In Titian's Birthplace, two important graphic works show the artist's influence on Rubens

From August 1 to September 1, 2024, Titian’s Birthplace in Pieve di Cadore will host the exhibition-dossier A Magical Bridge from Titian to Rubens. The Fortune of a Lost Painting, which is part of the Estate Tizianesca 2024 exhibition. The exhibition is a collaboration between Magnifica Comunità di Cadore and the Titian and Cadore Study Center Foundation, with key support from the Treviso and Belluno/Dolomiti Chamber of Commerce. In addition to providing an opportunity to visit the artist’s birthplace, which will later be closed for restoration work, the exhibition aims to tell the story of an emblematic work by Titian Vecellio that has unfortunately been lost - and is still awaiting a shared identification of the battle depicted by the Cadore artist - and at the same time of the fortune and influence that Titian’s inventions had on Rubens a century later.

Two important graphic works that were the subject of significant donations and bequests to the Foundation will be on display: the engraving dated 1623 taken from a masterpiece by Rubens now housed in the Alte Pinakotheke in Munich, namely the Battle of the Amazons (ca. 1613), translated onto copper by Lucas Vostermann, and the print by Giulio Fontana - mentioned already by Ridolfi and of which very few specimens of this quality and completeness are preserved in the world - taken from what must have been Titian’s grandiose canvas known as the Battle of Cadore, made for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace but unfortunately destroyed in the devastating fire of 1577. At the center of the scene is a bridge: the powerful fulcrum of the entire composition in Titian’s invention, which returns in Rubens’ work, an emblematic trait-d’union between the two artists.

The engraving by Rubens, which recently enriched the Fondazione Centro Studi Titian and Cadore’s collection of prints “by” and “of” Titian, was made by Rubens’ closest collaborator in this area and is of considerable size (85.6 x 120.8 cm) taken from six plates on sheets glued together, but it also has clear references to Titian and the lost Ducale work. Rubens could learn about the Titian painting not only indirectly through copies, but also from the preparatory drawing, which even appeared in the inventory of his collection and is now in the Louvre.

The second sixteenth-century print on display, engraved by the Veronese Giulio Fontana, on the other hand, is an important record of Titian’s large canvas. References, intersections of art, attributive reflections that shed new light on Titian’s art and life, which exhibition curator Stefania Mason, president of the Foundation’s Scientific Council, also gives an account of in the catalog published by ZeL Edizioni.

It was Titian who had proposed to the Grand Council the undertaking of making a grandiose canvass, depicting a battle, for the most complicated part of the salon in the Doges’ Palace, “...da la banda verso la piaza, che è la più difficile et che homo, fino questo dì, non ha voluto tuor questa impresa,” because it was totally backlit. The work, delivered in August 1538, later than expected and only after the Senate intimated to the painter the return of the money he had received, having failed to fulfill the commission, must have been truly grand, capable of influencing contemporaries and posterity.

In the supplication, Titian had not clarified which battle he intended to paint, while Francesco Sansovino in his description of the canvas that he left us, pointing out the lack of the explanatory table in the original, that is, the sort of caption present instead in the other canvases, indulged the doubts of critics, who over the years have advanced different hypotheses: Sometimes the Battle of Ghiaradadda (but this would have been the terrible defeat of the Venetians at Agnadello), other times the Battle of Spoleto (following Barbarossa’s sack in 1155 of the Umbrian city) and, above all, the Battle of Cadore in 1508, with the triumph of the Serenissima’s army led by Bartolomeo d’Alviano over Maximilian I.

Supporting the hypothesis was already Ridolfi in his Wonders of Art (1648), and reconfirming its reliability was Lionello Puppi (2009), who saw the Castle of Pieve di Cadore in the simulacrum of the burning castle painted by Titian, and perhaps its Rusecco (Riosecco) in the river that flowed under the small bridge. Rubens, who seems to have come into possession of the Cadore artist’s preparatory drawing, was probably so impressed by Titian’s invention that he reproposed the idea in the canvas now in Munich, in which he depicts the battle between Theseus king of Athens and Talestri queen of the Amazons, on the bridge of the Termodon, the river on whose banks, according to legend, warrior women lived. Here, too, the bridge pivots the entire composition.

A century later, the iconographic force and compositional power of Titian’s masterpiece still persisted, and the print by Vostermann, who entered in 1618 the workshop started by Rubens precisely for the purpose of drawing from some of his paintings several engravings destined for important personalities of the time, reproducing the original faithfully and with absolute skill (albeit en reverse) builds “a bridge” between two extraordinary protagonists of art.

On August 1, the opening of the exhibition-dossier will be preceded (5.30) by a lecture by curator Stefania Mason, who, in recounting the events evoked by the two prints (now preserved in Titian’s hometown thanks to the donation of Fabio Zanella, in memory of his parents Luisa and Sincero, and the bequest of Giovanni Maria Susin) comes to the conclusion, with a reconstruction of the sources, that the painter represented precisely the Battle, fought victoriously in “his” Cadore, corroborating the attribution advanced by Lionello Puppi fifteen years ago.

Hours: daily from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 3 to 6 p.m.

Image: Lucas Vosterman from Pieter Paul Rubens, Battle of the Amazons (1623; burin engraving, printed from six plates on six sheets glued together, 873 x 1230 mm or 856 x 1208 mm; Pieve di Cadore, Fondazione Centro Studi Tiziano e Cadore, gift Fabio Zanella in memory of his father Sincero Zanella)

In Titian's Birthplace, two important graphic works show the artist's influence on Rubens

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