As A catalogue raisonne, this is necessarily a scholarly work of reference, a report on the current level of knowledge of Titian, and the current state of play in the never-ending debate about the authorship and provenance of works attributed to him. But Titian was a dazzling painter whose reputation, established early in his own lifetime, has proved unassailable over the centuries. So that this volume also offers an irresistible opportunity to have a comprehensive record, meticulously annotated and fully illustrated in superb colour, of a lifetime's work that stands as one of the crowning individual achievements of Western culture.
Famously long-lived (his date of birth is unknown, but he was somewhere between 88 and 103 when he died in 1576), he was sent, aged nine, from his home town, Cadore, to live with an uncle in Venice, where he was apprenticed to several artists, including the great Giovanni Bellini.
A precocious talent, he was associated with but not, as some accounts have it, a student of Giorgione. In an extraordinary collaborative enterprise, Titian was assigned to complete Giorgione's unfinished works when the latter fell victim to the plague, aged barely 30. Skilfully manoeuvring himself into the position of official state painter in 1513, Titian managed a thriving international career from his busy Venetian Studio, treating illustrious patrons as equals and mixing with nobles and intellectuals. Though his wife, Concilia, died after just five years of marriage (they had three children), he never remarried, and his sister, Orsa, ran his household.
Titian was not only a restless innovator with immense natural facility, he was also a true original in the sense that, while he absorbed an enormous range of influences, including that of northern Europeans like Durer, and the Florentines and Romans to the south, he always managed to make something of his own from them. Pedrocco is sceptical of the idea of his much discussed Mannerist "crisis" in the 1540s when artists of the Central Italian School arrived in Venice.
The evidence of the paintings is that Titian was already responsive to developments elsewhere and was in any case extremely self-confident - confident enough to appropriate freely without feeling that his own artistic identity was in any way threatened. Stylistic promiscuity was integral to his daring, exploratory approach.
He was always slightly ahead of the game, dismaying Germano de Casale, who commissioned the Frari altarpiece of the Assumption, with the boldness and dynamism of his composition. His flying Virgin perplexed friars used to the more grounded, sedate Madonnas of Bellini.
Titian won out, of course, and you can still visit the Frari in the heart of Venice and, when your eyes adjust to the gloomy interior of the church, see the once revolutionary painting in situ. In both his religious works and his many allegorical subjects, Titian was a master of the large-scale figure composition, combining glowing, vibrant colours with a keen dramatic sense and formidable skills of spatial organisation, lending mythic themes an unprecedented vitality. His portraits are stunningly good, and they understandably invited the admiration and imitation of generations of European artists.
While he could manufacture solidly muscled male nudes with all the conviction of the Mid-Italians, his female nudes are of a different order entirely, fiercely sexualising the ethereal beauty of Giorgione's dreamy figures. When the papal legate in Venice glimpsed Titian's unfinished Danae, he worriedly reported that it made the painter's earlier reclining Venus, a distinctly suggestive nude, "look like a nun".
The pose of Danae is probably based on Michelangelo's Night, but the latter's awkwardness with the female nude contrasts with Titian's incomparable zest for conveying the warm, voluptuous quality of flesh. This kind of fluent, sensuous painting didn't please Michelangelo, and prompted his disparaging remark about Venetians never learning how to draw. He was right in that, rather than painting onto a meticulously built linear armature, Titian worked fast and "drew" with expanses of pigment.
HIS pupil Palma Giovane's contemporary account has him building up subjects by means of highlights picked out against midtoned backgrounds, swiftly defining figures with "four strokes of the brush", then leaving the work aside to dry before coming back to correct and elaborate, often finishing by smearing on paint with his fingers.
The soft-edged, simmering warmth of his later work created difficulties for observers well into the 20th century. From Vasari onwards, there was a tendency to ascribe its distinctive appearance to lack of finish or failing powers (the story goes that assistants used to rescue earlier works that the old man wanted to "improve"), but Titian clearly knew what he was doing. Despite his unbroken success, his final years were marked by sadness as many people close to him died, including his beloved daughter, Lavinia.
Plague was raging in Venice in 1576 when he himself died. Though it apparently did not kill him - his name is not on the list of plague victims - it took his son and heir, Orazio. Paintings and jewellery were stolen from their abandoned house before his surviving son, Pomponio, arrived to take charge and sell what remained.
Aidan Dunne is Art Criticof The Irish Times
