Titian as "Italian" Artist, 1540–60

• In Event: Titian II

Abstract

This paper explores the critical, generally negative reaction to Titian by artists and writers on art in Milan and Naples from the mid-1500s, focusing in particular on the fortunes of The Crowning with Thorns for S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan. When artists responded to the painting, they generally found that something needed to be fixed, that certain relationships needed to be clarified, that the emotional register of the image, even the legibility of its narrative, was strangely indeterminate. The alien and inscrutable character of Titian’s later Italian paintings (by contrast with those for non-Italian destinations) reveals a pattern of resistance to an emerging critical consensus about the “poetic” and “natural” character of his work.

Author

• Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University