Cultura: Flesh in Venice: why there's no one like Titian

Venus Anadyomene, painted by Titian around 1520, is at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Posted by Jonathan Jones

Friday 30 July 2010 13.05 BST

guardian.co.uk

Titian is an artist who travels well. The very name we know him by in the English-speaking world, derived from Tiziano, is testament to his capacity to take root in cultures remote from his own. In his later life, he painted for export, sending paintings by ship from his native Venice to his employer, the Spanish king. Amazingly, he was on salary as a Habsburg court artist, paid lavishly first by Charles V and then Philip II, while being allowed to live in his own city.

That was an astute as well as magnificent decision by Charles V, forTitian's art breathes in the air and light of Venice and softly breathes it out again, as gold, as fire, as flesh. That's right – I've just come back from a holiday in La Serenissima. Man, those Titians.

In fact, because Titian travels so well, because he was so sought after by princes in his lifetime and has been so keenly collected by connoisseurs and museums ever since, there are not that many canvases by him in Venice itself. You can see his works all over Europe and America, fromEdinburgh to Boston. What you can see in Venice, however, are paintings intimately connected with the city and his life there.

Titian's Assumption in the church of the Frari is a strong candidate for the title of the world's greatest painting. It is his answer to Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, Leonardo's Last Supper. But in Venice a fresco would have faded – the moist air eats works on plaster. So the Assumption is an oil painting placed by the artist against the glorious natural light of a Gothic window. Titian competes with the sun; he challenges God. His light equals and enriches that of nature itself.

In the Accademia gallery you can see his Pieta, the crushing last work in which he prays for the light to last, for its dying embers to linger on. Titian, in extreme old age and with his city ravaged by plague, painted a work of such force it is like a building, a cathedral, made of paint – his answer to Michelangelo's terrifying Vestibule of the Laurentian Library.

Titian showed what oil paints can do, how they can even create an architecture. He is sensual, profound and audacious. In Venice, his art mirrors the light-filled waters, the blazing sunsets, the dawn copper that filters in through medieval windows. His canvases have drunk in enough of that light to fill the whole world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/jul/30/venice-titian-travels-well