An Appetite for Human Character

By ROBERT HUGHES

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

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

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

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

The idea that a portrait should be the "mirror of the soul" as well as a formal utterance about appearance and rank was not born with Titian; Leonardo, Botticelli, Durer and Van Eyck were all his elders, and in his youth he worked with Giorgione, the most shadowed and inward looking of Venetian quattrocento painters, on the fresco decorations of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Giorgione's ambition to paint people in the act of thinking, to invent signs for internal reflection as well as external show, was carried forward by Titian into works such as the Louvre's Man with a Glove.

The projection of character reached new levels with Titian, just as the dramatic exploration of character and foible, already a mainspring of English plays before the early 17th century, had to wait for Shakespeare to disclose its full power. "There's no art/ To find the mind's construction in the face," complained Duncan in Macbeth, but he was a primitive Scot; after Titian, there emphatically was such an art. The fierce, glaring authority of Doge Andrea Gritti; the plump self-assurance of the Florentine historian Benedetto Varchi; the saurian cunning of old Pope Paul III, huddled in his velvet cape; and the inflexible determination of the military commander Francesco Maria della Rovere, whose carapace of bombshell-black armor is painted with a freedom and virtuosity that looks forward to Velazquez and, beyond him, to Manet -- to scan these portraits is to realize what an appetite for human character Titian had, and what a gallery of it he created.

There were, however, limits. Character, for Titian, was something mainly possessed by men. His women are by no means insipid or vacant, but they never have the singularity of being that leaps from his best male portraits. They are always cast in the passive voice: the madonnas with their union of tenderness, patrician grace and a certain country solidity, and the nymphs and goddesses (Venus especially), those Venetian odalisques whose weighty gold- pink flesh may not conform to modern conventions of beauty but excited Titian's contemporaries to rapture. There too Titian embodied the assumptions of his time, place and class. What terser image of sociosexual politics in 16th century Venice could one ask for than Titian's Danae, princess of Argos, seduced by Zeus in the form of a rainburst of gold coins?

The last full-dress Titian show took place more than a half-century ago in Venice in 1935. This summer its successor is on view in the Doges' Palace, and it will travel, in a much truncated form, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, opening Oct. 28. The incompleteness of the Venice show, which is more a generous sampler than a true retrospective, and the even more fragmentary character it will have in Washington, testifies that the day of the big single-master show is closing.

A quick checklist of absences would be as large as the show itself. It would include the Louvre's Entombment, the Bacchus and Ariadne from London, the Rape of Europa from Boston, the Borghese Gallery's Sacred and Profane Love, the Naples portrait of Pope Paul III and his two grandsons (surely the most piercing political image in Western art, until Goya's portrait of the family of Charles IV). And then there are the masterpieces that remain in Venice, such as the Pesaro Madonna in the Frari.

There is a growing consensus that to send such things around the world, or even to move them at all, verges on the irresponsible. Yet museums still feel obliged to lend paintings as hostages to others to ensure reciprocal loans. Only this can explain, for instance, why the National Gallery refused to move its Feast of the Gods (the figures by Bellini, the deep and magically sonorous landscape background by his apprentice Titian) a few city blocks to the Phillips Collection's "Pastoral Landscape" show in 1988, whose centerpiece it should have been, but had no compunction about flying it back and forth across the Atlantic in 1990. There is something opportunistic about such policies, and this show will be remembered as a signal that the very form in which it is cast is dying, the victim of anxiety, insurance costs and a shift in museum priorities.