Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting
September 16 and 17, 2006
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibitions
Bellini, Giorgione,
Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting and The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art
September 16, 2006
Morning session
10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Introduction
David Alan Brown, curator of Italian and Spanish paintings, National Gallery of Art
Some Questions About the Venetian Paintings in Trafalgar Square
Nicholas Penny, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts
The "Quadro da Portego": A Genre of Venetian Painting?
Monika Schmitter, associate professor of art history, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The portego, the long salonlike space of the Venetian home that extended from the front to the back of the house, was the most important display area and has been seen as a precursor of the gallery. Its original purpose, to house weapons and armor of noble ancestors, was vestigial by the sixteenth century when the room was used chiefly for display, entertaining, and banqueting, but it continued to be associated with family identity and civic virtue. This lecture examines the development of the quadro da portego in the sixteenth century, and explores how the intention to hang a painting in this room influenced not only its size and shape, but also its subject and content. Using the quadro da portego as an example, the lecture considers how location within the house is significant in its impact on both the production and interpretation of works of art.
Spheres of Women
Stanley Chojnacki, professor of history emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Like all other Italian (indeed, European) cities circa 1500, Venice was a man's world. At all social levels—but most sharply in the ruling patriciate and the second-rank but wealthy and influential citizen (cittadino) class—men held exclusive access to official functions and dominated the economic enterprise that gave Venice its dazzling wealth and magnificence. Men enjoyed legal privileges denied women, status was handed down along the male line, lists of patrician marriages recorded the given names of bridegrooms but only the paternity of the brides, and patrician genealogies identified by name only the male offspring of those marriages.
Despite all these structures of male superiority, however, women of the ruling class played a prominent role in both domestic life and the public sphere of social interaction. Personal wealth, a distinctive female social orientation, and—most critically—the nature of husband-wife relationships gave women the means and opportunity to exercise influence inside and outside their family circles. These activities offered married patrician women the opportunity to reconfigure the division between the family and the wider social world.
This lecture traces the steps in this process: first, it surveys the circumstances that gave married women responsibilities and influence in their families. Next, it examines some of the avenues of activity these women followed in the wider society: tending to their husbands' businesses, managing their children's careers, promoting their own interests, and, sometimes, performing official functions in official settings. The discussion investigates the extent to which these public activities derived from the distinctiveness of women's place and women's roles—that is, of the spheres of women.
September 16, 2006
Afternoon session
2:00–4:30 p.m.
Introduction
Nicholas Penny, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art
The Moment of Giorgione
David Rosand, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History, Columbia University
In the course of his brief career Giorgione effected a revolution in the art of oil painting. Exploiting the Venetian use of canvas as a support and the covering potential of the medium itself, he initiated an open process of painting that frustrated the aesthetic and technical expectations of central Italian critics. Giorgio Vasari, both impressed and appalled by Giorgione's achievement, credited the painter with having initiated the modern style in Venice, following the lead of Leonardo da Vinci. In particular, Vasari was responding to Giorgione's tonalism—his use of shadow to obscure formal outline—which he thought was inspired by the example of Leonardo. But Vasari also recognized, at least implicitly, the consequent subjectivity of such tonalism, which left much to the imagination of the beholder. The openness of form and process in Giorgione's painting suggest a corollary openness of content. These values participate in the larger aesthetic and noetic transformation that occurs circa 1500, one that is most clearly articulated by Leonardo but more poetically manifest in the art of Venice.
"Calor"/Color: The Topos of the Living Image
Frank Fehrenbach, professor, history of art and architecture, Harvard University
Renaissance writers on art refer in an almost inflationary way to the quality of "life" in paintings and sculptures. But what makes a work of art appear enlivened or animated? Besides dynamic features (movements, gestures, facial expressions), authors often emphasize the liveliness of color. This lecture confronts texts by Venetian writers to Venetian Renaissance color practice. It scrutinizes the analogy between unione de' colori and the living organism as described in contemporary discourses in natural philosophy and medicine. In these discourses, the Aristotelian quality of inborn warmth (calor innatus), unifying heterogeneous elements through metabolism, is of central importance.
Myth, Science, and Philosophical Painting
Stephen J. Campbell, professor and chair, history of art, The Johns Hopkins University
One of the central problems in the interpretation of Venetian painting—which is so emphatically defined by its material character, its sensual quality, and a technique that emphasizes medium and execution—is that any account of meaning seeking to pursue this question solely at the level of subject matter seems inadequate. Meaning cannot be adequately addressed by "iconology" in the traditional sense. Rather, it commands an iconology that is also a phenomenology: a method is needed that can address what these images do, how they anticipate the reactions of their beholders, and how the dynamics of sensation they represent and produce transform the ostensible subject matter.
The idea that naturalistic representation was a goal of painting in 1500 was a commonplace, one well elaborated in literary responses and theoretical prescriptions—so much so that it may no longer have seemed a productive idea. What gave painting a special purchase on the natural, however, was its capacity to produce certain affects in a beholder by "artificial" means (as Leonardo realized). Nature now is not so concerned with what lies "out there" as with the material and cognitive links between perceiving bodies and the physical world that enfolds them. All of this means that painting obtains a special purchase on questions regarding human nature that were central to contemporary philosophical discussions. This presentation assesses the achievement of one painting that addresses the condition of being human in relation to larger forces of nature—Giorgione's Tempest—and to consider what I identify as a series of responses to this painting by Titian, the Campagnolas, and others.
Sunday, September 17
1:00–4:30 p.m.
Introduction
Faya Causey, head, academic programs, National Gallery of Art
Titian, Giorgione, and the Mysteries of Paris
Paul Joannides, professor, department of art history, University of Cambridge
Starting with a discussion of Titian's so-called Nymph and Shepherd in Vienna, for which Professor Joannides accepts Erwin Panofsky's identification as Paris and Oenone, the lecture explores the question of subjects from the life of Paris in Venetian sixteenth century painting. Stressing, as many scholars have, the intensely retrospective nature of the figural elements in the Nymph and Shepherd, which all look back to work produced in Venice or by Venetian artists in the first decade of the sixteenth century—the lecture considers whether this is also true of the subject matter. It looks at treatments of Paris subjects in the first decade or so of the sixteenth century, paying particular attention to Giorgione's lost (or partially lost) Exposure of Paris, and attempts to discover whether other paintings by or from the circle of Titian and Giorgione also deal with Parisian themes.
Titian's "Virgin and Child with Saints Roch and Anthony of Padua"
Miguel Falomir, head of the department of Italian and French painting, Museo del Prado
The lecture focuses on one the earliest surviving works by Titian, the Madonna and Child with Saints Roch and Anthony of Padua from the Museo del Prado included in the exhibition. It analyzes its connections with Giorgione and shows recent technical findings that provide new information about the beginnings of the painter.
Departing from the Madonna and Child with Saints Roch and Anthony of Padua, the second part of the lecture shows how the sacra conversazione subject changed in Titian's mind during the first decade of his career, ending with the Madonna and Child with Saints (circa 1516), also from the Prado. The comparison between the two paintings illustrates not only Titian's formal evolution, but also the development of an important workshop.
New Findings on Titian's "Concert Champêtre"
Jean Habert, conservateur en chef au département des Peintures Musée du Louvre
Painted just before 1510, the Louvre's Concert Champêtre, an allegory of Poesia of historical importance, created a new genre that sets the imagined civilization of rediscovered antiquity in the bucolic landscapes of sixteenth-century Venetian terraferma (mainland). The author of the picture is sometimes debated. Traditionally assumed to be Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto, c. 1477/1478–Venice, 1510), this attribution has been challenged since the nineteenth century. Today, a majority of critics believe the painting is by Titian (Pieve di Cadore, 1488/1490–Venice, 1576) or that Titian completed an unfinished painting by Giorgione after the latter died of the plague in 1510 in his early thirties.
When the first x-ray images of the Concert Champêtre came out in 1949, a major alteration appeared affecting the standing woman. The idea arose that she was begun by Giorgione and completed by Titian, who changed her initially frontal attitude, with her head turned to the right,into a graceful contrapposto (swirling gesture) by which she turns to the left and reaches out toward a well. Among the several alterations brought to light by the new scientific evidence gathered in 2005, infrared reflectography reveals not one but two underdrawings meant to change this figure, both squared: the painter studied his project independently in drawing and carefully transferred two different projects onto the canvas by the technique of squaring (grid system of vertical and horizontal lines). All of the pentimenti (alterations) are evidently by one hand, the same that painted the entire picture, and they were all brought in while the work was in the making. Comparisons with infrared reflectograms and radiographs of other paintings by Giorgione and Titian of the same period indicate that the masterly hand that so feverishly searched for the perfect expression of Poesia is most probably Titian's.
A panel discussion with the exhibition organizers will follow the lectures.
Participants will include:
Jaynie Anderson, head of the School of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne,
David Alan Brown, curator of Italian and Spanish paintings, National Gallery of Art,
Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, curator of Italian Renaissance painting, Kunsthistorisches Museum Gemäldegalerie,
Peter Humfrey, professor at the School of Art History, University of Saint Andrews,
Mauro Lucco, professor, Università degli Studi di Bologna
Salvatore Settis, director, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
The symposium is organized by the National Gallery of Art in conjunction with The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation.