The first definitive biography of the master painter in more than a century, Titian: His Life is being hailed as a "landmark achievement" for critically acclaimed author Sheila Hale (Publishers Weekly). Brilliant in its interpretation of the 16th-century master's paintings, this monumental biography of Titian draws on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research and scholarship, some of it previously unpublished, providing an unparalleled portrait of the artist, as well as a fascinating rendering of Venice as a center of culture, commerce, and power. Sheila Hale's Titian is destined to be this century's authoritative text on the life of greatest painter of the Italian High Renaissance.
After Vasari's Lives of the Most Famous Artists,The Life of Titian by the seventeenth-century Venetian artist and writer Carlo Ridolfi is the most important contemporary documentary source for our understanding of the great Renaissance artist. This new critical edition, the first translation into English of Ridolfi's biography, illuminates his life, his artistic production, and his early critical reputation. The editors address art-historical questions of attribution, provenance, and documentation that Ridolfi's biography raises. Two introductory essays present the nature, scope, and importance of the biography for the study of Titian and Venetian Renaissance art and place Ridolfi in the tradition of Renaissance biography and artistic literature. The annotations provide a useful and current bibliography drawn from both art history and literature. The Life of Titian will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students of the history of Renaissance art, literature, language, and culture.
This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.
"For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Renaissance Venice's three greatest painters - Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese - overlapped, encouraging mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed the course of art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In this environment, the three artists - brilliant, ambitious, and fiercely competitive - vied with each other for primacy, deploying the new combination of oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature touch. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that allowed for unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 160 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the "Venetian style"--Characterized by loose technique. rich coloring, and often sensual subject matter - as well as the social, political, and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of new approaches to studies of such crucial institutions as state commissions and the private patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, the volume presents a vibrant human portrait - one brimming with intense competition, one-upmanship, humor, and passion."--Jacket.
Welcome to an alarming book. In it Matthew Collings, known for his TV programmes and books about new art, tells you how to look at the old masters. Of course you can look at them however you like. But this book gives you some art historical facts as the context for what you're looking at - Collings gives you the resources you need, in order to make sense of what you're seeing. And he gets you to think for yourself. In art culture today all you hear about are literal meanings, about subject matter and ideas. Matt Collings objects to the droning repetition of that stuff. He looks to the past for a different model of art, one where the surface, the form, the look of something, is part of the idea, maybe even the main thing. We can't have the past back as a complete package, of course. That would be mad. But we can find critical principles in it that we can use to make something better out of our own time. The key figures he has chosen are Titian, Rubens, Velasquez and Hogarth. The first three stand for the highest that painting can go - rich, free, flowing, grand. In art historical terms, this is the 'painterly' stream of art. The last one didn't punch quite so high, but in him Collings sees a principle of adapting your understanding and admiration for what seems higher and greater than yourself - the achievements of the past - to your own sense of what is alive and real.Matthew Collings' new book gives a unique approach to the paintings of the past.
