The following article by Jenny Farrell was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
TITIAN's life and career (c. 1490–1576) spanned the turbulent sixteenth century, when Renaissance humanism – the belief in human agency – confronted religious reaction and the rise of early capitalism. His art records the struggle to preserve human possibility within a world increasingly governed by commodity exchange. John Berger argues that Titian was among the first artists to transform painting from a courtly craft into an independent profession. Four works – Assumption of the Virgin, Venus of Urbino, Portrait of Ippolito Riminaldi and The Flaying of Marsyas – trace his movement from High Renaissance confidence through political fragmentation to radical expressive freedom. Venice was a mercantile oligarchy controlling Mediterranean trade and extracting wealth from its eastern possessions. Neither fully feudal nor entirely capitalist, it placed artists ambiguously between skilled labour and courtly service. As Berger observes, Titian's anxiety was "intimately connected with Venice, with the city's special kind of wealth and commerce and power". The market's logic – competition and the commodification of labour – entered artistic production itself.
The Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18) (left), painted for the Frari church, was Titian's first monumental public statement. Its gigantic apostles and ascending Virgin astonished the commissioning monks. Breaking with the enamel-like finish of earlier Venetian altarpieces, Titian uses masses of red, blue and gold to connect heaven and earth. Mary becomes an active protagonist, shown in movement, physically experiencing the miracle rather than simply representing it. The painting expresses the confidence of Venice at its republican zenith, when sacred history could still unfold within the material world inhabited by the viewer.
By the late 1530s, however, Habsburg domination had expanded and the Counter-Reformation was advancing. In Venus of Urbino (1538), (above right) Titian relocates Renaissance humanism from public life into the private sphere. Myth and everyday Venetian life become inseparable: the antique goddess is also a Venetian woman. Contours "melt" and subtle colour makes the flesh appear to breathe. Venus meets the viewer's gaze, as a participant in human exchange. Yet, this affirmation of home life is also a retreat, as public humanism loses ground; the female body itself becomes implicated in the commodity relations of patrician marriage.
The Portrait of Ippolito Riminaldi (c. 1528) reveals the growing crisis beneath this culture. Riminaldi appears isolated against a muted background, his softened features suggesting uncertainty, while his sharply focused eyes signal intense awareness. His closed book affirms humanist learning, but the contrast between his bare and gloved hands indicates a division between inner thought and social obligation. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, Riminaldi perceives the failures of his world, but can no longer act upon them. The portrait reveals the alienation of the humanist: belief in humanity, but increasingly powerless.
By the 1570s, the world sustaining Venetian humanism had collapsed. The Inquisition, Habsburg rule, economic decline and the plague of 1576 formed the background to Titian's final works. In The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570–76), stable Renaissance classicism dissolves into "open, large brushstrokes"; paint is sometimes applied with the fingers. Titian abandons the illusion of a stable external world because historical stability itself has become impossible. Violence and suffering become embodied in the unstable painted surface.
Titian thus chronicles the crisis of Renaissance humanism: Assumption expresses collective confidence; Venus relocates humanist ideals into private life; in Riminaldi the humanist withdraws; and Marsyas confronts catastrophe through radical artistic freedom.
Berger asks how art re-enters life. For Titian, the answer lies in the labour of artistic creation: visible brushstrokes become an assertion of human agency, refusing both illusion and despair and insisting that the world, in all its material density and suffering can still be known, endured and be loved