BELLINI, GIORGIONE, TITIAN at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Vienna, Austria - During the first thirty years of the 16th century Venetian painting experienced a remarkable upswing characterized by constant innovations and extraordinary achievements. During these three decades the pioneer of early Renaissance painting, Giovanni Bellini, completed his final works. The highly innovative Giorgione, who died young, executed his whole oeuvre. And the greatest Venetian painter of the century, Titian, reached his prime and set out on an international career that was to take him far beyond the confines of the city. Besides these three great masters Venice was home to numerous other, hardly less important painters, members of both the older and the younger generation. Cima da Conegliano, Marco Basiati and Vincenzo Catera belonged to the older generation or continued to paint in the traditional manner. Lorenzo Lotto - born in Venice but more interested in Northern painting than his contemporaries - painted his highly idiosyncratic works, comprising both hyper-realistic and lyrical-poetic elements.
In 1511 Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian’s rival, went to Rome. Palma il Vecchio moved to Venice from Bergamo and his paintings are among the most successful of the second decade of the 16th century, together with Titian’s. Younger artists such as Paris Bordone and Bonifazio Veronese continued these achievements in their works. Their creativity was stimulated by the short sojourns in Venice of a number of distinguished visitors – Leonardo da Vinci in 1500, Albrecht Durer from 1505 till 1506, Fra Bartolommeo in 1508, and Michelangelo in 1529.
These three decades witnessed an intense fermentation that was to have a profound influence on the development of European painting – after all, the Venetian artists whose works are included in this exhibition all knew each other intimately - as teachers and pupils, as friends and rivals, perhaps even as enemies. They worked in close proximity, competed for the best inventions, borrowed certain elements from each other’s works, changing and altering some of them while ignoring others. Their fruitful interaction may be compared to the similar, almost exactly contemporaneous situation in Florence and Rome between Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and their contemporaries. Thus the term “High Renaissance” - though somewhat out of fashion at present - may also be applied to this phase of Venetian painting.
During this period traditional subjects, especially religious ones, were rephrased. Formerly static-symmetrical compositions featuring half-length or full-length figures of the Virgin and Child with or without saints become asymmetrical, the figures begin to interact with each other and with the viewer which makes them appear much more alive. If placed in a formal church or some other interior setting, a landscape vista is included in the background; later the scene itself is sited in a landscape setting. The same happens to scenes from the life of Christ or the saints: they begin to interact, they are brought to life, and – if you like - they are secularized. Landscape is one of the new subject matters, not only as a setting for religious stories but as an element permeating and uniting almost all subjects. Classical authors had celebrated the pastoral landscape and their works inspired contemporary poets writing in Italian, such as, for example, Jacopo Sannazaro from Naples. The bucolic landscape was also a favorite setting for classical myths and allegories. Titian’s “Concert Champêtre”
(Pastoral Concert), his “Worship of Venus”, Bellini’s “Feast of the Gods”, Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers” and, famously, his Christian allegory “Il Tramonto” (Sunset Landscape) are all placed in a landscape setting. Never before were such precious allegorical myths – now cherished by museums among their most highly valued treasures – united in a single exhibition. On exhibition until January 7, 2007.
However, many of the subjects remain elusive. A good number of them are based on classical literature. The “Feast of the Gods” was inspired by Ovid’s “Fasti”; when commissioning the “Worship of Venus”, Alfonso d’Este asked for a copy of a classical painting known only from a description by the Greek author, Philostratus. Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers” was probably based on a programme devised by a contemporary scholar of classical texts. The same may be true for “Concert Champêtre”. Landscape was also used as the ideal backdrop for another new subject matter, the female nude. Numerous depictions of Venus were inspired by the landscape in the celebrated “Venus” now in Dresden – this exhibition includes an example by Palma Vecchio, though here the landscape remains unfinished. But another painting by him contains no less than thirteen female nudes in a charming landscape.
Woman as the subject of erotic dreams is now transposed into the female half-length portrait, creating a new subject matter or genre, the so-called “bella donna veneziana”. These erotic half-length figures, the first of which was presumably Giorgione’s “Laura”, are probably primarily the expression of male desires and thus a poetic elevation of reality. Male portraits include similarly idealizing modes of depiction that are clearly removed from reality and its constraints; they encompass various poses or moods, from the lovelorn to the poet to the warrior to the cortegiano, the elegant courtier.
Venetian painting was not only innovative in its treatment of different subject matters but also in its development of a completely new technique of painting and the way a picture was increasingly composed on the canvas itself, dispensing with preliminary drawings. Combined with a progressively subtle handling of the new medium of oil painting, it enabled artists to capture sensual atmospheric phenomena created by Venice’s unique light, as well as things like skin or velvet, so realistically that one is almost fooled into believing one can touch them. Venice was the centre of world trade and thus able to supply her artists with the very best materials from all over the world, among them extremely rare pigments. This magnificent exhibition, a seductive feast of visual sensuality permeating all subject matters, will captivate all visitors. Dr. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden Curator of the Exhibition.
The exhibition is organized by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and the National Gallery of Art, Washington and supported by BRACCO, an international leader in diagnostic imaging.
The word “Renaissance” in the exhibition title refers, in the traditional sense, to the rebirth of antiquity – the revival of interest in classical art, literature, and philosophy. But here it also signifies that Venetian painting was transformed – reborn – in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. The exhibition focuses on the period from 1500 to 1530, which represents, visually and intellectually, the most exciting phase of the Renaissance in Venice, when three great masters, the old Bellini, Giorgione, and the young Titian, were all working side by side. Their innovations and those of gifted contemporaries, such as Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, and Lorenzo Lotto, would influence European art for centuries.
DIRECTORS’ FOREWORD
Sixteenth-century Venetian art, from a period regarded as a Golden Age, has been the subject of numerous international loan exhibitions, most recently in London, Paris, Rome, Venice, and Edinburgh. Except for the show focusing on Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” in Rome in 1995, these exhibitions were all large surveys, organized chronologically by medium and artist. Now the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, are offering a new exhibition of Venetian art that differs in important ways from the previous surveys. Our show is limited to paintings, the quintessential artistic medium of the school, and it concentrates on the period 1500–1530, which represents the most exciting phase of the Renaissance in Venice. Our exhibition also differs signi ficantly from its predecessors in that, instead of dividing up the artists, it explores the relationships between them by comparing and contrasting their works. Consisting of nearly sixty pictures, the exhibition in Washington and Vienna provides an opportunity to see displayed together many of the greatest masterpieces of Venetian painting. The collection in Vienna is a historic one, formed by the Habsburg dynasty, particularly the archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and already complete or nearly so by the mid-seventeenth century. Most of the Venetian paintings that Washington provided to the exhibition were brought together by two early twentieth-century collectors, Samuel H. Kress and Joseph Widener, whose art joined that of the Gallery’s founder Andrew Mellon. Pooling their resources. To these were added outstanding loans from other institutions, including the National Gallery, London, the Uf fizi in Florence, and the Prado in Madrid. The large majority of the works in the exhibition appear at both venues.
In addition to highlighting recently cleaned pictures, the exhibition incorporates the findings of recent technical investigations into the artists’ methods and materials. X-radiography, infrared re flectography, and cross sections of paint layers have brought forward new evidence about how the artists designed and painted their pictures. The urge to innovate — clearly evident in the technique, as well as in the subject matter and style, of these works — makes Bracco the perfect sponsor for the Washington venue of the exhibition. This company is a global leader in all aspects of innovative diagnostic imaging, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and x-ray imaging.
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