magnificent, brilliant, and shining image. The paragraph is:

I’ve a present for my Venus,

I’ve a present for my dear,

Since I did mark a treetop high

and doves a-building nesties there.

The golden apples did pluck,

ten golden apples a wild tree bore:

All that I could, I sent to my boy,

tomorrow he shall have ten more.

A child you were when I first beheld you
our orchard fruit was chilled with dew

 

2‘ Virgil, Eclogue X (L.11 from the bottom), 44.

I4

You and your mother both apple-gathering:
just twelve l was, but I took charge of you.25

In Titian’s painting, the boy becomes hundreds of cupids and ten golden apples
from a tree turn into thousands of apples spread on the ground and hanging on a
group of laden trees. A statue of Venus, the goddess of love and fertility,
watches over a frolicking field of cupids, who fly on the branches of ripe apple
trees plucking fruits to drop to their comrades on the ground, and kissing and
sweetly fondling one another. Two women rush into the picture from the right;
one offers Venus a mirror—a traditional symbol of Venus—while the other looks
back seemingly to be calling more company. A sense of ripeness, of blooming,
of cheerful celebration with an innocent playfulness, and the golden, warm color
of apples and flesh are embodied in this picture, which contains more incidents
and images than those of the original literary paragraphs. This is probably
because the essence and merits of the pictorial image are quite different from
those of the literary image.

It appears that Titian sometimes interprets phrases from the Eclogues but
changes their context. What Titian depicts in The Madonna and Child with Saint
John the Baptist and Saint Catherine (figure 3) is an interpretation of Virgil’s
words: “All nature smiles.”26 Beyond the shepherd driving his herd of cattle and
lambs and walking into the picture from the extreme right (figure 4), a curved
road dimly appears in front of them and passes to the undulating, distant

mountains. Some green trees and the deep blue range of mountains rise from

 

2" Virgil, Eclogue lll (Damoetas L.1-—8), 13—14 & 34.

the plain and a putto flies down from the sky above. The foreground is occupied
by the Madonna and St. Catherine, who plays with the Christ Child, and the
young St. John. A cheerful mood and atmosphere are represented by both the
figures and the landscape. All of these figures have smiling faces that are
echoed by the corresponding appearance of the distant mountains and the mass
of trees. Nature’s face is shown by the soft twilight that breaks through the
clouds and cleanses the mountains and trees, like a beauty unveiling her smile
after tears. The light-hearted mood is also rendered by the angel who brought
the gospel, revelations, and divine messages to mankind. The lobes of leaves
are opening as if they are pleasingly bathed in the divine scene. A warm, dust-
filled light diffuses the foliage and brings the mountains to life. All these natural
details, harmonious with the spirit of the figures, show us how “nature smiles.”

A play with pleasant sounds and effects goes along with the scene of
“nature smiles,” in this painting. St. John slightly opens his mouth while offering
the Virgin flowers and fruits, as if he is inviting the Virgin to enjoy his gift. St.
Catherine is playing the Christ Child, who looks up and raises his hand toward
the sky happily, and we can almost hear him giggle. The sound also comes from
the shepherd urging the march of his flocks, and the foliage waving in the wind.
The figures’ voices and the natural sounds are composed by a graceful, glorious
and stately concerto with a pleasant tone. Titian, alone, depicts this theme with
such a favorable and joyful aura. His expressive, joyous mind, which is attuned

to Virgil’s, unreservedly is revealed here again.

 

2" Virgil, Eclogue Vll (Corydon L3), 31.

In moving from the Eclogues to the Georgics, Virgil became more realistic.
The ideal Arcadian world gave way to real rural life. As Titian followed in the
steps of Virgil, his subjects became more realistic?7 as if “he put down the copy
of Virgil’s Eclogues and opened up the Georgics.”28

In the Georgics, Virgil is dedicated to agriculture. He presents his
incredible knowledge of actual agrarian activities, as if he were a farmer or a
shepherd setting out to teach others this knowledge. As to the things he
discussed, they covered how to plant crops, to plow, and to observe the laws of
seasonal changes; how to manage flocks; and how to trap cranes, stags, and
hares; and even more specifically, the rotation of crops, irrigation, and the
trimming of sheep for wool. The Georgics is almost a farmer’s manual and
calendar.

As a versatile artist, we might imagine that Titian was naturally attracted
by these verses, and ambitiously desired to present them in his work.
Unfortunately, there are not many extant prints attributed to Titian, and the only
one known today is The Landscape with a Milkmaid, (figure 5) a woodcut after a
drawing by Titian.

There is no specific literary passage from Virgil’s Georgics that informs the

Landscape with a Milkmaid, but the subject matter and spirit of this work are

 

27 Some factors may also contribute to these changes. For example, printmaking was
a freer, less restrained medium than painting and broadly spread in the middle

class instead of the nobility. Employing this medium, Titian could create the
Georgics’ style of pastoral scene and not to consider aristocratic taste or
commissions.

2" Patricia Fortine Brow, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Harry N.
Abrams Press, 1997), 139.

 

Virgilian. In this woodcut, a boy, feeding his flock of goats and playing with a
sheep, and a woman milking a cow, are set in a country scene with an
abundance of rocky outcroppings. A village with the castles and mountains,
seen beyond rolling terrain, appears in the far distance against the sky with
whirling clouds. The galloping horse in the middle ground and the triumphant
eagle perched on a stump in the front plane, are not from Titian’s original
drawing and perhaps were added later by the woodcut artist. The horse and
eagle look too awkward and noisy to be congruent with this quiet pastoral mood.
Here, Titian depicts a typical rustic scene of farmyard activity but never loses the
essentially peaceful, poetic qualities of his pastoral painting.

Another painting of relevance here is the Pastoral Symphony (Fete
Champetre) (figure 6), the attribution of which to Giorgione or Titian still remains
controversial.” All critics, no matter which side they take, provide substantial
evidence to support their opinions. Owing to the cooperative relationship
between Giorgione and Titian, and their mutual influence, to make a judgment of
the attribution of this painting is really hard. Even though this controversy may

not yet be solved, we find there are some strong Titianesque characteristics,

 

29 There is a great controversy surrounding the attribution of this work. It has passed
from Palma Vecchio to Giorgione, then to an imitator of Sebastiano del Piombo to
Sebastiano himself, then back to Giorgione. Today opinion veers strongly towards
an attribution to the young Titian. See Turner, 98. From Marcantonio Michiel’s
statement in 1525, we know that Titian painted the landscape background of both
Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, and the Pastoral Concert, but Harold E. Wethey also
thinks that many critics now give the work Pastoral Concert to Titian alone. See
Wethey, 43. Voices advocating Titian eventually prevailed so that in 1976 the
picture was relabeled by the Louvre curators as Titian. See Paul Holberton, “The
Pastorale or Fete-Champetre in the Early 16’”-century” Studies in the History of Art,
45 (1994), 255. A more recent article which attributes this painting to Titian is
Elhanan Motzkin, “The meaning of Titian’s Concert Champetre in the Louvre"

 

which do not belong to Giorgione. These include the diagonal composition, the
motif of a shepherd with his flock walking into the picture on the right, the full
crowned foliage, and a tall, strong tree in the foreground.30

A strong Virgilian atmosphere can be sensed in the Pastoral Symphony.
The two nude females, accompanied by two clothed young men, sit on verdant
grass through which a shepherd passes; in the distance, a villa crowns a hill and
the valley while a stream disappears into the horizon. If we read this painting as
a pictorial expression of Virgil’s poetry, then the meaning of this work will not be
as mysterious as scholars usually suggest.31 The scene almost interprets a
verse in the Eclogues:

We sit upon the soft grass here

At the loveliest time of the year-fields pushing up their crops,

And every orchard fruiting and woodlands all in leaf.

You begin, Damoetas, and you, Menalcas, follow.

Sing turn and turn about: that’s what the Muses love."2
The protagonists, both in the painting and in the poem, like natural artists who
are engaged in poetry and music, found their natural setting in some shady
grove. Singing of their loves, they celebrate the songs of their passion, and
enjoy leisure time in the pleasant season.

In the Pastoral Symphony, the two young men-one, dressed fashionably

and playing a lute, looks like an urban gentleman; the other, a rustic youth or a

 

Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 116 (1990), 51-66.

3° Considering Giorgione’s three unanimous attributed paintings-the Nativity, the
Three Philosophers, and the Tempesta, we find Giorgione does not use these
compositional characteristics, but they often appear in Titian’s other paintings.

3‘ For example, Patricia Fortini Brown says: “The subject of the work (the Pastoral
Symphony) has also eluded a sure interpretation.” See Brown, 138.

32 Virgil, Eclogue lll (Palaemon L.1-6), 12-13.

 

l9

shepherd, are placed in the middle of the picture. A concert takes place here, or
perhaps it is a musical contest, witnessed by the urban visitor to the country.33
There are two women; the standing nude on the left pours water from a crystal
pitcher; the other, holds a flute and faces the shepherds on the right. The women
probably are muses; the water one of them pours symbolizes the source of
poetic inspiration and the instrument the other holds could also be the inspiration
for the two young men’s poetry.“

The iconography of the muse changed from the ancient period to the
Renaissance. In a Roman sarcophagus (figure 7), muses are dressed and
posed gracefully; two of them hold a scroll. In the Renaissance, Raphael
preferred the fashionably and luxuriously dressed muses holding instruments
(figure 8), and Marcantonio Raimondi (figure 9) followed the classical models.
They both infused them with idealized beauty. In the Pastoral Symphony, the
muses are personified as two nude women. The muses are nude, which is not
usually the case, but “their being so is not a serious modification of the traditional
n35

iconography, for female superior beings to be portrayed as nude is banal.

Philipp Fehl explains them as two nymphs who, having been attracted by the

 

33 For Virgil, shepherds are god-like or heroic people, not only because they inhabit
the same Arcadian community as that of gods and goddesses, but because the
shepherds’ status is possibly changed. The shepherds could attain their divinity or
heroism by contesting or even beating gods in music, even though they do not
possess gods and goddesses’ supernatural power. The Eclogues records: “Should
Pan compete with me (the shepherd poet), and Arcady judge us, even Pan , great
Pan, with Arcadian judges, would lose the contest,” and “Amyntas fancies himself
to beat Apollo.” See Virgil, Eclogue IV (L6-7 from the bottom), Eclogue V (Mopsus
L.1), 20-1.

3“ Virgil says: “You, (Muse) my poetry’s source, shall be its bourne." In another
paragraph he mentions: “The Muses made me/ A poet too.” See Virgil, Eclogue VIII
(L.14), Eclogue IX (Lycidas L.5-6), 33 & 39.

20

music and the charm of the young men, have joined their concert.36 These two
nude women could be nymphs, but it is not likely they are attracted to join the
concert, because of the gloomy face of the standing one.

The instruments associated with the protagonists carry different
connotations. The lute that the young man plays, stringed and able to
accompany the poetry of song, recalls ancient Apollo’s lyre that signifies a high
cultural sophistication. The wooden flute that the woman holds, originated from
the pipes of Pan, belongs to the pastoral mode.37 According to the Eclogues, the
musical instrument is invested with magical power, almost equal to divine
miracles, which makes the shepherd’s love eternal.“3 Although the reed-pipes in
the Eclogues are replaced by flute and lute in the painting, their function is
unequivocal; they represent the quality of love and poetry. Nature is there to
contain and listen to the shepherds’ music or poetry, the tale of love,39 and Titian

depicts a consonant natural scene of field and mountains in the distance as a

 

35 Motzkin, 55.

36 Philipp Fehl, “The Hidden Genre: A study of the Concert Champetre in the Louvre,” The Journal
of

Aesthetics & Art Criticism, XVI (1957), 157.

37 David Rosand, Giggione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision, collected in Robert
Cafritz ed. Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape ( New York: ON. Potter Press,
1988), 38-9.

38 Virgil mentions the device of the reed-pipes: “Pan invented the shepherd’s pipes,
waxing a handful/ Of reeds together: Pan looks after sheep and shepherd.“ Since
Pan is the guardian of shepherds, the pipe seems to have a magical, fantastic
power.

Virgil writes: “If over them you reed-pipes were making my love immortal." See

Virgil, Eclogue X, 41-3.

39 Virgil, Eclogue lX (L.40-3), 43. The poem is: “Arcadians, you’ll be singing/ The tale
of my love to your mountains, whatever befall. You are masters of music, you
Arcadians.”

 

 

 

21

background for these figures."0 The dream of Arcadia is embodied in both of
their works.“1

A diagonal composition is devised in the Pastoral Symphony to distinguish
yet to link the two worlds-the actual world, where a goatherd, driving his flock,
diagonally enters the picture from the right, and the divine world, where the two
youths work with the muses on music and poetry. Man and the gods, goddesses
live in a world in which the ancient pastoral tradition is strongly recalled.

The protagonists in the Pastoral Symphony are set in a shaded place with
a woodland, which is repeatedly described in pastoral literature. Theocritus
mentions that on the slope of Mt. Etna, a shepherd meets a goatherd and, in the
shade of the pine trees, by a stream that drips from a high rock, sings in
exchange for a beautifully figured bowl.42 Virgil also believed that heroes, gods,
and shepherds lived in a wooded land: “Trojan Paris, and even gods have lived
in the woods like me,” and “The woodland spirit beneath a spread of sheltering

beech.“3 In Sannazaro’s Arcadia in the sixteenth century the shepherds enjoy

 

4° Vigil writes, 43: “The tale of my love to your mountains, whatever befall." “The

valleys caught this music and tossed it/ Skyward." “He poured forth words like

these, piecemeal, to wood and hill.” See Virgil, Eclogue VI, 27 & 8.

4‘ The idea of Arcadia cannot be separated from the pastoral ideal, which evokes the

lost innocence of mankind of the past. The famous descriptions of nature as a

place of innocence or escape in Euripides’ Hippo/ytus, or as a place that, in Plato’s

Phaedrus, is filled with inner peace and the quiet joys. See Lee, 14-5.

“2 Theocritus, trans. by Anna Rist, The Poems of Theocritus (Chapel Hill: The

University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 11-2.

‘3 Virgil, Eclogue I (L2), 3 & 9. There are many other places which mention the

shaded woodland in the Eclogues. For example, “Oh mossy springs, grass soft as

sleep is, all besprent with green arbutus shade," (Eclogue ll, 31) “Shading our

uplands; but when my Phyllis comes here,/ green shall the woodlands be,”

(Eclogue ll, 31) “the springs thatched over with leaves to shade them?” (Eclogue IX,

39) “In shade and teach the woods to repeat ‘Fair Amaryllis,’” (Eclogue l, 3) “Here with me in the
woodlands, you’d rival Pan for music," (Eclogue ll, 8) “I live in woods, my fame lives in the stars,"
(Eclogue V, 22) and “To live in the woods and dally with

 

22

their lives under a pleasant shade.“ Therefore, we have reason to believe that
the pastoral construction of a shaded place in the painting was inspired by
pastoral literature.

The most significant quality of the Pastoral Symphony—the poetic, lyric
pastoral mood, not done before by other artists to such a degree, relies on the
thematic significance and the features of landscape. Virgil’s descriptions of the
beauty of nature, music, and youth are materialized here. The air is suffused
with a muted musical and poetic atmosphere, and the verdant opulence and the
lushness of trees emphatically enhance this tranquil mood.

There is a drawing by Titian titled Arcadian Musicians, (figure 10) which
shows the same spirit as the Pastoral Symphony. In the drawing, the lyrical
pastoral mood can be found in the passages of music and love in the woodland,
the shepherd with his sheep sleeping under his feet, and the beauty of an ideal
landscape. The youth plays a stringed instrument to attract a goddess-like
female with his song, but she appears to listen rather abstractedly, as she holds
her pipe and gazes off into the distance. Compared to the nude female figure in
the Pastoral Symphony, this one seems a copy of it; they show the same turn
and seated pose and both hold the flute. This is a mild seduction scene; it is this
temperate presentation of love that makes Titian’s pastoral landscape lofty. The

trees with stout boughs are even more powerfully rendered in the drawing than in

 

lightweight pastoral verse.” (Eclogue VI, 25)

4“ cited in Fehl, 173. Sannazaro says: “...shall I indeed amid these desert strands, to
the listening trees, and to those few shepherds that may be here, recount rustic
eclogues issuing forth from a natural vein, and present them as naked of ornament
as under pleasant shades, to the murmur of clear flowing springs, by the shepherds

23

the painting. The landscape in both the painting and the drawing plays with
human thoughts; it shows that the pastoral dream of love and music in the
countryside is as strong as the tree trunks and boughs, and yet as far as the
dreams of the shepherd and the sheep.

Titian’s landscapes display close relations to pastoral literature. He
seems to adopt the subject matter, the pastoral construction, and the mood from
Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics freely. His landscapes are suffused with pastoral
pathos; both the shepherd’s idealized life and the reality of life are revealed

there.

 

of Arcady I heard them sung.”

24

Chapter 2 A Chronology of Titian’s Landscapes

The pictorial form that Titian constructs in his pastoral landscape is a
place of shelter, protected by a stand of trees with thick foliage within a grove,
which provides a large terrain to contain the thematic story. The meaning of this
pictorial construction, David Rosand argues, “is carried by visual structures and
itself becomes inherently visual, operating within its own”; this pictorial
convention is “founded in a perception of the world dependent upon the poetic
imagination.“5 Rosand, on the one hand, recognizes the poetic creation of
Titian’s landscape, but on the other, denies its close relationship with literary
work. He thinks, “this structure, only distantly dependent on literary association,
is essentially pictorial.“6 The intention of his argument, which stresses Titian’s
independent invention, can be comprehended, but it does not necessarily mean
that the distance between Titian’s designs and literary associations is remote.47
Vlfith an original mind, Titian surely does not copy a piece of literature, but in the
analysis of the first chapter we suggested that the pictorial construction of
Titian’s pastoral landscape was inspired by a pastoral tradition in literature,

especially by Virgil’s poetry. A sheltered place with a large tree and a grove,

 

“5 David Rosand, “Pastoral topoe: on the construction of meaning in landscape,”
Studies in the History of Art, 32 (1992), 162.

‘5 Rosand, 174.

‘7 In another article, Rosand, who attributes the Pastoral Symphony (the Concert
Champetre) to Giorgione, argues that this painting “visually realizes the world of the
eclogue, [that is, in Sannazzaro’s L’Arcadia] the world of shepherds and nymphs, of
music, poetry, and implicitly, love, a world shaded from the sun, refreshed by the
sound of a spring.” It is hard to imagine that the similarities between this painting
and this poetry are only by accident, and without any close relationship. See

David Rosand, Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision, collected in Robert
Cafritz ed. Places of Delight: The pastoral landscai§( New York: ON. Potter Press,

 

 

 

25

where Arcadia exists, is almost a norm in traditional pastoral literature as well as
in many of Titian’s landscape paintings. The relation between Titian’s landscape
and literary sources is indeed not remote, but intimate.

Yet, Rosand is perfectly right about the idea that the visual design of
pastoral landscape does attain an independent meaning and its own life. The
choice to construct a large tree with thick foliage and spacious terrain was
meaningful. It gives a warm, immediate experience and perception of the scene
and it is more accessible emotionally. Especially in Titian’s paintings, a tall
standing tree, followed by an uninterrupted continuum of space, gives an
architectural character and directs the eye into the distance. Under the shade of
trees, it seems that the figures obtain protection. All of the figures’ activities
beneath the tree seem like a strong accent and weighted overture to start telling
a marvelous story. This construction is founded in the artist’s favorable
perception of the natural world, and this perception is associated with literary
sources.

It would be an incomplete picture if we neglected to mention earlier
Venetian artists, such as Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Palma Vecchio, who
had been dealing with poetic feeling and imagination of landscape long before
Titian. They used their sensitivities to view their surroundings, such as lagoons,
canals, and natural scenes, and found in them the tinges, colors, and sources for

their particular landscape. Like the poets, these Venetian masters wrote their

 

1988), 48.

26

poetry in landscape form. Titian was certainly influenced by his Venetian
predecessors.

Literary sources and Venetian artistic tradition are two cornerstones for
Titian’s landscapes. On these foundations, Titian built his own subtle and
delicate landscapes. In the first chapter, I have discussed that literary sources
could have influenced Titian. In this second chapter, in order to gain a complete
understanding of Titian’s accomplishments, including his heritage and originality,
there is a need to investigate Titian’s landscape paintings on a chronological
basis. An iconographical analysis is also necessary in order to understand his
stylistic characteristics and development, as well as his pictorial thoughts. After
all, pictorial vocabularies and languages are fundamental elements for all artists.

Panofsky provides a chronological framework of Titian’s style.“8 He
divides Titian’s activity into three periods, depending on how Titian’s attitude
changed in each period: his attitude is traditional in his early years to 1529; he
originates a tradition of his own from 1530 to 1550; he outgrows the tradition and
is no longer accessible to others from 1551 to 1576. Panofsky further suggests
a subdivision of each of these periods into two equal sub-periods or phases,

primarily focusing on how Titian perceives and uses color. The division of six

 

‘8 Panofsky, 18-25. Panofsky says that in the first phase Titian conceives color as
“object color” and the shadows are often gray. During this time the general mood of
Titian’s paintings is calm and lyrical. In the second phase, the gray shadows have
disappeared, and the chromatic harmony improved. In the third phase, his
dramatic passion is replaced by a spirit of quiet observation and impassive order.

In the fourth phase, Titian favors broad strokes, patches and dissonant
chromaticism. In the fifth phase, the colors begin to glow like jewels, and this is

his final efflorescence of colorism. In the sixth phase, a “colorful monochrome” is

27

equal phases during Titian’s almost seventy years activity means that almost
every ten years Titian renewed his style. This also shows Titian’s tremendous
creative power to change form and content in his work continuously. As a result
of his penetrating eye and intellectual mind, Panofsky’s chronological analysis is
astute, and it is also useful as a way of understanding the different periods of
development in Titian’s landscapes.

Charles Ricketts also divides Titian’s life into three periods, equivalent to
Panofsky’s and based on Titian’s perception of color. He distinguishes Titian’s
three careers as: the first, a colorist; the second, a harmonist; and the third, an
experimentalist.“9 His analysis gives us a vivid conception about how the artist
deliberately managed and developed his technique of using color. Besides an
examination of color, our analysis in this chapter will focus on compositional
significance, the manner, the method, and the pictorial thought. we will discuss
Titian’s landscape paintings in three periods, correspondent to Panofsky and
Ricketts’ division, that is the first period (early to 1530), the second period (1531-
1550), and the third period (1551-1576).

Panofsky characterizes Titian’s manner in the first thirty years of his

career, before 1530, as traditional. I would describe it as an ever-growing

 

developed, and Titian reaches a balance of two opposite direction: intense emotion
and outward stillness.

“9 Ricketts, 123-27. Ricketts explains that in the first thirty years, Titian, as a colorist,
brought the richest hues and combined them in nobly spaced patterns, which

means that color was secured by the choice of the dominant hues, and their

quantity and spacing were equally important. In the second period, Titian, as a
harmonist, delighted in color’s modulation and transitions from one to another,

which may even be achieved in a hueless scheme, or without recognizable color-
pattern. In the third period, Titian, as an experimentalist, more drastically used

28

development, in which his vision of landscapes was continuously broadened and
enriched. Even in the first ten years of his career until 1510, Titian had already
established his own landscape style, which distinguishes his from his Venetian
predecessors’. As innovation is always developed from convention, the master
used the conventional rule as a jumping off point. Although nourished by
Venetian masters, Titian innovated and refreshed the landscape tradition, and
thus earned the title “the Homer of landscapists,” and “the creator of
landscape.”50 These epithets signify Titian’s unique and landmark status in
landscape development and his high level of achievement. Other than the
charm of landscape in Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, Titian found a new poetry,
a new pathos, a new sentiment to interpret nature in a novel vision. He entered
into the moods of nature as expressed in her noblest scenes.

We know much about how Titian is related to Bellini and Giorgione
through extensive scholarship, but more important is where Titian breaks with
these two masters. It is well known that Titian learned from Bellini about the
towers rising upon a steep hill, the hills against the cumulus clouds, a tender sky,
and the quietude of mood. Titian learned from Giorgione about lofty mountain
forms, open fields, groves, streams, and blue hills.51 Titian also shared with

Bellini and Giorgione the feeling that figures and landscape should be related to

 

color, employed broken, almost shapeless touches and surfaces, and at times
applied a dark-colored underground.

5° Count Francesco Algarotti first gave Titian this sublime praise, and his words:
“Titian, nature’s greatest confidant, is among Iandscapists the Homer” were
published in 1756. Eugene Delacroix also mentioned: “One may regard him (Titian)
as the creator of landscape. He introduced in it that breadth with which he
rendered his figures and draperies.” See Turner, 107 8 110.

one another.52 However, Titian departed from them in significant ways. For
example, Bellini favored the leaf-less, but Titian loved full-crowned foliage.
Giorgione’s landscape is characterized as “sober”—that is not what Titian liked.53
Titian’s world is more tangible, whereas Giorgione’s is a softly floating world.
And, furthermore, Bellini and Giorgione did not establish a truly idealistic and
pastoral landscape.

Titian infused the pastoral passion, in other words, the pastoral with
human pathos of great magnitude, into his landscapes, which is absent in
Giovanni Bellini’s landscapes. Giovanni Bellini germinated a kind of landscape,
which we may more properly call “bucolic” rather than “pastoral?“ In his
landscapes, Bellini showed his power to illustrate peaceful mood of a rustic
scene, but he lacked the ability to bring the figures and the landscape into a
dynamic relationship. The Madonna and Child in 3 Landscape (figure 11) is a
typical work of this kind. The details of a rustic countryside are finely configured,
but there is no pastoral passion in this scene. In the landscape, behind the
lovely Madonna and Child, flocks of sheep accompanied by a shepherd graze in
the soft glow of approaching twilight. Rabbits hop through the fields to the right,
while a white bull stands still and another crouches at the left.55 All the human

beings, animals, and landscape create a static setting or a tableau frozen in the

 

5’ Gilbert, 319.

52 Turner, 111-12.

53 Gilbert, 320.

5“ There are more cowherds than shepherds in Giovanni Bellini’s painting, and in
Greek, the word for cowherd is “bucolics.”

55 Harold E. Wethey, Titian and His Drawing: with reference to Giorflme and some
close contemporaries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 42.

 

 

30

background. The mood of stillness, peace, and serenity is incomparable, but
they are too motionless to express a pastoral passion.

Titian tried to create a feeling of a warm, intimate landscape scene distinct
from Giorgione’s remote, dream-like quality, enclosing space, and enveloping
atmosphere. For example, in Giorgione’s Tempesta (figure 12), the interrupted
space and the entangled objects compose an intricate structure that enriches our
visual enjoyment but loses intimacy. On the other hand, in Titian’s Three Ages
of Man (figure 1), from 1509, there is an open space and intimate quality. The
protagonists are drawn into the foreground, and a spacious plane is unrolled
behind them. Opposed to Giorgione’s horizontal device, V-shape composition in
the Three Ages of Man serves to open the middle of the picture into the far
distance. Several layers of meanings lie in this compositional design: it leaves a
space to arouse people’s imagination; it directs the eye to look into the far
distance; and it makes the painting less enclosed. An effect of illusion is
produced; it is as if the subject of the story occurs not on a stage, but in an open
landscape.

We come to another controversial painting: the ldyll, a young mother and
a halberdier in a wooded landscape (figure 13), the attribution of which may
perhaps be solved by considering its stylistic characteristics. Although this work

looks like a copy of Giorgione’s Tempesta,56 the approaches in both composition

 

56 The attribution of this piece ldyll: a young mother and a halberdier in a wooded
landscape varies from Sebastino del Piombo, Palma il Vecchio to the circle of
Giorgione. Nonetheless, in this century Bernard Berenson first proposed an
attribution to Titian in 1932, an opinion advanced more recently by Konrad
Oberhuber. See Hilliard T. Goldfarb, “An early masterpiece by Titian rediscovered,

31

and feeling are quite different. As Hilliard T. Goldfarb analyzes, the ldyll is more
accessible physically and psychologically.57 In the ldyll, it seems that the tree is
enlarged and moved from the middle ground to the foreground, and is put to the
front of the eye. The water is used to guide the eye naturally into the distance.
The mystic sense in the Tempesta of the approaching storm, darkening the sky,
trees and everything, disappears. The feeling of the Tempesta is completely
opposite the simple lyrical and coloristic splendor in the ldyll. These changes
draw the distance between the viewer and the painting closer, and all
characteristics of the ldyll belong more to Titian rather than to Giorgione.

In the second ten years of his career (1511-20), Titian developed a
majestic vista of landscape as seen in the Sacred and Profane Love. (figure 14)
The simple lyricism of his early phase was replaced by a grand orchestra. Titian
was not satisfied merely to show a segment of nature with a poetic and lyrical
aura in a microcosmic context, as he did in Three Ages of Man. He also
ambitiously worked on a macrocosm landscape reflecting his broad, vast mind.
The Sacred and Profane Love exhibits Titian’s enormous capability of displaying
mighty, magnificent landscape. Titian creates two types of worlds, the divine and
the secular. These two worlds are linked by sky but skillfully separated by a
large piece of gorgeous foliage in silhouette. In the divine world, behind the
nude female or sacred love, long horizontal lines stretching into the unlimited

space are drawn in the evening blue sky with cumulus clouds. An immense,

 

and its stylistic implications,” The Burlington Magazine, 127 (1985), 419.
Goldfarb has a detailed discussion about the attribution of this painting.

 

32

extended universe and a prolonged time are hinted at this macrocosmic
landscape. To the right, two hunters with their hounds are riding inland on their
horses; because of their small scale, they do not spoil the quiet mood. In the
same middle distance, the shepherd and his flock are resting while there is also
an embracing couple under the grove on the side. A town with a tower is set
between peaceful lagoons and a large piece of calm blue sea. Earth and water,
blended with one another, receive the last rays of sunlight. The sails of a boat
disappear towards the horizon in the far distance. A sharp-towered church
stands high to watch over a broad vista and symbolize spiritual refinement. An
extraordinary scene with tranquil atmosphere is rendered, and it is worthy of
being called “divine.”

The secular world counterpoints the divine world, just as sacred love is
accompanied with profane love. In the Sacred and Profane Love, behind the
dressed woman or profane love, a man hurriedly rides a horse towards a fortified
city. The fortified buildings represent that man-made artifacts are hard and solid
but perishable. To the left, the land is decorated with small flowers, and rabbits
who are freely and contentedly playing there. Like the secular world, it is
beautiful but evanescent. Titian purposely contrasts this world with the divine
world; one is mortal, the other timeless and eternal.

Landscape painting is regarded as a substitute for an exhausting journey,
because people could stay home and comfortably enjoy the natural scene

without walking anywhere. As Max J. Friendlander says, there are two kinds of

 

5’ Goldfarb, 420-23.

DJ
DJ

enjoyment of nature: “a view from above of the open country, ...the spectator
feels himself free, lifted up, face to face with nature and outside her.... The other
kind of enjoyment comes from lingering in the woods, looking up at tall trees,
living in nature.”58 If the Sacred and Profane Love satisfies the former delight,
then the Worship of Venus and Bacchanal of the Andrians relates to the latter
preference. It must take different temperaments for one to enjoy these two kinds
of pleasures.

Titian produced two excellent woodland scenes in the Worship of Venus,
and Bacchanal of the Andrians in 1518-19. A new way of seeing and a new type
of pictorial form, such as the effect of interlaced groups of figures and trees, a
dynamic composition, and various colors of trees, are introduced in these works.

In the Worship of Venus (figure 2), the trees with intricate shapes, rising to
the sky, occupy more space and dominate the scene. The leaves of several
trees merge in a dense mass and the branches of foliage stretch out against the
evening sky. The trees create a screen and laterally recede into the distance.
The erection of this tree-wall is significant for the composition, because it
functions as a perspective plane diagonally extending towards the horizon.

The leafy tree with fruits is as striking as the hundreds of frolicking cupids
in the Worship of Venus. The ovenrvhelming foliage not only provides surface
decoration to the painting but allows the glint of light among trees, fresh air, and

a cool shade for the forest wanderer. Of great charm is the variety of the colors

 

5“ Max J. Friedlander, Landscape Portrait, Still-Life-Their Origin and Development
(New York: Philosophical Library Press, 1950), 83.

 

34

of the leaves. These colors change, depending on the level of received sunlight,
from dark black, light green to golden brown. The gracious and various position

of the leaves are also successfully portrayed. Titian’s foliage is among the most
beautiful foliage ever painted. The leafy tree, like a hero who looks down on the
world with a victory glance, is comprehensively palpable.

Another breath-taking innovative landscape during the second phase is
Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andn'ans (figure 15). Compared with Bellini’s similar
subject of the Feast of the Gods, (figure 16) in which gods and goddesses like a
stately tableau recline in a grove, the Bacchanal of the Andrians breaks stillness
and quietude. Titian creates a fabulous drama with passionate ecstasy. A new
pastoral community is established in a mythological splendor. Although there
are no shepherds in this place, the single tree in the right and the shaded grove
as well as the pastoral passion of music and love are here.

Infused with laughter, music and love in woodland, Titian refreshed the
subject of the feast of gods. The Bacchanal of the Andrians brings the relations
of the landscape and the figures to a new height. The interlaced groups of trees,
coupled with the interlocking groups of figures, are invested with vigorous
movement and dynamic interaction. As John Walker points out, in many ways
the Bacchanal of the Andn'ans rejuvenates the pictorial content, such as the
complexity of composition, the intricate choreographic movement, and the

passionate visions.59 Gods and goddesses, dancing in an enchanted grove, are

 

59 John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara (London: Phaidon Pulishers Press, 1956),
64.

 

35

organized carefully in a dynamic design, interlocking with each other. This gives
a new richness and density to the composition. A sense of balance is injected
into the painting. The looming mountains in the distance on the right are placed
in opposition to the heavy foliage on the left and between them is blue sky. The
heavy foliage with overshadowing majesty is counterbalanced by the mass of
figures. The stream of light flows between the dark masses of the mountain and
the foliage.

The Bacchanal of the Andn'ans directly and compellingly appeals to the
spectator’s vision, since the trees and the figures are drawn to the frontal plane
of the picture. This is the first time the protagonists of the painting are placed
and activated in the woods. The pleasure of lingering there belongs not only to
the viewer, but also to the gods and goddesses in the picture. The feast is
performed in a burst of emotions of the figures and the cheery atmosphere of a
festival. The joy of an open view is replaced by the direct attention of the viewer.

In the third ten years of his career (1521-30), Titian extended his interests
to religious pastoral landscapes. Two Madonna pictures were created in 1530.
These twin works portray the Alpine mountain scene from different times and
viewpoints. The sensuous manipulation of pigments is a prevailing trait common
in these two paintings, which best illustrate what Charles Ricketts describes as
Titian’s style as a colorist. The choice of color and its combinations are spaced
in definite patterns, and show the richest hues.‘50 In The Madonna and Child with

Saint John the Baptist and Saint Catherine, (figure 3) the saints are set on a

36

piece of rock and shaded by a cluster of foliage on the left; on the right further in
the distance are the grazing flock with shepherd and the deep blue mountains.
The time is dawn; the sky and mountains still remain blue, when the first light
breaks the clouds. This blue is repeated in the Virgin’s dress. The same
expression is seen in The Madonna with 3 Rabbit. (figure 17) It seems that the
artist changes the Virgin’s dress to red to echo the color of the sunset landscape.
It appears that Venetian painters preferred nature most in the evening, a
time when all is warmed by the glow of the sky and atmosphere. Rich tones can
be caught through modulated and blended colors of objects at evening, and
through the sun glowing against a darkening sky at sunset. The Venetian sunset
is caught in The Madonna with the Rabbit in wonderful glory. All objects are
immersed in the sunlight; the colors of golden-red and yellow dominate the
scene, and the shadows are soft. The happy mood and warm relations of the
Madonna, Child, Catherine and the rabbit form a light, pleasant vision. In the
foreground, the flowers and vegetation in the Virgin‘s garden are naturalistically
painted. To the right, the shepherd is about to stand up, intending to drive his
flock back, while the sheep are still hidden in the grove playing with one another.
Shoulder by shoulder, peak by peak, the stately Alpine mountains in the
background create gigantic energy to enhance the magnificence of the picture.
A tower in silhouette, isolated and standing high on a steep hill, stretches into the

infinite sky. The spiritual quality is heightened by its temporality.

 

6° Riketts, 125.

37

In the second period (1531-1550), Titian changed his style of landscape
to another dimension of pictorial thought. He tended to a generalized form and
used a heavier key of color and tone. The typical work is Charies V. (figure 18).
This painting shows a darkened scene, in which the color is modulated; Titian
turns from a “colorist” to a “harrnonist.”61 The landscape in this painting, vague
and indistinct, successfully constructs a meditative atmosphere. The emperor,
an emaciated figure, canters on his horse out of the forest towards an unknown
destination. Dimly visible before the emperor is a river, and beyond the river the
mist rolls upward. A calm resplendent twilight is found here. The sun is almost
set; the gloomy sky and trees turn to a resonant color, consonant to the deep
brown of the horse. The golden armor shines in the darkness. One triumph of
this painting is the Venetian red, which enlivens the whole dark scene. A
contemplative atmosphere and mood can be found in the figure’s nobility and the
darkened landscape. This painting evokes the emperor’s glorious past and
simultaneously reveals the approaching end of his life. The emperor thus looks
pale and his marching seems slow. All these indicate that the emperor’s fine
past is at the end of his glory.62 Charles V’s love of this painting showed his
good taste in appreciating its contemplative mood. His state of mind during this
time could correspond with the portrayal in this painting.

Titian’s types of landscapes changed in the third period (1551-1576),

along with the different subjects. In Venus and Adonis of 1551-54, (figure 19)

 

6‘ Riketts, 124.
62 Turner, 111-12.

38

Titian repeated the motif of the dark silhouette of a large tree with thick foliage in
Charles V of 1548, but the interpretation of the sky is totally new. The sky, with
its patches of blue and rays of light, appears as a glimpse of sunlight. As Cupid
is still sleeping, Adonis is about to leave Venus when the day breaks and the sun
will shine on everything. The blurred effect of the trees injected by the radiant
light of the sun is wonderful. Every stroke of the brush is natural, and the
feelings of the figures and the landscape are properly exhibited. The well-
interpreted sky increases the charm of this touching mythological story.

Later on, in 1554, Titian attempted a night scene in St. Margaret. (figure
20) Its stunning evocation of nocturnal illumination, especially in the burning city
in the background, is striking. The color is reduced to a lowered tone. The
painter developed this reduced color palette, but with no less variations than
before. This anticipates that Titian, a colorist, in his later years would be haunted
by monochrome painting. The conception of the work is inventive. A lyrical
impulse of darkness has added fascination to the magic of color. The saint is
robed in green, the dragon being lost in a mass of gloom; beyond the rock
stretches an immense sky of broken color, decorated by a range of rich blue. A
town is swept away towards the horizon, while at the left edge of the picture, a
boat sails in the river. There are ceaseless variations in the tones of the sky, the
rock, and the dress of the saint as well. All tints of color are resonant and united
in the darkness.

Titian continued the tendency of the play of water and rock and the play of

brilliant colors in the Rape of Europa (figure 21), but with much coarser strokes

39

than earlier. Colors are still placed on each object unmistakably but looser than
before. The figures and the landscape are composed in a similar pictorial form.
The sweeping movement of the figures corresponds to the sweeping landscape;
a powerful diagonal line divides yet connects them into a counterbalanced
composition. Arthur Pope says that by the time of the Rape of Europa Titian’s
paintings had become highly dramatic in character. He defines the “dramatic” as
“the representation of the human figure in action on a noble scale with the large
and sweeping movement which we now associate with grand opera. It meant
especially movement of hands and arms and legs in gestures far removed from
those of ordinary life.”63 The blending of the shapes and colors between the far
distant mountains and the clouds, and between the water and the sky produces
a harmonious and grand atmospheric effect.

After 1571, Titian’s inclination towards spiritual refinement is unreservedly
revealed in his last landscape paintings. The austere life and the spirituality of
the hermit saint is reflected in the roughness and wildness of the landscape in
St. Jerome. (figure 22) The landscape is seen in darkness, and a spot of light is
dramatically injected into the grotto from the heavens. It seems that the saint’s
soul is purified in the moment when he fervently gazes at the illumination on the
tiny crucifix. Creating this fascinating scene, Titian in his eighties must be

likened to the hermit saint in his spirituality.

 

’33 Arthur Pope, Titian’s Rape of Europa (Cambridge, Massachusettes: Harvard
University Press, 1960), 15.

 

4O

The motif of trees and rocks, combined with a religious theme, is brought
to a new high level. The wild mass of vegetation, expanded on the surface of
the arched rocks, is half immersed in the darkness and half illuminated by
heavenly light. Glimpsed through from the inside of the dark grotto, one can see
a bright scene with deep blue sky. The majesty of clouds and mountains in the
distance builds up a place where the miracle is expected to occur. The coarse
rocks and pebbles, on which the saint kneels, signify his harsh seclusion.

In the foregoing discussion, we have seen that Titian’s style changed at
different periods, based on the growing results of his never ceasing observation
and study. In his early period, before 1530, he painted with careful details, grace
and spontaneity, and smoothness. He blended and harmonized a broad range of
colors with fascinating effects. He created majestic views of landscape as well
as warm, intimate ones. The pastoral passion, the dynamic composition, the
majestic interlaced trees were brought into his landscapes. As his style
progressed after 1530, he leaned towards forms without outlines and a restricted
palette. He executed his paintings in bold, broad strokes, and in dark-colored
underground.

Titian’s landscape drawings show different inclinations from his landscape
paintings. In this medium, Titian was completely free from the preferences of
patrons and the restrictions of ecclesiastical art. Most of his landscape drawings
were executed not in preparation for a painting but for their own sake.

Therefore, his landscape drawings, perhaps, are more expressive and freer than

his landscape paintings.

41

There still exists a wide divergence of opinion about Titian’s drawings-
which one is by Titian’s own hand, which is a copy of a lost original, which is by
Domenico Campagnola,“ and which is a forgery. Most authorities seem to
agree that the total number of surviving figural as well as landscape drawings by
Titian himself is about fifty.’35 We may call copies, imitations, and forgeries
“Titianesque drawings,” for they were executed in Titian’s manner or style. His
drawings we choose to analyze here are accepted as his. They reveal Titian’s
achievement in landscape.

In the Group of Trees of 1514-15 (figure 23), Titian challenged himself
with the form of the cluster of trees conglomerated with interlaced complexity.
The aesthetic consideration rather than botanical interest is probably the primary
concern here. Several clumps of trees are interwoven together with a light, sure
touch. The gnarletrees grow from a mound, and the stems of these trees are
meticulously executed. Vlflth the strong and assertive stroke, the vitality and
vigorous growth of trees are rendered with thorough effect. Even though this is
merely a drawing, it is moody. An atmosphere is shown by the deep shadow of
the trees; the daylight disappears and the forest is darkened gradually.

The Shepherd Asleep with His Flock in an Alpine Setting of 1520-25

(figure 24) is a study of Titian’s hometown in a pastoral context. Here, a sleeping

 

6" Domenico Campagnola, the adopted son of Giulio Campagnola the engraver, is
himself well known as an engraver and designer for woodcuts and a prolific
draughtsman. He is said to have been an assistant for Titian, and the one artist

of the Venetian circle who came closest to Titian in certain landscape drawings.
See James Byam Shaw, “Titian’s Drawings: A Summing-up,” Apollo 112 (1980),
389.

55 Shaw, 386-88.

42

shepherd naps under a tall tree with gnarled trunk in the foreground, while the
familiar high-pitched roofs of wooden Alpine houses are singled out in the
background. A stream with steep banks meanders into the distance on the one
side, and an arched bridge and sailboats are added to the other side. The
pastoral mood of peace and contentment are shown through accomplished
technique and design. The passage of sheep is very successful in this drawing.
It is like a study of the ecology of the animal; rather than as a flock, the sheep
are depicted in various poses, raising heads, grasping grass, and squatting on
the land. Expressed usually in several suggestive strokes with vague contours in
less prominent places in Titian’s other works, the sheep are now drawn enlarged
and take on a prominent status.

Titian made copious numbers of drawings between 1521 and 1530, in
which a nostalgic yearning is revealed and suffused. The scene of Titian’s
birthplace—Pieve di Cadore, a town in the Alps three day’s journey to Venice—
often appears in his works. It is very likely that Titian drew his familiar landscape
in the Fortified Village in 3 Landscape of 1525-30. (figure 25) The castle with the
sharp-crowned tower is built on rocks, and beneath the castle are the straggling
houses. Near the village, a Iimpid stream flows to the distance on the one side,
and a few branches of trees handsomely stand on the other side. This scenery
almost completely corresponds to the description of Cadore by Crowe and

Cavalcaselle.66 If their description is reliable, then this landscape is not created

 

6‘5 There is a vivid description about the similarity: “The rock of Cadore rises in a steep
and rugged mass; the castle of Pieve rears its towers on the crest, which falls more

43

by imagination, as Wethey says, but from a real vista.67 The master kept his
vivid memory in his forties and unmistakably presented it in his drawing. This
may have soothed his mind of homesickness and amused with a pure
landscape.

The technique of the Fortified Village in a Landscape is superior. It is a
well-done work like an ink painting; the trees and the castle are skillfully shaded
by different gradations of penstrokes. This produces a wonderful effect of a
black-and-white picture, appropriate to a nostalgic mood. The fortifications rising
from barren mounds take on a monumentality. The scenery is composed
beautifully; the crossing mounds, edged by delicate trees that wave in the
foreground, and in the middle, the spaciousness accommodates plenty of
buildings. The whole town is suspended in a moody air. The artist produced a
vaporous effect by varying the lines from light, dark, to blur. To create an
atmosphere is as important as the solids that are drawn.

Segments of nature, appearing as diverse and multifarious, eternally
attract the landscapist’s attention. The communion between the artist and nature
is so subtle that nature’s outlooks are always caught on canvas by Titian from
different perspectives. Sometimes, he puts several unrelated segments of

natural scene together to create an idealistic landscape.

 

precipitously than in nature to the torrent of the Piave; and we feel that if the

foliage would butlet us, we should see-as from Ravis-the town of Pieve on the
saddle to the left, the peaks of Antelao above the town, and beneath the castle crag
the straggling houses of Sotto Castello.” Quoted in Walker, 68-9.

67 Wethey, 49.

44

The Shepherd Playing a Flute and Leading His Flock of 1530 (figure 26) is
an elaborate idealistic work. The beautiful moments and segments of nature are
detected and collected by Titian’s sensitive aesthetic concerns in this drawing.
The way of composing and delineating the details is a distinct characteristic of
this work. Two water ways appear in this picture; a pond in the foreground and
a large lake surrounding the land on the left. A sheep stops to drink the water in
the foreground and its graceful turning pose indeed heightens this beautiful
moment. Some vegetation decorates the top of a well-knit, textured rock, near
the transparent lake. Far across a lake, one sees two sailboats, a splendid tree
and a row of wooden houses. A feeling of the quantity of the sheep is well-
expressed by using clear contours to depict the foreground sheep and indistinct
lines to depict the flock farther beyond. The shepherd’s flute enchants the
animals with musical magic. A rustic scene with a landscape pathos is the result
of Titian’s genius.

Titian was still obsessed with the study of trees in his third period, and
further enhanced his techniques and expressions. If compared with the Group of
Trees of 1514-15, the Tree and Distant Castle of 1530 (figure 27) is a more
refined work. In it, the trees are heavily shaded to create an effect of relief. The
hanging foliage overlooks the majestic castle. Titian’s love for trees and his
accomplishments in portraying them established his place and influence in the
history of landscape painting on the later age. His landscapes were famous and
widely diffused during his lifetime. They were recommended as models to the

students of painting after his death by Karel van Mander, a Dutch painter and

45

critic in the seventeenth century. Titian’s woodcuts were a source for the
landscape in Netherlands art. Later in the seventeenth century, Netherlands
painters still studied them, using his inventions in their own work.68

Titian attempted to show the reflection of the thicket’s foliage in the water
in the Trees beside a Pool of 1530 (figure 28). A startling scene of suffused
foliage and its reflection is viewed with an ovenrvhelming feeling. Although the
delineation is only a few vertical suggestive lines, the intention of demonstrating
the reflection in the water is innovative. Such a pure landscape with full rich
massed foliage reflected in the transparent water is admirable. By all means,
this representation required a high intricate technique of control of each stroke
with appropriate variation. The deep shadow of the foliage gives the viewer hints
to imagine its volume and depth. The curled leaves are elaborately shaped by a
number of light and dark pen-strokes.

Two small drawings, The Castle on a Mountain (figure 29) and The Satyr
in a Landscape of 1535 (figure 30) are, for this period, like two simple etudes to
entertain the artist. Even so, The Castle on a Mountain creates a marvelous
effect for its sheer isolation and simplicity. The soaring height of the castle in the
almost empty countryside is impressive. The Satyr in a Landscape probably is
preparatory for a more complicated satyric pastoral scene. The satyr sits beside

a rock and faces a goat in the foreground. In the background there is still Titian’s

 

5“ Peter Dreyer, “A Woodcut by Titian as a model for Netherlands landscape drawing
in the Kupferstichkabinett,” The Burlington Magazine, 127 (1985), 762.

 

46

familiar village with a stream flowing through the far hills. The sureness of the
thin lines accounts for the artist’s confidence in easily drawing these scenes.

Some wonderful drawings were executed in 1565. The Horse Running
from a Pool (figure 31) is a splendid and poetic piece. The vigorous movement
of the running horse in the foreground makes a strong contrast with the serene,
poetic landscape in the background. The combination of these two is an
interesting and unusual pictorial conceit. Both the lunging body of the horse and
the long bridge shape two horizontal lines, coupled with the lower horizon,
geometrically balanced by the vertical lines formed by the tall trees, groves and
their reflections in the water. The feeling of enraged tossing clouds, which
occupy a large space on paper, and the mood of the quiet, smoothly flowing
water in the lower part, form another interesting contrast. The deliberate
composition, associated with the graceful shapes of the trees, bridge, pond, and
horse, constitutes a harmonious melody of a pictorial poem.

Roger and Angelica in a Landscape of 1565 (figure 32) is one of Titian’s
most beautiful drawings. A graceful female nude reclines in a corner facing a
magnified, marvelous landscape. A line of architecture, beginning with the
ancient ruins at the upper left, the tower, bridge, and a set of buildings on the
right, extends to the far distance. The crossed lines and various pen-strokes,
which constitute a complicated composition, are used on the dragon, skull, pond,
hills, buildings, trees and clouds. Our eyes are busy moving from here to there.
Nobody will try to view this picture in one glance. A meticulous examination of

each part of the picture is necessary for us to witness the artist’s superior pen-

47

work and to speculate on the creator‘s sophisticated thought reflecting on each
detail.

The Nymphs and Satyrs in 3 Forest of 1565 (figure 33) is another of
Titian’s most elaborate drawings. The accomplishment of Titian’s study of trees
reached its culmination here. A real full, rich forest becomes the protagonist,
and the figures and buildings merely play a supporting role on paper. Like
human poses and facial expressions, the trees are shown in diverse gestures
and countenances: some handsomely posed, some wild and strong with wrath,
and some slender and delicate in laughter. Several large trees grow beyond the
frame of the picture; their foliage almost covers the whole sky, and their shadows
are cast on the land, pond, and figures. The receding trees, varied in size,
successfully generate the feelings of depth and broad space of the forest.

While the trees in the forest are busily engaged in their competitive growth
towards the sky, the mythological figures proceed with their story. In a corner of
the forest, a nymph is seduced by a satyr, but her stare, along with the other two
satyrs’ gazes, falls on a comic scene, where a jaunty satyr is chased by a goat
near the pond on the other side of the forest. In spite of the small scale of the
nymphs and satyrs, the lush landscape is enlivened by the incidents of this
mythological theme. The presence of the nymphs and satyrs greatly intensifies
the mysterious, idyllic pathos of the forest. The artist’s deliberate organization of
the whole scene is conceivable. The sense of the density, the warmth, and the

variety of the woods are lavishly added to the forest’s opulence.

48

Titian was prolific in landscapes in his early years until 1530, and most of
his landscape paintings as well as drawings were created during this period. In
the first thirty years of his career, Titian exhibited his joy of living in all its youth
and beauty in his landscape paintings; the color is resplendent with subtle
delicacy. His drawings create unrivaled pastoral and nostalgic moods, and
unprecedented pictorial thoughts in his study of gnarled trees as well as new
ways of composing and looking at the beautiful natural scene. In his later years
(1531-76), he produced only limited landscape paintings and drawings. The
master seemed inclined towards stimulating his soul to be loftier. There was
also a change in his technique of modulating and darkening the color, and in his
use of broad brushwork in his landscape paintings. In his drawings, he indulged
in elaborate satyric landscape. Titian’s view of nature changed at different

periods, reflected in his continuous refinement of his landscapes.

49

Chapter 3 Subject and Meaning of Titian’s Landscapes

Nature, one of the most miraculous masterpieces created by God, is a
direct and effective vehicle to communicate with the supreme power. This
communion between the artist and nature through landscapes could be a
spiritual union. Working on the landscape, the artist receives a kind of inward
spiritual touch, which originates from his constantly being in contact with and
observing the natural scene. Venetian artists in the sixteenth century, more or
less and to different degrees, achieved this goal in their minds. They painted the
landscape and the figures in a comprehensive wholeness, which, indeed,
realistically reflected their interior worlds. Among them, Titian went through a
journey of inner mind, perhaps more significant than other artists of the period
resulting in a wealth of landscapes in both paintings and drawings. When he
moved from one work to another, it perhaps reflected not merely a stylistic
change, but a spiritual journey. The different subjects and meanings of Titian’s
landscapes reflect different stages of his search for self-understanding. This
course of approaching a higher spiritual form and existence in his landscapes,
and, of course, his figural paintings as well, and the changes of his inward state
of mind are as important as his stylistic development. This chapter will engage in
a further investigation of these aspects of change.

Venetian artists seldom expressed their thoughts in writing, and their

‘ interests were mostly confined to the visual arts. The only writings by Titian that

50

can provide some insight into his thought and culture are his own letters.69
Unfortunately, a mass of correspondence and records only reveal that he was
shrewd and sagacious in building up his fame and fortune, but nothing about his
state of mind.” Because of the absence of any documentation to enlighten us
about Titian’s intellectual world, the artwork itself, the choice of subject and the
method of expression, provide us with insight to judge the painter’s emotions and
the passion of his soul.

Most of Titian’s landscapes could be generally classified as “pastoral,”
even though Richard Turner claims that: “the idea of pastoralism in Venetian
painting is so broad that it escapes any exact definition.”71 For him, “pastoralism”
had already become an enigmatic term for which a host of definitions have been
proposed. The genesis of the word “pastoral” comes from the Latin word
“pastor,” which means shepherd.72 Thus we know the original meaning of
“pastoral” is associated with the shepherd’s world. The essential elements for
the “pastoral” are shepherds, whose flocks are joined with the deities or
demigods of pleasant groves. Often, once a term is created, a great number of
generic meanings are attached to it so that they enrich yet simultaneously veil
the original meaning of the term. Even so, the situation is not completely

hopeless. If we can put the word “pastoral” in a significant framework, and when

 

59 Padoan, 46. Titian left a rich body of correspondence for us. The volume comprises
103 letters from him, and 81 addressed to him. In addition, there are eight

petitions to the Venetian authorities and a tax declaration of 1566.

7° Arthur Stanley Riggs, Titian the Magnificent and the Venice of His Day (New York,
Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Press, 1946), 48.

7‘ Turner, 125.

72 Lee, 10.

 

its many meanings are reviewed, then this term becomes more understandable.
This can be achieved by looking at different literary, religious and metaphorical
contexts. Tumer’s further summary of the Venetian pastoral is an example. He
clarified “pastoral” as two distinct streams: the literary pastoral with mythological
figures, shepherds, and nymphs in Arcadia; and the contemporary rural life with
peasants.73 Turner puts Titian’s landscapes in both literary and social contexts.
However, for Titian, it seems that these two streams belong to the same
category—the literary pastoral. Both of them originate from literature: the former
from Virgil’s Eclogues and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the latter from Virgil’s
Georgics. Other than subject matter, we may widen the range of the pastoral
more broadly to the landscape which possesses pastoral structure, mood, or
passions, and to a place, which is ideal and imagined and where Arcadia lies.74
Titian’s early life was his journey to search for an Arcadia, and the idea of
his pastoral landscape cannot be separated from this. We cannot pinpoint an
exact geographical location, for Arcadia is a concept. When this idea is
embodied, its primary feature could take the form of a civilized, lyric landscape

as in Titian’s works.

 

’3 Turner, 125.

7‘ Before Sannazaro’s Arcadia, in medieval or early Renaissance pastoral, Arcadia was
not yet a paradise. Arcady was referred to a kind of forest of Ardennes, a land that

is not here. Snell, Curtius, and Panofsky suppose that Arcadia existed as a magic

and before Sannazaro. Any gathering of shepherds or the gods or heroes was

enough to create an Arcadia. It could be created by invoking in a pastoral manner

the trees, rivers, and rocks, and by simply to make music. See Paul Holberton,

“The Pastorale or Fete Champetre in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Studies in the
History of Art, 45 (1994), 245-62.

 

52

In Titian’s early years, the configuration of Arcadia is similar to Virgil’s. It
is as defined by M. Owen Lee: “a place half-way between a past dimly
remembered in myth, a Golden Age of innocence, and the troubled present.”75
Virgil, as well as Titian, set this place in a perspective of a village over the rocky
hill, a rivulet meandering into the distance, and a tall, strong tree standing nearby
a grove. For them, the pastoral represents not an escape from the city or the
sophisticated complexities of urban life, but a pleasant place to show their
happiness, sorrow, love, hope, and desire. Through the mirror of shepherds,
gods, and goddesses, we see Titian and Virgil’s celebration of youth and beauty.

We come to the Pastoral Symphony (figure 6) again; no matter whether
scholars attribute it to Giorgione or Titian, the pastoral vein and the spirit of this
painting is evident. In this painting the observer feels the arrival in an Arcadia, a
pleasant, comfortable place, where shepherds and goddesses are making music
in the shade of a grove, and a village is just a stone’s throw in the distance. As
in Virgil’s Eclogues, in this Pastoral Symphony, a youth’s joys, sorrows, and
hopes for the future are reflected with transparent clarity. Here, the men look
young and the women mature, in their heyday, and the landscape is lush and
full. Their joys spring from the musical competition, an Arcadian tradition in
which all shepherds are poets who sing their poems. As we see in the painting,
two youths sit together. One might imagine that they discuss how to improve

their music and poems. While one nymph or muse holds a pipe and turns to the

two youths seemingly to consult about their music, the other pours water into a

 

75 Lee, 36 8. 86-7.

53

well symbolizing their inspiration. The days for the youth are not always without
anxiety, if his passion and love earns no response nor release. The nymph or
muse, turning her back to the shepherds and standing beside the well, looks
gloomy; is she worried about the loser in the musical competition?

The peaceful sky and valley is painted in a reduced vibrancy. It shows
nature remains silent; there are no responses nor solace for the shepherd‘s pain,
as he sings his song to the valley and the sky. The young shepherd’s sorrow,
however, is so slight that it is released when he drives the flock home, and after
he consoles himself with his pastoral tasks. As we see the shepherd driving the
flock home on the right of the picture, the scene seems to imply that there is
hope for the future; therefore, the shepherd’s happiness returns. The shepherd’s
feelings are keyed to the times of day; as Virgil describes, when the shadows
fall, his passion subsides. Similarly in the painting, the pastoral passion is keyed
to the landscape.

Many scholars have given numerous interpretations of the Pastoral
Symphony, but none satisfactorily explains it.76 The subject and meaning are, in
fact, ambiguous and escape interpretation. It is dissonant that two dressed
gentlemen sit with two nude females in the open air surrounded by a beautiful

natural scene. The most discordant note, as Turner points out, is the elegant

 

7“ Some scholars go very far; for example, J. P. Hodin thinks that it is not important

to reach any satisfactory explanation because the artist gave free vein to his

creative imagination, guided only by the inner logic of his poetic vision. See J. P. Hodin, “The
Riddle of Giorgione,” Art Digest, September 15, 1995. To me, this opinion reveals the formalist
claims of the autonomy of art, and precludes cultural

influence on artistic development.

54

young man with overbred sophistication.77 One interpretation is that the two
nudes and two men are two halves of Aristotle’s views on poetry, a higher’and a
lower genre.78 Another interpretation is that the elegant young man himself
represents the pastoral poet and could not completely escape from the refined
environment and the sophistication of society.’9 The nude female personifies
poetry, based on evidence of the fifteenth century playing card, labeled “poesia,”
where a woman is seated by a fountain, playing the flute in one hand and
pouring water with the other.80 Turner argues that this painting should not be
interpreted as a simple allegory.81 I agree with Turner, because the two genres
of Aristotelian poetry would not be illustrated with a large length of lush
landscape to distract the viewer’s attention, nor would the dressed men
represent a lower status since they occupy the central place and play a dominant
role in the painting. However, if, as Turner says, the sophisticated dressed man
is pastoral poetry itself, and the nude female is the nymph of the fountain, how
can we explain her sad emotion? I believe if we put this picture in Virgil’s literary
context, its meanings can be comprehended.

In Virgil’s Eclogues Arcadia is not a place where the inhabitants

 

’7 Turner, 102.

78 Patricia Egan, “Poesia and the Fete Champetre,” The Art Bulletin, XLI (1959), 304-
06. To Patricia Egan the picture appears divided in two halves: the left side
comprises the water-pouring “musi,” the fine young lute-player, the white

gabled building by the lake, and the far landscape; the enclosed landscape on

the right side contains the flute-playing “muse,” the shepherd boy, the

farmhouse, the grove, and the goatherd with his flock. All these contrasts are
strengthened by implications of “higher” and “lower" status.

79 Turner, 101-12.

8° Turner, 101-12.

8‘ Turner, 101.

55

are in timeless happiness and youth, nor is it in Titian’s paintings. In the Three
Ages of Man, (figure 1) Titian tackles the essential problems of life and death.
There a strong sense of melancholy and mortality is conveyed by the young
shepherd’s sorrowful face, the skulls held by an old man, as well as by the
gloomy sky, the tree stump, and the dark tree. The joys of life bear a weighted,
pessimistic feeling, elicited by the fact that life is unavoidably ended by death. r..-
Any joy of love and youth cannot make one escape from this destiny. In this
case, Arcadia turns into a vulnerable place, and the tones of Arcadia become

sad, heavy and blue. Although there is no tomb here for the shepherd, a sense

 

of the immediacy of death is detectable. Once the question of life and death is
considered, one can feel that death is not in the far distance but is imminent; in
other words, it is not in the future tense but in the present. Therefore, Titian puts
the putti, the young shepherd and his beloved, and the old man as three groups
of people in contiguous places on the canvas, connecting this nexus into a cycle
of life. Through the process of searching, no answer is found in the Three Ages
of Man; all questions seem suspended there in Titian’s early life.

The heavy burden of speculating on the question of life and death is
relieved in The Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint
Catherine, (figure 3) by the message of the Messiah brought by the angel. In
Arcadia man’s original sin is committed but man can be saved only by God’s
mercy and compassion. In this painting, the shepherd, on the left, bears witness
to a scene of the promise of religious salvation. He is bathed in a smiling

landscape; the dawning sunlight plays upon the clouds on hills, bushes, and the

56

foliage. The shepherd must be enlightened by the descending angel and its
blissful gospel and must know how to share the joys with the holy family. The
two worlds, the shepherd’s and the religious, are thus melded into one united
Arcadia. The shepherd’s hope for the future is thus not a Utopian dream, and it
could be fulfilled through the Christian religion.

In addition to finding hope in the religious context, the hope of i:-
the pastoral could also come from the innocence of childhood. In the Worship of
Venus, (figure 2) the image of a wealth of golden apples and a huge number of

lovely cupids evokes the innocence of the past Golden Age. The landscape

 

echoes this image; as we see, the foliage contains full saturated sunlight. The
“Golden Age” was sung for centuries in literature, but it was in an irrevocable
past. M. Owen Lee says: “Virgil is in fact the first poet to sing that the Golden
Age of the dawn of creation will return,”82 and Titian followed him but put it in a
mythological scene. The trees laden with apples symbolize the Golden Age in all
its fullness. The putti plucking the apples signify the future’s hope. By the time
the child matures and reaches manhood, the Golden Age will come. The apple
here is no longer a symbol of original sin but an emblem of humankind’s
promising land.

Titian’s spiritual journey of his early years was attuned to Virgil’s, but in his
later years his spiritual journey turned to explore deeper emotions and human

soul. Titian thus no longer stayed in the Virgilian pastoral mood. A tragic pathos

 

“2 Lee, 77.

57

and dramatic emotions are reflected in the subjects of hermit saints in his later
landscapes.

The Nymph and Shepherd (figure 34), a painting created in Titian’s last
years, shows the master’s farewell to the pastoral landscape favored most in his
youth. In the first glance, the spectator is as if back to Titian’s early work, where
the shepherd’s love of music is the subject under the shadow of a tall standing
tree. As a matter of fact, the elderly artist rephrased the whole pictorial
language and text in this painting. The scene is vague, and takes on a superreal
quality. No clouds, mountains, or land can be distinguished. The landscape
bursts with pigments; the glowing sunset is suggested by the floating and
modulated pigments with an outburst of emotions. The tree stumps, stretching
towards the sky, and monumentally placed on the hill, are painted by a mere
conglomeration of dark pigments. The overshadowing foliage, drawn by loose,
broad strokes, are shaped like feathers, flying and dancing in the sky gracefully.
The furry leaves are similar to the shepherd‘s crown of hair and the animal skin
beneath the nymph.

The pastoral world, expressed by the shepherd holding a pipe and
peacefully staring at the nymph, and the nymph turning her reclined body and
exchanging glances with the shepherd, creates a classical calm and noble scene
in the foreground. In contrast, the landscape in the background is submersed in
furious pigments. The pigment here becomes a powerful medium to show the

artist’s passion. Reading this painting, we feel that Titian experienced a conflict

58

 

and yet a balance of two opposite emotions; pastoral peace and a strong feeling
of an uncompromising struggle to destiny.

A transcendence of trivial pleasures on earth and of human mortality is
pursued by the master, after he exhausted secular wit and brightness. A
civilized, lyric Arcadia gives way to a wild, untamed nature in Titian’s St. Jerome

(figure 22).

"‘17.

Titian depicts a place of timelessness in the St. Jerome; outside of the .
cave the sky is gloomy blue, and inside the cavern is dark, but enlightened by a

soft light with a silvery shimmer. Turner explains that this soft glow is the

 

emanation of moonlight, which rises directly behind the tree, and that this is a
haunting nocturnal scene.’33 As a matter of fact, it is hard to discern if the time is
dawn or evening, because of the multiple sources of light coexisting in this
picture. The light illuminating the interior cave could be moonlight, assuming that
this light comes from the outside of the cave, but in this picture the source of
moonlight comes from within, so this does not seem possible. The fresh blue
sky combined with the crystal mountains is probably illuminated by the natural
light of dawn, and the darkened cavern and the saint’s body are lit by a
supernatural light. Most fascinating is a dramatic light like a thunderbolt pouring
into the rocky architecture of gigantic monoliths and falling on the tiny crucifix.
After unaccountable days of meditation and complete seclusion, a dramatic
event happens. The saint’s eyes and muscular body as well as his cave are

suddenly brightened by this supernatural light, coming from God’s mercy.

59

Not only is the time indiscernible, but the place is unrecognizable on

 

earth, where the cave is next to crystal mountains and a furious sea. This place
seems a space without boundary that crosses the secular world and paves the
way to heaven. As Turner describes, the artist attempts to show the theme of
the hermit saint in a landscape as “a search for an intersection of Time and
Eternity in some quiet spot of God’s creation)“ Titian’s St. Jerome is the best 3 -
explanation for this description.

The supernatural light, appearing in a natural subtle landscape, was an

astute invention of Venetian artists. It is applied to replace the traditional way of

 

showing Christian subjects in narrative sequence and to symbolize divine
revelation. In Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (figure 35), perhaps the three
magi, disguised as the three philosophers, are set in a vision of boundless light
suffused through airy clouds, and the sun setting behind blue hills beside a
cavern.”35 In this lyric, beautiful scene, we notice the two sources of light—that is,
an artificial light and the light from the heaven. The heavenly light comes from

outside the picture; it picks out the leaves, the rough rock, and scatters a myriad

 

“3 Turner, 114-15.

8“ Turner, 112.

“5 Salvatore Settis discovered through X-rays an earlier version of the painting which
differed from the final composition in certain details of the landscape, and
especially in the facial expressions of the three protagonists. The youngest
“philosopher” stares intently, with parted lips, in an attitude of surprise rather

than meditation. The eldest is turned sharply towards the cave and wears an
extravagant “oriental” head-dress; the third man is no longer a generic “oriental"
but a negro. This last detail dispels any doubts about the identity of the
“philosophers” in the earlier version: they are the three Magi. See Salvatore Settis,
tr. by Ellen Bianchini, Giorgione’s Termiest-lnterpreting the Hidden Subject
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 20.

 

60

of reflections over the pebbles at the mouth of the cave.86 We are barely aware
that this light is not natural, because it is skillfully and sensitively melded with the
natural scene.

Besides the supernatural light, another significant emblem representing
divine revelation in Titian’s St. Jerome is the tree. We know a tall, strong tree
that borders the picture has structural meaning and denotes a “locus amoenus”87
in Titian’s pastoral landscapes, but beyond this meaning, this type of tree gains
another layer of meaning associated with Christian thought. In St. Jerome, the
tree, with a stunted trunk and invisible stems, truncated from the top foliage,
seems to root on a coarse rocky cliff—an impossible place to grow trees. This
shows the tree must have been invested with unusual, transcendent meanings.
As we know the tree in Genesis; when Adam and Eve are at the moment of the
original sin in Eden, the fig is an allusion to the tree of good and evil or the tree
of knowledge, and the ivy to the strength of redemption. Although it is
impossible to identify the species of the tree in this picture, the implication of this
tree as an emblem of the choice tree is perceivable. It is like the Tree of Life or
the Tree of Paradise that bears the promise of salvation through the Passion of
Christ.

In St. Jerome, Titian created a timeless place which is in the intersection of

time and eternity. Beyond human emotions, like happiness, anxiety, and love,

 

”6 Settis, 27-8.

87 The “locus amoenus” means the “pleasant place” that is the requisite site for

pastoral encounters. See David Rosand, Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral

Vision, in Robert Cafritz ed. Places of Delight: The pastoral landscape ( New York: ON. Potter
Press, 1988), 38.

 

 

 

 

61

 

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i

this place is modeled by an atmosphere of sublime peace, laden with penitence;
the light and the tree evoke religious piety. The artist‘s state of mind should
attain a reprieve after completing such a work of ingenious design for a Christian
subject.

In summary, the subject and meaning of Titian’s landscapes reveal
messages about the painter’s inner world. His spiritual journey began with ~-
delight and joy of life and continued by searching for the meaning of life and
death. His journey seems to end in his religious passion. His last religious

works explain his spiritual refinement and sublimity.

 

'-Aii¥,-A.
I..

Conclusion

Titian’s pastoral landscapes are among the most imaginative and original
Old Master paintings. As discussed here, inspired by Virgil’s pastoral poetry,
Titian added his own love and understanding of nature from the mountains and
forests of the Veneto. He continued the lyrical, contemplative mood of
landscape in the Venetian tradition, but, more importantly, he invented new ways
to express the landscape in each stage of his long life. With bright intelligence
and high sensitivity, he carefully studied the stems of group of trees, the large-
armed trees, the steep slant of the wooded hill, the effect of airy or glowing
mountains, and the result was new landscape compositions. In Titian’s work
nature is characterized by cumulus clouds overhead, the rural buildings
overlooking a peaceful valley, or a pleasant grove with a remarkable tree. The
distillation of the essential ingredients from nature nourished his landscape to an
unequaled high level.

Titian is regarded as a great colorist and sensual painter in his figure
paintings, but through Titian’s insight into the soul of nature we see his spiritual
elevation and refinement in his landscapes. His dream of the Arcadian or
pastoral ideal, and his experience of religious spirituality through his landscapes

as well, makes him undoubtedly not only a sensualist but also a spiritualist.

63

APPENDIX

64

- a mm

mm.

 

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Figure 1 Titian: the Three Ages of Man, 0. 1509.

65

 

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Figure 2 Titian: the Worship of Venus, c. 1518— 19.

66

 

 
   

Figure 3 Titian: The Madonna and Child with St. John the

Baptist and St. Catherine, c.1530.

67

 

         

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Figure 4 (detail) Titian: The Madonna and Child with St. John the

Baptist and St. Catherine, c.1530.

68

 

 

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Figure 5 Boldrini (woodcut after Titi n): Landscape with

 
 

     

Milkmaid and Youth Sowing, c. 1540.

69

 

 

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Figure Titian: Fastoral Symphoyn, c.1508-10.

70

 

Vienna, Archaeological Museum.

71

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Figure 8 Raphael: Apollo and the Muses. Detail of the

Parnassus, fresco, c. 1509.

72

 

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Figure 9 Marcantonio Raimondi: the two Muses. (Engraving) 0.1517— 20.

73

    
  
   

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74

   

.' .‘ I. ‘ " Thin ‘. "«-. i .
Figur l 1 Giovanni Bellini: The Madonna and Child in a Landscape,
c. 1505.

75

 

 

76

   

Wooded landscape, c.?

77

    

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Figure 14 Titian: Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1514.

 

78

    

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Figure 15 Titian: Bacchanal of the

Andrians, c.1518— 1.

79

   

80

   

Figure 17 Titian: The Madonna and the Rabbit, c.1530.

81

 

   

Figure 18 Titian: Charles V, c.1548.

82

   

Figure 19 Titian: Venus and Adonis, c.1551-54.

83

 

Figure 20 Titian: St. Magaret, 0.155468.

84

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85

 

   

Figure 22 Titian: St. Jerome, 01571-75.

86

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87

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Figure 25 Titian: F ortified Village in a Landscape, c.1525-1530. I

 

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89

 

Figure 26 Titian: Shepherd Playing a Flute and Leading His Flock,

c.1530.

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91

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92

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94

  

      
   
  
 
 
 
  

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97

 

Figure 34 Titian: Nymph and Shepherd, C. 1570.

98

 

99

BIBLIOGRAPHY

100

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Books

Berenson, Bernard. The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. New
York, London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894.

Berenson, Bernard. The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. New
York: G.P. Putnam‘s Sons,1896.

 

Brown, Patricia Fortine. Art and Life in Renaissance Venice. New York:
Harry N. Abrams Press, 1997.

 

Carli, Enzo. The Landscape in Art. New York: Morrow Press, 1980.

 

Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. London: J. Murray, 1949.

 

Friedlander, Max.J. Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life-Their Origin and
Development. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.

 

 

Gilbert, Josiah. Landscape in Art Before Claude and Salvator. London:
J. Murray Press,1885.

 

Turner, Richard. The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy. London:
J. Murray Press, 1949.

 

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters. New York: Heritage
Press, 1967.

 

Specific Books

Andreadakis, Katya B. & Berger, John. Titian: Nymph and Shepherd.
Munich & New York: Prestel Press, 1996.

 

Baldass, Ludwig von. Giorgione. New York: H. N. Abrams Press, 1965.

Cafritz, Robert. ed. Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. New York:
ON Potter Press, 1988.

 

Coletti, Luigi. trans. by Colacicchi, Paul. All the Paintings of Giorgione.

 

101

 

New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc. Press, 1961.

Fillips, Claude, Sir. The Earlier Work of Titian. London: Seeley and Co.,
Limited; New York: The Macmillan Company Press, 1897.

 

Gronau, Georg. Titian. New York: C. Soribner’s Sons Press, 1904.
Hope, Charles. Titian. London: Constable Press, 1980.

Kennedy, Ruth Wedgwood. Novelty and Tradition in Titian’s Art.
Northampton, Mass, Smith College Press, 1963.

 

Lee, M. Owen. Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia. New York: State
University of New York Press, 1989.

 

Panofsky, EnNin. Problems in Titian-Mostly Iconographic. New York:
New York University Press, 1969.

 

 

[Ir-u. ,
.

Pignatti, Terisio. Giorgione. London: Phaidon Press, 1971.

Pope, Arther. Titian’s Rape of Europa. Cambridge, Massachusettes:
Harvard University Press, 1960.

 

Ricketts, Charles S. Titian. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd. Press, 1910.

 

Riggs, Arthur Stanley. Titian the Mamificent and the Venice of His Day.
New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Press,1946.

 

Rosand, David. Titian and the Venetian woodcut. Washington: The
Foundation Press, 1976.

 

Rosand, David. Titian. New York: Abrams Press, 1978.

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