FROM PIEVE DI CADORE TO MONACO. THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF TIZIANO

Great master of Venetian tonalism, together with Giorgione, Titian artistically dominates in Venice and reaches an extraordinary world fame.

by Fabio Massimo Penna

As we saw in a previous article Tiziano Vecellio , a pupil and collaborator of Giorgione, was a painter with a great technical mastery, able in the last years of his life to paint by dipping his fingers in color and then creating the work with fingerprints. This technique left Giorgio Vasari astonished because if up close the paintings looked like a confused mass of colors from a distance they turned out to be perfectly defined works. An ante litteram impressionist we could define him. In fact, the Cadore is one of the greatest painters in the history of art. His long life (he died around the age of eighty-six) saw him pass from one prestigious position to another and establish himself undisputed until becoming the authentic ruler of Venice from an artistic point of view. Together with Giorgione it is the maximum expression of Venetian tonalism, the pictorial technique based not on drawing, which is eliminated, but on the juxtaposition of colors. Of the first collaboration between the two great artists, the frescoes for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi , almost nothing remains while for the first works by Titian, given his great ability to assimilate Giorgione's innovative language, the attribution is uncertain because some see the hand of the Cadore, others that of the master of Castelfranco Veneto. The Louvre Country Concert is exemplary in this sense, but it is considered by the majority of scholars to be Titian.

The first documented works of Cadore are the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo in Padua, among which the miracle of the wounded woman stands out. Initially, the canvases with profane subjects such as Sacred love and profane love (preserved in Rome at the Borghese Gallery), a work with a perfect balance of vertical and horizontal elements based on the juxtaposition of two beautiful girls, one dressed in clothes, obtain great success. elegant and the other naked, in a probable symbolic representation of earthly and celestial love. The work that marks the first part of Titian's life is the panel of L'Assunta dei Frari (1516-1518) painted for the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. The monumental altarpiece (690 × 360 cm) is dominated by the grandiloquence of the gestures and the energetic drafting of the colors that give it a great theatricality. At the chromatic level, the red of the clothes (the famous Titian red) and the dazzling golden light of the sun strike the eye of the observer. A few years later is the canvas of the Pala Pesaro (Venice, Santa Maria dei Frari) set on the diagonal of the perspective escape of the two monumental columns in the foreground with the vanishing point falling out of the work, reaffirming the ambition to open the space to infinity.

The Venetian painter is also responsible for one of the great nudes of world art, the Venus of Urbino (Uffizi Gallery in Florence), a work characterized by concrete sensuality. The beautiful female body, made with the transitions of color, lying softly on a bed in a sumptuous room refers to Giorgione's Venus of Dresden to whose realization the Cadore had contributed. The woman boldly looks at the viewer showing herself aware of her own attractiveness. The great fame of the artist from Pieve di Cadore goes beyond the Italian borders and Charles V invites him on two occasions to Augusta. To the monarch Titian he dedicates the extraordinary equestrian portrait Charles V returning from the battle of Muhlberg (Madrid, Museo del Prado), a work dominated in the foreground by the black horse of Charles V with red drape and plume in front of a landscape captured at dusk with the white clouds and cobalt sky.

Cadorino's latest works show that frayed, incandescent painting that dissolves the contours, drawn in spots of which we spoke at the beginning of the article. The lightning-fast strokes of the fingers emphasized by an intense light that flakes the forms dominate the late Crowning with Thorns of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the powerful Marsyas Flayed of the National Museum of Kromeriz, which represents the cruel punishment of the satyr who had dared to challenge in a competition the god Apollo.