Titian’s ‘Flight into Egypt’
London

by PAUL HILLS

The occasion for the exhibition Titian’s First Masterpiece: The Flight into Egypt at the National Gallery, London (to 19th August), is the first showing outside Russia in modern times of the large canvas from the Hermitage (Fig.53). In Nicholas Penny’s words, the intent was to show the Flight ‘alongside works from our collection explaining its genesis and confirming its attribution’. With a limited number of paintings at his disposal, the guest curator, Antonio Mazzotta, has fulfilled this brief with a discriminating eye and some daring. After entering through a gallery of portraits (discussed by Mazzotta in this Magazine),1 the visitor is presented with a broadly chronological narrative. It starts with Bellini’s Madonna of the meadow (cat. fig.18), here dated as early as c.1495–1500, continues with a quartet of small paintings attributed to Giorgione, and on to the Flight itself, of about 1506–07. This is followed by Bellini’s Death of St Peter Martyr (fig.55) and a series of works by or attributed to Titian, culminating in the assured Noli me tangere of 1511–12 (fig.69). Displayed in a case in front of the Flight, prints and drawings by Dürer and his circle demonstrate what Titian may have learnt from the northerner’s mastery of landscape, plants and animals.

This hang sets up echoes and subtle contrasts across and around the room that are endlessly fascinating. Looking from the Madonna of the meadow to the Flight and on to Bellini’s Peter Martyr we see, for example, how Titian learnt from Giovanni Bellini to translate depth into pictorial breadth. Occasionally the selection loads the dice. The quartet of paintings attributed to Giorgione are – with the exception of the National Gallery’s Adoration of the Magi (fig.26) – doubtful or at best uncharacteristic examples of his art. Wall panels and the publication accompanying the exhibition stress that Titian takes ‘a fresh look at nature’ by contrasting his work with that of the Giorgionesque panel Homage to a poet (fig.21), where a peacock and cheetah are lifted from a pattern book in an archaic manner. This odd painting is used to highlight the impact of Dürer’s stay in Venice between late 1505 and early 1507 on the young Titian, particularly his depiction of animals in a landscape. But this emphasis downplays Bellini’s achievement in this field, which is so evident in the Madonna of the meadow, where the white oxen are quietly absorbed in the vernal scene.

If anything the comparison between the paintings of the young Titian and Dürer’s works on paper exposes the limits of his debt to the German master. Far from borrowing from Dürer’s woodcut of the Flight into Egypt (fig.49), Titian rejects it in favour of a level foreground stage and Giottesque simplicity in the central group of the Madonna and Child riding on the donkey. Where Dürer does have some impact on the young Titian is in the apprehension of the life that stirs in the foliage and the drama in the torsion of tree-trunks. The tall tree on the right margin of Titian’s Flight, with its jagged stump of a broken branch high on the trunk, its slight twist in the bark and its canopy emphatically cropped by the upper limit of the painting, recalls the vigorous trees in Dürer’s engraving of the Vision of St Eustace (Fig.54). Titian’s marginal tree with its dark canopy contrasting with the bright cloud beyond anticipates the tree that tilts against Christ in his Noli me tangere, and even distantly presages the repoussoir trees of Claude and Turner.

Despite the testimony of Vasari regarding the provenance and attribution of the Flight, recently discussed in this Magazine, Titian’s authorship of this exceptionally large canvas continues to be denied by some scholars.2 Although it is true that Vasari is often an unreliable source regarding Venetian painting, for this reviewer the visual evidence alone compellingly demonstrates Titian’s authorship. First it must be noted that the condition of the painting is uneven and the long conservation that it has been undergoing in the Hermitage is incomplete. Some passages appear unsatisfactory, such as the group of sheep in the middle ground to the right and the pair of seated figures in the shade behind them.

What gives to the painting a charmingly naive air is the fact that the principal figures – Joseph, the group of Mary and the Child on the donkey, the idealised youth in front, as well as the deer and other animals to the right – are strung out across the surface without overlapping. Not only has the painter avoided occlusion, he has included examples of what perceptual psychologists term ‘false attachment’ – where the contours of shapes lying at different depths of space appear to meet. Thus the donkey’s muzzle grazes the youth’s arm and the same youth’s knee coincides with the hindquarters of the deer that reclines on the ground a little distance behind him. Even minor artists of the period normally avoid the potential confusion of false attachment, and the lack of occlusion in the Flight is the very opposite of Sebastiano del Piombo’s masterly grouping in his near contemporary Judgment of Solomon (Kingston Lacy). All this might suggest we are dealing with an unsophisticated painter: on the contrary, stepping back from the canvas we register a highly tuned sense of scansion and interval. The metre is marked by the rise and fall of feet and hooves, leading up to the caesura between the deer and the large bird perched on a stump. Boldly shifting the principal actors to the left, Titian has unobtrusively co-ordinated them with the trees behind. He never again composed a story with such childlike simplicity, but some seventeen years later he orchestrated the rise and fall of feet to urgent effect in Bacchus and Ariadne. Add to this the play of light entering the curtain of trees from the front and shining through in a blur of gold from the back – in a manner that was reprised with looser brushstokes in the Death of Actaeon – and we are left in no doubt that this is Titian’s first masterpiece.

Other paintings by Titian in the exhibition reveal how rapidly his range expanded between 1506 and 1512. Many are familiar as they belong to the National Gallery, but a small, darkened and sadly damaged painting of the Rest on the flight into Egypt from Longleat (Fig.55) merits a closer look. A white napkin laid over the Virgin’s left knee indicates that the Child was sitting there and has just been moved back by his mother to a more protected position, his head now partially obscured behind hers. This device of the napkin is typical of how Titian will use cloths and veils, often slightly detached from the wearer, to tell a story. The red of the Virgin’s dress, offset by the napkin, is treated with marvellous breadth, and the ultramarine of her cloak is spread across the bank to meet the strong amber of Joseph’s mantle, which in turn contrasts with the violet of his robe. The solicitous movement of the figures, counterpoised by the tilt of tree-trunks, is underscored by this drama of colour. Leaving the exhibition past the gallery of portraits, we are reminded that the special chromatic value that Titian gives to fabrics was informed by his early experience painting the satins and velvets worn by his elegant sitters. These, as Mazzotta points out, were often the patrons both of the portraits and the canvases of religious subjects executed for Venetian palaces.

1    A. Mazzotta: ‘A “gentiluomo da Ca’ Barbarigo” by Titian in the National Gallery, London’, The Burlington Magazine 154 (2012), pp.12–19. Mazzotta is also the author of the insightful booklet accompanying the exhibition: Titian: A fresh look at nature. 88 pp. incl. 69 col. ills. (National Gallery, London, 2012), £9.99 ISBN 978–1–85709–544–9.
2    I. Artemieva: ‘New light on Titian’s “Flight into Egypt” in the Hermitage’, the burlington magazine 154 (2012), pp.4–11, esp. p.5 for Vasari, and pp.6–7 for the attribution history. Titian’s authorship has recently been denied by Charles Hope in the London Review of Books (24th May 2012), p.22.