The Paintings of Titian


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Titian to 1518


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The work that Titian produced during the first decade of his career is beautiful and varied, but it has raised many questions of attribution and chronology. This book - the first thorough and coherent account of this period in Titian's life - reconstructs what he painted, when he painted it and what these paintings mean. Paul Joannides begins by discussing the probable course of Titian's early career and his relationship to the Bellinis. There are individual excurses on Giorgione and on Sebastiano del Piombo whose work has often been confused with his. Joannides then offers new interpretations of some of Titian's paintings, emphasising their poetic and dramatic qualities. Among other topics, he associates for the first time the paintings in Saint Petersburg, Venice and Houston; lays out Titian's part of the Fondaco; connects the privately owned Resurrected Christ with the Fogg Circumcision; integrates the Dresden Venus and the Berlin Portrait into Titian's work; and establishes the dynamism and inventiveness of the great Assunta of 1516-18. Joannides provides detailed arguments in support of both new and familiar attributions, proposes a more closely reasoned and precise chronology




Titian & Tragic Painting


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Late in his life Titian created a series of paintings--the "Four Sinners,” the "poesie” for his patron Philip II of Spain, and the "Final Tragedies”--that were dark in tone and content, full of pathos and physical suffering.In this major reinterpretation of Titian’s art, Thomas Puttfarken shows that the often dramatic and violent subject matter of these works was not, as is often argued, the consequence of the artist’s increasing age and sense of isolation and tragedy. Rather, these paintings were influenced by discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics that permeated learned discourse in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century. The Poetics led directly to a rich theory of the visual arts, and painting in particular, that enabled artists like Titian to consider themselves on equal footing with poets. Puttfarken investigates Titian’s late works in this context and analyzes his relations with his patrons, his intellectual and humanistic contacts, and his choices of subject matter, style, and technique.







Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic


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"Titian's fame as the greatest colorist in the history of painting has led students of his art to concentrate on problems of style and authenticity rather than on problems of content and meaning. Dr. Panofsky treats this neglected aspect of the Venetian master's work with a wealth of humanistic scholarship, exploring such varied topics as Titian's relationship to the philosophy and literature of his time, his attitude toward the antique, and the reasons behind his unrivaled acclaim as a portraitist. These studies show Titian to have been a man of far richer and more complex culture than hitherto assumed, possessed not only of the supremely gifted hand but of a subtle and poetic mind. Dr. Panofsky thus deepens our insight into the workings of a great artist's imagination and guides us to a fuller understanding of his genius. At the time Dr. Panofsky was preparing this book for publication, he wrote: "The illustrations were made from the best available originals and are all in black-and-white not in spite of but because of the fact that Titian was the greatest colorist that ever lived."--Book jacket.










Death in Documentaries


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Memento mori is a broad and understudied cultural phenomenon and experience. The term “memento mori” is a Latin injunction that means “remember mortality,” or more directly, “remember that you must die.” In art and cultural history, memento mori appears widely, especially in medieval folk culture and in the well-known Dutch still life vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet memento mori extends well beyond these points in art and cultural history. In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori. Bennett-Carpenter shows that documentaries may offer composed transformative experiences in which a viewer may renew one’s consciousness of mortality – and thus renew one’s life.




The Americana


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