Titian: Love, Desire, Death Review – Wild at Heart
Titian: Love, Desire, Death Review – Wild at Heart

‘A one-two shock of realization’: "The Death of Actaeon", 1559-75 by Titian
The painting is a one-two shock of realization. On the left, Diana the huntress draws her bow to catch and kill some at first unseen prey. Her action sends the eye across the canvas – which is itself a deep forest of brushstrokes – to discover the identity of her victim. Actaeon is by now half-man and half-stag. His faithful hounds, so sympathetically painted by the dog-loving Titian, are already flying to attack.
Actaeon topples in the brown undergrowth, his head already resembling a stuffed hunting-lodge trophy. The sky is heavy, the trees losing their leaves, the ground thick with damp mulch. Nobody knows whether the painting is completely finished; there is no string to Diana’s bow, and no signature on the canvas, though Titian did not always sign his works. The scene is less dramatic than tragic, sorrowful, immensely subtle in its contrast of the pointlessly vengeful Diana, just performing her automatic vengeance, and poor, hapless Actaeon, whose only flaw was to have looked when he shouldn’t. The story, for Titian, is always more complex than the myth.
The seven paintings in what Titian called his “poesie” – visual equivalents to poetry – have never been displayed together before. They are monumental images, made to startle and absorb, and their reunion – or quite possibly union, given that they were painted over more than ten years, and Titian himself may never have seen them all together – is a theater of climactic emotion and sensational incident.

Titian’s "The Rape of Europa," 1559-62
And nowhere more than the sumptuous, ravishingly seductive Danaë, the first painting in the series. Danaë was the mythical princess of Argos, impregnated by Jupiter in the form of a shower of coins. Titian depicts her reclining nude on a bed, legs slightly parted to receive the scintillating mirage. Her body is caressed by warm light, her face in gentle shadow, just out of reach, eyes gazing upwards in what might be desire or release.
Michelangelo, in one of the most notorious barbs in art history, said of Titian (to paraphrase) that he’d be quite good if he only learned to draw. He was referring to a version of Danaë seen on a visit to Titian’s house, accompanied by Vasari. It may not have been this particular picture, but the criticism speaks to the qualities of Titian’s late painting that we so revere now – the way he thought, and felt, so directly with his brush.

‘Titian has managed to make Perseus appear both determined and flailing’: Titian’s "Perseus and Andromeda" (1554-56)
Nothing as easily defined as form or substance: that is the mystery of these paintings. A cascade of water glitters from a fountain and you can’t discern its motion just by getting up close, any more than you can catch the spume on the waves that flow through these paintings. The skies are transcendently beautiful, especially in Europa where an expanse of cobalt burns through golden clouds, here and there, with a veiled and thus even more exhilarating promise.

"Diana and Actaeon," 1556-9 by Titian
Saved for the nation in 2008, this picture remains perturbing. Actaeon is nearly off balance in his commedia dell’arte astonishment at the sight of Diana, her limbs of unequal lengths, head mismatched with body. The space is oddly indeterminate, and it feels as if the glassy pond, a grimacing statue and the odd little flocks of marks that resolve into fronds have mattered more to him at certain stages.
All of Titian’s breathtaking details, visible online, are condensed as sonnets. And these are set against a staggering theater of poses – flailing, falling, dancing, recoiling – that break free of their source in Ovid into a perpetual motion, and emotion. Racing clouds, briny spray, fluttering garments – a hand desperately grasping a departing arm, or gesturing for help, or ripping a veil to expose the pregnant body of poor Callisto, humiliated by Diana: the series is a miracle of expression. Five of these paintings are permanently in London – at the Wallace Collection, Apsley House and the National Gallery itself – for anyone unlikely to see this show; and the catalogue is a marvel of reproductions, magnifications and essays.
“I am never satisfied with my works,” Titian wrote to Philip II about this cycle, and it would be hard to think of a greater spur to aspiration. The proximity of love and lust, hope and fear, the artist’s compassion for victims, and humanity towards oppressors: all are made palpable with unprecedented freedom of style, “painted more with his fingers than his brushes”, it was said, in the end. With the poesie, Titian discovered the full power of oil painting to reveal the invisible – the wild truths of the heart.
By Laura Cumming