Kenneth Clark TV - James Fox TV - Tim Marlow TV - John Ruskin - Titian - William Hazlitt - Claude Phillips - Giorgio Vasari - Matthew Collings TV - Mary Beard TV - Titian: Behind Closed Doors TV - Helen Rosslyn TV - Waldermar Januszczak TV -
Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin a baroque picture ... was painted in the same period as his great celebrations of paganism ... The art we call Baroque was a popular art. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 7/13: Grandeur & Obedience, BBC 1969
Titian was a colour addict. Dr James Fox, A History of Art in Three Colours: Blue II, BBC 2012
By 1514 ... Titian established his own workshop. His artistic rivals had either left Venice, grown old or been struck by the plague. Allowing his workshop quickly to become one of the most successful in town. Titian had painted a number of commissions in churches but in 1516 he got a big commission that established his reputation throughout Venice and beyond ... The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Great Artists with Tim Marlow s1e6: Titian, Sky Arts 2003
Everyone wanted Titian to paint in their churches. ibid.
One of the reasons for Titian’s swift rise to celebrity was his large and varied output. ibid.
By his early thirties Titian was well established as the leading Venetian artist. ibid.
He turns paint itself into something life flesh. ibid.
An increasingly loose and liberated style. ibid.
But above all by the Venetian painter Titian, whose luminous use of colour and free use of brush strokes was to have a profound effect on the young artist. Great Artists With Tim Marlow: Rubens
Nobody cares much at heart about Titian; only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they. John Ruskin, The Two Paths: Lecture II
Not every painter has a gift for painting; in fact, many painters are disappointed when they meet with difficulties in art. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting. Titian, cited Peggy Hadden, ‘The Quotable Artist’
It is the intense personal character which, I think, gives the superiority to Titian’s portraits over all others, and stamps them with a living and permanent interest. Of other pictures you tire, if you have them constantly before you; of his, never. For other pictures have either an abstracted look, and you dismiss them, when you have made up your mind on the subject as a matter of criticism; or an heroic look, and you cannot be always straining your enthusiasm; or an insipid look, and you sicken of it. But whenever you turn to look at Titian’s portraits, they appear to be looking at you; there seems to be some question pending between you, as though an intimate friend or inveterate foe were in the room with you; they exert a kind of fascinating power; and there is that exact resemblance of individual nature which is always new and always interesting, because you cannot carry away a mental abstraction of it, and you must recur to the object to revive it in its full force and integrity. I would as soon have Raphael’s or most other pictures, hanging up in a collection, that I might pay an occasional visit to them: Titian’s are the only ones that I should wish to have hanging in the same room with me for company! William Hazlitt, cited Van Dyck ‘On a Portrait of an English Lady’
There is no greater name in Italian art – therefore no greater in art – than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the poet-painter of the world and the world’s fairest creatures than any one of these. Claude Phillips, Earlier Works of Titian, 1897
Although Titian’s works seem to many to have been created without much effort, this is far from the truth and those who think so are deceiving themselves. In fact, it is clear that Titian retouched his pictures, going over them with his colours several times, so that he must obviously have taken great pains. The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them. Giorgio Vasari, Titian of Cadore in Lives of the Artists
Titian is a late Renaissance painter … In Venice where Titian lives a new style starts up … which is loose and free and has Titian as its main figure. Matthew Collings, Matt’s Old Masters: Titian, Channel 4 2003
Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda: It’s impact comes from the touch of the brush and the play of the colour. ibid.
By 1507 he was part of the Venetian art world. ibid.
All the frescoes are now gone; destroyed by the weather. ibid.
The Holy Family and a Shepherd in London’s National Gallery … The painting is full of anatomical wrongness … This is Titian learning to be Titan. ibid.
The world Titian paints – the Venetian world of power and money – is all about who’s got more and who’s got less. The flesh he paints is very opulent and goes with oil’s richness. ibid.
His audience bought his paintings to put in their own places of special power, chapels and palaces and stuff. ibid.
Bacchus & Ariadne: All of this is Titian’s own invention; it’s all coming out of his head … He’s come up with something totally visually new. ibid.
An ancient tradition in art started by Titian – the sensual handing of materials. But is also the beginning of a new tradition of shocks in art. ibid.
Titian: Venus of Urbino 1534: One of the every first reclining nudes in Western art. Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude I, BBC 2020
‘They simply are amongst the most beautiful paintings ever painted.’ Titian: Behind Closed Doors, critic, BBC 2020
6 masterpieces: ‘They are a kind of manifesto about what painting is and what painting can do.’ ibid.
For 450 years, the paintings have been apart. Now they are reunited. ibid. captions
‘The greatest artists in Venice: and he has been for some time.’ ibid. critic
‘He’s doing something new in painting that is so radical that you can’t really think about painting the same way afterwards.’
Titian would become a passion for Arundel. Helen Rosslyn, Bought With Love: The Secret History of British Art Collections I: The Pioneers, BBC 2013
Titian painted his enormous altar-piece. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained III: Silk, Sex and Sin, BBC 2016
Another story painted by Titian was Europa and the Bull. ibid.