Shakespeare & Titian I

This is an edited version of a talk I gave recently to a Shakespeare society in Stratford-upon-Avon. My “brief” was to talk about Shakespeare and renaissance art; so I chose Titian. Rather than put this up as one long post, I’ve broken it into two, which works better, I think. The first post considers the iconographic approaches taken by scholars; the second- which Il put up tomorrow- concentrates on the problem of whether Shakespeare could have seen Titian’s art through copies, reproductions etc.

Titian probably never knew how he was going to finish a painting; his brush strokes were likely less planned execution and more the result of re-touchings as he felt his way. In speaking on Shakespeare and Titian, I find myself in much the same position- not really seeing the picture as a whole, but seeing lots of areas of specific interest along the way, which might, conceivably coalesce into a unified work, or talk.

Both Titian and Shakespeare left their mark on history and art; and although they came from different countries and cultures, it is intriguing to ponder the parallels between the two men. Most of the work carried out on Shakespeare and Titian has centred on determining (a) to what extent ideas contained in Shakespeare’s texts can be found in Titian’s paintings, particularly two which I’ll talk about tonight, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love (a title given to it in the 18th century) and the Venus and Adonis painted for Philip II of Spain. By considering these two paintings, I hope to bring out how the painter’s art might reflect the poet’s words, although we should be cautious of thinking there is a one-to-one correspondence between text and image in renaissance culture. The situation was far more complex in the renaissance with the doctrine of ut pictura poesis, as is painting, so is poetry. Titian’s paintings for the Spanish king, Philip II, including the Venus and Adonis, have been called poesia, meaning a created image developed out of the artist’s invention as well as out of his knowledge of visual sources and literary texts.

The second approach is to try to ascertain whether Shakespeare could have known any of Titian’s creations, mainly through painted variants and engraved copies, a problem that demands a high degree of connoisseurship rather than iconographical exegesis.

The first part of my talk will concentrate on exegesis, or the decoding of symbols and iconography, in order to see whether there could be a connection with Shakespeare’s themes and ideas. In the second I’ll consider whether Shakespeare could have known Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and have incorporated some of its ideas into his own work. It goes without saying that I’m no Shakespeare expert, and in the discussion period I’m hoping to benefit from your knowledge about Stratford’s most famous son.

The first art historian to directly connect Shakespeare with Titian was Erwin Panofsky,

one of the founders of the discipline, although he may have been unconsciously echoing the thoughts of the Shakespearean expert A.H. Bullen in making connections.

In a series of lectures in 1969, subsequently posthumously collected into a book Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographical, Panofsky made the intriguing suggestion that in a portrait (Stockholm National Museum) of Titian by Orlando Flacco, the Venetian master looked like how one thought the Merchant of Venice, Shylock, would have looked; next to Flacco’s portrait is an engraving by Richard Westall, a 19th century English artist, of a scene from the play.[1]

This was a playful and tenuous link, though it is known that Titian had a reputation for being greedy and avaricious; he appears as a moneylender in The Expulsion of the Moneylenders from the Temple, a painting by Jacopo Bassano, another Venetian artist. More appropriately Panofsky began to consider how certain Shakespearian themes might underscore a number of mythological paintings painted by Titian.

Foremost of these was the so-called Sacred and Profane Love (Borghese, Rome, 1514). Within this marvellous painting, which shows two Venuses- themselves the subject of much debate- there is a superbly executed sculptural relief. One of the figures on the ground, on the right hand side of the painted relief was thought by Panofsky to be Adonis chastised. In the background behind the two men, a female figure raises her hand, which. Panofsky

speculated might be Venus. Panofsky was not the first to suggest the prostrate man was Adonis; his contemporary Edgar Wind argued Adonis should be connected with the chastisement of Adonis in another visual source: a woodcut in the book known as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream, published in Venice by Francesco Colonna in 1499.

Wind also maintained that the chastised man, together with the woman being grasped by the hair next to a horse represented the checking of the passions, the horse being the Platonic symbol of sensuous passion or libido.[2] Here’s a visual illustration of this so you get the idea: an engraving by Gulio Bonasone from Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicae quaestiones published in Bologna in 1555. Away from all these erudite, philosophical renaissance sources, Panofsky decided that the horse in the Sacred and Profane Love, with its connotations of sensual passion, had some connection with Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis.[3] According to Panofsky, the tradition of depicting the horse as “unbridled passion” culminates in the description of mating horses in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Here’s an extract from it:

But, lo, from forth a copse that neighbours by,

A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,

Adonis' trampling courser doth espy,

And forth she rushes, snorts and neighs aloud:

The strong-neck'd steed, being tied unto a tree,

Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.

Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,

And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;

The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,

Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven's thunder;

The iron bit he crusheth 'tween his teeth,

Controlling what he was controlled with.

The “breeding jennet” has occasioned much debate on the part of Shakespeare scholars. One believed that this episode (a) ridicules the courtship between Venus and Adonis by turning it to lust; (b) the runaway stallion is Adonis in animal form; (c) the breeding jennet symbolises the base motives of Venus, who seeks only lust.[4]

Turning now to Titian’s painting of Venus and Adonis (Prado), horses don’t appear in this; but horses may not be the only animals to suggest the psychological state of Adonis. According to one Shakespeare scholar, the hesitating third dog might refer to Adonis’s reticence as a lover.[5] Personally, I think this Shakespearean scholar is reading too much into Titian’s painting- Titian liked dogs and frequently put them in his art! Interestingly, Panofsky also didn’t mention the dogs as symbols conveying psychological moods; but he was convinced that the text inserted between Ovid- the poet who was a major influence on renaissance painting- and Titian was Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.[6] Panofsky was especially struck by the way the detail of a love or Cupid on his back- probably a symbol of love unfulfilled, matched the composition of Titian’s Venus and Adonis. To quote Panofsky:

“Shakespeare’s words, down to such details as the nocturnal setting and “love upon her backe deeply distrest,” sound like a poetic paraphrase of Titian’s composition.”[7]

As Panofsky says- and this is the crux of the matter- both art historians and Shakespeare scholars were troubled by the fact that both poet and painter show Adonis as a reluctant lover.[8] In stanza 136 of the poem Shakespeare describes Adonis’s flight from Venus in these words:

“With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace

Of those faire armes which bound him to her brest,

And homeward through the dark lawnd runs apace;

Leaves love upon her backe, deeply distrest.

Looke, how a bright star shooteth from the skye,

So glides he in the night from Venus’s eye.”

At this point Panofsky really went out on a limb asserting that Shakespeare saw the Venus and Adonis in London, and was consequently inspired to diverge from Ovid as well.[9] Panofsky said:

“I venture to propose that Titian- just as he was to inspire Keats with his “swift bound of Bacchus” – inspired Shakespeare with a new version of the Venus and Adonis story, a version well motivated on artistic grounds (i.e. by the painter’s intention to present the principal figure from the back) but not anticipated, it would seem, in any literary source.”

Regarding the question of the reluctant lover, Panofsky was convinced that Titian departed from Ovid by showing Adonis fleeing from Venus, in the process completely re-inventing the myth. Ovid has Adonis embrace Venus, and not break away, contrary to Shakespeare as well. Although art historians and literary scholars have shown no wish to argue with Panofsky about this, it has been pointed out that Shakespeare’s view of Adonis as a reticent lover was not without precedent; it has also been observed that the leave-taking of lovers at dawn was part of the literary tradition.[10] My own view is that unless somebody comes up with irrefutable evidence to disprove a connection between the two masterpieces, then we should give Panofsky the benefit of the doubt. It is possible that Shakespeare knew Titian’s composition and was influenced by the painter’s interpretation of the story of Adonis.

In order to reinvent the Adonis myth, Titian used a piece of classical sculpture known as the Bed of Polyclitus. He also did this because he had promised his patron, Philip II of Spain, that he would “show the female form from the back” for which Titian was severely censured by a renaissance critic, Raffaello Borghini, in his Il Riposo of 1584. Titian probably did this to introduce variety into the king’s series of nudes, probably to cater to the monarch’s erotic tastes; and also probably because it conformed to the painter’s own ideals of beauty. In the words of one scholar Titian produced a “relief aesthetic” making the figures look like a sculpture group whilist preserving their vitality by the effect of fleshy paint.[11] Within the terms of the renaissance paragone- the comparison between painting and sculpture made famous by Leonardo da Vinci - the painted relief of the Venus and Adonis ensemble would be a mature development of the relief in the Sacred and Profane Love, painted earlier in Titian’s career.[12]  This could be a interesting topic for further research; we can detect awareness of the paragone in Shakespeare’s text, since he does use the language of art to communicate Adonis’s coldness to Venus:

“Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone

Well painted idol, image dull and dead

Statue contenting but the eye alone.”

The language with its comparison of stone and paint suggests knowledge of the paragone, and further evidence of the poet’s understanding of art theory is proved by an allusion in the text to Zeuxis, the classical artist whose artificial grapes fooled the real birds. We know of course that Shakespeare was interested in the way marble became flesh and vice versa, as is proved by the reanimation of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.  More significantly as Noemi Magri observed in a recent essay of 2007, Shakespeare is referring to Adonis as a painted image; the “well painted” reluctant lover strongly suggests that Shakespeare was looking at a painting, not the text of Ovid, although that is pure speculation. [13] This of course brings us to the other main topic of this talk: could Shakespeare have known Titian’s image, either through painting or copies in other media?

---

[1] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 6, note.

[2] Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, 1980, 145.

[3] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 118.

[4] Robert P. Miller, “Venus, Adonis, and the Horses”, English Literary History, 19, (1952), 249-64.

[5] John Doebler, The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare, Shakespearean Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), 480-490.

[6] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 153.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] David Rosand, “Ut Pictor Poeta:” Meaning in Titian’s Poesie, New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, Literary and Art History (Spring 546), 527-546, 537.

[11] David Rosand, “Titian and the Bed of Polyclitus”, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No. 865, (Apr 1975), 242-5, 242.

[12] David Rosand, “Ut Pictor Poeta:” Meaning in Titian’s Poesie, New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, Literary and Art History (Spring 546), 527-546, 535.

[13] Noemi Magri, “Titian’s Barberini Painting: the Pictorial Source of Venus and Adonis” in Great Oxford: Essays on the Life and Work of Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, ed. Richard Malim, 2004, 79-90.

Comments

[Francis DeStefano]

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, could have seen the Venus and Adonis in Titian's own studio on his long sojourn in Venice in 1575. If, as many think, DeVere was the real Shakespeare, then many things fall into place. Does your last citation hint at the Oxfordian interpretation?

Frank

[David Packwood]

Frank, Yes, the author of the last citation definitely takes the Oxford view. I stress this in the second part, but I played it down in the talk because I was speaking to a room of Stratfordians who don't take kindly to that view.

[Francis DeStefano]

In "Shakespeare by Another Name," Mark Anderson wrote, "There were at least four replicas of Titian's Venus and Adonis elsewhere on the Continent by 1575--most notably in the collection of the king of Spain. But the copy remaining in Titian's studio was distinctive. In Titian's copy and in Titian's copy only, Adonis wears a stylized form of a man's hat known as a bonnet. The other copies of the painting feature a bareheaded Adonis. Shakes-speare's Adonis wears a "bonnet [that] hides his angry brow."

Frank

[David Packwood]

Hi Frank- see next post!

[K. Bender]

Shakespeare & Titian I & II are excellent talks about the possible link between the beautiful poem of Shakespeare and the painting of Titian.
While there are strong similarities - e. g. verse 225: 'Sometime her arms enfold him like a band' - one should not forget that in Shakespeare's poem Adonis is a young boy - still a child (1, p.59) - but is painted by Titian as a grown-up. Furthermore, Shakespeare fully excluded Cupid, but art historians stress his presence in the paintings of Titian (see Shakespeare & Titian II).

As pointed out by David Packwood, there are many copies of Titian's masterwork. And there are also many other contemporary works, inspired by Ovid's myth, not always imitations of Titian's paintings.

For instance, Giogio Ghisi made a print (ca 1556 -1570), after a design by his brother Theodore, where Venus is seen from the back similar to Titian's composition, but holding Adonis' face in her hand trying to kiss him.

Veronese's painting of ca 1561, now in the Staatsgalerie, Augsburg, is another example of an analogue composition. Likewise are some works of Luca Cambiaso (1527-1585), among the very many he made about the myth.

Thus Shakespeare was perhaps 'looking at paintings which inspired these ideas, but not necessarily Titian’s'. One could add that in the methodology of iconology as defined by Aby Warburg in 1912 (2, p.31) not only pictures considered as the greatest masterpieces of art should be examined.

The successful afterlife of Titian's picturial and Shakespeare's poetic representations can be estimated quantitatively by the number of visual artworks with the subtopic 'Adonis leaving Venus' compared to the total number for the full topic 'Venus and Adonis'(3), compiled in my Topical Catalogues 'The Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times' (4): 47/242 by Italian artists; 41/199 by French artists and 161/459 by artists of the Low Countries.

This success of both the general topic 'Venus and Adonis' and the subtopic 'Adonis leaving Venus' among artists of the Low Countries is striking and has, as far as I know, not been analyzed in an interdisciplinary approach (5).

Notes:
(1) 'Shakespeare's Poems' edited by K. Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. 2007. The Arden Shakespeare www.ardenshakespeare.com
(2) 'Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie, mit einem Anhang unbekannter Quellen zur Geschichte der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Ikonographische Studien' by Schmidt, Peter; mit einem Anhang ... von Dieter Wuttke. Gratia : Bamberger Schriften zur Renaissanceforschung. Heft 20. Bamberg 1989.
(3) This categorization is based on the title and/or on the visual inspection of the artworks (sculptures, reliefs, paintings, frescoes, drawings, prints and illustrations).
(4) http://sites.google.com/site/venusiconography/home/topical-catalogues
(5) See my Research Paper 5 'Time Distribution, Popularity, Diversity and
Productivity of the Iconography of Venus in the Low Countries, France and Italy' (2011) http://sites.google.com/site/venusiconography/home/research-papers/research-paper-5

[David Packwood]

Dear Mr Bender,

Thanks for taking the trouble to write such a scholarly and detailed comment! There's much to ponder here. I was going to say more about the versions by other artists, maybe another time.

I will follow the links and read your research paper- it's a fascinating topic. I may do another post highlighting your research.

Best,

David

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