Houghton Hall Exhibition

We plan to visit Houghton Hall in Norfolk, England to see an incredible art exhibition. I say incredible not only because of the quality of the art that will be on display in the ancestral home of famed eighteenth century English politician Robert Walpole, but also because of the circumstances of the exhibition itself.

Houghton Hall

Sir Robert Walpole, later 1^st Earl of Orford, was the most important politician in Great Britain from roughly 1714 to 1740. He played an indispensible role in cementing the rule of George I and the Hanoverian dynasty. He was also an avid art collector. After his death his heirs squandered his wealth and eventually his magnificent collection of Old Masters had to be sold to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.

 The collection wound up in the Hermitage where it survived even the Russian revolution. Incredibly, the Hermitage has agreed this year to lend not just a painting or two to an English exhibition but the whole Walpole collection that will be displayed not in a museum but at Houghton Hall. It promises to be the highlight of the British art year.

After Houghton we will train back to London for a brief stay where in addition to a visit to the National Gallery we hope to visit Strawberry Hill, the home of Sir Robert’s youngest son, Horace Walpole, who in his own way was just as illustrious as his father. Strawberry Hill is a monument to Walpole’s eclectic interests and it represents in its architecture and furnishings almost the start of the Gothic revival in England. Walpole’s little novel, The Castle of Otranto, is regarded as the first Gothic novel.

Strawberry Hill after recent restoration

But Horace Walpole is also the greatest letter-writer in the English language. His correspondence to his numerous friends spans a period of almost 60 years and along with his memoirs and other writings provides a veritable chronicle of the eighteenth century. Over 50 years ago I had to read and study most of Walpole’s correspondence and memoirs in my doctoral research on the political career of Henry Seymour Conway, a British general and politician.

Horace Walpole

Conway was Horace Walpole’s cousin and closest friend. Their lives and careers were always intertwined from their schoolboy days at Eton. Conway is not as well known as Walpole but he played a very important role in British politics during the era of the American War. As Secretary of State during the short-lived Rockingham administration he moved the repeal of the odious Stamp Act in the House of Commons. Afterwards, he opposed the disastrous measures that led to the war with America and eventually brought an end to the war with his motion in the House of Commons in 1782 to cease all offensive military action.

Henry Seymour Conway
as Secretary of State
Lewis collection, Farmington, CT

The study of Conway’s life was valuable in itself but having to read his cousin’s marvelous letters and memoirs constituted a life-changing education in many ways.  I had to leave Walpole and Conway aside after I left academe 50 years ago but now it was difficult to pass up this opportunity to re-visit. As an added bonus we will get to see an eighteenth century art collection in its original setting. 

See the video below for a brief preview of the Houghton exhibition.

Giorgione: "Tempest", First Edition

Today, on the anniversary of its first appearance in the Wall St. Journal on May 13, 2006, I would like to reprint my original essay on Giorgione's "Tempest", one of the most famous and mysterious paintings in the history of Western art. It originally appeared in the Journal's "Masterpiece" column under the title, “A Renaissance Mystery Solved?” A longer and more comprehensive version can now be found at my website. 

Giorgione: The Tempest (1509-10)

"Giorgione "La Tempesta": A Renaissance Mystery Solved?"

No great work of art has mystified art historians and critics more than Giorgione’s “Tempesta,” one of a handful of paintings definitively attributed to the Venetian Renaissance master. After his untimely death in 1510 of the plague at about the age of 30, most of his paintings were either lost or completed by others, especially his colleague, Titian.

Although little is known of his life, Giorgione was apparently apprenticed to the great Giovanni Bellini at the outset of his career, and certainly was a major influence on Titian. In June the National Gallery in Washington will be hosting a Bellini, Giorgione, Titian exhibition.

While the “Tempesta” is universally admired as a pioneering work of landscape art because of its dramatic use of color and shadow, art historians have not been able to agree on the subject matter of this masterpiece of the High Renaissance. More than the painting itself, it was the mystery about its subject matter that first attracted me to it, and which prompted a trip to Venice last year.

This relatively small painting (82x73cm.) currently hangs in the Accademia in Venice. Over a hundred years ago my favorite travel author, Edward Hutton, described it as “a delicious landscape of green and shady valley, of stream and ruin and towering country town.” The town is visible in the background and above it, clouds and a flash of lightning indicate that a storm is raging. In the middle distance, separated from the town by a bridge, are overgrown ruins and two broken columns. In a glade in the foreground, a nude woman nursing an infant sits on the right, while on the left, a young man dressed in contemporary Venetian clothing holds a long staff.

Although never named by Giorgione himself, the painting is usually called “La Tempesta” because of the storm. Sometimes it is called “The Soldier and the Gypsy,” even though critics have pointed out that the man is not a soldier and the nude woman is not a gypsy.

One tends to accept works of art at face value, particularly when they are as famous as this one. But one question struck me: Why is the woman nude? Other than a white cloth draped around her shoulder, there is no sign of any clothing. After all, it isn’t necessary for a woman to completely undress to nurse a baby. I believe that if the nursing woman were clothed, the subject would be immediately recognizable for what it is: a “Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.”

The “Flight” is a common subject in the history of art. It illustrates a passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew in which Jesus, Mary and Joseph, escaping from the deadly designs of King Herod, find an idyllic rest stop upon arrival in Egypt. Giorgione’s painting has all the elements common to a “Flight” image: Mary holding or nursing the baby Jesus; Joseph standing off to the side or in the background; a town in the distance; and ruins.

Why ruins? Emile Male, the great French art historian, pointed out that it was common for medieval artists to draw on the legend of the “Fall of Idols” when painting the “Flight.” According to it, when the infant Jesus entered Egypt, all the idols crumbled. Artists commonly used broken columns to represent this episode.

Giorgione was a master of artistic narrative. In this painting the Holy Family has left Judea and its dangers, symbolized by the storm, behind. They have crossed the bridge and stream representing the border between Judea and Egypt. They have entered Egypt and the idols, symbolized by the broken columns, lie broken behind them. We notice that the tempest is raging in the distance. The glade in which they rest is serene. Now they rest in safety.

It is only the depiction of the man and the woman that has deterred experts from recognizing this painting as the ”Flight into Egypt.” Joseph is usually portrayed as an old man by Medieval artists. Nevertheless, in the 15th century he began to be depicted as a young, virile carpenter. In Raphael’s depiction of the marriage of Joseph and Mary, the ”Sposalizio,” Joseph appears to be about the same age as Giorgione’s man. Italians especially found it unseemly to show Mary being married to an old man.

But why the nude Madonna? The explanation lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine of which every Venetian would have been aware. Simply put it was the belief that Mary from the first moment of her existence had been created free from the stain of original sin which every other descendant of Adam and Eve had inherited.

The concept of Mary’s Immaculate Conception had been vigorously debated by theologians during the previous 250 years. The great advocates of the doctrine were the Franciscans; whose center in Venice, the “Frari” became a virtual shrine to the Immaculate Conception. Special impetus to the belief had been given by Pope Sixtus IV, himself a Franciscan, in 1476 when he added the feast of the Conception to the liturgy of the entire Western Church.

Theologians called Mary the new or second Eve. Artists had difficulty in expressing this increasingly popular doctrine. By Giorgione’s time they had not yet come up with the now familiar image of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun” from the Book of Revelation. Giorgione had the unprecedented audacity to portray a nude Madonna as Eve would have appeared in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.

Nothing is in Giorgione’s painting by accident. The white cloth on which the Madonna sits is a symbol of the winding sheet or burial cloth of Christ. Franciscans regarded Mary as the altar on which the Eucharist rested. The altar was always covered with a white cloth.

Finally, in front of the Madonna a scraggly bush rises out of bare rock. Artists frequently used plants or flowers symbolically to identify characters. From the way it is growing, the plant could be a member of the nightshade family, a common plant found in Italy at the time. The most well known form of nightshade is the aptly named “belladonna.” This plant is associated with witchcraft and the Devil. Is that why the plant below the heel of the Woman has withered and died?

The discovery that this most mysterious and enigmatic painting has a "sacred" subject has led to a number of other significant findings. Giorgione's "Three Ages of Man" in the Pitti Palace has been identified as "The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man", and Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love" has been identified as "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen." These two papers as well as a number of others can be found on my site, My Giorgione. Of course, I have also been discussing them and others on this blog for the past three years. 

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The New Connoisseurship

The annual meeting of the College Art Association was held this year in New York City from February 13 to 16. It was a huge conference with panels galore and an incredible array of exhibitors.  I took the train down from Connecticut on Friday to have lunch with some other Art history bloggers, and then to attend the panel entitled, “The New Connoisseurship: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators.”

Bloggers at lunch in NYC

It turned out to be a large panel featuring two chairpersons as well as six prestigious presenters from high-powered institutions. Each presenter was slated to give a ten-minute talk, and when all were done there would be a round table discussion. The topic must be important since there were at least 200 people in attendance in the huge West Ballroom of the Hilton hotel.

Chairperson Gail Feigenbaum opened the proceedings with a mini overview of the concept of connoisseurship that included a review of the reasons for its apparent decline despite her belief that it was still “fundamentally indispensable.” She argued that the basic concept was sound enough in that connoisseurship involves both expert knowledge and an informed and discerning taste. However, the decline can be traced to a number of factors.

Noted practitioners of the past often were ignorant of or ignored scientific tools, and today scholars accuse them of being unscientific, and question the value of mere “close looking”.  Moreover, there is still a taint of corruption associated with connoisseurs like Bernhard Berenson who worked very closely with art dealers and collectors. A favorable Berenson opinion could substantially increase the market value of any work of art. Finally, there was a kind of aristocratic aura surrounding the old connoisseurship that offends modern sensibilities. Only the wealthy could afford to dabble in Old Masters, or even think of traveling to Italy to view them.

Bernhard Berenson

The first panelist was Maryan Ainsworth, a distinguished scholar and curator of Renaissance painting at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She outlined some of the scientific techniques that modern scholars are using to acquire expert knowledge. They study fingerprints in books of Hours in order to assess popularity and usage. Humidity stains are being examined in order to reconstruct old manuscripts. Some are examining the canvas supports of paintings in order to verify the proper placement of panels. Virtual restoration is now enabling scholars to decipher illegible texts in old paintings, and therefore relate the texts more closely to the subject of a painting. Students of Jan van Eyck are even using painted pearls as a kind of digital signature. It would appear that they are almost as good as a signature.

VanEyck: Ghent Altarpiece detail

David Bomfort, a conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, discussed the importance of technical analysis of underpainting and paint samples in the new connoisseurship. These scientific studies can produce what he called “unambiguous  information” that can be helpful in questions of authentication and attribution. As an example, he discussed Altdorfer’s, “Christ Taking Leave of His Mother,” as an example of how technical analysis of pentimenti can help to construct the narrative. In a similar vein E. Melanie Gifford of Washington’s National Gallery followed Bomfort with a discussion of the use of pigment analysis in assessing the still life’s of William van Aelst.

Altdorfer: Christ Taking Leave of His Mother

Carmen C. Bombach of New York’s Metropolitan Museum argued that the “new connoisseurship” placed a much greater emphasis on drawings and preparatory sketches. In her opinion the old connoisseurship tended to ignore or undervalue drawings and concentrate almost exclusively on the finished product. Anyone aware of the value placed on Renaissance drawings in the current art market would have to agree with her.

According to Michelle Marincola of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, reproductions of famous images are now seen by modern scholars as important objects of study in themselves. In the old connoisseurship these reproductions were largely ignored since they seemed to lose the power of the original cult image. Marincola argued that now these reproductions, usually depicting the Madonna and Child, can actually be seen as enhancing the prime image especially if one takes into consideration the departures from the original in order to satisfy varying devotional needs.

Elizabeth Honig, an Art historian at the University of California at Berkeley, gave the final presentation, “Oeuvre and the Internet, What Happens when People Stop Using Our Books”. I believe that she was the first to raise the issue of the Internet during the session. In the past her students would have to wade through piles of catalogs and texts but now most of them merely turn to the Web. For example, she pointed to sites devoted to Breughel and Vermeer that were incredibly comprehensive. She acknowledged the problems associated with Web scholarship but still believed that Art history would have to co-opt the Internet.

It is true that many scholars are reluctant to deal with the Internet. One noted Titian scholar told me that he refused to read anything on the Web. Even young scholars at the conference admitted that even if they blogged and used social media, they would still not consider publishing their work on the Web. I believe that it was Dr. Honig who ending her presentation by quoting another scholar, “the Internet is an eight-lane highway but no one’s on it.”

Unfortunately, I had to leave to catch the train before the round table discussion. On the ride home I could not help but think that the “new connoisseurship” was not so much different from the old. There is still a need for expert knowledge and close looking and study are still valuable. Today’s scholars have more arrows in their quiver, and the Internet has opened up the Art world to a much wider audience. Nevertheless, the distinguished panelists at this session still were representative of a kind of aristocracy of the Art world.

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Raphael: St. Cecilia

In 1514 Elena Duglioli dall'Oglio, a patrician lady and mystic from Bologna, commissioned Raphael to do an altarpiece featuring St. Cecilia for her family chapel in the church of San Giovanni in Monte. The story of this painting is well known and the five main figures are easily identified but  there is still mystery about the reasons for their inclusion.*

St. Cecilia was one of the four great Virgin saints of the Western church. Mrs. Anna Jameson devoted a chapter to her and her legend in “Sacred and Legendary Art”.

The veneration paid to her can be traced back to the third century, in which she is supposed to have lived; and there can be little doubt that the main incidents of her life are founded in fact, though mixed up with the usual amount of marvels, parables and precepts, poetry and allegory…**

She was a chaste virgin who even after her marriage was reputed to have converted her new husband to a life of virginity. They both eventually suffered martyrdom. Somehow she also became the patron saint of music and the creator of the organ.

As she excelled in music, she turned her good gift to the glory of God, and composed hymns, which she sang herself with such ravishing sweetness that even the angels descended from heaven to listen to her, or to join their voices to hers. She played on all instruments, but none sufficed to breathe forth that flood of harmony with which her whole soul was filed: therefore she invented the organ, consecrating it to the service of God.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Jameson believed that only in the fifteenth century did artists begin to depict Cecilia with musical instruments. She rightly pointed out that the most famous version was Raphael’s version now in Bologna’s Pinacoteca Nazionale. In Raphael’s painting St. Cecilia stands in ecstasy among her cast-down instruments whose music bears no comparison with that of heaven. Despite her uplifted eyes, her sandals indicate that she is still of this world. Her heavenly onlookers are barefoot, a sign of their superior status.

It is easy to understand why the visionary Elena Duglioli dall’Oglio would want to feature St. Cecilia in the altarpiece of her chapel. Although a married woman, she too lived a life of celibacy. But the presence of the other saints has been difficult to explain. In his magisterial study of Raphael Oskar Fischel wrote,

The reasons that may have existed for the choice of the saints surrounding Cecilia have remained hitherto completely in the dark; and yet their relationships to the person of the lady who gave the commission and to the place of its destination were not unfamiliar to Raphael. At that time nothing of the content of a devotional picture can have been left to the artist; only in Raphael did every commission work itself out as a self-chosen theme, thanks to his free and dominating imagination and to the profound culture by virtue of which he adopted everything and caused it to become part of his own vital experience.*** 

St. John the Evangelist and St. Augustine are in the background but St. Paul and Mary Magdalen are figured much more prominently in the foreground. Fischel thought that they all were representations of love.

the significance of these saints precisely to the donors of the picture can scarcely be surmised. Only St John is adequately explained as patron of the church of san Giovanni in Monte—the “disciple whom Jesus loved” …He exchanges a glance of tearful radiance with the Doctor of the Church, St Augustine,…”How often have I wept at thy hymns of praise and chants, filling thy Church with soft strains, and have been stirred by its voices to the very depths.” …He too is a confessor of love:…”our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”…
St. John seems to come from St. Paul: he understands the sublime Apostle—in the book on which the eagle stands there is a sign with the word “Corin”; here, then—from I Corinthians xiii—we have the explanation of the connection between St. Paul and the Magdalen. The Apostle mighty in speech acknowledges of himself: “though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” There at his feet lies the allegory—but at this point St Mary Magdalen may come in; she that “loved much” goes “in peace”.*** 

Fischel argued that the figure of St. Paul could not just be explained allegorically.

It is to him precisely that Raphael acknowledged himself to be indebted, by him attracted...the painter of the figure was no stranger to the character of the great preacher of Conversion. Raphael at that time lived with the words of St. Paul. When, in the course of his work on the Disputa, the pages of his sketchbook were being filled with ideas for the figures, a hasty sketch was made for St Paul with his sword…And then, on a drawing at Oxford, for the Disputa, line after line is set down for a sonnet out of an overflowing sense of bliss, occasioned by an incident by night which must remain for the world in obscurity, Raphael discovers that his tongue is bound in a sudden kinship with the Apostle…***

 Fischel himself then began to wax rhapsodically.

And now, as the Apostle stands beside Cecilia, these ineffable hymns are re-echoed from above, and the hand of the apostle is laid like a clamp upon his chin, checking every word,…His fingers merely play about the pommel of his menacing sword; more important for him seem to be the letter, the Epistles they are clutching….in him Raphael embodied his ideal for society, the “cortegiano” perfect in his power, in an equilibrium of essence and semblance…***

At this point Mary Magdalen joins the group from the right, and invites the viewer to enter the scene.

Thus by the moving power of the back view of this figure, who has with sweeping cloak just entered the circle of the elect, the worshipper is, as it were, carried along with it into the region of other-worldly happenings—seized, with St Paul, by a sense of the vanity of all action “that has not charity”; and a bridge is thrown across to link him with her who “loved much” and therefore, her sins forgiven, may enter in before many.***

There is a text that also linked St. Paul and Mary Magdalen in the popular imagination of the time. In the third volume of his classic work on Medieval iconography, Emile Male discussed a small book whose fame spread all over Europe during the fifteenth century. The book was the Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying).

The text was often striking, but it was the astonishing woodcuts above all that spread its fame throughout Europe…. death appears not as a farcical dance, but as a serious drama played around the bed of the dying man; angel and devil stand at his side, contending for the soul that will soon depart. #

Male based his discussion on a 1492 French commentary, the L’Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir (The Art of Good Living and Good dying), a “book that edified all Europe.” [349-350]. After a series of temptations where the devil is unable to shake the dying man’s faith, the devil tries another approach.

Hideous monsters again rove around the sick man’s bed. One presents him with a large parchment document: this is the list “of all the evils that the poor creature has committed during his sojourn on earth.”…#

But the angel intervenes and brings four helpers.

They are St. Peter, who thrice denied his Master; Mary Magdalene, the sinner; St. Paul, the persecutor whom God struck down to convert him; and the good thief, who repented on the cross. These are the great witnesses of divine mercy….”do not despair. Even though you had committed as many crimes as there are drops of water in the sea, one contrite impulse of the heart is enough. God is greater than the greatest crimes.”#

Raphael received the commission for the St. Cecilia in 1514. At the same time Titian was working on “The Sacred and Profane Love”. I have interpreted that famous and mysterious painting as “The Conversion of Mary Magdalen”, and argued that Titian included a depiction of the conversion of St. Paul on the centrally located antique relief.

It is hard to imagine today but the ideas of conversion and repentance must have been like a tsunami in Renaissance Europe. We like to think of the Renaissance as the revival of the gods and goddesses of antiquity but figures like St. Paul and Mary Magdalen were of far greater importance in the minds of contemporary believers. At the same time as Raphael and Titian were bringing Christian art to a new level, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk in Germany, who had struggled for years with his own sinfulness, finally found conversion and salvation in the epistles of St. Paul. ###

*For a very thorough discussion see "Virgin Cults and Raphael's St. Cecilia" at the popular Art history blog, Three Pipe Problem.

**Anna Jameson: Sacred and Legendary Art, Vol. II, Boston, 1885. pp. 571-2.

***Oskar Fischel, Raphael, London, 1948, pp. 246-8.

#Emile Male, Religious Art in France, The Late Middle Ages, Princeton,1986, pp. 348-351.

Addendum:

Here is an image of San Giovanni in Monte supplied by David Orme. See comments for his note on the site in Bologna.

San Giovanni in Monte, Bologna

Titian: Sacred and Profane Love, Relief summary

In my previous three posts on Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” I have discussed the figures in the antique relief that is placed so prominently in the center of the famous painting. I have argued that the three scenes represent great sinners: Adam and Eve around the Tree of Knowledge on the right; Cain and Abel toward the center; and on the left side St. Paul being thrown from his horse on the road to Damascus. The relief then has a direct relationship to the real subject of the painting that I have identified as, “The Conversion of Mary Magdalen.” See link for full paper..

Today I would like to deal with some possible objections to my interpretation and also present a summary account of the relief.  At the outset I would like to point out that my interpretation of the relief does not fly in the face of any settled opinion on the subject. For the most part scholars have either thrown in the towel, or just offered the scantiest of guesses.

However, in 2001 Paul Joannides, in his study of the young Titian, provided a somewhat thorough examination. He noted the similarity of the relief to an equally mysterious one in an earlier work by Titian, "Jacopo Pesaro presented to St. Peter."

The grey marble trough of the sarcophagus contains a relief. Like that below Peter in Jacopo Pesaro presented to St. Peter, it is not based on any identified classical source but seems to be the invention of the artist.*

In the case of the "Sacred and Profane Love" h e admitted that it would be “reasonable to suppose that the relief had some significance” but noted that so far there has been no plausible elucidation. He did agree that it “would seem odd if so prominent a scene had no relevance to the main one,” and so decided to take a close look. Here is his description of the relief in the “Sacred and Profane Love”.

Starting from the left an engagement of some type, perhaps but not necessarily, a struggle, is proceeding between two figures, one, at the far left clearly male, the other, partly obscured behind the hind quarters of a horse, perhaps, but not certainly, female. The horse, which bears neither saddle nor bridle, is being led calmly left to right by a nude male figure, although since he is partly obscured by the shrub, it is difficult to ascertain exactly the nature of his action. This scene is separated by the bronze nozzle from that to the right which shows a violent episode; a nude woman lying on the ground, is being beaten—probably but not certainly on the buttocks—by a nude man. Taken literally, the scene appears to be one of punishment rather than murder or sexual assault. This group is represented in notional high relief; behind it, in lower relief, is a nude woman, standing to the left of a tree, across which a nude man is advancing towards her from the right, but without any clear intent.

He then paused for a moment to consider the possibility that the nude woman lying on the ground could be a man and the possible implication.

If, on the right-hand side, the sprawled figure could reasonably be identified as male, then the scene might represent Cain killing Abel, in which case the couple behind could be their parents, Adam and Eve either side of the tree of knowledge. But aside from the relative unlikelihood of representing an Old Testament scene on a classical sarcophagus, such a reading of the figures is not convincing, nor would it appear to relate in any way to the scene at the left. The most one can say about it is that a punishment and a conflict do seem to be represented and that it is treated in a specific—and surely meaningful way. 

In other words, Joannides saw Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel but couldn’t believe his own eyes. Two objections deterred him from seeing the relief as a “sacred” subject. In the first place, “there was the relative unlikelihood of representing an Old Testament scene on a classical sarcophagus.” Secondly, he could not see how the biblical scenes from Genesis could relate to the left hand side of the relief. A third objection was left unsaid. Since there is a great likelihood that the centrally located relief is related to the painting as a whole, to see a scriptural subject in the relief would point to a “sacred” subject for the “Sacred and Profane Love.”

Here is another line of reasoning. The figure on the left hand side of the painting is St. Paul who not only called himself the greatest of sinners but who was also one of the great propounders of the doctrine of original sin. He referred to it continually in his letters and felt its effect in his own life. He argued that because of the Fall, sin and death entered the world, and that it was only through the grace of God that he was freed from their clutches.

The conversion of St. Paul fits very well in a relief that also depicts Adam and Eve, as well as the story of Cain and Abel, the first instance of the presence of sin and death in the world. If this relief is a sacred subject, scholars might also want to take another look at Titian’s earlier attempt at an antique relief in Jacopo Pesaro being Presented to St. Peter. The subject of that relief has also eluded identification but I think I see Adam and Eve on the left. Why is it unthinkable that Titian would use an antique relief to depict a scriptural scene? Art historians have to fit their theories to the actual work of the artist and not vice versa.

Finally, I have wondered, along with some correspondents, why the action in the relief seems to move from right to left. You will notice that Joannides in his above description of the relief read it in the traditional way from left to right. Normally, in a narrative painting the action does begin in the left background and progresses through the mid-ground until it culminates with the foreground figures who are either in the center or off to the right. Giovanni Bellini did so in the Frick “St. Francis in the Desert”, and so did Giorgione in the “Tempest.”

In my interpretation of the “Sacred and Profane Love”, I have argued that Titian employed the same left to right narrative scheme. As is often the case the city in the left background is a place of spiritual and even physical danger. The sinful Magdalen has left the city behind and now sits on the sarcophagus in the foreground contemplating her own conversion. We move across the water filled sarcophagus to see her own resurrection to a new life. She appears on the right side of the sarcophagus bereft of her worldly finery. Behind her in the right background the scene, where she will spend the rest of her life, is bucolic and peaceful.

I can only guess as to why Titian might have chosen to have the action on the relief move from right to left. First, it could have been just a painterly decision to have the action on the relief counterbalance the action in the main scene. It is after all a very large painting. I also wonder if he might have just used a copy of an engraving as a cartoon for the relief and just flipped the scene.

On a more profound level, perhaps Titian or his patron wanted the action on the relief to move backwards in time. So we can begin on the left and trace the action back from a story of a conversion from a life of sin to the origins of sin itself. Here is my view of the relief reading from right to left.

Adam stands on the extreme right on one side of the tree. Eve is on the other side and her outstretched arm actually touches her son Cain in the act of murdering his brother. Abel lies on the ground but he faces left away from his parents. In the medieval period Abel, whose sacrifice was acceptable to the Lord, was always viewed as a precursor of Christ. Dividing the relief in half is the spigot with flowing water, and right next to it is the emblem of the donor. On the left side, Paul’s attendant still leads the horse toward Damascus but Paul falls off in the other direction towards a new life. 

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*Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518, The Assumption of Genius, Yale, 2001, p. 192.