Is This the Greatest Father’s Day Painting Ever?

Last month I asked if Whistler’s Mother is the greatest Mother’s Day painting ever, so it only seems fair to pose a similar question on Father’s Day. Although Mother’s Day evokes thoughts of flowers and flowery cards, Father’s Day brings to mind bad ties and power tools. While Mary Cassatt may be the ultimate artist of the ideal of motherhood, thinking of the chief image-maker for the ideal dad is a bit harder. Perhaps the ideal painting of the ideal dad exists somewhere, but I prefer a great painting of a real, less-than-ideal father. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is This the Greatest Father’s Day Painting Ever?"

[Image: Paul Cezanne. Portrait of the Artist’s Father, 1866.]

The Fast and the Furious

In his prime, friends and fellow painters called Jacopo Comin, better known as Tintoretto (or the “little dyer” after his father’s occupation as a dyer), Jacopo Robusti (“the robust one”) or Il Furioso for his seemingly endless store of furious energy. Until his death on May 31, 1594, Tintoretto painted scenes of ancient gods and the Christian God like he had made a pact with the devil instead. Jacopo’s father reportedly took Tintoretto to study under Titian, but the Old Master never took Jacopo as a student, either, as the legend goes, out of fear of being outdone by a student or, more likely, out of fear of unfairly influencing a unique talent. In Venus, Mars, and Vulcan (above, from 1551), Tintoretto paints a classical tale in Titian-like style but with his own sense of humor mixed in. The cuckolded Vulcan rushes into room to confront Venus as Mars hides under the table and Cupid feigns both sleep and innocence. Tintoretto paints the very moment of tension before Venus’ dog barks at Mars in his hiding place and the fur really begins to fly. It’s truly amazing just how much energy Tintoretto could inject into any scene, even one as well-known and over-painted as this classic love triangle. With humor and humanity, Tintoretto speeds up the film and gets the action started.

Above his studio door, Tintoretto inscribed “Michelangelo's design and Titian's color.” Titian certainly knew Michelangelo’s 1541 fresco of The Last Judgment and didn’t flinch from the idea of drawing a comparison, just as Michelangelo himself had strove to do Giotto one better. Tintoretto’s The Last Judgment (above, from 1560-1562) stands more than 47 feet high; Michelangelo’s version comes in at a hair under 45 feet. In that slightly larger space, Tintoretto inserts more souls per square foot than his predecessor. Also, Tintoretto depicts the figures greatly foreshortened. Standing at the base of the painting you get the feeling that they are about to fall down on you, as if you had just opened a giant closet door and the entire apocalypse was crammed inside. Giotto’s Last Judgment is pure, coherent order; Michelangelo’s version is complexity masquerading as chaos; but Tintoretto’s take is chaos covering more chaos—perhaps the best rendition of how the final reckoning will actually look to human eyes, if that day should ever come. Perhaps there’s a method to the madness of Tintoretto’s Last Judgment, but the teasing out of the rationale is beyond me. Like so many people trying to keep up with Tintoretto, I just don’t have the energy.

When fires destroyed the decorations of the legislative meeting rooms of the Doge’s Palace, Tintoretto created his largest and last blockbuster, titled with deceptive simplicity, Paradise (detail above, from 1587-1590; see the whole thing here). At 74 feet wide and 30 feet tall, Paradise may be the largest canvas painting ever made. With the help of his son Domenico, the 70-year-old but still spry Tintoretto painted the work and installed it in the room. In the center, Jesus and the Virgin Mary serve as the still center around which hundreds and hundreds of saints radiate out. With Paradise, Tintoretto finishes the job he began with his Last Judgment, showing you the final results, as it were. As with Tintoretto’s Last Judgment, Tintoretto’s Paradise defies easy summation and bursts beyond our ken. One can only wonder what went through the minds of Italian politicians over the years as they deliberated with Tintoretto’s masses teeming on the wall and passing judgment on them as they pass judgment on others. Sadly, Tintoretto’s career is colored by his big thinking and painting. You simply can’t wrap your mind around these works. I suspect that Tintoretto’s point isn’t to stop and think as much as to look and learn, and always, always keep moving.

Holy Toledo

Doménicos Theotokópoulos, better known simply as El Greco, did more than his share of traveling during his lifetime. Born October 1, 1541 in Crete, El Greco traveled to Rome in 1570 to hone his already formidable skills. Although Michelangelo, Raphael, and other giants of the High Renaissance no longer lived, their influence was inescapable. However, El Greco found himself drawn the school of Mannerism and masters such as Tintoretto and Titian. El Greco soon took the eccentricities of Mannerism beyond acceptable levels for Italy and traveled to Spain in 1577 in search of royal patronage from King Philip II. The good Spanish king longed for a proper Counter-Reformation artist who would place religious substance over personal style. El Greco sadly didn’t fit the bill, but he remained in Toledo for the rest of his days. El Greco’s View of Toledo (above, from 1596-1600) shows the then-vibrant city, the religious capital of Spain in its day, beneath a tormented sky. Arriving during the height of the Spanish Renaissance, after artists such as Alonso Berruguete had already pushed the envelope of what was acceptable stylistically, El Greco should have fit right in, but his unique style, although enjoyed by some contemporaries, remained an enigma for most until the twentieth century, when Expressionism and even Cubism “discovered” El Greco as a long-lost predecessor.

Despite the overarching influence of Michelangelo, or perhaps because of it, El Greco couldn’t stand Michelangelo. El Greco believed Michelangelo to be a good man who just didn’t know how to paint. In 1610, El Greco painted his version of the Laokoön, the classical sculpture unearthed during Michelangelo’s time that some suspect Michelangelo sculpted himself and planted to cause a stir. In El Greco’s version, that classical, Michelangelo-esque story gets the full El Greco treatment. The tight arrangement of the original sculpture comes unravelled in El Greco’s hands. Even the snakes seem stretched across the landscape. So many El Greco works stretch vertically that this horizontal work stands out even more. In the background , El Greco models the doomed city of Troy with the Trojan Horse at its gates on his adopted home of Toledo. Compositionally, El Greco’s version is brilliant—years, if not centuries ahead of its time. Painting at a time when religious works always were the most profitable, El Greco’s choice of a classical subject done in such an un-classical way seems odd, unless he intentionally wanted to cast off the burden of Michelangelo and all he stood for once and for all.

When El Greco died in 1614, The Opening of the Fifth Seal (above, from 1609-1614) remained in his studio, finished or unfinished depending on who you ask. El Greco remained one of those strange offshoots of the tree of art history—a fruitless branch until the twentieth century adopted him almost three centuries later. Paul Cézanne saw traces of what would flower into Cubism in El Greco’s stylized figures and landscapes. Pablo Picasso saw such bizarre figures as the risen souls of The Opening of the Fifth Seal and incorporated El Greco’s vision along with countless other influences into his landmark Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Much modern appreciation for El Greco comes from the fact that our eyes are now accustomed to his style after more than a century of similar stylistic experimentation. Taken out of context, El Greco doesn’t seem that different from us today. Returned to his context of time and place, El Greco becomes once again as foreign and difficult to understand as his name once was to his Spanish contemporaries.

The Proper Study

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:…

Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

—From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

“The size I am speaking about is the size of a man, or rather my own relation to my own decisions as to the best size a man can be,” Mark Rothko once said when trying to explain the bigger-than-life scale of so many of his paintings, including White Center (above, from 1950). “To this extent I am again a Renaissance man, for my pictures [are] a personal tape measure of my moral values.” In Rothko, edited by Oliver Wick, Rothko as Renaissance man, specifically an Italian Renaissance man, is reborn. Accompanying an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Italy, last year, Rothko examines the link between Rothko the modern artist and the artists of the distant past, whom Rothko modeled his own art and career after. Writing of Rothko’s drawings patterned after Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Wick sees Rothko “[u]sing the Leonardo not as a direct model, but as an allusion and intellectual parallel” in order to “play… with an internalized image of man and human proportions.” “Do they negate each other, modern and classical?” Rothko once asked. Borrowing that line for the title of his essay, Wick definitively answers no. Wick sees Rothko longing for the good old days of the Renaissance when the artist could fulfill a vital role in society rather than lurk on the perimeter.

Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, picks up on Wick’s examination of Rothko the Renaissance man with his essay, “Mark Rothko’s The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies through an Italian Lens.” “Rothko places the artist/philosopher at the center of [his ideal] society,” Christopher says of his father, “as a leader in expression of truth and of synthesizing a gestalt understanding of the world around him or her.” Such social works as the Seagram Murals (one example above, from 1958) show how Rothko longed to connect with the public and publicize his thoughts on life through his art. In Rothko’s unfinished treatise on art, The Artist’s Reality, Rothko looked all the way back through Italian art history to Giotto to find a kindred spirit. “In Giotto’s painting [Rothko] saw an embodiment of his own modernist ideals: figures of real weight and substance, bold use of color that helped create the painting’s space rather than remaining subservient to it, and the creation of art that depicted its own reality rather than functioning as pastiche of the ‘reality’ presented to us by sight alone,” Christopher writes. In contrast, Michelangelo, although “visually stunning,” enslaves himself to perspective and the other visual trickery that “preoccupied” Renaissance artists. For Rothko, Christopher writes, “The artist’s role is that of the philosopher: to examine the world around him and express his understanding of the truth based on what he sees.” Michelangelo simply doesn’t express this “truth” for Rothko. da Vinci, however, fares better in that he recognizes the limitations of perspective and uses sfumato and chiaroscuro to restore the “subjective” over the slavishly scientific. Titian, Tintoretto, and the School of Venice stand as heroes for Rothko in “creating a new naturalism, a type of artwork that speaks to our unified experience of the world, not an appeal to our eyes through a collection of visual effects.” Christopher Rothko’s profound understanding of his father’s appreciation of the Italian masters not only sheds new light on Rothko’s painting but also provides a fascinating perspective on these past painters.

Rothko carried on his love affair with Italy and Italian art most of his adult life. First travelling to Italy in 1950 on a Fullbright Scholarship, Rothko filled his days with sightseeing and museum-going. In “Mark Rothko’s Three Italian Journeys,” Giovanni Carandente traces Rothko’s path through Italian art history during his 1950 visit and subsequent visits in 1959 and 1966. On his second and third visits, Rothko fell in love with the frescoes by Fra Angelico at the Convent at San Marco. “In the cells of the Florentine convent,” Carandente writes, “the evangelical episodes narrated on a wall for a single viewer to meditate upon became the optimum for a painter like Rothko.” Such an experience prompted Rothko to design the Rothko Chapel, a modern sacred space of private meditation. Again, the catalogue beautifully recreates how Rothko linked the work of these artists with his own mature work. As Wick points out, Rothko often claimed that his abstract works “liberated from representation and objective image, were profoundly charged with content, raising the question of a contradiction in terms of associating modern abstraction with classical art and its content.” The essays collected by Wick convincingly answer the question of the contradiction between Fra Angelico’s biblical scenes and Rothko’s blocks of color (as in Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple, above, from 1949) as both addressing a human need for bigger answers. Both artists arrive at salvation from vastly different visual paths but with an identical drive to justify the ways of god to mankind.

Perhaps the most fascinating essay in the collection is Jeffrey Weiss’ “Temps Mort: Rothko and Antonioni.” Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni visited Rothko’s studio in 1962 while touring for the United States opening of L'eclisse. “In the annals of existentialism as something like an international style during the rise of the Cold War,” Weiss writes, “there can be no more striking display of generational inheritance than this meeting.” For hours, Antonioni sat silently as Rothko paraded a succession of his works before him. Antonioni’s next film, Il deserto rosso, his first color film clearly draws on Rothko’s art for inspiration. Throughout, as Weiss points out, Antonioni uses frames and margins “as both an image and a compositional device,” as shown in the example of the film’s star, Monica Vitti, literally framed by Rothko-esque color (above). Even more importantly for Antonioni’s connection to Rothko is the use of “temps mort,” which Weiss defines as “the evacuation of a depicted space contained or cropped by the cinematic frame, a just-inhabited place that achieves formal presence—abstract, quasi-pictorial fullness—through a narrative absence that transpires before the beholder’s gaze.” Vitti may exist in a virtual Rothko in the example above, but when she walks out of that frame and the camera lingers on that space after her absence, that frame retains a special electric charge by her absence. Through such sequences, Antonioni duplicates the paradoxical union of presence within absence that makes Rothko’s art so simultaneously enigmatic and compelling. Weiss wonderfully explains and illustrates this subtle, yet powerful argument that might actually convert many who fail to “get” Rothko.

As much as Rothko loved Italy and its art, Italy loved Rothko back. Claudia Terenzi recounts the critical and popular reception of Rothko in Italy, which is remarkably prescient and informed. “It’s easy to say that he’s the painter of nothing, in order to denigrate his creation,” Italian critic Marco Valsecchi writes in 1962. “But it requires only a little more attention to see that nothing is, instead, filled with that spiritual essence one finds in the quiet, vertical pages of some baroque mystics.” Rothko (shown above in his studio with the Rothko Chapel murals in 1964) is the Seinfeld of abstract art—his works are about nothing, yet they touch on everything, from the minute to the grand. Oliver Wick and his fellow contributors compellingly argue for Rothko’s relevance through his philosophical if not stylistic links to Italian art’s greatest artists. Anyone who sees nothing in Rothko’s work should read Rothko and open their mind. Anyone who already sees something in Rothko’s paintings will read Rothko and discover yet another universe to be explored.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Rothko, edited by Oliver Wick.]

Knight Rider

As much as being knighted is an honor, being knighted twice has to be a surreal experience. Born June 28, 1577, Peter Paul Rubens knelt before both Spain’s Philip IV and England’s Charles I and rose a knight of each of those realms in appreciation for his diplomatic service. Rubens helped bring not only peace to Europe but became a self-appointed ambassador of art, bringing not only his own artwork across borders but also the works of others. Not least of all, Rubens enlisted in the battle for Europe’s collective soul, fighting on the side of the Counter-Reformation with such works as The Raising of the Cross (above, from 1610-1611), a Baroque bombshell that fused the heavenly Renaissance reach of Michelangelo with the grounded earthiness of Flemish painting. Rubens often seems more than one man, present everywhere, fighting for every cause, and influenced by and influencing everyone.

Rubens’ trip to Italy in 1600 shaped him irreversibly into the artist we know today. From the older works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and da Vinci to more recent works by Tintoretto, Veronese, and Caravaggio, Rubens saw and understood them all. For the rest of his life, Rubens affected an adopted Italian-ness, often writing to others in Italian and even signing his name Pietro Paulo. In The Fall of the Rebel Angels (above, from 1618-1620), Rubens seems to rewrite Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment by presenting the “first judgment” in which God banished Lucifer and the rebellious angels from Heaven. The writhing bodies seem to fall in thick chains of flesh into the fiery depths. The powerful diagonal Rubens uses almost acts like a slide upon which the fallen angels descend into perdition. Rubens’ painting serves notice to all those mortals who would follow Martin Luther of the fate once bestowed on heavenly beings that may also await them.

For all his contemporary influence in so many fields of endeavor, what we think when we hear the name Rubens today is the curvy, sensuous, classically Rubenesque female nude, as displayed and judged in The Judgment of Paris (above, from 1639). Rubens appreciated the late work of Titian when few others did. As wonderfully explained in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting (reviewed earlier here), Titian’s late works not only took on erotic subjects but also depicted them with a physicality rarely seen before and, therefore, misunderstood by Titian’s contemporaries. Rubens, however, saw the genius of Titian’s nymphs and danae and similarly freed his style (and mind) to the possibility of nudes expressive by brushwork rather than pose or composition. In The Judgment of Paris, Rubens shows exemplary judgment in stripping away all the influences he had amassed in his travels and getting down, like Titian, to the simple act of placing paint on canvas as an extension of the heart and soul. After so many years of battles and causes, Rubens retired to the confines of his own expressiveness.

Final Gestures

Titian, Nymph and Shepherd, c. 1570-1575. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum di Vienna. 149.7 x 187 cm.

Listen to the final works of Beethoven–the last string quartets or the Ninth Symphony—and you hear a wholly different composer. Whether that difference came from Beethoven’s encroaching deafness, a philosophical epiphany born of a lifetime of experience, or both will always be a subject for debate. In Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, the last 25 years of Titian’s life undergo a similar debate. Did Titian’s new, freer brushwork originate from his failing vision and dexterity, the insights of age, both, or neither? Sylvia Ferino-Pagden edits this collection of essays accompanying a selection of works on display earlier in 2008 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Through the use of x-rays and infrared reflectography as well as cross-sections of the paintings, works such as Nymph and Shepherd (above) reveal not only the pentimenti (overpainted drawings) of such works but also the thought processes of Titian in his final years. In an essay examining Nymph and Shepherd as a classic case study of Titian’s final period, Elke Oberthaler writes, “As with no other painter, painting practice and technique in Titian’s late work have themselves been thematised and charged with meaning.” Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting recharges Titian’s works with meaning for a modern audience more receptive to such technique than Titian’s own contemporaries.

Titan, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1565-1575. London, National Gallery. 76.2 x 69.6 cm.

When a diplomat asked Titian why his later works differed so greatly from earlier ones, Titian answered that he gave up trying to match Michelangelo, Raphael, and others in refinement and beauty, aiming to make his mark with a new roughness of handling. “Thus, Titian’s visible brushwork is also his artistic signature,” Ferino-Pagden writes in her introductory essay. Titian’s Allegory of Prudence (above) visually depicts the artist’s concern with legacy. On the left, Titian paints himself as an old man, literally fading into the darkness. Titian’s son, Orazion, heir to the family painting workshop, dominates the center in the prime of his life, as Titian’s young nephew Marco appears on the right, full of youthful enthusiasm and indecision. The “prudence” allegorized here is more wisdom than caution, as Titian wisely recognized that his day had passed and his son’s sun was rising. Titian added the wolf, lion, and dog appearing below the portraits at a late stage, placing another layer of personalized mythology onto the image. Sadly, Titian and Orazion both died of plague in 1576, leaving the family workshop prey to looters and definitively ending the “school” of Titian.

Titian, Jacopo Strada, c. 1566. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum di Vienna. 125 x 90 cm.

Titian’s late style brought him more grief than joy. Giorgio Vasari, who included Titian in his Lives after meeting the artist in 1566, believed that these late works damaged his reputation, clouding over earlier success. Augusto Gentili writes that Titian’s Venetian contemporaries saw Titian’s rough style as “a gratuitous and presumptuous offense, not only to the figurative, but also the civic tradition of Venice.” Venice’s favored son metaphorically betrayed his home and its artistic tradition in going his own way. By the 1560s, Titian lost most church commissions to the rising generation of artists that included Tintoretto and Veronese. Fortunately, private clients and old admirers still provided Titian with work, mostly in the line of portraiture, such as the portrait of the art dealer Jacopo Strada (above). Thanks to x-ray and infrared cameras, we can see beneath the surface of this portrait multiple changes, including additional figures. Titian originally made Strada’s expression “slightly less proud,” writes Wencke Deiters and Natalia Gustavson, and altered the composition to be more vivid arrangement in which “diagonals dominate the structure, lending the scene an atmosphere of both instability and dynamism.” As time slowed Titian’s body down, his artistic vision sped up, injecting more and more movement and energy into his works.

Titian, Saint Jerome in the Desert, c. 1570-1575. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. 135 x 96 cm.

Not only Titian’s style but also his religious sensibilities precluded him from much church work in his late period. In “Titian’s Prudent Dissent: Painting Religion in the Disciplinary Years,” Augusto Gentili sees Titian as “openly hostile to the bureaucratic rules and theological subtleties both of the ‘Papists’ and the ‘Lutherans.’” Titian, thus, “tends toward an immediately understandable, highly individualist religion that is inevitably disturbing because subject to increasingly impelling forms of control.” To resist all control, Titian, like many of his contemporaries, gets back to basics in a “highly sentimental, Christ-centered religion.” In Saint Jerome in the Desert, Titian lends the saint his own face, which is turned in adoration to a crucifix. In the barren desert, Jerome/Titian “has abandoned everything—but not Christ, not wisdom,” Gentili writes. In such images, the rough brushwork mirrors the rough simplicity of Titian’s faith, which has been tested by fate yet remains strong. Titian intended for his tomb a Pieta in which he again appears as Saint Jerome, humbly touching the body of Christ, but it remained unfinished at his death.

Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, c. 1570-1575. Kromeriz, Archdiocese Olomouc, Archiepiscopal Palace, Picture Gallery. 212 x 207 cm.

Titian’s faith in the power of art, however, seems to waiver at the end. In The Flaying of Marsyas, Titian combines two tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and casts himself as King Midas witnessing the torture of Marsyas. Titian chooses to show Midas not using his golden touch but, instead, watching violence impotently. “By painting himself as Midas,” Fernando Checa writes, “Titian is not only practicing self-criticism of his position as a court painter who loves riches,” but also “expressing profound criticism of his own nature as an artist.” As Sylvia Ferino-Pagden later puts it, “The artist may here have reflected on the power and powerlessness of art as an instrument in changing the world.” Such pessimism comes before even the death of his son and the apparent conclusion of his reputation. Fortunately, artists such as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Delacroix, and even moderns such as the German Expressionists and Oskar Kokoschka, came to see the beauty and power of Titian’s late works, rediscovering them as the final exclamation point on a long career rather than the sad ellipsis Vasari believed them to be.

Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting brings these amazing works to light with large, beautiful reproductions. A sense of Titian’s sensuality comes across not just in the poesia or eroticized mythological painting such as Nymph and Shepherd (top of post) but also in the lush, free gestures that give a sense of individuality that seems strikingly modern. Modern technology now allows us to look beneath the painted surfaces and glimpse into the mind of the artist himself, permitting us to know Titian’s thinking better perhaps than even his contemporaries did. The essays in the catalogue, ably translated from the original German and Italian, lose nothing in translation in terms of explaining the genius and continued relevance of Titian.


[Many thanks to Marsilio Editori for providing me with a review copy of Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting and to Civita for the images above.]