This videos is about the High Renaissance in Venice.
So, we're back into northern Italy -- the eastern
side of Italy, and we'll be focusing in on two artists. So, Giorgione and Titian
are the most famous artists and competitors of this period.
However, Giorgione will die relatively young, leaving Titian
as really the dominant figure of the Venetian High and Late
Renaissance. A couple of things to note about the style,
and the way the paintings are created. So, Venetian artists represent light as
softer and more atmospheric, and we'll see this in a few examples.
And we have to think about this in terms of the climate of Venice, and the way that
Venice
looked. Venetian painting is more painterly,
so it emphasizes the fact that is painting, rather than
hiding those brush trucks, we see broad brush strokes.
And the importance of color, so really
playing on the idea that you need color to build up the life of your painting.
Figures in Venetian painting are fuller and fleshier, especially in the case of
Titian. So, if we go back to Michelangelo, we think that
his figures, which were so muscular, even the women.
We see these very fleshy, beautiful women in the Venetian
painting that really demonstrate the differences.
And, number five, Florentine artists emphasize drawing -- what
is often discussed is "disegno" or design.
Venetian artists paint directly on the canvas.
What this means is that Florentine artist are going through a careful
process
of preparing their panel
or they're painting ahead of time. Drawing out exactly what they're going to paint.
Venetian artists are bit more -- they kind of go with flow
a little bit more. They paint directly on the canvas, and they might
change something.
So, what this means is that when you have a Venetian painting
doing a number of different scans on it [X-ray, infrared reflectography] can often reveal
the different ideas the artist had before they came to the final composition,
so it's interesting to actually look and see what's underpaintings
appear to be so that you can see how these paintings were developed.
And then we also have what's called "poesie" or visual poetry.
These narratives that are somewhat mysterious that either we've lost the
stories that what they're intended to represent,
or these are just supposed to be
beautiful scenes in the countryside that don't necessarily
make sense directly to a story. And so these artworks that we've
grappled with for years trying to figure out what they represent.
And we'll go through them and think about some of the different
interpretations.
So just a few notes about the differences to think about. So first off, we have Giorgione's
Tempest. This is a very famous work from 1510, right before the death of Giorgione.
And the way this work was described, around the time that it was
collected,
was that it was a gypsy and a soldier, and that doesn't tell us very much. So
this has become one of the most enigmatic paintings of all time.
So we have a woman who's nearly naked breastfeeding off to the side,
and a man who's holding onto a kind of
spear type of thing, and
we have a broken column behind him. The man is gazing at the woman,
and then you have this moment right before storm is gonna break -- this is the
tempest, of
course. So, you see this little crackle of lightning back
in these bluish gray clouds. So, clearly we're in
a landscape in the "terrafirma" or in the
the countryside outside of Venice
proper. And so there have been so many different ideas as to what's going on.
Is this Adam and Eve? Is this some kind of mythological? story
Is this related to poetry created at the time? We don't know for sure,
and what makes it even more mysterious is we know that Giorgione actually
represented a woman here first.
That the very first way he created the canvas was that there was a woman
bathing,
getting into you the stream here, and then the other woman
doing her breastfeeding. So, again, not very logical.
Is it a Virgin Mary? Probably not -- I mean this women's just sitting on the
ground, and
just breastfeeding in a very kind of undignified
way. One interpretation discusses that it may be a moment
falling in love.
So, you have this crackle of lightning. Is this supposed to
be equated with Cupid's arrow. This man's gazing upon this woman.
Is this supposed to be a self-portrait after Giorgione?
So, hopefully, this gives you a sense of how many different ideas have been put
forth,
but this really speaks to the idea that we do you have a number these mysterious narratives
that we can't quite figure out exactly what they're supposed to represent,
but they are beautiful to look at and there are many elements
that speak to the fleshiness of the female figures , the atmospheric
quality of Venetian painting, and the beautiful use color.
So, next we see here Giorgione's Sleeping Venus.
This is another one with a fleshy female form on a landscape, speaking to the land
outside of Venice. And what we see here is a woman,
who is a Venus figure. There originally was supposed to be a cupid here.
This was probably completed by Titian, following Giorgione's
death and modified. But we see that her eyes are closed.
And we can see that this is probably some had romantic encounter that's going
to happen in the countryside.
And we see that even her fingers are kind of curled in a way that indicates
that perhaps she's even
touching herself in a way. That's been one interpretation. This
may be related to ideas of how to
bear children, and how these images maybe could be instructive,
or that they could be erotic in a way to encourage couples to bear
children.
So these often are associated with marriages and married couples.
But what we see here is this woman reclining, eyes closed,
one hand up and another one down,
and the idea that her eyes are closed is that this allows us to look upon her
without her knowing that we're here. So that was intended to be exciting
for the viewer. A similar work by
probably by Giorgione -- or at least maybe started by Giorgione -- we see the landscape
is very similar to the Tempest.
But, the figures themselves are actually very typical of Titian. They're
little bit larger.
And Titian's figures tend to be even larger than Giorgione's,
even fleshier. But again, we have a very mysterious landscape,
a shepherd in the background, two men: one dressed in fine clothing, one
dressed
in less refined clothing, and then two nude women, so we see a woman here
with some drapery, pouring water into a fountain, a woman sitting here
holding on to a pipe of some kind or
flute, and so we can see again this doesn't all
work together in a logical fashion. Again, this may be a story that we've lost,
or a piece of visual poetry that's not necessarily supposed to make sense
in a literal fashion. But clearly with these women here sitting in the nude,
and these men really not even noticing them, it speak to the idea
that maybe we are seeing things that are actually meant to be figments of the imagination.
And again this may have just been a trend in painting
at the time. This is a work by Titian --
we definitely know is by Titian. Clearly, it's deriving a lot
of its subject matter and its style from Giorgione's
much earlier "Sleeping Venus," but the differences -- the key differences -- are that
we're inside a palace here.
We can see the women getting out a dress to dress this woman.
These were basically your closets of the Renaissance. These are called
cassone. This is what a woman would take into
her new house when she got married. We can see there are beautiful
tapestries and linens on the wall, so clearly so very expensive house.
We see the woman reclining here, similar pose -- one hand down, one hand up.
She's holding flowers, and often the gesture of offering flowers
with the gesture offering yourself. Also,
the blonde hair -- something that Titian tended to prefer.
We tend to see more brunettes with Giorgione, moer blondes with Titian.
We still see the fleshy female form. We still see that crumpled sheet,
hinting at possible lovemaking.
And we also see a little dog here, which is, of course, a symbol of loyalty,
of fidelity, and so possibly this is indicating
loyalty and fidelity in a marriage. So possibly this was commissioned
for the Duke Guidobaldo II's marriage,
and we have actually have some letters where he
is very interested in obtaining this painting from Titian, so this seems to have been
a painting that he [the patron] greatly desired.
Our final stop is to look at work that's pretty late, so we're moving into the later part
of the Renaissance for this example.
but I wanted to show you how Titian's style really changes in the later
portion of his career, so we see that his brush style becomes much looser,
much more painterly we might call it. We see the impasto technique here
where you see thick application of paint. And the story here is called the "Rape of Europa,"
and this is a period when
rape scenes become much more common -- rape and abduction scenes --
and this could be something that patrons were very interested in at the time -- ideas
of male dominance.
Also, it could symbolically allude to ideas of taking what you want in terms
of
taking land that you want, or taking something that you desire
So, these became very popular representations. And ideas of abduction and
rape would have been less disturbing to a Renaissance and Baroque
artists or audience that it is to us today.
But what we see here is the woman Europa -- this is the myth
of the story of how Europe came to be. So there is a woman who was playing with
her
her friends, her girlfriends. Zeus spots her, and Zeus was always interested in
the ladies. He spots Europa and he turns himself into a beautiful white
bull.
And Europa becomes very interested and all of her little friends come and they
decorate the bull; they put beautiful flowers on it -- we see flowers up in its horns.
And when time is right, Zeus carries her off into
the water -- and this is how she eventually becomes Europe.
But we see here this moment where she is kind of flailing around. Her
legs are spread. And the idea is that it probably was supposed to make the Renaissance
audience laugh -- that she looks kind of silly here
with her fleshy shown. And we even see a little Cupid figure
imitating
her, riding on a little fish, so probably the Renaissance audience was
meant to laugh at this --
to think this was funny, but for us it has some more disturbing implications.
And we'll in some the Baroque artworks additional
scenes of rape or abduction the we see
with other artists like Bernini, Rubens, where see stories of men
carting off women or carrying of women, which again today
is disturbing, but, at the time, would have been received
in different ways. It would have spoken to
the male dominance at the time -- and just different senses of humor.