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- They simply are
amongst the most beautiful paintings ever painted.
- They are a kind of manifesto about what painting is
and what painting could do.
- What we're seeing are very important pictures.
We almost certainly looking at great masterpieces.
- Philip is a young man.
He's on the cusp of having
to assume enormous responsibility.
- [Woman] Anybody who loves painting loves Titian.
- He is the most famous painter in Europe by far.
- Titian did intend them as a series
and Philip II wanted them as a series.
But in fact, very few people had the opportunity
to see them as a series.
Finally, with the show, we can actually
think of them as a whole suite of paintings.
It's a huge thrill for us, and it's
a huge thrill, I'm sure, for everyone.
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(PA announcement in foreign language)
It weighs heavily on you to have to lock the doors on a room
that holds some of the greatest pictures ever painted.
They carry with them something significant from the past
and they have an ability to speak to us in the present.
- Should I be enjoying the sight of these naked women?
- There is something we need to
look at, see and recognize here.
- They're bound up with people's fears about love.
They're bound up with people's fears about death
but they're bound up also with this great sense
of celebrating the fact that we are alive.
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- Phillip, he's a young man preparing
to take over as king of Spain.
He's on the cusp of having
to assume enormous responsibility.
It's certainly a high-stakes moment for him.
And so he's concerned with establishing himself
as a credible figure.
- He needs paintings.
A great king has great works of art.
You know, if you're an important person
at that time, you should be magnificent.
You should show that in everything you do,
and art has become one of the ways people do that.
- You wanted to cultivate a relationship
with the artist regarded as the best.
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- Like many of the great potentates of his time,
he had phenomenal power, but technically bankrupt.
So they had to find other ways than cash
often to pay for these huge things.
- It was not Phillip's private wealth that financed this.
It was the Fugger family.
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- [Alexander] I'm essentially the 19th generation
of the family since it's been recorded
that they arrived in Augsburg in 1367.
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In 1550, Phillip II and a lot of the Habsburg family members
spent a couple of months here in Augsburg,
in the Fugger Palace.
(upbeat music) (talking quietly)
The relationship between Fugger and Phillip II
was essentially funding his needs to finance the state,
to finance the court, to finance his personal interests.
And there weren't that many firms like ours
that were able to fund these kinds of sums.
- When Phillips says, writes to Venice saying
he wants Titian to come to Augsburg.
- They agree on a number of paintings
that he's going to deliver it to Phillip
and it's up to Titian to come up with the subjects.
- That was it. Nothing further was specified.
Nothing further was agreed.
He simply let Titian get on with it.
- So they parted and Titian went back to Venice
and Phillip went back to Spain and they never met again.
They never meet again.
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- By this time, by the 1540s, 1550s,
Titian is already very famous.
He's already carried out several commissions
for lots of European dignitaries.
- By the time that he meets Phillip,
he's become the greatest artist in Venice
and has been for a long time.
He's held the crown of being the grand old man in Venice
in terms of the arts.
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- This is Titian's garden.
It's completely enveloping, and I think, quite magical.
- You can see that he had a real contact
with the Venetians at that time.
He was part of the city, as not only a painter
but as a Venetian person.
- We have, of course, the written testament
of the dinner parties that Titian used to give
here in this garden and how after,
at the end of the dinner, he would open the gate
and he would arrange to have gondolas
with courtesans and musicians and singers
who would come and entertain his guests.
In Titian's time, the door would have opened,
and it would be the lagoon.
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Shall we come in?
The house is very long and narrow,
which is most unusual for Venice.
Living in Titian's house,
it's a presence that you live with.
We have a fireplace, it's sort of warm and cozy.
This is our confessional, and I know
my husband always has need of that.
I think Titian was constantly on our mind
when we were buying things.
This is the drawing room.
I decided to do something creative here.
And that's when we incorporated
landscape scenes from Titian's paintings.
I think there's a butterfly,
there's a butterfly or a dragonfly over there.
And we even have some naked ladies,
there's a naked lady there.
He probably would have approved of her.
Yes, I think he definitely liked the ladies.
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- He brings you in with this kind of
delicious promise of beauty.
And so we see Danae laying on a bed
in a very voluptuous setting.
There's a maidservant with her as well,
watching this golden rain fall down onto her lap area.
(chuckling)
- It is one of the sexiest paintings ever painted
and everything about it suggest the turbulence of sex.
- One of the things that makes it so sexy
is that the sheets are rumpled,
the sheets are painted with broad brush strokes,
they're very, very rumpled.
I mean, there's been something going on in that bed.
- Titian has done has most erotic painting.
And that is saying something,
because he specialized in erotic painting.
He's pioneer of the reclining female nude.
- Titian has, at this period, kind of a specialty
of giving very favored patrons
pictures of naked female nudes on beds
- In 1538, Titian painted this extremely famous nude.
She's doing something with her hand that to some
was considered to be as close to pornography
as art of this period gets.
Then we cut to 1544 and Titian painted
this picture for Alessandro Farnese,
and the Venus of Urbino is about flirtation.
The Farnese Venus is about penetration,
and this one's about passion.
This is about orgasm.
- This golden shower of rain is related
to some kind of metaphor for ejaculation.
- But painted for a man whom Titian
believed to be very sexually active.
Phillip was only 21 at the time that he painted it for him.
- We have many accounts of him being a womanizer
and being very interested in women and so on.
Phillip's in his early 20s.
Titian is in his 60s.
He's also smart, he's a reader of people
and he understands that this is what Phillip likes.
- I can understand why you can say,
"oh, it's just like pornography.
It's just like a pin-up,"
but that's not what it's for.
And these paintings have much more to them.
- Of course, we know that he didn't just
invent alt this out of the top of his head.
I mean, it's based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses."
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- This is where I keep nicely alphabetical order, my Ovid.
I've got him very austerely in Latin only.
I've got him in English on a buy one, get one free offer.
Ovid takes quite a lot of shelf space
because he's one of the most important,
famous, classical and subversive of all Roman poets.
The most famous thing that he ever wrote
is his poem which is called "The Metamorphoses,"
the change of shape.
He's talking fundamentally about what it is to be a human.
What is it to change?
What do we mean by someone becoming different,
and how do human beings change in the course of their lives?
But it spans a whole range of subjects,
all of them slightly naughty.
The first in the series was Danae being impregnated
by the God Jupiter in a shower of gold.
The person who is going to be born
from this strange impregnation is the hero Perseus.
What's going on here is that Titian
is not illustrating of it.
He's reconfiguring some of the main themes of the text.
And that's why I think they're kind of very rich
because it's not as if there's a kind of
simple and straightforward message
and all you've got to do is uncode it.
What we're being asked to do
is to think about this story and what it means.
- Many of these paintings were designed
as kind of talking points for intellectuals.
And the idea was that little references
would be put in there to the nature of painting,
to poetry, to mythology that Phillip's intellectuals,
courtiers and poets would unravel.
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Venus tries to prevail upon her human lover Adonis
to stop him from going on hunting,
where he's going to be killed.
Needless to say, he pays no attention,
goes off and gets killed.
That's what you get for trifling with the gods.
They will destroy you.
- Titian hasn't Followed the story that Ovid tells us,
because according to Ovid, what happened was
Venus, who is bending the night with her boyfriend Adonis,
says, "Oh, Adonis, promise me you won't go hunting.
I'm frightened," and all the rest of it.
And he says, "Of course I promise I won't."
At dawn she leaves him.
After she's gone, he goes out hunting.
Now Titian has painted it as something quite different,
i.e. he's trying to leave, she's trying to restrain him.
It's after dawn.
- Titian knew perfectly well what he was trying to do,
what he was trying to achieve
with something which was very, very sexy.
- The Venus and Adonis explicitly is about depicting
a female nude from behind, because Titian sends a letter
to Philip and says that he's going to depict the nude,
the female nude from a variety of perspectives.
The way that he presents Venus from the back and sitting,
so you can see the pressure on her buttock,
this is really celebrated in the 16th century, this idea
that you can see the kind of softness of the flesh.
IT's about Titian being really skillful
by making you feel so sexually aroused by this image.
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- In the years when it was here in the studio,
it just gave you a thrill every time
you walked in each morning.
it never ceases to do that.
- It's a very erotic picture, I think,
with the back view where so much is sort of
left to the imagination, but you've also got this,
her very prominent bottom.
'Cause there's a variety of bottoms as well.
if you look at them, there's different forms
where the eyes draw, the way that the lines
of the composition.
I like the pressure of sitting.
but there is, it's true though.
It is true. If you look at that,
there's a real sense of weight.
- He began this picture preparatory for producing
the picture for Phillip II.
it was a master template for Titian's Venus and Adonis.
- This is a working piece and he is developing things
on the canvas as he goes along.
Other artists, might've done it in drawings,
or they might've done it in cartoons.
They might've worked away from the canvas.
He works on the canvas.
It's got elements of compositional change
that tell us about his process of thinking.
This has to do with that line,
the sinuosity of that line.
Moving little elements around the top of the boot.
- Yes, that's extraordinary, that the boot gets so much.
The minute he supplied that picture to Phillip II,
it became the most famous picture in the world.
It was his best selling picture.
He got orders for it, and he would sort of
press print on it, as it then was.
it was an absolutely winning composition.
Each of these pictures meant money for Titian's studio.
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- We have here on the table,
three prints by the early Titian.
Titian, in his early career already made it clear
that he had a very strong and very outspoken sense
of the potentialities of various new techniques.
So he had a nose for this and he tried it out.
So he started not just painting, but making prints.
And indeed here we have the figure of Christ
on a chariot, drawn by here, figures,
allegorical figures representing faith, turning around.
Ooh, this is something new.
The new technique gave the possibility to,
as it were, commercialize new inventions on a scale
that was unheard of, and that's exactly what Titian did.
A great example of that is the Venus and Adonis.
Hmm, If I make a print out of one of these paintings
and sell that print, I can make a nice living out of that.
Why not?
- As he grew older and more famous, he was not averse
to copying himself or making variants.
He did it quite often.
- HE made no secret of the fact
that he was interested in money.
He said, in a letter, "my pensions are my passion."
I mean, he made a lot of money out of these pictures.
They were money spinners, I'm afraid,
apart from anything else.
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- Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess.
And her mother has bragged that she and her daughter
are much more beautiful than the nymphs
who serve the god of the sea Neptune.
So he sends a monster to devour her.
Perseus is flying through the air.
He decides to save her.
The big difference between the Perseus and Andromeda
and the two previous is that it's invented
from the ground up.
It's a new invention for Titian, because he wants
to depict a figure in motion through the air.
It is clear that it's reworked a lot,
over a protracted period.
He couldn't work out whether to stick with Ovid,
in which I believe Perseus is standing on the shore.
So he started by putting her on this side
and Perseus on this side and he changed his mind.
- I think he's also trying to suggest
a slight lack of control in the figure of Perseus,
and that makes him look a little clumsy.
This figure of the tumbling Perseus,
it looks like he's gonna crash into the water
quite some way off from the sea monster.
He looks like he's just fallen off the cliff
and is going headlong into the water,
rather than that he's gonna go and kill this monster.
It reminds me a little bit of the figure
in Tintoretto's The Freeing of the Slave.
- He's working at a time in Venice where
a new generation of artists is coming to the fore
including Jacoba Tintoretto, with whom he has
a very strained relationship.
And Tintoretto has an incredible facility
and is very good at sort of kinetic dynamic action
and pictures flying through the air
is something he's very good at.
And it seems like Titian is also competing with that.
He's very competitive artist.
He always looks at what's going on around him
and measures himself against it and tries to outdo it.
- Many paintings were done to show he could do far better
than someone else who he thought threatened his position.
- The figure that's effortless is the figure of Andromeda.
She's elegant, she has this balletic pose.
She's the one who's restrained, but she's really
the one who is shown with composure
- And it's to do with power.
It's not to do with eroticism
as much as it's to do with power.
He's got this enormous empire, including a new empire
in the new world that he's trying to protect.
There's a relationship between masculinity and virility
and leadership or the ability to lead people,
to be in charge.
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And so these paintings also, really I suppose,
the implication hidden underneath these paintings
is that say, Phillip II or whoever the commissioner was
is like Perseus sweeping in to save the day.
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- Phillip is very conscious of the fact
that some of the major decisions he makes
affects the political life and the personal lives
of Europeans all over the continent.
One of the first prints we have here is of
the defenses constructed for the Port of Vera Cruz.
This beautiful and very complex painting
is to illustrate the waterways
leading into the Port of Antwerp.
Having therefore come into possession
of all these territories by inheritance,
Phillip had the advantage, presumably,
of being able to draw income from them.
But at the same time, he had to defend them.
Phillip found, I suppose to his disgust,
that having an empire isn't really always a good thing.
We have an empire which on the face of it
covers all the continents of the globe,
but which in reality creates important obligations
on the king himself to try and defend,
which he never really could.
- Titian is smart, he's a reader of people.
He has a sense of Phillip's situation,
how difficult it is to be a ruler
and the kind of decisions you make.
- There is no letter from Phillip in that period
in which he expresses any reaction to the pictures at all.
- He was very worried about Phillip's reaction
Nothing like this particular treatment of a subject
had ever been seen before, so what was Phillip
going to make of it?
So Phillip had an awful lot on his mind
and he didn't respond, and Titian wrote him at least twice.
- "I Haven't heard anything from you.
It's been so long since I sent these pictures.
I assume that's maybe because you don't like them.
If you don't like them, I'm happy to do them again."
- And he never heard from him, until I think
quite a long time had passed, over a year.
So you can imagine the anxiety.
- But in a sense, you can make the argument
that it just becomes a catalyst for Titian.
(lively classical music)
He has sort of a resurgence of creativity in this period.
To work with an artist, for a patron
who's going to be paying you as long
as you're delivering something, that is remarkable.
(lively classical music)
- This is really the normal size painting brush
which you can imagine Titian using, similar to.
The reason why you've got it long,
you want to hold it so you can actually make marks.
And when you're actually painting,
you can actually see the whole canvas.
When you get kind of close, it's all a blur.
But when you're further away, the actual drawing,
the shape-making comes together
and actually creates form.
- For Titian, the execution on the surface,
on the canvas, is the content.
the way he starts opening up his forms
to where he starts painting even more atmospherically
than he had previously
Titian, straight on there with the brush.
That's the idea.
- He's carving the surface
is where the analogy is, is carving.
- His approach to gestural brushwork,
his approach to layering of color and his use of that
to tell stories with not just narrative precision
but emotional and psychological precision
- And you can imagine Titian doing that.
And when you're involved with a picture,
you become so lost within it.
- Titian is the great precursor of our modern day
idea of painting as self-expression.
- And it's fundamental to remember they are abstract.
And again, it's not about painting every single thing in,
he's getting to an essence as your brain fills the rest in,
again, which you could say as a modern idea.
- He's doing something new in painting that is so radical
that you can't really think about painting
the same way after this.
He's painting the future.
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- This is the one that many people think of
as the absolute top of the series.
It's a kind of manifesto about what painting is
and what painting could do.
- Look at this, look at it.
I mean, every texture that you can imagine,
water, stone, glass.
- Things that are vaporous, translucent.
You know, those are things that are notoriously
difficult to paint, and he just puts them in,
masses of them, just to show what he can do.
- These later pictures, they're unusually freely painted
or they give the impression of unusually freely painted.
When you look close to them, you just make out
a mass of color and so forth.
When you stand back, it all falls into place
and they seem to be alive and perfect.
- This is just form that lives straight-through paint,
that has as many dimensions to it as poetry
- Here is the goddess Diana suddenly being surprised
by the hunter Actaeon who, in the course of the chase,
has come across Diana and her followers bathing.
- Which no man must ever do.
It's that startled look of the discomfort every man has felt
at not being wanted in the company of women.
- Then what happens is that Diana sees him,
she transforms him into a stag
and he gets eaten by his own hounds.
He constantly makes you question
why you're looking at these paintings
and your morals for looking at these paintings
and the ethics of looking.
Should I be enjoying this sight of these naked women?
- Mr. Ongaro, the proud owner of Titian's studio.
You've worked here for how many years?
(speaking in foreign language)
60 years.
(speaking in foreign language)
What is this?
(speaking in foreign language)
Ahhh. (chuckling)
(speaking in foreign language)
- Right, so the issue of female life models
is a kind of much-debated question amongst
Renaissance art historians, and it used to be
that people said there weren't any female life models
in the Renaissance, it was just men.
And in some cases you do use male life models
for clothed female figures, but to get female nudes
and particularly female nudes in strange positions,
you have to have a life model.
Otherwise you can't see things like how the breasts fall,
for example, you can't do that with a male model.
So female life models absolutely were used
in the 16th century, and Titian was one of the people
who used them frequently.
(classical music)
- I think I would have loved to sit for Titian,
provided I could keep my clothes on.
This was obviously many years ago,
and it was the first cover of "Cosmopolitan."
(chuckling) They wanted cleavage, and I had cleavage.
The job of the models in Titian's time
was to project whatever image it was
that they were requested to project.
It's not really how I see myself.
- Female bodies are really transgressive,
so you get preachers like Bernardino of Siena
saying "Woman, never let yourself be seen naked,
because you sin and so does your husband.
They should never see your naked body."
So the idea of painting women naked
was indeed a deeply sexual act.
- It's a lot of focused, concentrated time
together in the studio.
And I think, in my memory, it tells me
that I was sort of coming around maybe what would have been
an average of two, two and a half days a week.
Something like this. - Yeah.
- For about four hours, four or five hours each sitting.
- I know it was a difficult pose
and this arm was particularly difficult, wasn't it?
I mean, the artists could often
be criticized for being cruel.
- I remember my body not being very happy.
There were yeah, sort of aches and pains
that I hadn't experienced before.
I don't know what's happening, but this arm
would have to be holding the weight of the body
which seems like, nearly impossible.
- You see that really well.
- If you were really sort of leaning over
and having that as the point that's anchoring the pose,
then there would have to be incredible tension.
I wonder if there wasn't something that was
more vertical that was sort of then tipped over.
Gravity will tell you, and circulation will tell you
that it's not a good idea to have your arms
above your head for a very long time,
but I know that this varies a lot between models.
I know a couple of models that can hold their arms
above their head for a whole hour,
where within 10 minutes at the most,
I would have no blood and there would be pain.
As a naked person in the room,
it can sometimes be or feel vulnerable.
And I think sometimes it could seem very subtle
and I think I've been in situations where
people might have used particular terminology
that they're probably naive to the fact
that that could maybe make one not feel so comfortable
and perhaps a little bit more exposed.
What we're doing has nothing to do with sex,
but I think it would be naive to say
that it can't be, because we're sexual beings.
It's not the case with Andy.
Andy is very, very clear.
- I don't think about sex when I'm painting.
I don't need to go to the next room
and kind of have an orgasm or something
to better paint, to put it crudely.
But I think there probably have been
artists that have done that.
- There is an expectation that artists
have sex with their models.
Writers talk about not letting good girls
go into artists' studios because of
all the things that could happen to them.
So whether this during Titian's case,
I mean, it's lost to history.
Nobody knows.
- We don't know, is the answer,
and I didn't think anybody will,
and I don't think it should change our views
about pictures either.
What people do in the privacy
of their own studios is their affair.
(lively music)
- It may be difficult to know who Titian's models were,
but there's reported difficulty in getting
the right kind of female models.
- They are not professional models, I think,
and nor are they relatives, of course.
they are presumably courtesans, of which
there was a great number in Venice.
- So Venice, this very beautiful city raising out
from the water, was one of the wonders in Europe.
Just an amazing, really beauty, with approximately
a population of 170,000 inhabitants.
11,000 were courtesans.
And here in the middle, over there behind
the Rialto Bridge, you can see this area,
which was the ancient red light district.
In 1565, a catalog was printed, a catalog
of the 220 most important Venetian courtesans.
- It's important to think about courtesans'
cultural relationship to these paintings
because this is a new kind of culture.
You're going to get courtesans
in the early 16th century in Venice,
and Titian is friends with some of these courtesans,
he's very much part of this culture.
(upbeat music)
- Let's go.
Now we are in Castellete in the ancient
red light district of Venice.
So we can also see some very beautiful statues
reminding us of some of their very special
and attractive female attributes, because not far from here
there is also the very famous Bridge of Tits,
where the courtesans there were used,
where they are to show their tits.
Of course, they were totally bare-breasted
to entice clients.
For instance, we can find Ludovica Stella,
living here in Campo Santa Barnaba, just drio la chiesa.
It means behind the church.
let's check how much she charged.
Only two scudi. Two shields, hmm.
Quite good, actually.
For instance, a doctor earned eight scudi,
eight shields, for a month.
So you can imagine the big amount
of money that the courtesans earned.
- Many women would have sexual relations with a man
in exchange for goods and maybe rent or maybe a house,
and that courtesan spent a lot of the time
just creating wonderfully beautiful atmospheres for them.
So we'll write poetry and we'll sing
and we'll be beautiful and entertaining and accessible,
in a way that a lot of aristocratic women weren't.
And so they wouldn't define themselves
necessarily as sex workers
- He's a purveyor of fantasy.
So were the courtesans of Venice.
They're both selling their fantasies to the same people.
(somber orchestral music)
- Here, we've got Diana as the rather commanding
virgin goddess who has discovered that one of her
poor attendants, the sad Callisto here, who has
because they had to get undressed,
she's revealed that she was pregnant.
Callisto was impregnated by the god Jupiter
in the form of Diana.
- She's not allowed to be pregnant because
Diana's nymphs are supposed to be chaste.
- It's a terrible moment where she's being held down
by the other nymphs and they're revealing her pregnancy.
Diana and Callisto is a deeply upsetting painting.
- It's one of the most expressively painted,
possibly the most expressively painted.
What this painting is, essentially,
a rape victim ostracized by her peers,
another innocent victim of fate.
- Diana isn't a wicked woman, she's a goddess,
which means that she can control your fate.
Anything can happen if there's somebody up there,
is going to do something good or bad for you.
All that says that there is no justice in the world.
What happens happens.
- It is interesting that the painting
for Phillip gets so dark.
(soft music)
- Titian is very anxious, there are two pensions
and some other sums that have not been paid to him.
He has not been paid as they had agreed
for a very long time by this point.
- Now that if you work for a duke or a king,
there's nothing you can do about taking them
to court if they don't pay.
They're not gonna give you the contract.
That's how it is.
All you can do is kind of go on and on and on,
"where's my money," and so forth.
(tense music)
(speaking in foreign language)
- Phillip II's ambitions and his budget
was getting bigger and bigger.
He was fighting a lot of wars,
and obviously there were these
very expensive ventures in the Americas.
It led to a point where we as a firm
became a bit more conscientious about the risk.
in this letter that Phillip II sent to Max Fugger,
it's more of a demanding that he would want us
to finance one million ducats.
So our answer is not no, it's more of a
"we have to see if we're able to accommodate that,"
and we sort of tried to buy time.
This is essentially writing together how large
is the outstanding sum that Phillip II owes to us as a firm,
and how is that split within the various pieces of debt
that we have given to him?
And the sum that comes out is rather large.
So we tried to find a way of not going into that request
for financing because the outstanding debt
was 6 million ducats, which in today's terms
is roughly $600 million.
This is essentially sort of the beginning of the end,
at least in terms of the financing relationship
between the Fugger family and the Habsburg family.
- Titian is obviously interested in money and who is not,
but he wasn't doing this stuff for love exclusively.
If he could be paid as well, That's fine.
- When some of the payments do come through,
it was paid in a warrant for rice, which gave him the right
to import and export rice through Naples without paying tax.
So it was this kind of amazingly petty
background to the whole thing.
These sort of sublime paintings
paid for in this torturous charade
of constant promises, constant impeachment.
(bright chime music)
Here, we have Europa, the climax of the series
- Titian painted it at probably a high point in his career.
He was about 70 years old when he painted this painting,
and he was really firing on all cylinders by that moment.
- Here is the bull again, Jupiter in a new form,
who is raping the terrified Europa.
And there's a backstory here about how the bull
comes on to start with, all very sweet
and Europa and her maids play with the bull.
When he's got her confidence, off he goes.
Here she's on his back, she's absolutely terrified.
- Phillip would have identified with Jupiter.
He himself not only identified with the ancient gods
and goddesses, but claimed descent from them.
We know that Titian refers to this painting in 1562
as the seal on the series.
He's pleased with this painting.
There is a level of quality embedded in it,
a level of intentionality, which perhaps he feels
he's come to at the end of a campaign
of over a decade of painting some of the most
fabulous and meaningful paintings in his career.
Traditionally, art historians have appreciated it
for its color and for its technique.
- Every inch of this is a kind of molten ecstasy.
It's ecstatic, isn't it?
Her posture is ecstatic.
That sense of ecstasy extends out into the sky
and the reflections and the luminosity of the water.
- Not only is she half uncovered,
but her right breast is visible.
In the first iteration, her breast was covered.
He then lowered the neckline of her dress
until it was fully exposed, so that clearly suggests
a desire to please his patron in the most basic,
sexualized and erotic way.
If you look at the face of Jupiter, Titian chose
to depict him facing the viewer, facing Phillip.
He looks at us with these wide eyes
and this pink wet nose as if to say, "Who, me?"
And so there's a momentary hesitation
where you look at the painting and realize
there's something pretty awful going on.
But at the same time, you look at the bull
who's the perpetrator and you think, "well, wait,
is it possible that he's the one about to rape this woman?"
I think hat kind of hesitation that Titian
builds into the painting is crucial to opening up
more potential meanings in it.
- It's interesting because it has a lot of
art historical writing about it that completely dismisses
the idea that this is a woman being raped.
We don't look at the subject matter,
we look at brush strokes and we look at, oh, genius
and we look at literature, We just look at everything
apart from what is in front of us a lot of the time
and what is in front of us, if you look at it bluntly,
is abduction and assault and rape.
- I first read Ovid at school and I remember
very clearly at school, we were taught
that we should say it wasn't rape, it was ravishing.
Somehow as if the women enjoyed it.
It's not surprising that recent discussion of Ovid
has been much clearer about what we're reading,
the treatment of women in this very long book
is they are often the victims of assault,
sexual violence, and there's no two ways about it.
They are raped.
(somber orchestral music)
- One thing that one can say about the Titians in general
is that when the major artists did see them,
these pictures had a decisive impact on a number
of really great European artists, in a way
that no other group of pictures ever did.
Reubens was transformed by the experience
of seeing them, Velazquez based his whole life
on the fact that he was familiar with them.
- I think Lucien Freud said this, and this
companion piece, Diana and Callisto.
were the most beautiful painting ever created,
Not a bad claim.
- Titian was sending these works out without ever
having the opportunity for him to see them
together in his own studio.
He did intend them as a series and Phillip II
wanted them as a series, but in fact,
when they all arrived in Spain, they actually
stayed together for a very, very short period.
- We tend to think of them as being together
from the beginning, but in fact, the thing
that was most striking to me when I mapped them
as a group, was to see that almost from the beginning,
they weren't together.
(chime music)
They were really only together for 20 years.
I wanted to animate the facts that these objects
were in constant motion and think about who saw
these artworks, and also what these artworks saw
over the course of their lives.
So the Venus and Adonis, which is now in the Prado,
was sent originally to England when Philip II
was getting married to Mary Tudor,
the Perseus and Andromeda is sent to Ghent.
We can look at the page that we have for Europa
and be able to see all of the places that she traveled.
First, start off in Venice, where the painting was executed,
and then is sent to Spain where Phillip II receives it.
What the project reveals about who's predominantly
looking at these pictures is that it is mostly men.
Francois Louis-Joseph de Laborde-Mereville,
the Bridgewater Syndicate, Lord Berwick,
the Earls of Darnley, the Colnaghi Gallery.
It seems very clear that these artworks
are mostly seen by men and collected by men,
gifted to men, exchanged by men or among men.
That tells us also that artworks with women
depicted in them were important
as transactional items between men.
(somber music)
- 20 years ago or so, a feminist art historian
started to say, hang on a minute.
How about the 70s onwards?
You get these responses to the nudes,
so you start to think of women like Carolee Schneemann,
where she uses her own body to articulate ideas
about power and art and how female sexuality is used
by artists without any recourse
or any real thoughts about women themselves.
The reclining nude is absolutely related to Titian.
It's just the fact of women
being objectified in Western art.
Just a real sense of anger, a real sense of fury
that the art world kind of colludes in this objectification.
- To demand that art ve sort of morally pure
is basically to demand that art not do
what it's always done.
And that's what art helps us do.
Art is not there to provide a moral example.
Art is there to ask us questions
or make us ask questions of each other.
- There's a lot of difficulty now both about
Ovid's poem and about Titian's dialogue with Ovid's poem.
I feel much more doubtful, not to say.
I'm fairly hostile to the view that
that means, so we shouldn't read it
or so we shouldn't look at it.
I think unless we face up to what rape is, we are lost.
That's what we need to know.
There is something we need to
look at, see and recognize here.
Put these in the cupboard, we're depriving ourselves
of something which is gonna make us think harder
and better and more productively
about what sexual violence is.
(chime music)
- The day we knew we had to close the gallery,
the team decided to gather together at course at six,
just before the doors closed to the public
so that we could spend a bit of time together
in the exhibition that all of us had played a part in doing.
So we wanted to enjoy those last
few minutes before the visiting public.
It was a strange moment.
I've never lived a moment like that before, frankly.
In times of stress or in times of crisis,
I think museums and art and music and pictures
can play an enormously important role
where people look for solace, where they look for comfort,
where they look for some kind of guidance.
So it weighs heavily on you to have to lock the doors on
a room that holds some of the greatest pictures ever painted
and you can't allow people to see them.
But we know that we've done something important
and we're very keen to share it when we're able
to open our doors again.
(solemn music)
(doors closing)
(bright music)