The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (479 page)

 
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Tischbein
.

Family of German 18th-cent. painters. The best-known of them,
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
(1751–1829), was most important for his engravings of classical antiquities, but is now remembered almost solely for his famous portrait
Goethe in the Roman Campagna
(Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, 1786–7). Tischbein was
Goethe's
friend and he is usually called ‘Goethe’ Tischbein. The two other leading members of the family, his uncle and cousin, were nicknamed after their main place of work:
Johann Heinrich the Elder
, ‘Kassel’ Tischbein (1722–89) and
Johann Friedrich
‘Leipzig’ Tischbein (1750–1812). They were principally portraitists.

 
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(1836–1902).
French painter and graphic artist. Early in his career he painted historical costume pieces, but in about 1864 he turned with great success to scenes of contemporary life, usually involving fashionable women. Following his alleged involvement in the turbulent events of the Paris Commune (1871) he took refuge in London, where he lived from 1871 to 1882. He was just as successful there as he had been in Paris and lived in some style in St John's Wood; in 1874 Edmond de
Goncourt
wrote sarcastically that he had ‘a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors, and around the studio, a garden where, all day long, one can see a footman in silk stockings brushing and shining the shrubbery leaves’. His pictures are distinguished most obviously by his love of painting women's costumes: indeed, his work—which has a fashion-plate elegance and a chocolate-box charm—has probably been more often reproduced in works on the history of costume than on the history of painting. He also, however, had a gift for wittily observing nuances of social behaviour. In 1882, following the death of his mistress Kathleen Newton (the archetypal Tissot model—beautiful but rather vacant), he returned to France. In 1885 he underwent a religious conversion when he went into a church to ‘catch the atmosphere for a picture’, and thereafter he devoted himself to religious subjects. He visited the Holy Land in 1886–7 and 1889, and his illustrations to the events of the Bible were enormously popular, both in book form and when the original drawings were exhibited. For many years after his death Tissot was considered a grossly vulgar artist, but since the 1970s there has been an upsurge of interest in him, expressed in sale-room prices for his work as well as in numerous books and exhibitions devoted to him.

 
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(
c.
1485–1576).
The greatest painter of the Venetian School. The evidence for his birthdate is contradictory, but he was certainly very old when he died. He was probably a pupil of Giovanni
Bellini
, and in his early work he came under the spell of
Giorgione
, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 he assisted him with the external fresco decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished paintings. The authorship of certain works (some of them famous) is still disputed between them.
Titian's first major independent commission was for three frescos on the life of St Antony of Padua in the Scuola del Santo, Padua (1511), noble and dignified paintings suggesting an almost central Italian firmness and monumentality. When he returned to Venice, Giorgione having died and
Sebastiano
having gone to Rome, the aged Bellini alone stood between him and supremacy, and that only until 1516 when Bellini died and Titian became official painter to the Republic. He maintained his position as the leading painter in the city until his death sixty years later. In the second decade of the century Titian broke free from the stylistic domination of Giorgione and developed a manner of his own. Something of a fusion between Titian's worldliness and Giorgione's poetry is seen in the enigmatic allegory known as
Sacred and Profane Love
(Borghese Gallery, Rome,
c.
1515), but his style soon became much more dynamic. The work that more than any other established his reputation is the huge altarpiece of
The Assumption of the Virgin
(Sta Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1516–18). It is the largest picture he ever painted and one of the greatest, matching the achievements of his most illustrious contemporaries in Rome in grandeur of form and surpassing them in splendour of colour. The soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the tempestuous group of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father looks forward to the
Baroque
. Similar qualities are seen in his two most famous altarpieces of the 1520s: the Pesaro altarpiece (Sta Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1519–26), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence, and
The Death of St Peter Martyr
(completed 1530), which he painted for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, having defeated
Palma Vecchio
and
Pordenone
in competition for the commission. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867, but it is known through copies and engraving; trees and figures together form a violent centrifugal composition suited to the action, and
Vasari
described it as ‘the most celebrated, the greatest work … that Titian has ever done’. Titian had important secular as well as ecclesiastical patrons in this energetic period of his career, one of his most important commissions being three mythological pictures (1518–23) for Alfonso d'
Este
—the
Worship of Venus
, the
Bacchanal
(both in the Prado, Madrid), and the
Bacchus and Ariadne
(NG, London). Outstanding among his portraits of the time is the exquisite
Man with a Glove
(Louvre, Paris,
c.
1520).
About 1530, the year in which his wife died, a change in Titian's manner becomes apparent. The vivacity of former years gave way to a more restrained and meditative art. He now began to use related rather than contrasting colours in juxtaposition, yellows and pale shades rather than the strong blues and reds of his previous work. In composition too he became less adventurous and used schemes which, compared with some of his earlier works, appear almost archaic. Thus his large
Presentation of the Virgin
(Accademia, Venice, 1534–8) makes use of the
relief
-like frieze composition dear to the
quattrocento
. During the 1530s Titian's fame spread throughout Europe. In 1530 he first met the emperor Charles V (in Bologna, where he was crowned in that year) and in 1533 he painted a famous portrait of him (Prado) based on a portrait by the Austrian
Seisenegger
. Charles was so pleased with it that he appointed Titian court painter and elevated him to the rank of Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur—an unprecedended honour for a painter. At the same time his works were increasingly sought after by Italian princes, as with the celebrated
Venus of Urbino
(Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1538), named after its owner, Guidobaldo, Duke of Camerino, who later became Duke of Urbino. The pose is based on Giorgione's
Sleeping Venus
(Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), but Titian substitutes a direct sensual appeal for Giorgione's idyllic remoteness.
Early in the 1540s Titian came under the influence of central and north Italian
Mannerism
, and in 1545–6 he made his first and only journey to Rome. There he was deeply impressed not only by modern works such as
Michelangelo's
Last Judgement
, but also by the remains of antiquity. His own paintings during this visit aroused much interest, his
Danaë
(Museo di Capodimonte, Naples) being praised for its handling and colour and (according to Vasari) criticized for its inexact drawing by Michelangelo. Titian also painted in Rome the famous portrait of
Pope Paul III and his Nephews
(Museo di Capodimonte). The decade closed with further imperial commissions. In 1548 the emperor summoned Titian to Augsburg, where he painted both a formal equestrian portrait (
Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg
, Prado) and a more intimate one showing him seated in an armchair (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). He travelled to Augsburg again in 1550 and this time painted portraits of Charles's son, the future Philip II of Spain, who was to be the greatest patron of his later career. Titian's work for Philip included a series of seven erotic mythological subjects (
c.
1550–
c.
1562):
Danaë
and
Venus and Adonis
(Prado),
Perseus and Andromeda
(Wallace Coll., London),
The Rape of Europa
(Gardner Mus., Boston),
Diana and Actaeon
and
Diana and Calisto
(Ellesmere Coll., on loan to NG of Scotland), and
The Death of Actaeon
(NG, London). Titian referred to these pictures as
poesie
, and they are indeed highly poetic visions of distant worlds, quite different from the sensual realities of his earlier mythological paintings.
Titian ran a busy studio, his assistants including his brother
Francesco Vecellio
(
c.
1490–1559/60), his son Orazio , and his cousin Cesare. Of these only Francesco sees to have had any individual substance as a painter, but his
œuvre
is not well defined. During the last twenty years of his life Titian's personal works, as opposed to those produced under his supervision and with his intervention, showed an increasing looseness in the handling and a sensitive merging of subdued colours, so that outlines disappear and the forms become more immaterial. With this went a growing emphasis on intimate pathos rather than external drama. His interest in new pictorial conceptions waned but his powers remained undimmed until the end, his career closing with the awe-inspiring
Pietà
(Accademia, Venice, 1573–6), intended for his own tomb and finished after his death by
Palma Giovane
.
Titian was recognized as a towering genius in his own time (
Lomazzo
described him as ‘the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world’) and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been seriously questioned. He was supreme in every branch of painting and his achievements were so varied—ranging from the joyous evocation of pagan antiquity in his early mythologies to the depths of tragedy in his late religious paintings—that he has been an inspiration to artists of very different character.
Poussin
,
Rubens
, and
Velázquez
are among the painters who have particularly revered him. In many subjects, above all in portraiture, he set patterns that were followed by generations of artists. His free and expressive brushwork revolutionized the oil technique: Vasari wrote that his late works ‘are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance … The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.’ His greatness as an artist, it appears, was not matched by his character, for he was notoriously avaricious. In spite of his wealth and status, he claimed he was impoverished, and his exaggerations about his age (by which he hoped to pull at the heartstrings of patrons) are one of the sources of confusion about his birthdate. Jacopo
Bassano
caricatured him as a moneylender in his
Purification of the Temple
(NG, London). Titian, however, was lavish in his hospitality towards his friends, who included the poet Pietro Aretino and the sculptor and architect Jacopo
Sansovino
. These three were so close that they were known in Venice as the triumvirate, and they used their influence with their respective patrons to further each other's careers.