Beauty, love, poetry – that is what Titian’s art was all about, and that is what it should be about again today, the curator Sylvia Ferino-Pagden informed those present at the press conference for the opening of her large Tizian exhibition. “These are not past terms, but elementary components of our life.” That can hardly be contradicted. But you shouldn’t trust these terms, neither in the past, nor in the present, and certainly not in museums. These are by no means innocent terms, the respective definitions of beauty and love in a society had and have to do with power, mostly with power over women, today sometimes also with power over all genders. What was understood by love in Titian’s time, in 16th century Venice, can only be compared with our understanding of it in idealizing, romantic approaches. The historical reality of the socially completely impermeable, patriarchal Doge Republic, has been widely published about, consisted of dynastic compulsions and rape.
Some paintings – such as “Young Woman with Feather Hat” (around 1534/36) from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg traveled far.
(Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum, 2021, Photo: Dmitri Sirotkin)
It is actually amazing, for a moment you are almost gripped by a strange nostalgia – suddenly to find yourself in such a rich exhibition with 60 paintings by Titian and his contemporaries, with loans from half the world, on which all these discourses and research of the past decades have almost no trace seem to have passed. Is it then the apple of oblivion that Tintoretto’s Eva hands us right at the entrance over Adam’s shoulder turned away? In order to be able to see the very young brides, whose deep, dark looks we are about to meet, again as so many generations of prince collectors and art historians have seen and presented them: as “the celebration of women as the greatest theme of life, love and the art”? As it says here in the press release.
Above all, the show celebrates the beauty of painting with classic motifs such as “nymph and shepherd”.
(Photo: © KHM-Museumsverband)
Brides or newlyweds are supposed to be gathered here in the first room. This is the central scientific finding that is to be conveyed in the major autumn exhibition of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which has been postponed for a year. Not portraits of courtesans, who were long believed to be represented in the “Belle Donne”, a type of image that Titian developed at the beginning of the 16th century: female half-length pictures between portrait and ideal, whose occasionally exposed breast was interpreted as “erotic”. These flashes of breasts are interpreted in the exhibition as an “opening of the heart” with reference to historical sources such as Giovanni Bonifacio’s “L’arte de ‘cenni” (1616), a treatise on gestures. Even if one cannot identify any of the portrayed in this way, and also does not know the client, it should be about wedding allegories, ordered by the future or husbands to express their hope that the intended surrender to this connection and their duty of (male) reproduction meet.
The portrait of a child bride is rated “magical” in the catalog
However, this social background was not disclosed in the exhibition. The splendid presentation celebrates the surfaces, which is just as irritating as the enthusiastic tone of some explanatory texts. The end point of the show, for example, is unbearable, the “enchanting child portrait” of Clarissa Strozzi, whom Tizian portrayed as a bride in 1542 at the age of two, with all the attributes of a “perfect wife”: in a long white dress, with a scented ball hanging from her belt , she feeds a little dog, standing for loyalty, with a ring-shaped pastry that was given to mothers in childbed. “Magical”? Instead, the curatorial off-screen commentary would be a presentation of the simple facts about the customs of the time of marrying minors. Like the marriage of eleven-year-old Princess Giulia da Camerino to Guidobaldo della Rovere, who bought Titian’s “Venus de Urbino” – a female nude.
The gender relations of the time are perfectly reflected – one would only have had to tell these stories: Portrait of Pietro Aretino (around 1527).
(Photo: © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler)
This “Venus” bears the same facial features as one of Titian’s favorite models, on which the exhibition shows in three versions, all dated 1534-36, how Titian worked, which female roles customers could choose in his workshop: very chaste as “La Bella “for example with elaborately braided golden hair, the ideal of beauty at the time, and fully clothed (recognizable as a courtesan with a delicate yellow veil hanging from one shoulder). With a pearl necklace and a bare bridal bosom in fur (a present to the wife that was popular at the time). Or captured in the act of dropping the covers – only the feather hat sits as if it had grown on.
All three have the same features. In the exhibition there is no assumption, in the catalog one sees “no evidence” that Angela del Moro was a model here, which the art historian Sheila Hale, author of the Tizian biography 2013, sees as a given. And also the Munich author and art historian Lea Singer, whose novel “La Fenice” revolves around the astonishing life of this courtesan. She was critical of the Vienna exhibition, but her book is still being sold in the shop and was quoted in the catalog, so it is difficult to speak of censorship, which the Singers publishing house already sensed due to scheduling problems for a requested book presentation.
After all, they have dedicated their own cabinet to the “proto-feminists”
Criticism of the access to this exhibition, designed by three curators, remains justified. Although it seems to be a question of generations, which does not excuse anything, but explains a lot. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (* 1950) was director of the KHM-Gemäldegalerie until 2014 and for a long time a strong female voice in this Viennese museum. As a Titian expert, she is undisputed, and in terms of art history, the exhibition, which will move on to the Palazzo Reale in Milan, is flawless, also in the secondary strands and details. For example, the fashion and jewelry in use at the time are not only explained, but also substantiated with real examples, such as the intertwined double ring of the married couple. The female iconography, alien to us today, becomes legible – the loose hair of the bride, the braided hair of the wife, the V-gesture of some fingers, which stands for Venus or Virtus.
The influence of the literature of the time, with which painting was in competition, is also recognized. A separate cabinet is dedicated to the Venetian poets and philosophers, another to their colleagues, who were given a voice for the first time at that time – the “protofeminists” who wielded a sharp tongue. “Oh, exclaimed Leonora, like many women, instead of marrying a man, it would be better to buy a beautiful pig every year for the carnival, because then they would be nice and round all year round, there would be someone to make them fat Take care of things and not bother you all the time! ” At least that’s how Moderata Fonte summed it up. As if the possibility of freedom had been one back then – around half of all patricians in Venice were in cloister custody, so to speak. The marriage, which required a dowry, was something most families could afford only for the first-born daughter.
Courtesan was the third option. Which brings us once more to the famous Angela del Moro, known as Zaffetta, immortalized by Pietro Arentino as a special feature in his “Hetaera Talks”, close friends with Titian, as sources show. Her fate, only half-heartedly hinted at in the catalog, seems harsh to us, was probably a common one and is passed down through a particularly perfidious hundred-stanza poem: “Il Trentuno della Zaffetta” describes her rape of eighty men as a punishment because she dared to become a high-ranking one To reject admirers. Lorenzo Venier, the author of the pamphlet.
The conciliation of this exhibition, which arose out of a feminism that is no longer up-to-date, may therefore perhaps be that this brutal reality is faded out. That women like Angela del Moro should continue to shine and remain as goddesses of beauty for all eternity. Who dares to know what they would have wanted themselves.
Titian’s image of women until January 16 in the Kunsthistorischebn Museum (KHM) in Vienna; thereafter from February 23rd. until May 29, 2022 in the Palazzo Reale, Milan. The catalog costs 39.95 euros.