Word: bellini
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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From his first Bellini-like and Giorgionesque paintings, through the classical certainties of his middle age -- such as the John the Baptist, a veritable column of vigor and controlled theatrical gesture -- and on to his late work, Titian never ceased to develop. Perhaps to a modern eye, late Titian is the most moving of all, for it goes beyond the pictorial rhetoric that made his success. It is broken, impressionistic and no longer interested in the classical ideal. From its smoky melancholy come Lear-like outcries of pessimism, whose fullest expression is reached in The Flaying of Marsyas, perhaps...
...world, or even to move them at all, verges on the irresponsible. Yet museums still feel obliged to lend paintings as hostages to others to ensure reciprocal loans. Only this can explain, for instance, why the National Gallery refused to move its Feast of the Gods (the figures by Bellini, the deep and magically sonorous landscape background by his apprentice Titian) a few city blocks to the Phillips Collection's "Pastoral Landscape" show in 1988, whose centerpiece it should have been, but had no compunction about flying it back and forth across the Atlantic in 1990. There is something opportunistic...