Examines the major paintings and themes of Titian, including an analysis of "Sacred and Profane Love", as well as information about his life and cultural surroundings. -- From product description.
"Sacred and Profane Love" is the title usually given to one of Titian's great masterpieces, a jewel of the Galleria Borghese. A sublime work of art, fascinating in the mystery of its meaning, its content appears to be a Neoplatonic interpretation of classical elements, approached through the poetry of Petrarch. This volume includes full-color reproductions of paintings by Titian, as well as text, originally published in Italian, based on the interviews between eminent art critic Federico Zeri and Marco Dolcetta. The book also includes a chronological reading of Titian's principal works; some documents and testimonies on Titian; a brief chronology of his life; a list of museums where Titian's paintings can be seen; and a bibliography.
The Art Mysteries series examines several highly regarded masterpieces in an attempt to unravel the mysteries that surround them. Edited by Marco Carminati and Stefano Zuffi, they present an up-to-date and spectacular reading of famous paintings, investi
Examining Titian's fascination with the theme of the beautiful woman, this text offers an interpretation of the artist's secular paintings of women and sets them in the context of life in 16th-century Venice. It aims to show how female images relate to Titian's concern with larger themes in life.
The work that Titian produced during the first decade of his career is beautiful and varied, but it has raised many questions of attribution and chronology. This book - the first thorough and coherent account of this period in Titian's life - reconstructs what he painted, when he painted it and what these paintings mean. Paul Joannides begins by discussing the probable course of Titian's early career and his relationship to the Bellinis. There are individual excurses on Giorgione and on Sebastiano del Piombo whose work has often been confused with his. Joannides then offers new interpretations of some of Titian's paintings, emphasising their poetic and dramatic qualities. Among other topics, he associates for the first time the paintings in Saint Petersburg, Venice and Houston; lays out Titian's part of the Fondaco; connects the privately owned Resurrected Christ with the Fogg Circumcision; integrates the Dresden Venus and the Berlin Portrait into Titian's work; and establishes the dynamism and inventiveness of the great Assunta of 1516-18. Joannides provides detailed arguments in support of both new and familiar attributions, proposes a more closely reasoned and precise chronology
Several Laocoons are identified in this study: the alleged lost "Greek original"; the extant marbles sculpted in the first century; the sixteenth-century restoration and its affect; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topos of critical judgment; and the twentieth-century re-restored artifact of ancient art.
An examination of ideas and ideals of medieval courtly love and the transition into later Romantic love, analyzing the work of Dante, Shakespeare, and Schopenhauer, among many others. Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking [that] is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the second volume, Singer studies the ideas and ideals of medieval courtly love and nineteenth-century Romantic love, as well as the transition between these two perspectives. According to the traditions of courtly love in the twelfth century and thereafter, not only God but also human beings in themselves are capable of authentic love. The pursuit of love between man and woman was seen as a splendid ideal that ennobles both the lover and the beloved. It was something more than libidinal sexuality and involved sophisticated and highly refined courtliness that emulated religious love in its ability to create a holy union between the participants. Adherents to Romantic love in later centuries, affirmed the capacity of love to effect a merging between two people who thus became one. Singer analyzes the transition from courtly to Romantic by reference to the writings of many artists beginning with Dante and ending with Richard Wagner, as well as Neoplatonist philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. In relation to romanticism itself, he distinguishes between two aspects—"benign romanticism" and "Romantic pessimism"—that took on renewed importance in the twentieth century.