Good morning and welcome to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
My name is Nat Silver and I'm the Curator of the Collection. Now in a year's time
it's here at the Museum in Boston that we're going to reunite for the first
time in the United States Titian's 'poesie'.
This is a life changing event, a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we
encourage you to come to this exhibition. Now what are Titian's 'poesie'?
Well, Titian painted between 1551 and 1562 a cycle of mythological paintings.
There were six paintings and he made them for the most powerful man in Europe,
King Philip II of Spain. All of these paintings, all six paintings, depicted
scenes in which gods come into contact with humans and the kind of fireworks
that ensue from these moments. They're pictures of lust and tragedy and
sometimes of death. In this case, we have here at the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum the last of those series of six paintings. So this is the 'Rape of Europa'
and it's the sixth painting in this cycle. This is a cycle that's not just
important for the painter Titian but a cycle that transformed Western European
art painting from Velázquez and beyond so we want to talk a little
bit about this painting here at the Gardener, the 'Rape of Europa'. Now where does
this story come from? The story comes from an ancient poet named Ovid and the
story goes as follows: Jupiter, the King of the gods, was lusting
after the young noblewoman named Europa. Now he knew that Europa was outside with
some of her maidens in a field picking flowers and he had a herd of cattle
driven down a mountain towards them and transformed himself into one of these
cows so that he could get as close as he possibly could to the object of his
desire, to Europa. Now what you're looking at here in Titian's painting in the very
background is just that: you see on the mountain range in the distance and you
see a herd of cattle at the far left-hand side of the painting on the
shore. If you look really carefully you can see there's one pale coloured cow
right there. Now what happened? Well as soon as Europa saw Jupiter as a cow, as a
bull, she got as close as she possibly could because he was the most beautiful
one of the bunch and she wove a crown of flowers and put it on his head.
Now as soon as she got close enough to put it on his head he swept
her off her feet and carried her off across the sea and that's exactly what
you see here. Titian focuses on the most dramatic moment of this story, the moment
of her kidnap and her abduction. So this is the moment right before her rape,
that's his intention, and these are stories, like the rape of Europa, that
have momentous consequences for Western European history. So it's the child produced by
their union that goes on to become the ruler of Crete, the founder of Europe, and
so that's the story behind this painting. Now you can see that Titian looked up to
two translations of Ovid in all of the details. Now if we get up close to
the page you can see here that the bull is wearing the crown of flowers that
lured Europa close to him and allowed him to carry her off across the sea. Now,
of course, this is a kidnap and abduction so you can actually read the terror on
Europa's face if you look carefully at the whites of her eyes there just
underneath her forearm and, of course, being kidnapped she waives this red scarf
towards her friends on the shore who wave back in terror. She's trying to get
their attention to call out, to say "help me". Now, Titian conveys this sense of panic
and this sense of terror not just in her face and through her actions but in the very
way, in the very posture, that she takes on the back of the bull, Jupiter himself.
You can see that it's an incredibly precarious position which speaks to the
precarious nature of her situation and an impending rape that's about to take
place when they make landfall just beyond this painting. You can see that here
she's balanced on the back of the bull, her legs are spread wide open and
perhaps if she were to slip off she'd slip into the water and drown or
maybe even be eaten by a sea monster, who's conjured here in the form of this
terrifying looking scaly fish with tiny teeth. Now at the same time that we see the
terror on her face and the precariousness of her position we can
also sense this very strange element of humour.
Now humour was an element of the story which Ovid himself wrote into it,
even in the fact that the idea that the King of the gods would transform himself
into a farmyard animal like a bull to go after the object of his
desire was something that his readers found very funny despite the horror of
this story. Now Titian really buys into that and he
has the bull look at us with these almost innocent eyes as if to suggest "Who? Me?"
He conveys that little bit of humour in other ways as well. While Europa
cries out in terror for her friends, this cupid is riding a dolphin
after Europa in the same way that Europa appears to be riding the bull and if we
look closely at the pose of this Cupid he appears to be mimicking or imitating or
making fun of Europa's own position in this very precarious pose. Now Isabella
Stewart Gardner bought this painting in 1896 bringing it to Boston, one of the
greatest Renaissance art works in the United States. When it got here it was a
huge success. People fell at their feet to come and see the
painting in her house and it eventually became a cornerstone of her new museum
which opened in 1903, the cornerstone of this room which she actually named
the Titian room after the painter who made this but its purchase wasn't always a
foregone conclusion. In 1896 her agent Bernard Berenson had actually offered
her a different painting first, not a Titian, but Thomas Gainsborough's
'Blueboy'. He offered it to her for a huge sum of money, for £30,000 pounds.
Gardner who is, at the time, considering it and seemed to be willing to go for this
painting, was very excited about it, was suddenly devastated when the owner of
the painting in England withdrew it from sale. Now her very crafty and clever art
advisor Berenson knew that she was clearly willing to spend a lot of money
on a painting even though this other opportunity had disappeared. He realised
that there was a Titian on the market which absolutely aligned with her taste
in Renaissance art. He had already offered it to one of her Boston
competitors named Susan Warren but he had failed to send Mrs Warren a
photograph of the painting so she hadn't yet decided. He quickly changed his mind,
sent a photograph to Isabella Stewart Gardner, she agreed on the spot and the
painting was sent to Boston several months later becoming what would be the
most famous Renaissance painting in the United States. Now when she moved it here
to her museum she created an installation around it that encourages
us to look at some of those wonderful details that
we were just talking about a second ago. So if you remember I was pointing out
this little Cupid in the foreground next to which Titian's signature appears, you
can actually see his inscription 'Titianus P' for 'Titian painted it' and below
that Cupid on a table Gardner installed this Cupid. Now this is a 17th century
French bronze, nothing to do with the Renaissance Italian painting above it,
and it originally would have stood vertically on this ball so that the
cupid was standing up blowing a horn. Gardner chose this idiosyncratic lying
down position deliberately because it corresponds to the pose of the cupid
in Titian's painting above and it encourages you to look at this detail as
well as of course to notice the signature in the bottom left-hand corner
so the fact that she was very proud that this painting was by Titian. Now on the
table next to it, opposite in the other corner, she shows us several other works
of the 'Rape of Europa' so here is a drawing, a copy after the famous painting
and then in front of that drawing, there's a tiny bronze relief and that's
the story of the rape of Europa but by an American artist, an American artist
she knew named Paul Manship so this is one of the ways that Gardner built a
kind of a sense of looking into the museum and a sense of the continuity of
the history of art from the past to the present in all of its different forms.
Now one of the things that we are most excited about and one of the reasons why
this exhibition is very special for us is because it gave us an
opportunity to clean our painting. Now out of the six paintings of 'poesie'
ours is the only one that's just been cleaned. As far as we can tell it hadn't
been cleaned since Gardner bought it and over
more than a hundred years, of course, the surface of the painting had gotten very
dirty so what we're seeing here is the newly cleaned painting in a new light
and you will be able to see it when you get up close to it in the exhibition
gallery. Now I encourage you to take this opportunity in the next few weeks to
look at the 'Rape of Europa' here at home in the Titian room because on February
10th our painting will be going on tour for the beginning of this exhibition
first in London then in Edinburgh, Scotland and finally in Madrid before it returns
to us here in Boston in February of 2021 when you all have to come and see this
fantastic exhibition here with us now. Thank you all for tuning in today and we
encourage you to come and see Titian's 'Rape of Europa'.