- Add to Favorites
-
Your web browser does not support
Add to Favorites.
Please add the site using your bookmark menu.
The function is available only on Internet Explorer
11Story
|
|
|
Young woman in a fur. Titian [Tiziano Vecellio] (circa 1490-1576). Italy, circa 1535
|
|
The following is the English part of the label accompanying the original displayed in Vienna (emphases added):
‘The unknown young woman repeatedly served Titian as a model. All portraits showing her were created for Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino and nephew of Pope Julius II, or for his son Guidobaldi, as this most likely was. The main motif is the exciting combination of fur and skin. The enchanting, erotically charged appearance of the unknown woman should not be seen as a portrait, rather a celebration on Titian’s part of the notion of beauty, which was stimulated by the love poetry of the time based on Petrarch.’
Someone whose portrait was painted, but whose name was later lost or forgotten, may have been almost anyone not already famous, yet possibly still worth enquiring about if their portrait survives. But what is to be made of an anonymous serial subject of an artist as celebrated as Titian? The writer of the above-quoted label suggests the young woman who modelled for this painting was merely an excuse for a game of poetry and eroticism. An artist’s model is one of the strangest roles, a token of someone else’s fantasy: not just a ‘sex object’ but an ‘art object’. Yet is it ever possible to disappear, to become transparent? If so, then the model might as well be completely invented.
So is not this painting still ‘of’ and ‘about’ the subject identified, if not named, as certainly someone (if we are to believe she is not a total fabrication)? Is there anything more engaging or less expressive of ‘mind’ in this pictured face, despite the distractions, than in the named faces of a thousand other pictures that no one would warn against seeing as portraits? |
| Back | ||
