Titian’s Six Mythological Paintings: The Show of the Year

At Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, we see that Titian is indeed ‘the wonder of the world who transforms nature into art.’

T  itian: Women, Myth & Power is the new exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. My advice is to run, not walk, to the phone, to your computer, to Western Union, to your local purveyor of smoke signals to get your tickets. That is, if you want to enrich your eyes with the most sublime color, channel the splendor of the court of Philip II, or simply tell your friends you’ve seen what I’m sure will be the most important show of the year. Let those without your foresight, alacrity, and good taste cry in their thin, cold gruel.

The Titian show, which in different iterations has already been to the National Gallery in London and the Prado in Madrid, gathers for the first time in 450 years the six big mythological paintings that Philip II (1527–98) commissioned from Titian (c. 1488–1576). It’s a great and deserved coup for the Gardner, which owns The Rape of Europa, arguably the best and certainly looking the best. Mrs. Gardner was exhilarated when she bought it in 1896 from a British aristocrat. She paid not a small fortune but a hefty one. Her joy will be yours, more so if you take the time to visit the rest of her collection in her Venice-inspired palace. The Gardner is unique.

Philip, king of Spain, then the world’s biggest, richest empire, was among the most discerning collectors of his age. Titian was the Venetian visionary and painter whom his contemporary, the poet and playwright Piero Aretino, called “the wonder of the world who transforms nature into art, in all of his figures, design and color in flesh and bone.” The Renaissance was a maker of such visionaries and painters. Titian shares its aesthetic summit with Michelangelo, Dürer, Raphael, and Leonardo.

Titian called the paintings his “poesie,” meaning “visual poems.” Though inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Roman author’s version of about 250 Greek and Roman myths, Titian took much artistic license. Philip hired him for the project in 1550 while he was still a prince and heir to the throne of Charles V, his father, the king of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, and also Titian’s patron. Philip and Titian met twice, in Milan in 1548 and in Augsburg in 1550, and there and in some letters discussed the outlines of the commission. Philip left Titian much discretion in design and interpretation. The painter created the big, bold, and luscious paintings between 1551 and 1562.

The show is elegantly and simply arranged in the Gardner’s big gallery for temporary loan exhibitions. In March, I reviewed the Gardner’s Shen Wei exhibition in this space, in a story on the museum’s new building after ten years. It’s a lovely, large gallery where everything looks good. The curator, Nathaniel Silver, one of the best young Old Master curators in America, made an octagonal space filled by a portrait of Philip II and Queen Mary Tudor, his wife for a brief time. Silver has written a short book on the Gardner’s picture. It’s a great companion to the big, comprehensive catalogue for the entire show.

The series begins with Danaë and Venus and Adonis. Danae is the daughter of the king of Argos, who learns from an oracle that Danaë will bear a son who’ll kill him. He thought he’d cut the Grim Reaper off at the pass by imprisoning Danaë in a tower. Jupiter, who’d seen Danaë and thought her one plump delight, transformed himself into a cloud of gold coins. The story is one of acquiescence and, of course, the best-laid schemes of mice and men going awry. They spend quality time together, and the result is Perseus, who, proving the oracle right, eventually kills his mother’s father. Danaë’s maid tries to catch the coins, getting her priorities right and ignoring the love scene in progress. Danaë was trimmed sometime in the 1700s while still in the Royal Collection, losing about ten inches on top for reasons we don’t know. We know from copies that the lost passage depicted a fuzzy Jupiter sprinkling coins.

Danaë introduces a central motif of the series, which is the relationship between men and women. Titian’s women are mostly nudes. Yes, these pictures are the biggest and most lascivious works of art of their time. The subtitle of the show, “Women, Myth & Power,” is vague enough to invite thoughts of big matters. Their succulence in flesh and color can’t be denied, however. These are very beautiful works of art.

Venus and Adonis is Danaë’s pendant, Titian tells Philip II, in that in the latter we see the female nude from the front and in the former we see her from behind. He portrays Danaë supine, at the moment of conception and, it seems, of an orgasm. The goddess Venus is smitten, too, with the mortal Adonis, but he’s not so passive. He’s going hunting for the day. Venus, whether via an oracle, a vision, or palace gossip on Mount Olympus, learns that a wild boar will kill Adonis. She begs him to stay with her. He rejects her pleas and goes to his boar-tusk death. Obsession, premonition, defiance, love, and loss are at play.

Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto are the next pair, painted between 1556 and 1559. While Danaë and Venus are besotted, Diana, the virgin goddess, is a very mean girl indeed. The mortal Actaeon is hunting in a forest. He unwittingly and disastrously discovers Diana’s grotto retreat from which men are barred. Nude nymphs scurry to clothe themselves, though still curious about the big, buff intruder.

Diana’s not amused. A stag’s head rests on a plinth near her, forecasting her revenge on Actaeon, who is soon turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his dogs. Destiny isn’t in his favor, and we can’t help thinking that Diana is vengeful and cruel.

In these two, Titian starts to develop another big theme in the series: the relationship between gods and mortals. Jupiter isn’t the god who turns our lives upside down, as he did with Danaë’s. Adonis was the most handsome man in the world. He and Venus were lovers, and other gods, male and female, resented it, wanting a piece of Adonis for themselves. Their jealousy made them mad. The gods engineered his death-by-boar, rendering him less than an ideal date even if shared. This and Diana and Callisto are two of Titian’s most complex figure arrangements, with multiple nudes from all angles. Callisto is a nymph who, as part of Diana’s cult following, is committed to chastity. Again, Jupiter is the divine debaucher. Rather than a shower of gold, he disguises himself as Diana herself, approaches Callisto, switches gender, rapes her, and disappears. Titian depicts the moment in Ovid’s version when Callisto, having disguised her pregnancy for months, squabbles with the other nymphs, who tear her robe from her. She’s banished. Later, offstage, so to speak, Juno, the jealous wife of Jupiter, transforms her into a bear.

These two paintings are pendants, both with many figures, in each the angry goddess on the right and protagonist victim on the left, each victim doomed by the removal of sweeps of fabric that hide. A stag’s head predicts Actaeon’s fate. A plinth on which Cupid stands shows the god of love pouring water as if to emphasize Diana’s space as one where lust is barred. Women in loveless packs are capable of dreadful things, Ovid tells us, and Titian seems to second the motion.

Titian would have been a great movie director. His scenes encapsulate long, involved stories, with nuances like Callisto’s pose, held under duress, tears in her eyes; Danaë’s sigh; and Venus’s armful gesture, which says “don’t go,” among all of Venus’s other pleadings rejected by Adonis’s own posture, which says “I’m shoving off.” Titian’s a choreographer, too, with supporting figures arranged to enhance the pathos and drama surrounding two protagonists.

Though Perseus and Andromeda and The Rape of Europa are paired at the Gardner, they’re not really meant to go together. The Andromeda nude was delivered to Philip in 1556, Europa in 1562. The Gardner made the right choice in pairing them, though. They’re both women in the air, Andromeda hanging from chains and Europa afloat on the back of Jupiter, disguised as a bull. Perseus and Andromeda belongs to the Wallace Collection in London. It’s London’s version of the Frick and essential visiting.

In its 124-year history, the Wallace Collection has never loaned a painting. For the Gardner’s Titian, how could it say “no”? Easily, when you’ve said “no” since 1897, but the museum has a brilliant, energetic, modern-thinking director who persuaded the trustees that “yes” was the right answer. Perseus and Andromeda made a trip across the sea that, I think, had fewer bumps than what we see in Titian’s painting.

Here hubris powers the story. Hubris is the Greek concept of pride or overconfidence tinged with pretension or arrogance. Hubris, or the haughty spirit in the Old Testament, goeth before lots of falls, among them Icarus, Phaeton, Tantalus, and anyone with too much power believing smugly, ignorantly, that he’s untouchable. We are where we are in this sad, cruel world today because of hubris. The disaster in Afghanistan comes from many shades of hubris. Cassiopeia, the mother of Andromeda, boasts that she and her daughters are more beautiful than the Nereids, Neptune’s sea maidens.

Mortals don’t joust with the gods, and if they do, they’re in deep doo-doo. The gods will always win if there’s a contest, and it won’t be pretty. If mortals fall in love with the gods, they’ll pay a price. Neptune retaliates by damning Andromeda to death-by-monster. Dangling from chains, she would have been munched for lunch but for Perseus, who sweeps from the air to save her.

Both the Andromeda and the Europa paintings are action scenes. Both are water scenes. Perseus and Andromeda needs a good cleaning. It’s dark and melodramatic, even apocalyptic. The story sired the “princess and the dragon” rescue theme, leading, I suppose, to scenes of young women tied to the railroad tracks. I think the Gardner might have made a little mischief in placing The Rape of Europa, which was conserved for the exhibition, next to it. It’s dazzling.

I’ve saved not the best for last — each is a great picture — but the hostess with the mostest, as Irving Berlin would have it. The Gardner’s painting makes the show. It’s Titian’s last delivery, painted between 1559 and 1562. Europa, daughter of the king of Sidon in Asia, while cavorting in the fields with her maid-in-waiting, finds a herd of grazing cattle, among which is a white bull, handsome and unusual. It’s Jupiter, up to his old tricks. He’d had his eye on Europa for a while and persuaded Mercury to deliver him, in disguise, to her midst. The unsuspecting Europa crowns the bull with a laurel of flowers, entranced by his gentleness.

Off she goes like a rocket, on the back of the bull, clinging to one of his horns, he with a crazy gleam in his eye. She waves a length of red silk as a sign of distress and plea for help from below. Obviously discommoded, legs and arms flailing, she’s helpless. The couple land on Crete, where Europa is made Jupiter’s woman. The Rape of Europa is a much later title. Europa never goes back to Daddy, and doesn’t seem to want to go. The child she has with Jupiter becomes the king of Crete, where European civilization, in Ovid’s view, begins.

I’ve seen this painting a hundred times at the Gardner and always found it jokey. Europa’s no Cyd Charisse, and I think cows are stupid. I have no set opinion on bulls aside from they always seem to lose in a bullfight or end up sizzling on a grill. At the Gardner, though, now freshly cleaned and displayed with proper, modern museum lighting rather than the Gardner’s dim palace lighting, it’s gorgeous. It’s quite a drama, too.

Titian’s late style is a juxtaposition of polished passages against minimalist but entirely evocative sweeps of paint. Long strokes of thin, white paint give Europa, am ample woman by any standard, a look that’s not feathery but still aeronautic. It’s immediacy we’re after. Her flesh is pink with vermillion highlights to suggest pliancy. It’s luminous. Dark brown contours around her fingers make for the clench with which she holds and waves her silk scarf. Her feet are clenched, too. Churning water is made in strokes of blue and green paint with layers of azure and umber paint for depth, capped by big dabs of white that look random but create whitecaps.

Fish look as menacing as anything Goya or Turner did. Titian’s are so abstract, with streaks and strokes of white and blue over warm browns creating bodies. Sharp teeth and wild eyes are done with dabs of white and brown. Jupiter’s eyes are very finished and look obsessive and hungry. They’re the eyes of a god. His flower garland, the arrows the putti carry, and their fat legs are painted thickly and precisely.

I kept thinking of Turner while I looked at the chaotic passages and the packed, gauzy passages of dabs, dragged paint, and layers. The vaporous sky and hazy mountains have a million descendants, though, from Veronese to Canaletto, the Impressionists, and Rothko. It’s a Venetian sky, a saturated, brilliant blue with a hint of bronze clouds. Together, they tell us that something momentous and magical is happening. Philip’s kingdom covered half the globe. I presume he thought his empire, under his rule, was ordained to finish, and finish splendidly, what Jupiter and Europa wrought. I loved the sky and Europa’s red scarf, with Titian’s expressive brushstrokes, which El Greco would have seen while he was in Venice, painted wet and wet. Dashes of yellow and white pick out the folds. The painting’s about lust, but it’s about speed, too.

I look at these majestic works as art first and foremost. The Gardner intelligently promotes this. Wall text is just enough for context. Titian drew predominantly from Ovid, but there’s no point for gallery text to examine Titian’s other sources and his own invention. All of this is considered in Matthias Wivel’s exceptional catalogue. He’s the curator of Italian painting at the National Gallery. A single big, round, contiguous bench allows close looking and scooching as the visitor moves from painting to painting. A small introductory gallery focuses mostly on Mrs. Gardner’s purchase. A letter to her from Henry James asks if she next planned to raid the Vatican of its Raphaels. This space is an exquisite balance of restraint and supplies information we actually want to know. The Gardner has the best taste.

This exhibition was a huge challenge. The Gardner, the Wallace Collection, Apsley House in London, the National Gallery, the Prado, and the National Gallery of Scotland each owned a Titian, prized what they owned, and had to agree to lend. Once that happened, the show had to be insured. Then, courtesy of COVID, it had to be rescheduled. Talk about a profile in courage. I think the Gardner, the only American venue, did lots of the heavy lifting.

I almost never read other reviews of shows I’m planning to tackle except when I’ve written a draft of a review of an exhibition I really don’t like. Out of fairness, I scan other reviews to see whether I’ve missed something. There’s no need for that here since Women, Myth & Power is stupendous. That said, I couldn’t help but glance at a review that dived into the #MeToo movement only because it was in a newspaper whose art section I read every day.

It isn’t the dumbest thing I ever read. I think all art writers try to say something original, and #MeToo is in the news. That doesn’t make Titian a skunk or the paintings in any way objectionable. They’re almost 500 years old. In them, men like Adonis, Actaeon, and Danaë’s father take it on the chin. Jupiter, whose mischief knows no bounds, tells us the gods, stand-ins for fate, have the power to transform the lives of us mortals at a whim. That’s what “metamorphosis” means, and that’s Ovid’s subject.

How did Philip see Titian’s series? We don’t know, except he seemed happy with them. Kings are different from you and me. Philip had four wives and many assignations with other women. He ruled a big part of the world, absolutely, saw himself as God’s champion on earth, and was well read. On one very low, narrow level, these are so many pin-up girls, but, let’s face it, Philip was a far bigger thinker than today’s skanky men who gave rise to #MeToo.

The catalogue doesn’t examine Titian’s poesie in the context of Philip’s marriage to Mary Tudor, which unfolded plunk in the middle of the series. She loved him. He didn’t hate her, but he didn’t love her either and saw the marriage as transactional. Much of Philip’s London court — marrying Mary made him bigger and more powerful, as he was king of Spain and king of England — thought Mary homely and clingy. Titian used prostitutes as models, and he was not above paying for fun. The sex trade in Venice was huge. Is this part of the story of the poesie? Danaë, Venus, Andromeda, Callisto, Diana, and Europa suggest a range of emotions and narratives. Hanging “Me Too” on them and Titian seems tinny and trite. It’s essential to remember that no one in Titian’s time was endorsing what the gods did. Philip was more Catholic than the pope, and, given papal decadence, a good deal more Catholic. The great artists, philosophers, clerics, and kings understood that the gods were part of a pagan system that Christianity challenged, dismantled, and replaced.

There are endless ways of looking at these paintings. Making great sense is Aretino’s view that Titian’s strength, what makes him still “the wonder of the world,” is in looking at nature, picking up his brush and paint, and taking us from our mundane world to the world of the gods, where love, lust, haplessness, vengeance, humiliation, fear, and bravery are at their most intense. He made the myths real.