The Earlier Work of Titian by Claude Phillips
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page 22 of 100 (22%)
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resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the
important _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the Brunswick Gallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--and the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in Titian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred and Profane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred pieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the Prado Gallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ at Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing characteristics as these--and others that could easily be singled out--as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main, be made with all the allowances which the situation demands? That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to |
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