Tiziano 1508. Agli esordi di una luminosa carriera

The Gallerie dell'Accademia announce the exhibition Tiziano 1508. At the Beginnings of a Luminous Career, from September 9 to December 3, 2023.

 

In 1508, in a Venice dominated by the famous Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, the figure of Titian begins to emerge, soon surpassing the fame of both. Indeed, it is a turning point, not only for Titian's career but for Venetian and, in a way, European art as a whole. It is at this moment that the young artist from Cadore, barely twenty years old, demonstrates his talent through significant public enterprises such as the Judith with the Head of Holofernes, a fresco on the side facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. The vivacity of colors and grandiose composition left contemporaries and later generations incredulous.

 

The exhibition Tiziano 1508. At the Beginnings of a Luminous Career, curated by Roberta Battaglia, Sarah Ferrari, and Antonio Mazzotta, tells the story of the talented artist through 17 autographed works by Titian and about ten comparisons with paintings, engravings, and drawings by contemporary artists such as Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo, Albrecht Dürer, and Francesco Vecellio. Among the exhibited works are important loans, such as the large print of Christ's Triumph from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Resurrected Christ from the Uffizi, the Angel with a Tambourine from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, the Madonna with Child between St. Anthony of Padua and St. Roch from the Prado Museum, and the Baptism of Christ from the Capitoline Museums.

 

The exhibition guides the visitor in understanding the artist's extraordinary ability to quickly assimilate different cultural components - especially those of Giorgione, Dürer, and Michelangelo - and direct Venetian pictorial language towards a blend of naturalism and classicism.

 

Many works are rediscovered thanks to new research, scientific investigations, and restorations. The combination of these pieces often leads to interesting revelations, as in the case of the painting Angel with a Tambourine, from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, displayed for the first time in an exhibition. This painting is a fragment of an altarpiece that was originally placed in the Church of Servi in Ferrara but was later dismantled. Research for the exhibition identified other possible fragments in a Madonna with Child on a throne, preserved in Russia, and in a Saint Francis, housed in a French museum.

 

Like archaeologists, the curators dig into past evidence to defend and prove their theses, as is the case with the Archangel Raphael and Tobias from the Gallerie dell'Accademia. The painting, according to Giorgio Vasari, who in the second edition of the Lives reports information he received from Titian himself, was executed in 1508. This magnificent image, chosen for the cover of the catalog published by La Mandragora, expresses all the power of the young artist from Cadore in his early youth. Alongside it will be exhibited the other version of the Archangel Raphael and Tobias, painted later by Titian for the church of San Marziale and generously lent by the Patriarchate and the Curia of Venice.

 

These are just some of the many stories that recount Titian's beginnings, Venice in the early sixteenth century, the importance of patrons, and the multiple cultural influences acquired by the artist. In 1508, Titian effectively began a public career that would soon transform him into the official painter of the Serenissima Republic and an essential reference point for the art history of subsequent centuries.

 

All the information here.