ART: Titian: The Last DaysBy Mark Hudson Bloomsbury, 298pp. £20
THE LATE PAINTINGS of Titian are arguably the greatest achievements in the art of painting. A small group of pictures, worked over the last few years of the artist's life, they are now scattered far and wide, some in obscure locations and difficult to see. It was only on my own third attempt, with letters of introduction from the Irish Ambassador and a distinguished Irish art historian, that I was able to get in to see the great Martyrdom of St Lawrencein the Royal Monastery of El Escorial.
Mark Hudson’s attempts to gain access to the paintings seem to have been just as fraught with difficulty. However, he is dogged in his pursuit of his subject, which is both elusive and shrouded in the obscurity of time, and, like a patient and inspired archaeologist, he has unearthed something of beauty.
This story is essentially a personal journey and a portrait done at 400 or so years remove, but one that is straightforward, honest and, most importantly, deeply felt. Because that is what these paintings are all about. Hudson expresses it succinctly on page 232:
He’s [Titian] concerned not so much with what things look like as what they feel like – as though he wants to elicit a response as much through the intensity with which the paint has been got on the canvas as through what it is supposed to evoke.
Paintings have to be experienced in the flesh; they can't be understood or mediated through a text. What this book achieves is to give you access to the author's personal experience of these paintings, which would appear to be profound as well as critical. He can spot a dud, for instance, such as the woefully corny Descent of the Holy Spiritin the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice.
One of the “issues” with late Titian is that there is an argument that the paintings themselves are not actually “finished”, ie that this is not what Titian intended the painting to be like in its final state and it is only our contemporary perspective, our modern sensibility and love of informality, that makes us respond to them. All art, of course, is subjective, but from my own subjective perspective this argument is academic.
As Hudson explains in some depth, the seven or eight large paintings that constitute the core of “late Titian” are the most extraordinary of creations, the most modern paintings that I know of. In these works Titian never loses contact with the essential goal of painting; he is never so distracted by his subject that his paintbrush is only describing things.
These are the last works – or the last days of the title – and much of the book fleshes out a fuller picture of Titian the man, (warts and all), his career and times. Titian might represent the beginning of celebrity culture: this is the painter for whom the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, then the most powerful man in the world, hurriedly stooped to pick up his fallen paintbrush – an action which changed the status of artists forever.
There is a lot of sex. Reading this book I was amazed to notice how much sex I had failed to notice in Titian's paintings before. It positively oozes out of the pictures and was clearly a nice little earner. In The Penitent Magdalene, a glassy-eyed, voluptuous blonde, erect nipples bursting through the tresses of her hair, looks into the sky expectantly. On being asked why a fasting hermit appeared in such good health Titian apparently replied with a twinkle in his eye that "Perhaps this was the first day of her fast".
A picture of Titian the man emerges, with all his complexities and the problems and challenges of his life. He was not just a painter but an owner of saw mills and iron mines, a father of difficult and loving children, a friend of dukes and kings, a business man, nobody’s fool, and, finally, an old, dignified but fearful man, whose world was swept away literally by the unpredictable nature of human destiny. This of course is the essential subject of his late paintings.
Hudson’s book is refreshed and invigorated by his own personal, diary-like entries, the encounters with ordinary people, which set the scene for his researches, in particular the search for Titian’s house and studio. These attempts to come close to the man read like a metaphor for human understanding.
Early on in the book, discovering the enormity of the task he has set himself, Hudson rails against the language of art criticism: “the ponderous genuflecting before the masters, the great towers of billowing, unreadable, rhetorical guff, the endless courtly, sycophantic waffle which passed for centuries as art criticism”. Believe me, Mr Hudson, it has not gone away but your book is a leap in the right direction.
The book is dense and full of information; Hudson could perhaps have avoided some of the imaginative speculation. Though I was travelling when I read it, I had with me an old, paint-spattered Titian – Complete Paintings, which was invaluable. To get the most out of this book you should have some further visual reference – the illustrations are good but there are far too few for the scope of the narrative. There is also a strange oddity in that the reproduction of the great Bacchus and Ariadnein London's National Gallery shows the painting as it was 40 years ago, before the controversial cleaning. It is rare to see an image of the painting now in this form yet no reference is made to it in the text.
Hughie O'Donoghue is a painter whose exhibition The Journeyis at Leeds Art Gallery until November 15th, 2009. His most recent solo exhibition in Ireland was at the Irish Museum of Modern Art earlier this year. His next solo exhibition, Sea Pictures, is at Wexford Arts Centre from September 21st and Pharosopens at the James Hyman Gallery, London on October 9th