THEFor painting, for Titian, it is life. For no painter, creation is simple reproduction and imitation of what exists: the painter continues, extends and continues existence. But Tiziano’s image is something more. His painting is an invasion of existence.
In Tiziano’s painting – especially in Tiziano Ultimo, but already senses in youth works, so dramatic, so full of energy – The body takes over compared to the idea. It is body, it is physical weight, it is meat that has an amazing heat and density.
Titian’s late paintings, and not only those, are paintings of existence, not in a philosophical sensebut because they completely replace reality: there is no reproduction of the fact that we see, there is no myth, there is no religious event, martyrdom or miracle, There is pure energy, irrepressible and incontinent, which spreads in color.
The color, matter of painting, is profused with the hands, with the body, with a physical invasion, as a contemporary artist would have done. The world exploded in color. It is as if this man, probably incontinent, vicious, stingy, certainly in love with life not only wanted to give a new image of the world, but wanted to take the world away, burn, with his existence, all possible existences, together with all painting.
Tiziano Vecellio: “Assunta” (1516-1518), Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice (photo Alamy /IPA).
After Titian any other painting is attenuated. Perhaps only Velásquez will manage, with the same strength, to give another idea of the world within paintingbut with an opposite procedure. For Titian all painting is consumed in life, that is, it falls and immersed itself in existence, it is bathed in existence. For Velázquez all existence ends up in art, that is, art cancels life, replaces it.
Tiziano’s formation, when from Pieve di Cadore arrives in Venice, is linked to two names, essentially: Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. Giovanni Bellini is the master and patriarch of all Venetian paintingsumma of the culture of the fifteenth century and openness to the sixteenth century. But the painter to whom Titian owes more, alongside Bellini, is certainly Giorgionewith whom he works on a monumental company: the decoration of the Fondaco of the Germans.
On the facade turned to the water, towards the Grand Canal, there is the decoration of Giorgione, on the facade aimed at the earth there is Tiziano’s decoration. And already here you feel the difference: On the one hand the monumental vision, full of volumes by Tiziano; On the other hand, however, the much more intimate and lyrical dimension of Giorgionewhich tends to make images ideal. In this relationship between physicality and ideality lies the primary difference between Giorgione and Titian, which are born together, and which in this youth solidarity determine the fate of modern painting.
Tiziano’s absolute masterpiece
All these paths thicken in theAssumptionpainted for the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frariprobably the most famous work of Tiziano: it is the point of arrival of an architecture and a thought of faith and also of space, as if the painting and architecture should, even in distinct times, find a necessary convergence.
At the bottom of the apse of the Basilica of the Frari this extraordinary invention It takes all the meaning of the painting of the sixteenth centurywith its intricate relationships with the great central-Italian culture, in particular with Michelangelo and Raffaello, who incorporates and seems almost overcome. But in theAssumption There is something more than a synthesis of different worlds: Tiziano seems to want to get out of the size of the painting, and recall a sound dimensiona symphony in which all elements contribute to a unit.
THE’Assumption It is a synaesthesia of musical, spatial, architectural and pictorial effects which, together, determine the theological declaration that in theAssumption It is implicit. This is why Titian’s masterpiece is A monument of philosophical and theological knowledge, as well as artistic. Or rather, it is the artistic power that creates the dogma of faith. No painter will be so divine, like Titian.
All articles by Vittorio Sgarbi
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