RENAISSANCE VENICE.
THE TRIUMPH OF BEAUTY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF PAINTING
From 20 June to 24 September 2017
Curator: Fernando Checa Cremades
From 20 June to 24 September 2017, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is hosting Renaissance
Venice. The Triumph of Beauty and the Destruction of Painting, an exhibition devoted to Venetian
art of the sixteenth century – its first zenith – and featuring nearly 100 works by artists such as
Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bassano, Giorgione and Lotto. It sets out to show how the specific
devices of Venetian painting, from the use of chiaroscuro and colour as the bases for representing
figures and space to a closer attention to nature than was advocated by the classical tradition,
more idealistic in its conception, embodied a fully Renaissance idea of beauty that was on a par
with, and sometimes superior to, the art then being produced in Rome, Parma and Florence.
Curated by Fernando Checa Cremades, professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense,
the show examines this hub of art production, which is essential to understanding the history of
painting, through a careful selection of the subjects depicted by the masters who earned it
universal fame rather than from a chronological or stylistic approach. It features an outstanding
group of paintings and a few sculptures, prints and books from private collections and museums
such as the Galleria dell´Accademia in Venice, the Fondazione Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, the
Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Galeria degli Uffizi in
Florencia, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London.
Images, from left to right:
Palma Vecchio. Two Nymphs in a Landscape (Jupiter disguised as Diana
seducing Callisto?), 1513‒14. Städel Museum Frankfurt am Main / Veronese.
Lucretia, 1580‒83. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna
More information and images:
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza – Press Office:
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid. Tel. +34 914203944 / +34 913600236. Fax
+34 914202780.
[email protected]; http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2017/Venecia/index.html
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The triumph of beauty
After centuries of looking to the East, even China (Marco Polo’s famous voyages), the fall of
Constantinople into Turkish hands in 1453, the defeat of the Serenissima Repubblica by Louis XII
of France’s armies at Agnadello in 1509 and the shift in the trade routes following the discovery of
America in 1492 changed Europe’s political, economic and commercial geography. Venice was in
danger of being left on the fringes.
It was then, however, that an artistic awakening began, especially in painting and architecture,
placing the city at the centre of a debate that started in Italy and spread to Europe in the late
1500s and above all the 1600s. Venice began to shape its own idea of beauty and became the
main alternative to the aesthetic paradigms of Florence and Rome embodied by Raphael and
Michelangelo. Whereas the classical or Tuscan-Roman approach attached greater importance to
the intellectual aspect through drawing (disegno), previously conceived in the mind (idea), the
artists of the Venetian school were more skilled at handling colour and the visual and sensual
aspects of painting.
The destruction of painting
As in other parts of Italy, classicism did not remain in vogue for long. The late works of Titian,
Tintoretto, Veronese and Bassano show how, in varying degrees and highly diverse ways, each of
these artists adopted a more “open”, loose brushwork – often described as patches or smudges –
which not only questioned the values of disegno as one of the
essential parts of painting but even the Renaissance idea of
beauty based on idealising reality.
This was not only a formal issue: the technique also imbued
figures, landscapes and nature with greater expressiveness and
life, a characteristic typical of the Baroque. From there it was a
short step to heightening the dramatic elements of the image,
which was very common practice in the paintings produced in the
1560s and 1570s by Bassano, Tintoretto and above all Titian, such
as the Christ on the Cross (c. 1565). This matchless example of the
dramatic qualities of the master’s final period draws the exhibition
to a close.
Titian: Christ on the Cross, c. 1565. Patrimonio
Nacional, Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial
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Renaissance Venice. The Triumph of Beauty and the Destruction of Painting is structured into eight
theme-based sections.
Between East and West: The most beautiful city in the world
The medieval splendour of the city of Venice captivated visitors
throughout the 16th century. In 1500, a symbolic year, Jacopo de’
Barbari produced his View of Venice, the first realistic bird’s-eye
view of a city. This extraordinary picture is shown in this room
alongside portraits of Venetian authorities such as the Doge
Mocenigo (Gentile Bellini), the procurators Gritti and Soranzo and
a senator (works by Tintoretto), and a famous painting by
Veronese in which two figures in Oriental dress illustrate the city’s
cosmopolitan nature as a frontier between two worlds, East and
West.
Venice and the dream of Classicism
Veronese. Portrait of the Architect
Vincenzo Scamozzi, c.1585. Denver Art
Museum, Charles Bayly, Jr. Collection
Gentile Bellini. Portrait of Dux Giovanni Micebugo, c. 1478-1483.
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Museo Correr
The Renaissance cultural scene that Venice wished to be part of
called for rapidly renovating the medieval city, whose Gothic
and Byzantine architecture needed to be given a new, classicist
appearance. Architects, humanists, publishers and collectors
quickly set to work, studying the classical texts such as
Vitruvius’s architectural treatise, the only surviving work on the
subject, or writing new ones as in the case of Sebastiano Serlio
and Vincenzo Scamozzi, who is represented in this room in a
painting by Veronese. Ancient ruins appear in the background
of many portraits of the period, such as another painting by
Veronese housed in Budapest. Classical reading material,
libraries and the collecting of antiquities are the characteristic
features of the Venetian world, as attested by Moroni’s
paintings and the bronzes on mythological subjects shown
here.
Beauty and melancholy of the Venetian Renaissance
The desire for urban beauty (room 1) achieved through
classicism (room 2) is embodied in a broad variety of
aesthetic types. The dream of youth was conveyed in
portraits of melancholic young men (represented here by
key examples by Giorgione, Bernardino Licinio, Giovanni
Cariani and Lorenzo Lotto); in allegories of music, the
highest symbol of aesthetic perfection in the
Renaissance (represented by a picture by Cariani); and in
the evocation of a utopian and dreamed-of antiquity
expressed in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (1499), undoubtedly the most attractive printed
book of the Renaissance.
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Lorenzo Lotto. Portrait of a Young Man in his
Studio, c.1528 – 1530. Venice, Gallerie dell’
Accademia
Venetian images of women
The survey of Venetian painting focused on beauty culminates in
this section on paintings of women. Key works by Palma
Vecchio, Titian and Veronese develop the idea of beauty in the
genre of idealised female portraits, which also extends to
mythological paintings where the main subject is Venus, the
goddess of beauty, such as Lambert Sustris’s Venus and Cupid
and Veronese’s Venus and Adonis, on view here alongside its
companion piece, Cephalus and Procris. Veronese’s spectacular
Rape of Europe from the Ducal Palace in Venice, one of the most
important Renaissance paintings, brings this selection to a close.
Midway between the image of female beauty and devotional
painting, the iconography of Mary Magdalen was one of the
most widely depicted by Titian. This room shows the three finest
Sebastiano Del Piombo
examples of the painter’s type of clothed Magdalen: a work
Portrait of a Young Woman, c.1508.
executed for Cardinal Farnese and now in the Museo di Budapest, Szépmüvészeti, Múzeum
Capodimonte in Naples; a picture possibly painted for Alfonso
de Ávalos; and a painting that was in the artist’s studio when he died. The latter is one of the
masterpieces from Titian’s late period, and legend has it that he died embracing it.
The glitter of power
The beauty created by Venetian painting was particularly
important as an expression of the image of power, from two
different perspectives. The first is the “glitter” of military
power through its painted reflection in the characteristic
armour worn by soldiers, of which there are key examples by
Carpaccio and Titian. Viewers must have been fascinated by
works of this kind, in which artists skilfully rose to the
technical challenge of capturing the elusive gleam of metal.
The second perspective, the representative significance of
aristocrats’ palaces, is illustrated by two examples of
architecture and painted decoration: the collaborative efforts
of Titian and Giulio Romano in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, and
of Palladio and Veronese in the palace of Iseppo da Porto in
Vincenza.
Titian. Portrait of Francesco Maria della
Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1536. Florence,
Galleria degli Uffizi
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Venetian pastorals
Theocritus’s Idylls and Sannazaro’s Arcadia are
the literary basis for the last section illustrating
how Venetian painting created beauty.
Delightful, idealised depictions of nature
provide settings for pastoral paintings on
mythological subjects, such as those by
Sebastiano del Piombo, Lorenzo Lotto, Palma
Vecchio and others. But also for devotional
paintings, such as that of Dosso Dossi and the
marvellous Virgin and Child with Saint
Catherine and a Shepherd Titian painted for
Duke Alfonso I of Este during the early stages of
Jacopo Bassano. Pastoral scene, c.1568
his career. Jacopo Bassano’s magnificent Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum
pastoral scenes convey a more real image of
nature in keeping with the agricultural interests of the Venetian patricians based in the terra
firma, who found Palladio’s villas to be the highest expression of architecture.
Decline of the Renaissance
Tintoretto. The Flagellation of the
Christ, c. 1585 – 1590. Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The Venetian painting technique, which shunned drawing
and focused on colour and “patches”, carried within it the
seed of its own destruction. Towards the end of their
careers, many of the artists who developed this concept of
idealised beauty illustrated in the previous rooms in
paintings on subjects such as melancholy, music, women,
power and nature produced paintings in which violent
chiaroscuro or “harsh smudges” became totally predominant
– so much so that even today scholars continue to debate on
whether Titian’s works are finished. This room examines this
question and provides a comparison of late works by
Tintoretto, Jacopo Bassano and Veronese.
The drama of themes like the Passion of Christ, coupled with
the self-awareness of a period that viewed itself as the
“decline of the Renaissance” and the end of an era, did the
rest.
The destruction of painting
King Philip II was the keenest Titian enthusiast of the entire 16th century. He also owned the most
significant collection of works from the master’s late period, as attested by those in the Museo del
Prado and the monastery of El Escorial. Of the Escorial pictures, the dramatic Christ on the Cross,
which is less known to the public and brings this exhibition to a close, is a masterpiece of his late
period and an excellent example of what we have called the “destruction of painting”.
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EXHIBITION INFORMATION:
Title: Renaissance Venice. The Triumph of Beauty and the Destruction of Painting
Organiser: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Venue and dates: Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, from 20 June to 24 September 2017
Curator: Fernando Checa Cremades, professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense in
Madrid
Project director: Mar Borobia, head curator of Old Master Painting at the Museo ThyssenBornemisza
Technical curator: María Eugenia Alonso, curator of Old Master Painting at the Museo ThyssenBornemisza
Number of works: 89
Publications: Catalogue sponsored by Fundación Abertis with texts by Fernando Checa Cremades,
Augusto Gentili, Carlo Corsato, Thomas Dalla Costa, Piero Boccardo, Bernard Aikema, Santiago
Arroyo and Matteo Mancini and a chronology by Maria Eugenia Alonso. Educational guidebook and
digital publication available from the app Quiosco Thyssen
VISITOR INFORMATION:
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Address: Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid. Temporary exhibition galleries, ground floor
Opening times: Tuesday to Friday and Sundays, from 10am to 7pm; Saturdays, from 10am to 9pm
From 29 June to 2 September: from Tuesday to Saturday, from 10am to 10pm; Sundays from
10am to 7pm. Last entry one hour before closing.
Full-access ticket: Permanent collection and temporary exhibitions:
- Standard ticket: €12
- Reduced-price ticket: €8 for visitors aged over 65, pensioners, students with proof of status and
Large Families
- Free entry: children under 12 and visitors who are officially unemployed.
Advance ticket purchase at the Museum’s ticket desks, from its website and on tel.: 91 791 13 70
More information: www.museothyssen.org
Audio guide, available in several languages
PRESS INFORMATION:
http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2017/Venecia/index.html
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