Florence: Titian in the Pitti Palace

Edward Hutton ended his tour of the Pitti Palace with a discussion of its collection of Titian masterpieces by the hand of Titian, the famed Venetian master, whom he regarded as the "greatest painter of Italy, of the world."

 There remains to be considered the splendid ever living work of Titian. The early work of the greatest painter of Italy, of the world, greatest in the variety, number, and splendour of his pictures, is represented in the Pitti, happily enough by one of the most lovely of all Italian paintings, the Concert so long given to Giorgione. A monk in cowl and tonsure touches the keys of a harpsichord, while beside him stands an older man, a clerk and perhaps a monk too, who grasps the handle of a viol; in the background, a youthful and ambiguous figure, with a cap and plume, waits, perhaps on some interval to begin a song. Yet, indeed, that is not the picture, which, whatever its subject may be, would seem to be more expressive than any other in the world. Some great joy, some great sorrow, seems about to declare itself. What music does he hear, that monk with the beautiful sensitive hands, who turns away towards his companion? Something has awakened in his soul, and he is transfigured. Perhaps for the first time, in some rhythm of the music, he has understood everything, the beauty of life which passeth like a sunshine, now that it is too late, that his youth is over and middle age is upon him. His companion, on the threshold of old age, divines his trouble and lays a hand on his shoulder quietly, as though to still the tumult of his heart. Like a vision, youth itself, ambiguous, about to possess everything waits, like a stranger, as though invoked by the music, on an interval that will never come again, that is already passed.

 

If Titian is really the sole painter of this picture, how loyal he has been to his friend, to that new spirit which lighted Venetian art  as the sun makes beautiful the world. But indeed one might think that , even with Morelli, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, and Berenson against us, not to name others who have done much for the history of painting in Italy, we might still believe, not altogether without reason, that Giorgione had some part in the Concert, which after all passed as his altogether for two hundred and fifty years… that figure of a youth, so ambiguous in its beauty—could any other hand than Giorgione’s have painted it? does it ever appear in Titian’s innumerable masterpieces at all? Dying as he did at the age of thirty-three, Giorgione must have left many pictures unfinished, which Titian, his friend and disciple almost, may well have completed, and even signed, in an age when works, almost wholly untouched by a master, were certainly sold as his.

 

Titian’s other pictures here, with the exception of the Head of Christ and the Magdalen, are portraits all…

 

In another portrait of about the same time, the Young Englishman, we have Titian at his best. The extraordinarily beautiful English face, fulfilled with some incalculable romance, is to me at least by far the most delightful portrait in Florence. One seems to understand England, her charm, her fascination, her extraordinary pride and persistence, in looking at this picture of one of her sons. All the tragedy of her kings, the adventure to be met with on her seas, the beauty and culture of Oxford, and the serenity of her country places, come back to one fresh and unsullied memories of the defiling and trumpery cities that so lately have begun to destroy her….

Titian: Mary Magdalen

For Titian seems to have created life with something of the ease and facility of a natural force; to have desired always Beauty as the only perfect flower of life; and while he was not content with the mere truth, and never with beauty divorced from life, he has created life in such abundance that his work may well be larger than the achievement of any two other men, even the greatest in painting; yet in his work, in the work that is really his, you will find nothing that is not living, nothing that is not an impassioned gesture reaching above and beyond our vision into the realm of that force which seems to be eternal.

 

###

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 341-345.