High and Late Renaissance 609A
n important change occurring in Titian’s time was the almost
universal adoption of canvas, with its rough-textured surface,
in place of wood panels for paintings. Titian’s works (FIGS. 22-38 to
22-41) established oil color on canvas as the typical medium of the
Western pictorial tradition thereafter. One of Titian’s students and
collaborators was Jacopo Negretti, known as Palma il Giovane
(ca. 1548–1628), or “Palma the Younger.” He wrote a valuable account
of his teacher’s working methods and described how he used the new
medium to great advantage:
Titian [employed] a great mass of colors, which served... as a base
for the compositions....I too have seen some ofthese, formed with
bold strokes made with brushes laden with colors, sometimes of a
pure red earth, which he used, so to speak, for a middle tone, and at
other times of white lead; and with the same brush tinted with red,
black and yellow he formed a highlight; and observing these princi-ples he made the promise of an exceptional figure appear in four
brushstrokes....Having constructed these precious foundations he
used to turn his pictures to the wall and leave them there without
looking at them, sometimes for several months. When he wanted to
apply his brush again he would examine them with the utmost rigor
...to see ifhe could find any faults....In this way, working on the
figures and revising them, he brought them to the most perfect sym-
metry that the beauty of art and nature can reveal....[T]hus he
gradually covered those quintessential forms with living flesh, bring-
ing them by many stages to a state in which they lacked only the
breath of life. He never painted a figure all at once and... in the last
stages he painted more with his fingers than his brushes.*Palma il Giovane on Titian
ARTISTS ON ART* Quoted in Francesco Valcanover, “An Introduction to Titian,” in Susanna Biadene
and Mary Yakush, eds.,Titian: Prince of Painters (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1990),
23–24.22-39Titian, Meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne,from the Camerino d’Alabastro, Palazzo Ducale, Ferrara, Italy,
1522–1523. Oil on canvas, 5 9 6 3 . National Gallery, London.
Titian’s rich and luminous colors add greatly to the sensuous appeal of this mythological painting in which he
based one of the figures on the recently unearthed ancient statue of Laocoön(FIG. 5-88).1 ft.22-39ATITIAN
and PALMA IL
GIOVANE, Pietà,
ca. 1570–1576.