10-10 Titian

Hello. Titian was the most important and famous member of the 16th century Venetian school and one of the most influential artists who's ever lived. His techniques, particularly his ability to capture personality and his application and the use of colour, influenced the whole of Western art. Let's start with Venice, the city that has captured the hearts of millions and which was the home of the adult Tiziano Vecchielio, commonly known in English as Titian. Now Venice has changed little since Titian moved there when he was about 10 years old and it was then one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. What we're looking at here is the east end of St Mark's Square and the large building on the right is the Palazzo Ducale or Duke's Palace with its gothic arcades and loggia. Now Titian started his artistic training in the workshop of the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccato and then he later briefly joined Gentile Bellini's workshop and after Gentile's death in 1507 he joined the workshop of his brother Giovanni Bellini which at that time was the most important workshop in Venice. However it was through contact with Giorgione who had previously trained in Giovanni Bellini's workshop that he mainly developed his early style so Giorgione became his mentor at that stage. This is a self-portrait or detail of a self-portrait of Titian. He was born in Piave di Cadore which is about 110 kilometres north of Venice so in his lifetime he was often called da Cadore. He was the son of Gregorio Vecchieli and his wife Lucia and we know his father was a superintendent of the castle at di Cadore and managed the local mines for the owners. He was also a distinguished councillor and soldier and many of Titian's relatives including his grandfather were notaries and so the family was well established in the area and a family with some prestige. The area was ruled by Venice and he came under the Venetian spell through his apprenticeship with the Bellini clan as I said and then Giorgione and swiftly rose to fame in Venice from about 1520 onwards and then later throughout Italy and then Europe. Now this talks about Titian but I must first mention the great rivalry in Venice during the 16th century between the three great Venetian painters. There's Titian the oldest, Tintoretto some 30 years younger and Veronese about another 10 years younger, about 40 years younger than Titian and I will be giving another two talks one on Tintoretto and one on Veronese. I wanted to talk first though briefly about their focus of what we could call the Venetian school which was on colour as opposed to line and so there was this debate at the time between line or colour which was known as a paragone or literally a comparison and there were a number of such debates during the Renaissance for example the relative importance of sculpture compared with painting and line that is what they called disegno which literally means drawing is was believed by the artists in Florence like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael as the basis of art. You had to start with an accurate representation, an accurate drawing whereas Titian, Giorgione, Veronese saw colour as obviously line was important but saw colour as a fundamental basis of art because they saw colour as creating life and particularly emotion so the Florentine approach tended to be more intellectual it emphasised composition and form and Venetian art was seen to be more sensual focusing on light texture and mood. I didn't mention Tintoretto to some extent he combined both approaches his motto of his studio was the drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian although I would say that colour is a powerful element in his art as well. So let's move on this is one of his earliest portraits and this talk is specifically about Titian. Tintoretto and Veronese are another two talks that I'll be recording. So in this early portrait the sitter is turning to look at us over his shoulder he's meeting our gaze our attention is focused I think on his raised brow above his right eye which is positioned midway across the picture his elbow rests on a parapet his voluminous quilted sleeve projects out into our space and it has a strong physical presence one almost feels one could reach out and touch the material and know what it felt like. The shadowed portion of the figure merges into the grey atmospheric background and that all these things that I've been pointing out were particularly innovative so these were all breakthroughs you can see what I mean here by looking at how influential this and other Titian portraits became in European portraiture. This is Rembrandt's self-portrait at the age of 34 now in the National Gallery and you can see him inspired by the portrait by Titian. We don't know who it is by the way it was long believed to be a portrait of a celebrated Italian poet called Ludovico Ariosto. It was then later thought to be a self-portrait of Titian but it's now thought to be one of Titian's friends a member of the aristocratic Barbarigo family. Portrait of a lady also in the National Gallery known as La Schiavona which literally means the woman from Dalmatia painted in about 1510 to 12. We don't know who the woman is. Titian was about 20 to 24 years old and when he painted this private portraits of individual women were extremely rare and in particular a woman like this self-possessed with a commanding gaze was almost unprecedented. He's showing her three-quarter length and on the cameo in relief on a raised section of what looks like a parapet and we can tell in fact you can almost see her clothing coming through. We can tell that the parapet the raised section of the parapet was painted later so he revised the picture and added this raised section of the parapet with this imitation of a bas-relief carved into the stone of the parapet. Some people believe it's Caterina Cornaro who was the exiled Queen of Cyprus but it's unlikely because there aren't any royal symbols. You might think that the alternative title La Schiavona gives it away the Dalmatian woman but unfortunately that title wasn't used until the 17th century. It was started to be used later. Her dress and appearance suggest she was a member of the nobility of the Venetian territories and it's possible, in fact I think I like this explanation, it's possible it's a model he used to produce a generic portrait to encourage women from Venetian aristocracy to have their portrait painted. He was still establishing his reputation and something like this hung up in his studio would attract attention and could lead to commissions. This is now attributed to Titian. It's got a long history of mistaken attribution. For years it was attributed to Giorgione. It's also been credited to artists like Bellini and Palma Vecchio and it's now, I think by most authorities, considered as a work by Titian but to be on the safe side I've put attributed to Titian. It's called Pastoral Concert and at the time, in case you're wondering, it wasn't considered scandalous even though it's showing two naked women standing along or standing and seated beside two clothed men and you'll probably remind you of a later painting, Edouard Manet's 1863 painting Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, which was inspired by this painting and did cause outrage. As Manet's painting was not an allegory or mythological, it was a naked woman between two men dressed in contemporary clothes. Now despite being called Pastoral Concert there's a lack of actual musical interaction. The men seem oblivious of the women. Look at the man with the lute. He's talking to his friend and ignoring the woman with the flute. And this indicates the women are symbolic. They're not physically present. They are muses and exist in a spiritual realm. They may be nymphs, they may be Greek goddesses, they may represent poetry and music. So this could be another paragone, that is comparison, in this case, between music and poetry. But rather than presenting one as greater than the other, Titian seems to be representing them as complementary. The setting invokes the myth of Arcadia, as told by Virgil, and that tells of the happy life of shepherds whose life, he said, revolved around poetry and music. How did it end up in the Louvre? Well, it was owned by the Gonzaga family, later sold to Charles I, who bought the Gonzaga collection when they were short of money. When Charles I, or after Charles I was beheaded, Cromwell sold the royal collections and they were dispersed. And it was sold at auction to a German banker, an art collector, who in turn sold it on to Louis XIV in 1671. And that's how it ended up eventually in the Louvre. Now this is one of Titian's early masterpieces where he started to break away from the style of his mentor, Giorgione, and develop his own style. What we see here is Christ risen from the dead, appearing to Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane, and at first she mistakes him for a gardener, but then reaches out her hand to touch him and Christ says, noli me tangere, do not touch me. Now noli me tangere is typically translated as do not touch me, but a more accurate translation from the original is stop clinging to me, which could refer to a literal instruction not to make physical contact, or I think more likely it's a metaphorical request not to cling to Jesus's earthly presence. Titian unusually has omitted the traditional empty tomb to enable him to focus on the relationship between the two figures. There's expressive brushwork and he uses the background to draw our attention down to the two figures. Incidentally Christ, if you're wondering what he's holding, it's a hoe. And the reason he's holding a hoe is because in the Bible, as I said, Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener, so it's sort of Titian is, the Bible doesn't mention a hoe, but Titian is adding to that, or giving a reason for why Mary Magdalene might have mistaken him for a gardener at a distance. This enormous painting, nearly seven metres high, marked a new direction in Titian's style and reflects his awareness of developments in the High Renaissance further south, that is Florence and Rome, by artists like Raphael and Michelangelo. Note the agitated figures of the apostles at the bottom. That marked a break with the usual way of representing them, which was meditative. They were shown still in Venetian painting, in the tradition of Giovanni Bellini and others. So it was originally rather shocking to the Venetian public because of these agitated apostles which some described as quarrelling conspirators The other reason it was a bit shocking to some is the Virgin Mary. She's shown here as a mature, powerful woman rather than the way she's often shown as a meek and timid Madonna. There was another controversy, that might be slightly overstating it, but another area where there were questions being raised and that was the assumption of Mary, that is the physical moving of her body into heaven on her death, as it was an optional Catholic doctrine in the 16th century and the Franciscan order, this painting is in the Frari in Venice, the Franciscan order were keen to promote the assumption of Mary and it wasn't declared an article of faith until 1950 by Pope Pius XII. The Bible states Christ physically ascended to heaven but this was an ascension not an assumption and the difference is that he ascended by his own divine power whereas Mary was assumed into heaven, it was an assumption. Now Titian painted this massive altarpiece when he was only about 30. It was an incredibly ambitious project for such a relatively young artist particularly considering its size and it paid off. I said there was some criticism but overall it established his reputation as Venice's premier painter. Effectively this painting launched his illustrious career. Just to show you the size in the Frari which is where it was designed to hang, it's the largest altarpiece in the city and the figures in it are well over life size but this was required in the large church. This picture, this photograph you're looking at was taken from the front of the nave and you can see the painting looks a natural size from this distance even though the figures are larger than life size. So it's in proportion given the size of the Frari and at the official unveiling there was even an unexpected potential buyer. It said that Emperor Charles V, his envoy, happened to be at the event and offered to buy the painting on the spot if the Franciscan friars didn't like it enough to display in the church and that suggests that even amidst the initial controversy there were some, there were many in fact, who recognised its genius immediately. This is Venus rising from the sea wringing her hair after her birth as a fully grown woman. It's known as Venus Anodymine which means rising from the sea and she is said to have been, according to mythology, she's said to have been born from a shell and you can see the shell at the bottom left. It's a lot smaller than is usually shown in scenes of the birth of Venus and I guess Titian just added it there to identify it as Venus. You'll remember in Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus it's much larger and it's a boat-like vessel Venus. She's standing inside the shell. Titian's could almost be described as comically small. I guess Titian said to himself I guess I need a shell but let's focus on Venus. He was probably inspired by the Hellenistic models like this one that were being uncovered, discovered, dug up at the time. Notice the voluptuousness, her sideways glance are suggestive of, for example, the sculpture Crouching Venus which is now in the British Museum but there were many other representations of Venus that Titian could have drawn upon like the Canadian Venus type. The wringing of the hair is a direct imitation of what we believe Apelles' Lost Masterpiece looked like because it's described in Pliny's Natural History and Titian has, I think, deliberately included this detail to prove he could rival the art of antiquity. The painting itself, you may have wondered how it ended up in Scotland. It had a long journey through many royal collections. At one stage it was owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, known for her unconventional lifestyle and then later it found its way into the Orléans collection in France. So it was sort of, you could imagine it being passed around Europe like a hot potato amongst European nobility, if that's an appropriate way of describing it. It was finally acquired for the nation in 2003. It was partly offset against inheritance tax so it was used, Venus helped settle a tax bill. This is Bacchus and Ariadne, one of the most famous paintings and most popular paintings in the National Gallery in London. It illustrates a story told by Ovid and also Catullus. It tells the story of the Cretan princess Ariadne and she's abandoned by Theseus on the Greek island of Naxos and you can see next to her left shoulder a tiny ship sailing away to the horizon. That's the ship that contains Theseus. But simultaneously with her love Theseus leaving her, Bacchus, god of wine, has descended in his chariot and is leaping. Titian has caught him at the point of leaping from the chariot and falling in love at first sight with Ariadne. Later he throws Ariadne's crown into the air to create the constellation Corona Borealis, sometimes known as the Northern Crown. Now this is one of a series of paintings by various artists, Giovanni Bellini, Dosso Dossi and Titian and they were all commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara for his alabaster room in his palace. All the paint pictures were painted between 1514 and 1525 and all of them are various forms of bacchanale, that is scenes of hedonism, drinking, music making, love making and it's Titian that shows off his great skill as a colourist and he combines in this one picture all the purest and most vibrant pigments that were available at the time. Incidentally the Ovid story talks about tigers pulling the chariot but we know that the Duke of Ferrara, who was Alfonso d'Este, had cheetahs in his menagerie and so I guess Titian got permission from the Duke to let him use his cheetahs as models and add those as exotic pets as the two animals that were pulling the chariot. You'll also notice in the foreground a small cocker spaniel barking at the divine procession, sort of a bit anachronistic in a way, representing the human side of the scene. It seems unimpressed, the little dog seems unimpressed by Bacchus and it adds a touch of everyday humour I think. We find it in other paintings by Titian and it was probably a caught pet and we know it wasn't part of the original composition. Titian added it later, perhaps as a final touch, perhaps at the request of Alfonso d'Este. And then final point I want to draw your attention to, on the golden coloured bronze vase, bottom left, let me enlarge it, engraved upon it as if it was an ancient artefact, he has branded it with his name, a witty artistic flourish, he's written Titianius on the side of the bronze vase. This is the Bacchanal of the Andrians. So having delivered Bacchus and Ariadne, which we just saw, he then painted this painting. Now this painting was inspired by a story by Philostratus, a late second century Greek writer. It's set on the island of Andros, which in mythology was said to be favoured by Bacchus and the island was so favoured that there was a stream that was said to flow with wine. And in this painting, the gods, the men and the children are united in a celebration of the effects of wine. And in Philostratus' work, he says, quote, wine makes men rich, dominant, generous to their friends, handsome, and four cubits high. If we look at the figures in the painting, many of them are inspired or based on contemporary and classical sources. For example, the reclining male figure is based on a figure from one of Michelangelo's drawings, the Battle of Cascina. The female nude is inspired by one of the most renowned sculptures of the ancient world known as Sleeping Ariadne, although at the time it was called Cleopatra in the Vatican. It was in the Vatican and Titian would have seen it. And his nude combines those aspects of sensuality, vulnerability, and in Titian's case, I think a suggestion of sexual availability. Next to her, you might have noticed there's a boy urinating, a rather cheeky detail, unexpected and earthy element, adding a touch of humour to the scene, showing Titian's willingness to blend the mythological with the mundane. In the lower centre, you can make out a musical score, and music historians have actually managed to decipher and play the notes, but there aren't enough notes there for them to recognise the melody, so we have a sort of tantalising musical puzzle from the Renaissance. And again, the ownership is intriguing. In later 1598, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrundini essentially stole the painting, along with other paintings, when power was transferred in Ferrara, and he kept his theft secret for decades, and it only came to light in 1629, after the painting had already been sold on, changed hands. So it's amusing, I think, to imagine a high-ranking church official secretly hoarding a painting that he'd stolen, but maybe that was regarded as normal behaviour then. Supper at Emmaus was a popular subject. Most artists painted a supper at Emmaus. That includes Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Bassano, and it's a painting that recounts the story in Luke's Gospel of how Christ was travelling with two pilgrims. They stopped for supper at a town called Emmaus, and it wasn't until Christ consecrated the bread and wine that they suddenly recognised him, and it's that moment that Titian and many other artists capture, that moment of recognition, which enables them to explore the themes of recognition and revelation. Titian actually painted a number of versions of supper at Emmaus throughout his career. This version is the one in the Louvre, and he's included the traditional bread and wine, as well as, you can see in the middle of the table, an apple, and behind it a bowl of fruit, which includes apples, grapes and a pear, and unusually, he's included, you can just about see on the table, some bright blue borage flowers. They were used in Venice to add a fresh flavour to wine and salads. The dog under the table, the dog again, may refer to a passage in Matthew 15, when a non-Jewish woman tells Jesus, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. The reason she said that was that Christ had said he was sent to earth only to help the Jews, but with this metaphor, she convinces him of her faith and he healed her. We now come on to the Venus of Urbino, one of Titian's best-known masterpieces in the Uffizi in Florence. We believe it was commissioned by Guido Baldi della Rovera, the Duke of Urbino, in 1538, and we believe it was commissioned as a gift for his young wife, Giulia da Varano, and some suggest it may have commemorated their wedding, and although Giulia was, there's some discrepancies here, but Giulia was only about 10 years old when they married, and by the time this was painted, 1538, she would have been about 14, and so it may have been the time when the Duke of Urbino started to sleep with her. It was intended to hang, we believe, in his private dressing room, and we believe, there's a lot of controversy over the meaning of the painting, but when I say it's believed, I mean now the majority of art historians believe it was an instructional piece for the young bride. It's an allegory of marriage. There's, first of all, her sensuality, which is an indication of representation or a training of her duties towards her husband. There's the dog, the sleeping dog, representing fidelity. There are the roses, which are associated with Venus, of course, but also the constancy of love. On the ledge in the background against the sky is a myrtle plant, again associated with Venus and with marriage, and then finally motherhood is suggested by the maids in the background who are searching for a chest, which is called a cassone, and it's actually difficult to know why this would have been included in this painting if it was, as some have suggested, a purely erotic painting. So it's a painting that blends eroticism with symbolism related to love, beauty, and fertility, all themes associated with marriage in the Renaissance. It was probably displayed behind a curtain alongside other paintings for private viewing, and it does show the contradictory expectations placed on Renaissance women. They had to be both pure and sexualized. Of course, that's not just in Renaissance women. It was true in many societies, Victorian society, in fact, many societies today where women are expected to play this dual role. I've mentioned the curtain that was used to cover paintings like this. You'll notice that Titian is playfully referring to the curtain by including a curtain behind her, which has been half pulled back as if inviting us to take a peek. The sleeping dog at her feet is the same dog that appears in other Titian paintings. I've included here this one that I cut out of a portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, which has a small dog in it, and you can see the similarity. It seemed that Titian had a favorite canine model that he used in a lot of his paintings. I also should mention Mark Twain. In his 1880s travel diary, A Tramp Abroad, he described this painting as the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. Just let that sink in. His extreme reaction, it's difficult to know what caused it, but it may have been triggered, and it's indicated by other things he wrote, by the position of her hand. I think he believed that masturbation was a step too far. Although interestingly, marriage manuals from the Renaissance period recommend it to ensure orgasm because they believed it increased the likelihood of fertilization. A final point. You may think that this is a first, but it closely follows this painting by Giorgione, the Dresden Venus it's called, now in Dresden. This was painted some 28 years earlier, and it's believed that Titian worked on the painting and completed at least the landscape after Giorgione died, so Titian was very well acquainted with it. Although there are nude figures like the Botticelli I mentioned, Birth of Venus, that have been painted before this one, this work by Giorgione is probably the first nude to show a figure simply as a depiction of a nude. It's called a Venus, but you'll notice in both paintings there's no traditional attributes of Venus, maybe the roses in one case, but there's no cupid to indicate it represents a goddess, so it's a break with tradition and created a new subject for artists, the reclining female nude. Daniel Barbaro. This is a portrait of him. He was a member of the Venetian aristocracy. He was an important person. He was a humanist, architectural theorist, and prelate. Now, by this period, 1545, Titian had become the most sought-after artist in Venice, and being painted by him was a mark of distinction because it put you at a level with other portraits he'd painted of the Pope, Pope Paul III, Emperor Charles V, King Francis I. Now, in Venice, the ancientness of the family line of an aristocratic family determined the prestige of the family, and also, although portraiture was generally considered as a minor genre compared with religious and mythological paintings, in Venice, it enjoyed a particular status as it was a privilege of the ruling classes, the patricians, the wealthy, merchants, well-educated, and so on, to show how far back their ancestry went, and this person, Daniel Barbaro, was the Patriarch of Aquileia, and that was an important ecclesiastical province in north-eastern Italy, believed to have been founded by Saint Mark in the first century, and you can't get further back than that. It played a significant role in the religious and landscape in the whole of medieval Italy because it was, amongst other things, a powerful interface between the Pope, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Republic of Venice, so this was an important person. Another reclining female nude, this is one of many versions generally called Venus with a Dog, this one in the Prado, there's another one in the Prado with a Cupid, there's one in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge with a lute player, there's one in the Uffizi with a dog and a partridge, there's one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with Venus with a lute player, there's one in Berlin with an organ player, and so on. He painted a number of versions. Now this particular version belonged to a lawyer called Francesco Assunica, and it was a lawyer who Titian actually used professionally, so he knew him well. Later it was sold and it ended up in the collection of Charles I. It was one of those paintings that Oliver Cromwell sold when he sold off Charles I's art collection. It was bought through an agent to the Habsburgs for their Spanish collection and that's how it ended up in the Prado. There were many copies produced as well. I've mentioned those that we believe are by Titian or partly by Titian. A lot of these different examples of Venus with a Musician were painted by his workshop with aspects of the painting painted by Titian, but there are also many copies and Charles II, following the restoration of the royal family, bought a copy of the painting which is still in the royal collection. Now x-rays of this painting reveal that he actually painted a more daring version originally, one in which Venus was gazing directly at the Musician. But we think he, well we know he altered it, but we think he altered it because he was concerned about that being just too risqué. Some people, by the way, believe that all of these versions were symbolic and, for example, they relate to the relative importance of sound and vision and the discussion of that distinction in the Renaissance period, particularly art historians of the 19th century, but most modern historians believe that these are just straightforward, erotic works. Another work, Venus and Adonis, where many versions were produced, some 30 versions I believe, painted by Titian and Titian's workshop, no doubt popular because of the nudity of Venus, but this is actually a representation of a classical story. It's a story from Ovid's Metamorphosis and it tells how Venus fell in love with Adonis, perhaps because of an arrow from Cupid's bow which accidentally hit her. Venus would go hunting with Adonis but one day she warns him not to go hunting as she has a foresight that he'll be killed. He ignores her warning and Titian shows us the exact moment of him looking at her, pulling away, ignoring her warning and going off hunting and later he is gored by a wounded wild boar and dies and Venus, who at the time is in the sky in her chariot, hears his cries but cannot reach him in time to save him. This, as I said, there are many versions, they're all slightly different. This is the Prado type and it's a three dog version, that's another way of describing the different versions. We know this version because a letter was painted in 1554 and was painted for Philip II of Spain. We also know that infrared reflectography shows us that Titian traced this from an earlier version, possibly the one now in Moscow, and he used that earlier version to trace out the figures. It's amusing in a way to imagine the great Titian essentially tracing his own work. I assume it was done by him or his workshop to speed up production. Also, I thought you might be interested, a 16th century Venetian critic, Lodovico Dolce, praised the painting and he particularly liked Venus's bottom. He said the distension of the flesh caused by sitting was particularly admirable and he claimed the painting was so lifelike no man, regardless of age, could look at it without feeling warm and tender, with the whole of his blood stirring in his veins. This over-the-top reaction I think provides an amusing insight into 16th century art criticism and the male gaze, of course. Now this is a painting, the Death of Actaeon, that remained in his studio at his death and unlike another of the paintings that remained in his studio, the Flaying of Marcius, it's unsigned and so we don't know whether it's finished. But it tells the story of Ovid's metamorphosis, of how Actaeon was surprised by the goddess Diana bathing naked in the woods and in revenge for him looking at her naked, she transforms him into a stag and he was, which you can see here, as a man with a stag's head being attacked and killed by his own hounds. This is actually a painting in a sequence of paintings referred to by Titian as his posi, which is the visual equivalent of poetry, and he produced them for Philip II of Spain, starting in about 1551 and there are many. There's a Venus and Adonis, there's a Danae, there's a Perseus and Andromeda in the Wallace Collection in London, a Rape of Europa in Boston and Diana and Callisto in the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Gallery London. Its provenance again is interesting, quite long and complicated but I'll go through it I think. It was bought by a collector in Venice and later sold to the first Duke of Hamilton, James Hamilton from England, through his brother who was ambassador in Venice. Now Hamilton was a royalist and executed by Oliver Cromwell and most of his collection was sold off and this was bought by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, who later gave it to Queen Christina of Sweden. After her death in exile it passed to the Orléans Collection in Paris. The collection was bought by a London consortium after the French Revolution, sold to Sir Abraham Hume for just 200 guineas as it was seen to be unfinished. His collection then passed by descent through the family and it was then offered to the National Gallery in 1914 for £5,000. The offer was declined because one of the trustees, Alfred the Rothschild, said it would not fetch £5 at Christie's, maybe because he was thinking it was unfinished, but it was immediately bought by the 6th Earl of Harwood for £60,000, which I think gives you an idea of the measure of Rothschild's expertise and of Brownlow's generosity in offering it to the National Gallery. It was loaned to the National Gallery but later sold to John Paul Getty Museum for £1.75 million, unless the UK could match the price. So there was an active public campaign. The National Gallery put up £1 million from their fund and the government said it would equal any money the public put up and in that way the remaining £763,000 was raised by the public with an equal amount given by the government, which matched the amount offered by the John Paul Getty Museum, and so it stayed in the country and so that's why it's in the National Gallery in London. Nymph and Shepherd is one of Titian's late paintings. It's roughly painted, it's not commissioned. His technique became freer with age, as I think you saw in the last painting, and parts of this painting were actually done with his fingers. Blurred outlines take shape when viewed from a distance. There's a foggy veil of grey which is characteristic of his later paintings. It's not a specific scene from mythology or literature, it's just a pastoral painting. A shepherd is ready to begin playing his flute. He's approached a female figure from behind as she rests under a tree. He turns towards her, she looks over her right shoulder smiling at us. The nymph is reclining on what looks like a panther skin and there's a goat in the distance climbing a barren tree stump, a symbol used at the time to indicate lust. We come on to 1571, shortly before his death. This is Tarquin and Lucretia. He was over 80 at this time and by the time it was completed he was getting on and that makes the work sheer vitality all the more remarkable. This doesn't look like the work of a frail old man but a vigorous storyteller, someone at the height of their powers. He wrote to his patron Philip II of Spain and I quote, because I desire to close the days of this my extreme old age in the service of the Catholic King my Lord, I promise you that I am composing another invention of painting of much greater labour and ingenuity than perhaps any I have produced for many years until now, end quote, referring to this painting. The subject is the rape of Lucretia. She was the chaste wife of a Roman nobleman and the rape was by Sextus Tarquinius who was the son of the king. He was a 6th century BCE Roman prince. He raped her after threatening to kill her if she rejected his advances and this is the moment where he's threatening to kill her. The next day she exposed him and committed suicide, prompting the Romans to revolt and overthrow his father Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome and establish the Roman Republic traditionally dated to 509 BCE. So this is an important moment in Roman history, a mythological moment. And Titian is accentuating the brutal nature of the scene. She's propped up in cushions, she's struggling to defend herself against an opponent who's thrusting forward between her legs brandishing a dagger ready to strike her. The paint is applied in thick layers giving a sort of tactile surface reinforcing the violence of the painting. Some art historians believe, can you see there's someone looking from behind the curtain on the left? Some believe it may be a self-portrait of Titian that he's smuggled into the painting. Final point, it's interesting to note that the great Titian drew inspiration from the work of other artists. These are two engravings from earlier 1539-1553 by a German artist Heinrich Aldegraeve and it shows how he borrowed from these ideas but improved upon these earlier compositions. So as I said this has been part one of a trilogy of the great rivalry between three of Venice's greatest painters Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Titian was seen at the time as the sun amidst small stars. That's a quote from a line that was used at the time which is a reference to the last line of Dante's Paradiso which goes, the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Titian was the oldest, the most versatile, very adept with portraits, landscapes and mythological and religious subjects, so a wide range of subjects. His method, particularly the application of and use of colour, had a profound influence not only on the later Italian Renaissance but on future generations of Western art. So we end here with Ariadne waving goodbye to Theseus and like Ariadne I must say goodbye. I will continue the series though with my next two talks on Tintoretto and Veronese and thank you for your time and attention and I hope you will continue with me on my journey through the history of Western art. Thank you.