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 or in the centuries following his death are a rich visual source for understanding his work and its reception, and sometimes they’re even great works of art themselves.

It’s been a pleasure to write these entries and thus to contibute to a still mostly ignored field of study. The book is published by the Colnaghi Foundation. Look it up!

Titian, Angel, c. 1559-65, Florence, Uffizi

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 Holberton, is really excellent in my opinion, with many interesting contributions. Kudos to editors Maria Aresin, Thomas Dalla Costa, as well as Genevieve Verdigel who co-organised the online conference that started it all, back when we were all locked down.

Maria Aresin and Thomas Dalla Costa, eds., Venetian Disegno – New Frontiers c. 1420-1620, London, Paul Holberton Publishing 2024. It retails at a somewhat reasonable price — more here!

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 room 29 as part of our bicentenary NG200 celebrations. It is poignant, I think, that room 29 which first opened in 1930 was originally designed precisely for the Venetian paintings.

Although a collection display, our presentation is organised like a exhibition, presenting the story of Venetian painting in the period, the lives of the artists, the social, religious and political context with a view to elucidating why it was so pivotal in the development of Western painting, collected so assiduously in Britain (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century and thus why it is so core to the National Gallery’s collections.

In the video above, my colleague Carlo Corsato introduces a number of the key players in the organisation of the display, including of course yours truly. Do come have a look if you’re in London and let me know what you think!

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 involvement in Venetian literary circles from the later 1520s onwards and its manifestation in book illustration and print portraiture, to his increased collaboration with printers and printmakers issuing prints after his paintings from the 1550s onwards, culminating in his famous work with Cornelis Cort in the mid 1560s through 1571.

The article is included in the anthology Titian: Themes and Variations, edited by the great Peter Humfrey. It compiles new scholarship on Titian’s practice of replication and variation throughout his career and across media, written by many of the top scholars in the field. I’m honoured to be included.

The other article was developed from a conference paper I gave during covid for a Roman conference on Raphael in 2021, postponed like so many other things involving Raphael, from the anniversary year of 2020. It examines the close creative exchange, competition and mutual inspiration between Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo in Rome during the second decade of the sixteenth century and beyond. I have new things to say about Raphael’s appropriations from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his and Sebastiano’s race to complete mural paintings in oil, the internal chronology of their respective renditions of the Transfiguration of Christ and a proposal about Michelangelo’s contribution to Sebastiano’s never-complete altarpiece for the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria della Pace.

It is published in the volume Himmlische und irdische Liebe: Ein anderer Blick auf Raffael, edited by Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, Claudia Bertling Biaggini, Claudia Cieri Via, a rich compendium of work by a wide variety of scholars on this crucial period in the history of modern Western art.

Do take a look at either or both when you’re next at your academic library. I also recommend getting them for your own bookshelves of course, but realise that that is a longer shot.

Aretino was involved in printmaking throughout his career, employing it as a way of self-promotion but also encouraging creative engagement in the medium on the part of his friends, not least Titian. In the review, I reattribute the design of an engraved portrait of Aretino of around 1534 by Jacopo Caraglio, and a woodcut frontispiece based on the same model, to Titian. Consult the issue at your local art library!

Publications reviewed: Anne Bisceglia, Matteo Ceriana and Paolo Procaccioli, eds., Pietro Aretino a l’arte nel Rinascimento, exh. cat. Florence, Uffizi, Florence 2019; Anne Bisceglia, Matteo Ceriana and Paolo Procaccioli, eds., “Pietro Pictore Aretino”: Una parola complice per l’arte del Rinascimento, Venice 2019; and Anne Bisceglia, Matteo Ceriana and Paolo Procaccioli, eds., Inchiostro per colore: arte e artisti in Pietro Aretino, Rome 2019.

From what I’ve seen in the press and online, I’m greatly impressed with their installation and didactic material they’ve put together, and it pleases me greatly to see these great Titians united in my American home away from home in Boston. I can’t wait hopefully to see it later in the autumn.

If you’re anyway near it, do go see it. It is truely and without hyperbole a once-in-a-lifetime chance. These are some of the great paintings of the Western tradition and they haven’t been seen together since the 1570s.

Do also tune into the contributions by my colleagues Thomas Dalla Costa and Giorgio Tagliaferro who talked about Raphael and Titian and Raphael and Paolo Veronese, respectively.

The conference It will also feature four artist’s talks, with Nalini Malani, Michael Armitage, Phoebe Gloeckner and Tom de Freston — all reflecting on what Titian means to their practice and how they grapple with the enduring issues so central to his work.

The dates are 3, 10 and 17 November. You can see the full programme and register here.

Titian called these pictures poesie in order to emphasise the inspiration he had taken from classical poetry and the ambition to have them work as visual poems. The group of six canvases were executed for Philip of Habsburg, King Philip II of Spain from 1556, between about 1551 and 1562, while a seventh was never sent and only completed towards the end of the artist’s life. The six have not been seen together since, probably, the 1570s, and the seventh has never been displayed with the rest of the group. This was a dream project, not just of mine but any Titian or Italian renaissance enthusiast for generations.

I have been privileged to play a part in its realisation and hope you will want to take a closer look, if not in person at the National Gallery, then perhaps at one of our partnering venues: the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, the Museo del Prado in Madrid or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, to where the paintings will tour, if all goes well and the pandemic doesn’t get in the way of that too. And if not there, then perhaps virtually — we will doing our best to share our knowledge and appreciation online over the next months, in part under the #MuseumFromHome tag. Also, there will be a documentary dedicated to Titian and the poesie, in which I participate, broadcast on BBC 2 on 4 April and I believe Mary Beard will be featuring the works on Front Row Late sometime soon as well. Will post links in here when and if.

Our exhibition film is based on the BBC’s footage, a taster of which can be seen in the following short video on the paired Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto:

Here is a Facebook Live I did on 16 March, before we opened to the public. It was done under the worrying shadow of Covid-19 so bear with the slight incoherence. In the run-up to the exhibition my colleagues and I also did a series of FacebookLives on the individual paintings — they can be accessed here.

A creative decision that we made early in the process and which I was particularly happy with was to reframe Philip’s six pictures in matching frames in order to harmonise the display. Handcarved in the National Gallery framing department by Peter Schade, our Head of Framing and his team, they are based on the original sixteenth-century frame around Titian’s late Pietà at the Accademia in Venice. Check out this nice video the Gallery produced on the project:

They *are* such wonderful paintings.