Brush With Genius

By ROBERT HUGHES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though history does not record how other Venetian painters felt about competing with Titian, it cannot have been easy for them. Especially not for Tintoretto, a genius of the first rank, whom Titian's longevity compelled always to be a runner-up. Titian's work, so masterly in its effects, so profoundly inventive, so grand in scope and yet relieved by such suppleness and intimacy of feeling, continued to set the tone of aspiration for Rubens in the 17th century and, through Rubens, for painters like Delacroix well into the 19th.

Titian was the son of a provincial notary, born in Pieve di Cadore, in north Italy, in 1478 or 1479. Apprenticed to a Venetian artist before his 10th birthday (no child labor, no Renaissance), he came to work with the two painters whose work incarnated the "modern style" that had pushed Venetian taste away from gold-ground Gothic: Giovanni Bellini and Giorgio da Castelfranco, alias Giorgione. One sees, in the introductory galleries of this show, how Bellini supplied the prototypes for one side of early Titian, his suave construction of pictorial space and pragmatic realism. Then, equally fundamental, there is Giorgione, Titian's exact coeval, but dead "of exhaustion as much as the plague," as one literary mourner obscurely put it, in his early 30s. So little is known about Giorgione's life that the interplay of influence between the two young artists will probably never be fully sorted out. Our ignorance of it has given rise to innumerable wrangles over which paintings can be ascribed to early Titian and which to Giorgione.

Giorgione appeals more to modern taste because his imagery was more mysterious and poetic, and the idea that painting should mimic the effects of lyric or pastoral poetry, ut pictura poesis, was a favorite 16th century dictum. There is a word for it, Giorgionesque, an allusive quality that comes through even in conventional subjects, such as the exquisite portrait of a young knight surrounded by the gleaming black weapons of his vocation, a dense still life with religious overtones (the handle and pommel of the sword are also a cross), the bony silence of the knight's face contrasting with the open mouth of his page. But the most enduring product of the relation between Titian and Giorgione was the pastoral.

When you look at a Watteau fete champetre, an Impressionist boating party or certain Matisses, you are seeing the long-range results of Titian's and Giorgione's invention of the pastoral mode in art: the landscape of pleasure, the earthly paradise derived from Latin literature, with its shepherds, gallants and nymphs. The picture that starts this long train is Titian's Concert Champetre, circa 1509, which is one of the most hermetic and disputed images in all Western art. It gets about 27 columns of dense text in the catalog, chewing over its literary sources, the presence (or not) of Giorgione's hand in it, its presumed Neoplatonic content, its allegorical meanings.

But no theory will ever quite account for the magic of the scene, with the two naked women in the mature and fruitful landscape and the two clothed men, one standing for Culture -- as his city dress, his lute and the rhyme between his elegant hat and sharp profile and the architecture on the hill behind him proclaim -- while the other, rustic and mop-headed like the tree behind him, signifies Nature. This originally pagan, Arcadian image would come to permeate Venetian culture, even affecting religious art, as one can see in Palma Vecchio's magnificent rendering of the embrace of Jacob and Rachel among the shepherds.

LEARNED BUT NEVER PEDANTIC, steeped in the classics, Titian could mediate fluently between the world of Ovid and what, to him, was modern life. His integration of idea, observation and pictorial gesture was seamless. He consolidated a style of portraiture that would radiate throughout Europe: the official mask in the grand manner, suffused with mobile thought and subtle indications of personality. What military portrait compares with Titian's image of Francesco Maria della Rovere, glaring haughtily from the carapace of black steel whose reflections anticipate the blacks and whites of Manet? Where, except in Velazquez's Innocent X, could you find a more piercing evocation of cunning old age than Titian's portrait of the Farnese Pope, Paul III?

Titian's nudes may not conform to modern erotic taste. They are too plump and "womanly," and the idea of the Venus of the Pardo rising from her grassy couch to do some aerobics is hard to contemplate. But when his unbounded sensual curiosity played upon the idealized territory of the classical nude, he changed the whole sexual balance of the naked body in art, creating an inexhaustible domain of feeling for others as well as himself. Reprehensibly phallocratic, no doubt, but you can't help being grateful. It would be hard to pick the most gorgeous nude in this show, but a strong candidate is the Andromeda painted by Titian's contemporary Veronese, squirming operatically in her chains as Perseus drops on the dragon like a 16th century smart bomb, the scalloped edge of his cloak repeating the leathery batwings of his adversary.

In his late years Titian moved a long way from the perfectly controlled rhetorician of the 1540s; it's as though, in an old man's fury and sureness, he no longer cared about soliciting anyone's pleasure and sought only to release his deepest feelings in whatever roughhewn language they required. Old Titian is like old Michelangelo, the master of apparent incompletion. Old Titian is the astonishing predecessor of Expressionism; smooth modeling in continuous, rational space gives way to the agitated sea of paint, the broken emphatic touch, the gleam of marshlight or fire on darkness laid into yet more darkness. And once again, the new phase of his career pulls other artists, men of great gifts, along with it, like carriages behind a locomotive; it is fascinating, for instance, to see the effects of Titian's changed style on Bassano.

The daily immanence of death suffuses Titian's late work as the vast appetite for life filled his youth and middle age. We have moved, as it were, from the territory of Venus and Adonis or Antony and Cleopatra to that of King Lear. When old Titian is sardonic, he is terrible and can produce details that burn the mind's eye, like the little dog delicately lapping at the skinned satyr's blood in The Flaying of Marsyas. But he could also attain a height of tragic utterance beyond almost anything in Venetian painting, beating Tintoretto at his own game, as in the Crucifixion he painted in 1557 or thereabouts for the altar of San Domenico in Ancona. Under the lurid, eclipsed sky of Golgotha -- "no light, but rather darkness visible" -- each figure has a tragic singularity: the Virgin crushed by grief; St. Dominic clutching the foot of the cross like a drowning man; St. John stricken by awe, his extended arm the only form that pierces the otherwise flat plane of the composition. And high above them, the dead God in his incommunicable solitude. This was the only Crucifixion Titian painted. It is impossible to imagine how he might have produced another, there being nothing left to say.