Titian’s works easily fall into a few groups, according to the subject treated. In mythological themes he was in his natural element. Here he could express the sheer joy of living which was common to the Venetian and the Greek. Here physical beauty was its own excuse for being, without recourse to any ulterior significance. Here he could exercise unhindered his marvellous skill in modelling the human form along those perfect lines of grace which give Greek sculpture its distinctive character. It is in his earlier period that his affinity with the Greek spirit is closest, and we see it in perfect fruition in the Medea and Venus.
Titian’s treatment of sacred subjects is in the diverse moods of his many-sided artistic nature. The great ceremonial altar pieces, such as the Assumption of the Virgin, and the Pesaro Madonna, are a perfect reflection of the religious spirit of his environment. Religion was with the Venetians a delightful pastime, an occasion for festivals and pageants, a means of increasing the civic glory. These great decorative pictures are full of the pomp and magnificence dear to Venice, full of the joy and pride of life.
Yet in another mood Titian paints the life of the Holy Family as a pastoral idyl. A sunny landscape, a happy young mother, a laughing baby boy, bring the sacred subject very near to common human sympathies.
Some of Titian’s professedly sacred pictures are in the vein of pure genre, painted in a period when this department of art had not yet attained independent existence. We see such works in the St. Christopher and the St. John. These direct studies of the people throw an interesting light upon the painter of ideal beauty: they show an otherwise unsuspected vigor.
The Christ of the Tribute Money stands alone in Titian’s sacred art. The technical qualities are thoroughly characteristic of his hand, but a new note is struck in spiritual feeling. Virile, without coarseness; gentle, without weakness, the chief figure is perhaps the most intellectual ideal of Christ which has been conceived in art.
Titian’s landscapes, though holding an accessory place only in his art, are counted by the critical art historian with those of Giorgione, as the practical beginning of this branch of art. He knew how to express “the quintessence of nature’s most significant beauties without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.” [3] His imagination interpreted many of nature’s moods, from the pastoral calm environing Medea and Venus to the stormy grandeur of the forest in which St. Peter Martyr met his fate.
It is undoubtedly as a portrait-painter that Titian’s many great qualities meet in their utmost perfection. His feeling for textures, the delicacy with which he painted the hair and the hands; his skill in modelling; his instinct for pose; the infinite variety of his resources, made an incomparable equipment in the secondary matters of portrait painting. To these he added, as we have seen, the two highest essentials of the art, the power of giving life to his sitter, and the gift of insight into character.
Nature made him a court painter; he loved to impart to his sitter that air of noble distinction whose secret he so well understood. Yet he was too large a man to let this or any other natural preference hamper him. Something of himself, it is true, he frequently put into his figures, yet he was at times capable of thoroughly objective work. He stands perhaps somewhere between the extreme subjectivity of Van Dyck and the splendid realism of Velasquez. The noble company of his sitters, emperors, kings, doges, popes, cardinals and bishops, noblemen, poets and beautiful women, still make their presence felt in the world. Theirs was a deathless fame on whom the painter conferred the gift of his art.
Titian’s temperament was keenly sensitive to the influences of his environment, and in his extraordinary length of days, Venice passed through various changes, political, social, artistic and religious, which left their mark upon his work. One cannot make a random selection from his pictures and pronounce upon the qualities of his art. The work of his youth, his maturity, his old age, has each a character of its own. It is this rounding out of his art life through successive stages of growth and even of decay that gives the entire body of his works the character of a living organism.