Master of light still in shadow

BY the middle of the 16th century, Titian was not just a famous artist but one of the two greatest living contemporary masters.

Titian's Madonna and Child

BY the middle of the 16th century, Titian was not just a famous artist but one of the two greatest living contemporary masters.

He and Michelangelo were both called divine in their lifetimes. The importance of painting, sculpture and architecture, their status as liberal arts rather than manual crafts, and the social standing of their practitioners no longer needed to be argued in Italy, although it would take until the following century for the same recognition to be achieved north of the Alps.

The Italians loved comparisons and contests: the rivalry of Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti in Florence had been famous; that of Leonardo and Michelangelo had passed into art theory and given rise to the paragone, the debate about the respective merits of painting and sculpture. Titian and Michelangelo were not competing for the same commissions, but their different approaches to painting represented two very different conceptions of the art and its values.

Michelangelo stood for the standards of drawing that had been developed in Florence in the 15th century and perfected in the High Renaissance with Leonardo and Raphael, above all in Rome. His particular approach to drawing had been inspired by the extravagant musculature of late antique sculpture and, thanks to his profound knowledge of anatomy, he was able to translate these models into the colossal male nudes of the Sistine Chapel.

Yet there was something excessive about these figures, and it was the more harmonious Raphael who became, by the end of the 16th century, the great example for modern painters and the reference for the academic teaching that arose in the 17th century.

The Venetian school had remained faithful to the Byzantine tradition longer than elsewhere and always maintained the primacy of light and colour. Perspective, anatomy and the discipline of drawing, fundamental in Florence and Rome, never acquired the same absolute authority for Titian or his master Giovanni Bellini and fellow-pupil Giorgione.

Titian's great contribution to the development of modern painting was to conceive of the picture as a whole optical experience in which colour and tone become indistinguishable. If the Florentine-Roman tradition was concerned with objective and rational definition of bodies in space, the Venetian, in his hands, sought to capture a subjective and sensuous apprehension of visual experience; in effect, all subsequent modern painting has operated between these poles.

This fundamental polarity - embodied by Michelangelo and Titian - was already the matter of debate in the mid-16th century, in Lodovico Dolce's L'Aretino (1557). A century later, at the French Academy, the two sides of the question were represented by Raphael and Titian, before being updated to the more recent figures of Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens. In the 19th century, the opposition of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres and Eugene Delacroix was seen in these terms, and in the 20th century, one thinks, of course, of Picasso and Matisse.

Titian was a supreme artist, but he was not a thinker or a theorist and remains elusive as a personality, even after reading Sheila Hale's monumental biography. He does not seem to be have been motivated by ideas, as Michelangelo was, or even literature and history like Raphael. Mythology, which in the earlier Renaissance had been pregnant with the mystical wisdom of the ancients and would again be resonant with philosophical meaning for Poussin, mostly provides Titian with poetically erotic subjects, including the loves of Jupiter and the fatal encounter of Actaeon and Diana.

Titian is such an impersonal painter, so entirely concerned with the handling of his materials, that a biography is something of a paradox. Hale, with enormous erudition, achieves it largely by reconstructing the social and political context of Venice, down to details of the costumes of the different social classes and the organisation of elections, trade and taxation.

She also ably reconstructs the biographies of the friends and patrons who were instrumental in Titian's career - and many of whom emerge far more readily than the artist as three-dimensional characters.

This book is generally well written and informative and will be useful to anyone interested in Titian, Venice or the art history of the period. But it cannot be recommended without reservations, the first of which is that despite Hale's mastery of the immediately relevant literature, her broader grasp of art history and the ideas dealt with in early art theory is not always entirely convincing, and there are occasional slips, such as the use of the anachronistic term avant-garde in the early 16th century.

More generally, 750 pages is simply too long. Kenneth Clark's brilliant Introduction to Rembrandt (1978), for example, which runs to only 160 pages, leaves one with a much clearer idea of the artist and of the distinctive qualities of his work.

Even more seriously, it is very hard for a clear narrative to emerge when the text is constantly turning off into extended digressions about contemporary events or individuals. It would have been more effective to consign much of the supporting information to footnotes (and some matters to appendices on specific topics). This would have allowed the main body of the text to flow far more clearly.

Illustrations, too, are crucial in a book about a painter, and a handful of colour plates does not suffice. Every picture discussed should be illustrated in black and white at least in the body of the text, and here too extended captions could have allowed a further pruning of the main text. And all of this, in turn, raises the question of the book's format and size.

In the end, one wonders about the intended readership and their reading habits. No doubt the publishers thought lengthy footnotes would look too academic; and I can't help feeling the book implies the reading habits of people who enjoy immersing themselves in those contemporary novels whose length seems more important than their literary quality. Hale's book seems designed for readers who expect to swim in the text rather than to follow a clear exposition that discriminates between the essential and the peripheral.

Titian: His Life
By Sheila Hale
Harper Press, 672pp, $55 (HB)

Christopher Allen is The Australian's national art critic.