I think of Ovid as one of the most painterly of all poets.
Ovid always loves to set the scene.
Even if you’d never seen Titian’s paintings, I think in reading the Ovid you immediately
have an idea of place.
He is so visual, and he makes you think visually with his descriptiveness and the adjectives
he uses in the idea of touch, and the coolness, for example, the coolness of the grotto and
the nakedness of the flesh, it’s all so evocative.
Titian is almost the reverse of that.
He is the most poetic of painters and so in many, many ways it is an ideal meeting of
minds between these two very gifted men.
Ovid has a way of making poetry enjoyable, and I think Titian was a master of that as
well.
He certainly knew how to spin an extraordinary tale in a painting and he did that through
the gaze, through touch.
For example, the nymph’s foot in the icy stream, he makes us feel its cool freshness,
and so on.
He employs everything in his armoury, if you like.
Many of those tools or weapons, shall we say, are borrowed from poetry.
So for example, I think there’s a lot about rhyme, rhythm, contrast, antithesis and surprise,
all the tactics that Ovid employed.
Titian kind of recreates them in his own special style, which is particularly humane.
I think if people call Titian’s work poetic, they’re talking about poetic in the right
way, which is that he uses enormous precision and depth to bring about something very, very
human, rather than to create something romantic or epic.
And I think Titian’s ability to draw out essential human qualities in every figure
he depicted is what moved me most, this character moved me most, Callisto, because of this incredible
focus on her belly.
He doesn’t objectify her belly, he actually invests everything in it; he invests the acts
of the Gods in it.
The whole story is there, in this very, very human, swelling body.
These pictures are completely unprecedented in terms of their scope, the cast of characters
and the psychological interplay between them, and Titian was self-conscious about this.
He was the first one to call these paintings ‘poesie’, poems.
And he realised he had achieved something very special.