TITIAN! new publication from yours truly. I contributed an extensive section on prints after Titian to this catalogue of the collection of pictures by, after, and around Titian in the collection of Alec Cobbe at Hatchlands Park. Often neglected, prints designed or sanctioned by the artist, or made after his work either during his lifetime…
I have a new article out, on Titian’s use of drawing for his narrative works. It attempts to reassess what we know in light especially of a series of new and eye-opening technical discoveries regarding the underdrawing and revisions to his paintings made over recent decades. The volume it’s in, Venetian Disegno. out from Paul…
Over the past months, I’ve been working with colleagues across the National Gallery, particularly my two curatorial colleagues Maria Alambritis and Charlotte Wytema, on a new temporary presentation of a selection of the Gallery’s Venetian paintings from Giovanni Bellini to Titian, roughly. The display was conceived to inaugurate the newly – and beautifully – refurbished…
I’ve recently had a couple of scholarly articles published in two anthology volumes. I hope you will check them out. One is a treatment, my most comprehensive yet, of Titian’s engagement with reproductive printmaking, from his scattered interactions with printmakers working after his designs and finished works in the earlier parts of his career, his…
The latest volume of the excellent journal Artibus et Historiae includes an extended article by yours truly on Leonardo da Vinci’s significance for the art of Giorgione and Titian. And much-debated, but still vaguely defined topic in connection with Giorgione and, by contrast, little-discussed in relation to Titian, I think Leonardo’s art is a particularly…
In the latest issue of Print Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1, I review three publications — an exhibition catalogue from the Uffizi and two scholarly anthologies — around the Venetian writer, polemicist and literary activist Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), with a specific view to their treatment of Aretino’s relationship with prints and printmaking. Aretino was involved…
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down (online) with Howard Burton of Ideas Roadshow podcast to discuss my life and work, particularly at The National Gallery in London. The resulting podcast is now online! Clocking it at over two hours, it’s rather wide-ranging covering in particularly how my life in comics intersects with that…
The exhibition of Titian’s six great so-called poesie for King Philip II (c. 1551-1562) that I helped organise at the National Gallery in London, and which showed in modified form at the Prado earlier this year, has now opened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston under the title Titian: Women, Myth & Power.…
Postponed by Covid, the exhibition La forma del tempo (‘The Shape of Time’) at the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan finally opened last month and runs till 27 September. Centred around the museum’s extraodinary collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clocks, it examines conceptions of time in the renaissance as expressed in the visual arts. The National…
This week, the Museo del Prado in Madrid opened their exhibitions Passiones Mitológicas, or Mythological Passions. The show is their version of the exhibition I helmed at the National Gallery, which gathers for the first time since the sixteenth century Titian’s six mytholgical paintings, so-called poesie, originally painted for the Spanish king Philip II between…
The video posted here is my contribution to a lecture series on Raphael, organised to mark the 500th anniversary of his death in 1520 by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Toronto. Partly by happenstance, it turned into a series of lectures on Raphael and his relationship with or significance for other Italian renaissance artists,…
This November, we staging a large virtual conference devoted to Titian’s late mythological paintings at the National Gallery. Organised by Thomas Dalla Costa and myself on the occasion of the exhibition Titian: Love Desire Death, which is still on view at Trafalgar Square (until 17 January), it will bring together scholars, conservators and scientists from…
The BBC2 documentary Titian Behind Closed Doors, directed by Matthew Hill, aired on the BBC on Saturday night. It’s a treatment of Titian’s relationship with Philip II, the king of Spain, and the series of mythological paintings, the so-called poesie, that he painted for him. It coincides with our now-shuttered exhibition, Titian Love Desire Death,…
Before the world went sideways, I was working on an exhibition, Titian Love Desire Death, uniting seven masterpieces of mythological paintings by Titian (about 1488-1576) at the National Gallery. We managed to open the exhibition on 16 March. Three days later it closed along with the rest of the Gallery which was one of the…
Over at Apollo Magazine‘s website I provide my assessment of a picture of Orpheus, which has recently been restored in the process plausibly been associated with Titian. Go, read.