The one displayed by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is a magnificent roundup of female portraits: the focus is on Titian’s women, with 31 paintings, but there is also a dialoguing outline of about thirty female figures from contemporaries such as Giovanni Bellini, Palma il Vecchio, Giorgione, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto and Veronese.
From the dim light of the rooms overlooking the Ringstrasse emerge faces of ladies or courtesans, heroines or saints, alone or accompanied, now young, now elderly, now innocent, now sensual, now thoughtful. The elaborate hairstyles, the clothes represented in great detail, the accessories and jewels, the evocative backgrounds, the variety of characters that surround them, the symbolism that scatters clues on the canvases, tell of a fascinating universe declined in countless possibilities. From the home collections, here is Violante with blond hair and a maliciously placed violet in the neckline; or the elegant Isabella d’Este, or Tintoretto’s Susanna, observed with lasciviousness by two old men.
Ermitage
Dall’Eremitage is the young woman that Titian painted with a graceful plumed hat, intent on holding a cloak with her hands, perhaps about to fall, and from the state museums of Berlin it is the portrait that Titian created of the little Clarissa Strozzi and that aroused the praise of Pietro Aretino.From the Castello Sforzesco in Milan and Bernardino Licinio it is the woman dressed in black who holds the framed effigy of her husband in her hand, while in the Capodimonte Museum is the erotic Danae by Titian, aware of her own attractiveness and waiting for the golden rain into which Jupiter has transformed to covet it.
Paris Bordone
Still mythological is the scene of Tintoretto from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, with the ancient Vulcan surprising his own Venus in a love affair with Mars, who seeks shelter under the table, while the adulteress perhaps tries to cover her nakedness, or perhaps she has decided to show her completely, to confuse her husband.The exhibition offers a long series of representations of Venus, signed among other things by Titian and Miseroni, by Veronese and by the workshop of Paris Bordone, whose canvas Venus and Adonis, acquired in 1656 by Archduke Leopoldo Guglielmo d’Asburgo, it was restored for the occasion.
The dense network of references between canvases and artists selected by Sylvia Ferino Pagden with the advice of a scientific committee composed among other things by Anna Bellavitis, Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo and Jane Bridgeman, makes the exhibition a spectacular exhibition itinerary on the female essence, the power of seduction and the relationships between the sexes.