Titian
His Life and the Golden Age of Venice
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Devoted father and loyal friend, Titian was notorious for disregarding authority and was an international celebrity by his late fifties. He was famously difficult but his stubbornness and horrendous timekeeping did nothing to deter his patrons who included the Hapsburgs, the Pope and his family and Charles V.
During his career, which spanned more than seventy years, Titian painted around five or six hundred pictures of which less than half survive. His work has been studied by generations of great artists from Rubens to Manet and he is often seen as having artistically transcended his own time.
Sheila Hale not only examines his life, both personal and professional, but how his art affected his contemporaries and how it influences artists today. She also examines Venice in its context of a city at the time of the Renaissance, overshadowed artistically by Rome and Florence and growing into the famous historical city it has become.
This is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in the history of Western art and a vivid evocation of Venice in its ‘Golden Age’.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing upon her experience as research assistant to the celebrated Renaissance historian John Hale (her late husband), Hale frames her first foray into historical scholarship by tracing one artist's life to inform an epic biography of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. Compelling and well-researched, the book follows the career of Titian, an "explorer in paint," whose popularity reaches from the 16th century until today. Vivid descriptions of Renaissance Venice read like a firsthand account of food halls where "caged birds... sang among the fruit and vegetables" and citywide pageants that, "like prostitutes, outclassed and outnumbered" those in other cities. Hale presents Titian as a rural-born homebody who witnessed the intrigue of foreign courts and encountered greats such as Michelangelo, architect Jacopo Sansovino, and baroque painter Tintoretto. If anything gets short shrift, it's the paintings themselves. One is left wondering, for example, why the Annunciation painting in Treviso "doesn't really work." Hale's research benefits from recent cleanings and restorations of Titian's work, but she imparts her own expertise, for instance, in surmising that Titian's son, Orazio, may have been the painter of the portrait of Pietro Bembo in Rome. Fully aware of our need to believe in artistic genius, Hale (The Man Who Lost His Language) successfully utilizes Titian's career as a touchstone for events that carried Venice away from the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Two 16-page color inserts.
