some thoughts on Titian's Venus of Urbino

John Wilkes

6th July 1996

This short note attempts a reading of Titian's painting as a particular moment in the interaction of a courtesan and her lover. It's primary purpose is an exploratory piece in the genre of picture interpretation.   [larger image]

This essay was written for Christy Junkerman's Italian Renaissance Art course in the Stanford Continuing Studies Program, Spring quarter, 1996.

counterpoint

The following notes on my essay were extracted from a letter written by Christy Junkerman (and are reproduced here with her permission). I've included them to indicate that there are other interpretations possible - indeed, to suggest that I clearly only scratched the surface of this topic.

Dear John,

I think your paper is a wonderful essay on these paintings, as thoughtful as anything I've read and much more thoughtful than most. The way the essay works on paper, with details of the painting doing part of the arguing--or, rather, speaking for themselves--is very effective, I think, and I am very interested to see how it works on the computer.

You do a particularly fine job of looking at the cloth in all its mutations in both of these paintings. I am especially interested in cloth, as I may have mentioned in class, and your sensitive observations have helped me see new things here. I am still wondering if that pillow in the Giorgione is or isn't unlikely. Your comments on the contrast between the fabric and the geometry of the floor tiles in the Titian are nicely stated. This might be developed with a wider look at how Titian uses perspective grids like this one. He doesn't often use them, but when he does it's always interesting. He seems to make them a specific issue when he does (for example, in a fascinating Annunciation in the Cathedral of Treviso). I have wondered at times if the nude images, which span the painting from side to side are intended specifically to propose an alternative way of looking at painting and of positioning one before it, to the perspective system that dominated Florentine painting.

My only difference of opinion here is that I would personally resist the attempt to narrativize the painting, or to narrativize the relationship between elements within it. We have no reason, for example, to say that the women are relatives, or to assume that a scandal might ensue. My own interest is to try to find the range and the limits that Titian gives to the elements within the image. Titian's painting often seems to me to make visual arguments which are precisely not narrative arguments. The relation between foreground and background seems to me to be a contrast between such things as vertical and horizontal, nude (but partly adorned) and dressed (but partly undressed), an expanse to be scanned as opposed to a Tuscan perspectival space. I don't have it all worked out but those are the lines I would take. In this I have been much influenced by Mieke Bal's work on Rembrandt and the structuralist reading she attempts for his work.

It strikes me that the painting is less a narrative of choice that a poignant awareness of the impossibility of any choice. Titian is, it seems to me, fully aware of the power of his image to seduce, but just as aware of the impossibility of possession. The image will always remain an object of desire and must always remain out of reach. It is painting which has power over the viewer here, not this woman. The protaganist here is painting, not the woman depicted.

A few details:

I would disagree that Reff is the "standard reference," although Panofsky does present him as if he is. I think the kind of iconographic interpretation that he did, privileging the plants as carriers of meaning over other kinds of visual meaning is quite wrong, especially for Venetian painting. Are you interested in more reading? There is an interesting article by Seymour Howard on the Giorgione that suggests that the classical type of the hermaphrodite may be important. (Seymour Howard, "The Dresden 'Venus' and Its Kin: Mutation and Retrieval of Types", Art Quarterly, 2, 1979, pp. 90111). There is quite a list of fairly recent work, none of it conclusive, on the Titian. I could hunt some of them down if you are interested.

Wouldn't your business/pleasure dichotomy on p. 6 be put out of balance if business is pleasure?

... Thank you for a most enjoyable and intelligent paper. As always, Continuing Studies classes are such fun.

Christy Junkerman
October 10, 1996