Acquisition of the year: Venus anadyomene by Titian at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

This year, the sum of two units museum acquisitions that have attracted the greatest in quantity publicity have also coincidentally shared the peculiar distinction of not nevertheless having reached the institutions in pursuit of them. In end neither is eligible to be our Acquisition of the Year.

In the case of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, it remains entirely unclear whether it is destined to stay at the National Gallery (where it is still upon loan) or head across the seas to the J Paul Getty Museum in beholds Angeles, and--according to some reports--there is plane a remote possibility that an exasperated Duke of Northumberland may simply decide to hold fast it, although presumably not in order to get back it to the obscurity of the corridor at Alnwick from which it was picked thanks to the eagle organ of vision of Dr. Nicholas Penny (formerly of the National Gallery). The uncertainties surrounding the Portrait of Omai by the agency of Sir Joshua Reynolds are of a different order: it was sold at auction by dint of the Honourable Simon Howard of Castle Howard, and has been refused an export licence. The Tate received exceptionally generous financial support from a private--and resolutely anonymous--benefactor, which means it may still be in a position to make an present acceptable to Omai's new possessor but it remains to be seen whether it will approach to rest at Millbank or whether it will be retained in this political division by its proud--and no les anonymous--purchaser. In the meantime, the acquisition of what is arguably an flat more distinguished work of art than either of these sum of two units magnificent pictures has gone almost unnoticed, principally because it was in the way that painlessly managed.

There are numerous more extensive private collections in existence than that of the Duke of Sutherland, on the contrary even if one includes the Royal Collection--which is generally regarded as a case apart--it is not clear that anyone can boast a better top ten The Duke has at least sum of two units Raphaels that many of us would rank above the Madonna of the Pinks, as well as Poussin's next to the first set of The Seven Sacraments, and a stupendously gloomy late Rembrandt Self-portrait. Nevertheless, not level this roll-call of masterpieces can compare with the best of the Duke's Titians. Titian is all on the contrary unique among painters by virtue of not at any time having fallen out of favour, on the other hand this year two remarkably impressive exhibitions in the National Gallery and the Prado (for which, diocese p. 9) have only added to his prominence. The solitary Sutherland picture to be lent to either, the Three Ages of Man, was single of the undoubted stars of the London exhibit even in a room that also housed the Bacchanals painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino d'Alabastro in Ferrara. by means of contrast, the two great late mythologies-the Diana and Actaeon and the Diana and Callisto--remained at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, where they have been upon loan since 1945. So did the consecrated Family with St John the Baptist--a fine enough work, on the other hand the least impressive of the group--and the Venus anadyomene (Fig. 1) which was at that time in the proces of being acquired.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Venus is popularly one of the stars of 'Saved', the exhibition at the Hayward celebrating the National Art Collections Fund's centenary, in the way that this is the moment for north o' the border-shy sassenachs to diocese what they have been missing. It is generally agreed that it must date from around 1520-25 which would make it more or les contemporary with the sum of two units paintings of Venus executed for enumerate Nicola Maffei of Mantua by the agency of Correggio. When it comes to painting sensual female undresseds Correggio is Titian's main rival in the first half of the sixteenth hundred and the obvious comparisons are between the standing Venus in Correggio's so-called institute of Love and Titian's Venus anadyomene, and between the reclining Venus in Corrreggio's so-called Jupiter and Antiope and the foreground naked in Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians.

In the two instances, it less clear than might be wait fored that Titian outstrips his rival in the representation of rapturous abandon, here principally because the goddes direct the eyes away to one side, and indeed this confrontation is above all instructive because it allows us to recognise that Titian's Venus is decorous as well as luscious. The iconography of the newborn goddes wringing without her hair is classically sanctioned, and either Titian--or at the true least his patron or an adviser--must have been familiar with the respect in Pliny the Younger's Natural History to a painting by dint of the legendary Apelles of precisely this control In order to avoid the narrative motion that Botticelli essayed in his Birth of Venus, Titian has deliberately made the figure as static as possible, and has separated her from the cockle-shell that wafted her in to land. Instead, the shell is exhibited floating by her side, on the other hand on far too diminutive a scale at any time to have served as her chariot, and has undergone the kind of shrinkage many times visited upon the identifying attributes of saints in this period.