Unearthing Titian’s stories
Sacred love is naked because in this case nakedness stands not for sexual promiscuity but for freedom from worldly attachment
Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (1514) in the Borghese Gallery in Rome is a picture that tantalises many visitors today; they are attracted by its exquisite quality, the beauty of the two female figures and the charm of the poetic landscapes that extend in the background on either side. But they find the subject elusive, the underlying concept hard to grasp and the figures impossible to identify. If pressed, they would probably say that the naked figure must be profane love; in fact it is the reverse: sacred love is naked and profane clothed.
Of course one cannot expect to understand a mythological picture without knowing the story, or in this case to read an allegorical painting without a knowledge of the ideas that are being represented, or the iconographic conventions that help to identify those ideas. In this case the two loves referred to are akin to the two faces of Venus we discussed a couple of weeks ago in talking about Botticelli’s Primavera.
The underlying concept is Neoplatonic, but with a slightly more Christian emphasis in the terminology and also the iconography. Sacred love is naked because in this case nakedness stands not for sexual promiscuity but for freedom from worldly attachment; the lamp she holds is a motif from Christian iconography and is associated with the theological virtue of charity or love. This eclectic use of a Christian symbol in an otherwise Neoplatonic work would have been avoided elsewhere but is typical of the sometimes idiosyncratic Venetian approach to such matters. As visitors will remember, it is only in Venice that figures from the Old Testament are treated as honorary saints, so that you encounter churches dedicated to San Moisè or San Giobbe.
Sacred love, then, is naked or nearly naked, while profane love is dressed in the finery of earthly vanity and hedonism. In the centre, a figure of Cupid disturbs the water of the fountain: still water is an ancient symbol of peace of mind, and the Stoic word ataraxy, meaning a calm state of mind, etymologically implies water not churned up by oars, for example. The troubling of the calm water immediately suggests the disturbance of sexual and emotional arousal.
Perhaps this suggests what is going on in the head of profane love, as she looks out rather absently at us. Below sacred love, in the relief carved on the side of the fountain, is what looks like a man being flogged by another figure, but is perhaps more plausibly to be identified as the flaying of Marsyas, a subject that Titian painted in a late masterpiece. But as mentioned earlier, this ostensibly cruel subject, in its Neoplatonic interpretation, evoked the liberation of the soul from the body.
In the course of his long career, Titian frequently depicted both kinds of love. In his Noli me tangere (c. 1514), painted at around the same time, and which we were lucky enough to be able to see in Canberra earlier this year, he ventures into ambiguous territory between the two, evoking an unmistakeable physical tension between the figures of Mary Magdalene and Christ. In the limited space available here, however, I would like to concentrate on a few of his mythological pictures, for Titian was one of the greatest and most influential exponents of such subjects, even if his approach to them was more intuitive than intellectual.
Even this, however, varies according to the circumstances of the commission. Looking at these pictures again, it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast between the mythologies that he painted in the 1520s for Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, and those he made 30 years later for King Philip II of Spain. One factor was undoubtedly Titian’s supreme confidence in the later period, when he was regularly spoken of as a divine genius, but equally important was the difference between the highly literate and refined environment of an Italian Renaissance court and the much less intellectually sophisticated milieu of Spain.
The paintings for Ferrara are particularly complex in their iconography and use of both literary and archaeological sources. The greatest of these represents the arrival of Bacchus to rescue Ariadne, who has been left by Theseus on the island of Naxos. Titian would have known Ovid’s treatment of the myth in both his early Heroides and the later Metamorphoses, which became the primary mythological sourcebook for painters. But the brief account in Metamorphoses VIII is mostly about Ariadne’s transformation into the constellation Corona Borealis, as illustrated in Tintoretto’s painting of the subject (1576-77).
Titian’s picture, on the other hand, closely follows the lively image conjured up by Catullus in his Poem 64 (lines 251-64). But he also incorporates a number of archaeological references that would have delighted his learned patrons: Bacchus alighting from his chariot combines two figures of Orestes from a sarcophagus in the Vatican; Ariadne recalls the Venus Callipyge or a similar statue, and the satyr entwined with snakes alludes to the recently rediscovered (1506) statue of Laocoön.
But this picture, like others in the Ferrara series inspired by the late Greek author Philostratus, is based on a text that itself purports to be the description of a work of art. The literary evocation of a visual image is known as ecphrasis; the first great model was Homer’s elaborate description of the Shield of Achilles in Iliad XVIII, but ecphrasis became a favourite device of the Hellenistic poets whom Catullus is imitating. In later antiquity it grew into a genre in its own right, a belle-lettristic exercise that produced several collections of probably fictional descriptions of paintings or even whole galleries of pictures.
It was very tempting for Renaissance artists to reconstruct lost masterpieces of ancient art, even if these texts were mostly literary inventions rather than descriptions of real paintings.
One of the first to attempt such a reconstruction was Botticelli, whose Calumny of Apelles (1494-95) was based on the description, in this case possibly a real picture, by Lucian. Titian’s use of Catullus is one of the most successful attempts; but in any case part of the pleasure his audience would have taken in this painting was as a reverse ecphrasis, the hypothetical remaking of a lost image from antiquity.
One of his much later masterpieces, the Rape of Europa (1559-62), draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but also on a prose ecphrastic passage in the late antique novel The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Statius. Nonetheless the composition is much less self-consciously scholarly than the Bacchus and Ariadne; the emphasis is rather on the disarray of the girl, almost implausibly balanced on the back of the divine bull, Jupiter (Zeus) in disguise, who is carrying her across the sea to Crete where she will become the mother of Minos as well as giving her name to a whole continent.
In Diana and Callisto (1556-59), another of the great series painted for Philip II, he draws mainly on the Ovidian narrative, which typically combines vivid and even sensational storytelling with the leaven of humour and irony; as already suggested, this approach was better suited to the Spanish audience, but in some ways it was also better suited to Titian, with his uniquely immediate and imaginative feeling for mythology.
The story is one of the few myths to evoke lesbian eroticism: for Callisto is one of the nymphs of Diana (Artemis), virgin goddess of the hunt. In order to seduce her, Jupiter assumes the form of Diana herself; the girl is surprised at first by her mistress’s amorous advances but yields to them until it is too late. She becomes pregnant and conceals her growing belly until one day the girls are bathing in a stream and her shame is revealed, as we see in the picture. Diana banishes her as unchaste, and then Juno, blaming her for seducing her husband, turns her into a bear. In the sequel, her son grows up and many years later, as a young hunter, nearly kills his own mother before Jupiter prevents this tragedy by snatching them both away and turning them into the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
But it is not only the philandering Jupiter and his chronically jealous and angry wife Juno who are the cause of human unhappiness. Pindar, in Pythian 9, tells how Apollo is smitten with the nymph Cyrene whom he sees slaying a lion with her bare hands; she bears him a son, Aristaeus, who is the central figure of Virgil’s Georgic IV, and in turn the father of Actaeon.
Actaeon is a votary of Diana and spends his days hunting in the woods until one day, by ill fortune, he happens to see the goddess herself bathing with her nymphs; thus Titian’s painting of the event makes a natural pendant to the other scene of Diana bathing. Enraged at this violation of her chastity, Diana splashes him with water from the fountain, turning him into a stag; he is then set upon and torn apart by his own hounds.
This is a very old story, illustrated on a fifth century metope from Selinunte that is today in the Archaeological Museum in Palermo. It is a gripping, even nightmarish image. In the late 16th century Giordano Bruno, the brilliant thinker eventually condemned to death for heresy and burnt in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome in 1600, composed a couple of sonnets in which he wrote of how disturbing his own thoughts were to him, likening them to Actaeon’s hounds that devoured their own master.
The painting that Titian produced for the king of Spain shows the unhappy young man suddenly happening upon the goddess and her nymphs at their bath. He does not represent the sequel, although even his Spanish audience would have known what came next. But this also reminds us of a paradox: that while Ovid was the painter’s handbook of mythology at this period, an unspoken sense of decorum more or less prohibited the depiction of human bodies undergoing monstrous transformation.
Literal metamorphosis could be shown in woodblock illustrations for books, but not in the highest genre of history painting. And this is what makes Titian’s very late masterpiece, The Death of Actaeon (1559-75), so remarkable. For in this work which he never delivered to Philip but kept in his studio, the hunter is shown with a stag’s head, set upon by his dogs.
In the foreground, meanwhile, Diana has just let fly an arrow at the unfortunate youth; the artist takes a liberty with the story to emphasise the goddess’s responsibility for the death, but such is his attunement to the feeling of the story that he unconsciously reproduces a combination already used by the Pan Painter in a beautiful fifth century BC Attic krater, today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
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