Titian's Icons for a Modern World
Titian, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1512, oil on canvas, 68.2 x 88.3 cm. Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice
To think about the art of Titian—or, indeed, the art of the Renaissance Veneto—is most often to think about paintings that are so luminous that they seem lit-up from within. Images of sensuous women, such as Danaë and Diana, from Titian’s Poesie series, or Venus or Flora, spring to mind. However, these are not the works that occupy the pages of Christopher J. Nygren’s recent book, Titian’s Icons: Tradition, Charisma, and Devotion in Renaissance Italy.* In fact, Nygren’s aim is to recast Titian’s oeuvre by focusing on a series of deeply religious paintings and to make the reader consider the artist’s career and legacy anew. As Nygren points out, Titian is the only Renaissance artist credited during his lifetime with painting a miracle-working image, a fact that challenges “the narratives of disenchantment and secularization” often associated with Renaissance art.
To that end, Nygren focuses on a limited number of Titian’s paintings spanning the length of the artist’s career, beginning with the miracle-working San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross and ending with the Pietà, now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The paintings Nygren examines are united by their engagement with the icon tradition, which Nygren extends beyond the common understanding of Byzantine icons made of mosaic or painted tempera and adorned with gold leaf as portraits of holy persons or events through which individuals could communicate with God. In the introduction, he defines the icons as “small, portable sacred images used for spiritual or disciplinary purposes,” a construct sufficiently flexible to include the works of Titian that are portable (usually smaller than one square meter), represent roughly life-size figures at half-length, and depict biblical narratives.
This unifying construct of the icon is thoroughly discussed in the introduction. This is also where Nygren sets out the theological theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of charisma and devotion. The result is a rather dense introduction followed by chapters that seldom refer back to it. An explanation for choosing this particular structure may be that, although bound by the concept of the icon, the volume’s six chapters are better understood as a series of discrete essays on a theme rather than as a unified whole. It is not that the chapters do not cohere; a reader could, however, choose to read them out of order, as the introduction provides the necessary background to understand Nygren’s argument.
Subsequent chapters are arranged chronologically, roughly divided into two segments: before Titian’s trip to Rome in 1545 and after. This organization reinforces one of Nygren’s main contentions, which is that Titian’s approach to devotional paintings changed dramatically as a result of his trip to Rome. Each chapter then develops an argument regarding Titian’s varied engagement with the tradition of the icon by focusing on specific paintings. The only chapter that does not follow this structure strictly is the first chapter (“Icons and Agency”) which focuses exclusively on the cult image of Christ Carrying the Cross (ca. 1512). The overarching claim of this chapter is that this miracle-working painting played a critical role in Titian’s artistic development. Even if it could only be understood in retrospect (seeing that the first miracles performed by the painting were not recorded until several years after it was painted), Nygren argues that this painting “marks the intersection of [Titian’s] career with the cult of miraculous images in a way that is unique in the history of Western art.” Thus, using the San Rocco Christ as the high-point of Titian’s career, rather than his Assunta (painted in 1518) as is usually done, shifts our understanding of Titian’s corpus as one that consists of “great public commissions” to one that focuses on the innovations that he brought to the tradition of the icon, as revealed by Nygren’s study and analysis of the artist’s small devotional paintings.
The turning point in Titian’s production of devotional paintings, according to Nygren, came in 1545, the year of the Council of Trent, on the occasion of Titian’s sole trip to Rome at the behest of Pope Paul III. This fulcrum moment is the topic a chapter entitled “Icons and Community.” From this moment, Nygren observes, Titian turned to the illustration of single-figured biblical narratives focused on Christ’s suffering, as opposed to the multiple-figure biblical narratives of the earlier works. This shift is important because although Nygren characterizes Titian’s early devotional paintings as icons, they are narrative and rely on multiple figures to convey a biblical lesson, a marked shift from the icons of Byzantium, which featured a single holy individual. After his trip to Rome, Nygren observes that Titian’s icons adopt the single-figure tradition of centuries past, much in the same way as the icons he had observed in Rome. In support of his hypothesis regarding the significance of Titian’s Roman sojourn, Nygren examines a series of Ecce Homos by Titian, his studio, and various followers, dated to between 1545 and 1549. These paintings, based on Nygren’s analysis, show an affinity with the iconology of the Imago Pietatis (Man of Sorrows), first introduced in Rome in about 1400. Nygren posits that Titian’s paintings of Ecce Homo generated a community of devotion amongst its owners and beholders. The first nodes in that network were Pope Paul III, Charles V, Pietro Aretino, and Bishop Granvelle, four elite leaders in Catholic Europe at a time when the religious institution was under assault. Titian gifted each man a version of his Ecce Homo (the painting offered to Pope Paul III, the first in the series, no longer exists). As recipients of this painting, Nygren argues, the four men were drawn together into a “community of beholdership.” The multiples of Ecce Homo, in addition to contributing to the size of the community of beholders, demonstrate that Titian, by engaging in self-copying and reproduction, engaged in the artistic traditions he observed in Rome.
Titian, Christ with the Coin, 1516, oil on panel, 75 x 56 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden
This volume is theoretically sophisticated. One particularly compelling section is Nygren’s analysis of the painting Christ and the Coin (1516) in the second chapter. Titian made the painting for Duke Alfonso I d’Este, of the court in Ferrara. The Duke, Nygren found, kept the painting in the cabinet where he kept his numismatic collection. Titian’s was the first independent painting of the biblical dictum from Matthew 22:21—“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God, the things that are God’s.” Nygren examines the illustration of this dictum through the lens of the exegetical practice of the Ferrarese court, which brought together the practices of humanism and devotion. Combining the biblical narrative with the Duke’s antiquarian pastime, Nygren submits that when he looked at his painting, the Duke would have been reminded of the great deeds of the emperors depicted on the coins and aspire to moral and ethical greatness. In other words, the painting served as a mediator between the Duke of Ferrara and the moral, spiritual, and ethical ideals he aspired to as a Christian ruler.
Chapter 5, entitled “Rupestrian Icons,” is perhaps the most successful chapter of the volume. It examines the materiality of two of Titian’s icons: Ecce Homo on slate (1547), and Mater Dolorosa on marble (1555-56). Titian made both icons for Charles V (his son, King Philip II of Spain, was the recipient of Titian’s erotically-charged Poesie series). These two icons are the only works that Titian painted on stone support, and Nygren’s invocation of the construct of icon is particularly persuasive in this instance. As he points out, the relationship between the Imago Pietatis, which was “painted with stone” (the vocabulary used in the renaissance to describe the creation of mosaic images), and Titian’s depiction of the Ecce Homo, painted on stone, is striking because it is both visual and material. Also interesting is Nygren’s investigation of the role of the marble support, with its associations of purity and solidity (or steadfastness) for Titian’s painting of the Virgin. With this stone diptych, Nygren submits, Titian created meaning and invited devotion through the combination of image and material.
At times, however, Nygren seems to trade abundance of theory for clarity. In “Icons and Community,” for example, Nygren invokes a Latourian definition of network, Shira Brisman’s epistolary mode of artistic address, and the Republic of Letters in developing his argument that paintings of Ecce Homo by Titian and his followers (1545-1549) generated a community of beholders and marked a departure in Titian’s artistic approach to devotional paintings. These theoretical references do not directly speak to Nygren’s claim and seem forced. Critically, they are unnecessary to demonstrate Nygren’s point, which is satisfactorily supported by his example of Nicolaus Cusanus’s treatise On the Vision of God (1453) and the icon of the face of Christ by Rogier van der Weyden. Similar “theoretical detours” arise from time to time and are ultimately more distracting than helpful in supporting Nygren’s fresh and interesting approach to one of art history’s best known and most appreciated artist.
Titian, Ecce Homo, 1547, oil on slate, 69 x 56 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Nevertheless, this beautifully illustrated tome is interesting and challenging (in the best scholarly tradition), and Titian scholars and scholars of art and theology, in particular, are certain to benefit from it, as will art historians who are interested in Renaissance devotional paintings and in the performance of devotion in relation to images—a rather broad, specialized readership.
Catherine Powell-Warren is an art historian specialized in Renaissance and baroque art. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in art history at Ghent University, in Belgium.
Of note. Chris Nygren has been a part of Genealogies of Modernity since it started and he is a “Humanities Expert” for the Genealogies of Modernity project's National Endowment for the Humanities grant