The Brooklyn Rail

Sixteenth-century Venice was a rich, powerful republic run by canny businessmen. Residents from the countries that were their trading partners were permitted to live, under close surveillance, in the city. Right by the Rialto Bridge was the housing for the German merchants. (The building is still there.) When in 1505 a fire damaged this very important commercial site, it was quickly rebuilt. And then in 1508 Titian competed with Giorgione in doing frescoes on this building. The exhibition’s Italian title marks this moment as the beginning of Titian’s brilliant career. Giorgione painted a female nude and Titian depicted Judith beheading Holofernes. While Giorgione, an already accomplished painter, took the more important facade on the Grand Canal, Titian’s painting on a wall facing the canal apparently overshadowed the work of his older colleague. Here, as later in his long career, Titian proved to be famously competitive and very successful. These outdoor frescoes did not fully survive for long surrounded by the canals of Venice. But there are some good eighteenth-century copies of both images, and Canaletto did a painting of the Grand Canal which shows them. And about a century ago, an art historian was allowed to splash water on Giorgione’s wrecked picture, which briefly revealed the original glowing colors. The ruined remains of these two frescoes are on display in this show. A digital reconstruction in the Italian catalogue shows Titian’s picture in its original site.

This exhibition is in part an exercise in connoisseurship. Attributions of Giorgione’s small body of paintings have always been highly controversial. Often his work is very difficult to distinguish from Titian’s early paintings. Indeed, at least one work in this show, the Concerto (1507), a close-up of a singer, is not always attributed to him. Recently some art historians have been highly critical of connoisseurship. They are worried about its obvious links to the art market. Fair enough, but it’s impossible to practice Old Master art history without making plausible attributions. When, for example, Tom Nichols contrasts Giorgione and early Titian he makes a statement that begs to be tested against the visual evidence assembled in this show:

Even at his most Giorgionesque the young Titian gives his figures added visual prominence and three-dimensionality, organizing his compositions around moments of intense interchange between the leading protagonists.

Judging just from these two ruined frescoes, it is difficult to understand what happened in 1508, for we are comparing very poorly preserved pictures showing very different subjects. But this exhibition assembles a great deal of relevant auxiliary information about the difference between the men’s styles. We can compare Giorgione’s Madonna col Bambino e i santi Caterina e Giovanni Battista (1510) to Titian’s Madonna con il Bambino (1508). We can contrast Titian’s drawings of the countryside with Giorgione’s legendary landscape La tempest (1502–1503). And we can see the influence of two other artists, Sebastiano del Piombo, who came to Venice from Rome for a period, and Albrecht Dürer, a visitor from Germany, whose works are also on display.

Connoisseurship is complicated by the fact that we are comparing old works with very different histories of conservation. Visitors to the Academia are aware that often Italian museums have very different views of restoration than their English and American colleagues. And so, in making attributions to Giorgione, Titian, and the other artists here, we need to make allowance for the vagaries of preservation. The connoisseur’s working hypothesis is that each major painter has a distinctive style, which develops in the course of their career. And so the difficult goal is to understand how from this myriad of influences Titian formed his style, which governed his chosen subjects and how he depicted them.

“The beginning of Titian’s brilliant career” also has a second, less familiar equally important goal: it is a reconstruction of the public response to some important pre-modern art. In general, we art historians make a basic distinction between modernism, in which art is generally accompanied by a documented public response, and old master works, created under the old regime, where patronage was normally a top-down system. We know that Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) was highly controversial because we have many published reports from the time of its first exhibition in the Salon. And we may like to imagine, also, that when Caravaggio’s sacred works were first shown, they attracted an admiring audience. But in truth, we have only the slightest knowledge of the responses, apart of course from a small intellectual elite.

The change produced for modernism by these records of public response thus is dramatic; important pictures are regularly accompanied by commentaries. At the Rialto in 1508, these frescoes were seen and so could be judged in a public space accessible to everyone. That Titian apparently triumphed reveals something about that visual culture. (At any rate, that’s the story that Giorgio Vasari tells in his Lives, written nearly fifty years later.) The Venetians, it seems, were willing to admire novelty in painting. Needless to say, no one planned this competition before the fire of 1505. And no one in sixteenth-century Venice imagined the development of the public art museum, which only began in the late eighteenth century. But, so I am suggesting, in 1508 a modernist-situation was created temporarily, though without identifying its significance in our present terms. Only now can we understand the claim that Venetian modernism began in 1508. This competition between the two painters soon ended, and no such additional artistic competitions were organized.

Note: On Titian and connoisseurship see Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (Reaktion, London, 2013). On public and modernism, Oskar Bätschmann, The Art Public. A Short History (University of Chicago Press, 2023).