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ART JOURNAL: Titian, rivals battle for market share in Louvre show

By Jorg von Uthmann
BLOOMBERG
Wednesday, Sep 23, 2009, Page 15

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Did Antonio Salieri really kill his rival Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as rumor has it? Nothing is less certain. There is no denying, though, that jealousy among artists can both drive creativity and lead to dirty tricks.

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese — Rivalries in Venice, an exhibition at the Louvre, looks at the Venetian school of painting in the second half of the 16th century from the perspective of fierce competition for market share.

Titian (ca. 1488-1576) was the most senior among the three. His teacher, Giovanni Bellini, had transformed Venice from an artistic backwater to a beacon of the avant-garde. His use of oil instead of tempera and of color as an element of composition became a trademark of the Venetian school.

Not everybody was happy with the new style. Michelangelo, after having seen Titian’s Danae, told Vasari, the art critic, that he admired the handling of color, yet added: “What a pity that Venetian painters don’t learn how to draw properly.”

Europe’s ruling class didn’t share Michelangelo’s misgivings. The emperor, the pope, kings, cardinals and lesser dignitaries lined up to be immortalized by Titian. Emperor Charles V appointed him court painter and knighted him.

Titian’s European fame didn’t prevent him from keeping a watchful eye on potential rivals at home. Jacopo Robusti (1518-94), nicknamed Tintoretto after his father’s profession of dyer (tintore), lasted only a few days in his studio before the older master kicked him out.

When Tintoretto started to make inroads into the Venetian market, Titian’s friend, the pamphleteer Pietro Aretino, attacked his work as shallow mass production.

Tintoretto was no wallflower either. To secure commissions, he routinely undercut his colleagues.

In 1564, when the Scuola di San Rocco launched a competition for an important cycle of paintings, he arrived — while his rivals submitted their sketches — with a finished canvas for the ceiling, modestly offering it as a present to the religious community. Naturally, he won the contract that occupied him, off and on, for more than 20 years.

Tintoretto seems to have been a genuinely pious man in a not-so-pious city unlike Paolo Caliari (1528-88), nicknamed Veronese after Verona, his place of birth.

Veronese is best known for his sumptuous banquet scenes. In 1573, he got into trouble with the Inquisition: The religious authorities felt that his Last Supper looked more like a swanky reception than a biblical event and forced him to rename the painting. Under the title Feast in the House of Levi it’s one of the gems of Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia.

Tintoretto’s cycle from the Scuola di San Rocco didn’t make it to the Paris show, and instead of the Feast in the House of Levi you can see another of Veronese’s banquets — The Pilgrims of Emmaus from the Louvre’s own holdings.

Titian’s Danae, on the other hand, appears twice. There’s the earlier version, lambasted by Michelangelo, and a later one from the Prado in which Cupid has been replaced by an old woman.

Sensibly, the organizers have grouped the 86 canvases thematically so that the visitor can compare the three masters and their different ways of handling portraits, nudes, mythological and biblical subjects.

To round off the presentation, the Louvre has added some minor painters, such as Jacopo Bassano, Palma Giovane and Andrea Schiavone, who worked in Venice during the same period.

You’ll look in vain, though, for the first of Veronese’s banquets, the giant Marriage at Cana. It hasn’t budged from its wall in the Salle des Etats, facing the museum’s leading lady — Mona Lisa.

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