Art: Titian's Venus and Adonis

Art: Titian's Venus And Adonis Titian was one of the great painters of the Renaissance, and leader of the Venetian School in the Sixteenth Century. His Venus and Adonis, which now hangs at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is a work illustrative of both his personal style and of the period. Venus and Adonis is an oil painting on canvas. The painting was created for King Phillip II of Spain as one of eight others in a series of mythological subjects.

(the Collection, National Gallery of Art, 2006) Mythological themes were extremely fashionable at the time, and frequently to be seen in the residences of Western European kings and nobles. The artwork shows Adonis clutching the leashes of a pack of dogs with one hand, while with another he holds a spear. A near-naked Venus has thrown herself onto him, her arms grasped around his chest. She appears desperate to keep from departing. In a nearby tree hangs a bow, while cupid sleeps in the shade of an adjacent branch.

A golden urn, or similar vessel, lies overturned at Venus' feet. An elegant and voluptuous picture that showed off the erudition and culture of the king for whom it was made, it would - centuries later - grace the collection of an American collector, revealing his sensibilities.

The picture's current placement as part of the Getty's collection reveals too, the paintings movement from a private setting to a public one - what was once visible only to the eyes of a few, very elite personages is now available for the appreciation of all. Oil paintings were typical of Western art in this period. The medium was ideal depicting gentle gradations of color and for creating a powerful sense of depth and fluidity of motion.

Linseed oil was first employed as a medium of painting by the Flemish masters of the late Middle Ages. By Titian's day, it had become well-established in Italy, replacing the earlier tempera, but Titian was to further elaborate on the technique. Titian was reinventing the syntax of representation in oil painting... demarcating the boundaries in which the medium would be used up to the present day...

[His] ability to make material take shape as much in the mind as on the surface of the canvas far surpassed that of his predecessors. In fact, he rejected the idea of high finish in his paintings in favor of a surface that shows the mark of the artist's hand as it magically transubstantiates paint into the substance of the material world. Titian, like other European painters of that period, and later, sought to re-create a world on the canvas.

They hoped to fix an action, a feeling, an idea, in time and forever, yet they desired also that the person, scene, or object, should appear to possess a life of its own - that it should speak to the viewer, and tell its own story. One could view one o these paintings and believe that one was witnessing real life. Concomitantly, one could feel all of the emotions that one could feel were one actually participating in the scene.

The technique of creating such a living, breathing work of art is not simple. It requires numerous steps and materials.

Starting with a blank canvas, an artist like Titian would have built up a series of layers of different materials: coat of size (glue) mixed with white (like chalk or marble dust), to make the canvas as brilliant as possible; then the imprimatura (underpainting) over the entire canvas; then the underdrawing; the grisaille (a monochrome version of the painting, in full detail); and finally the painting itself -- a succession of body colors, painted outlines, details, glazes, and varnish.

Elkins 169) In a very real sense, the building up of the painting represents the building up of the story, the creation of the life that is the work of art. Through this laborious process, Titian, and others who work in the medium of oil paint, are forced to consider in incredible detail the entire plan of their work; the effect of each brushstroke and additional layer of color, glaze, and varnish.

The grisaille version of the finished painting is a kind of template upon which the artist builds, each step adding to the effect, introducing greater or lesser amounts of color, light, and emotion. It is a difficult undertaking, but well worth the result, as can be seen in Venus and Adonis. As lifelike as the painting may appear, it is, of course, not a depiction of an eyewitness event, but rather the retelling of an episode in myth.

The picture captures the instant at which the Goddess Venus has attempted to stop the handsome Adonis from leaving on a hunt during which he is fated to be killed by a wild boar. Miles 196) Titian has carefully chosen each figure and object in the painting as a way of representing the specific details of this dramatic moment in the tale. The pack of dogs and the spear convey the hunt. The dogs, in fact, look ready to dash off somewhere outside of the scene depicted in the painting.

The bow left hanging in the tree denotes that, whatever danger Adonis encounters, he will need to face it at close quarters. Venus, meanwhile, is nearly naked - a sign of the more peaceful allure of love and sex. She has apparently overturned a goblet, symbolic of simpler pleasures - and times - having "run out." Cupid - the mythological son of Venus, and himself, God of Love, is shown asleep on a nearby rock. That he sleeps is ominous for Venus's designs.

Love, the object of her quest is not awake; not active. Her entreaties will be in vain. Adonis will depart on fatal mission. The images within the painting form an allegory of this episode in the tale of Venus and Adonis. Allegory was enormously popular in this period, and later. Phillip II, and many of the painter's later owners, would have seen the entire scene as an allegory of some virtue or moral lesson they deemed important.

Mythological scenes frequently stood as lessons on good conduct, or as critiques of current affairs. Under the guise of presenting a long ago vent, one whose reality was perhaps lost in the mists of human memory, they served like today's political cartoons, or television series, like the Simpsons and South Park, to teach valuable lessons to powerful individuals who might otherwise have been offended by overt criticism. In his choice of subject, medium, and technique, Titian was both an innovator, and a man of his times.

Tiziano Vecelli, or Vecellio, was born in Italy, near Venice, in the late Fifteenth Century. It is interesting that in English, we know him by a Latinized version of his name - another sign of the importance of Classical influences in the age in which he lived. That age was the Renaissance, a period during which the brightest and most creative minds of the West looked to the vanished world of Ancient Greece and Rome for example of the ideal civilization.

Poring through ancient texts, they revived much of Classical thought and lore. The figures of Greek and Roman myth become as real to the educated men and women of the Renaissance as the Saints to the common people, and to the intellectuals of the medieval era. Renaissance artists looked also at the surviving example of Roman art and architecture; studied them, and the writings of Ancient theorists, and created what they believed to be an ideal artistic type and style, one that ultimately based on time-honored models.

In reality, Titian, and his contemporaries in art, architecture, music, and literature, gave birth to a vibrant new tradition in art and thought. This tradition derived many of its elements from a glorified Greco-Roman past, but added much to them, and considerably altered them in many ways. The Renaissance was more than a "re-birth," it was something new and exciting - the ideas and outlooks represented by Titian and the leading lights of.