New findings in Titian's fresco technique at the Scuola del Santo in Padua

Among Titian's true few surviving frescoes, the well-preserved assemblage painted in 1511 in the Scuola del Santo representing three miracles of Saint Anthony is his earliest work in this medium still in its original setting.(1) In individual of the scenes of this fresco circle of time The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, Titian places the greatest in quantity dramatic action of the story, the representation of a murder of a amiss accused woman by her husband, in the foreground of the painting.(2) It is sole in the background of the display that the miracle, which occasioned the fresco appears; there, the repentant husband kneel before Saint Anthony begging forgiveness. by dint of thrusting the disturbing, violent action of the stabbing toward the forefront of the painting, Titian makes the viewer a direct witness to the manslaughter This dramatic effect is reinforced through the extraordinary presence of the large foreground figures, the glowing color that suffuses the entire composition, and the impressive three-dimensional modeling of the volumes

Surprisingly, a shut examination of Titian's description of whirl in the figures reveals a passage where turn is actually sculpted in relief rather than described illusionistically. Clearly visible in a photograph taken in raking light [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], the right arm of the figure of the wife is shaped by the agency of a building up of the intonaco as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as two inches from the wall surface, thus causing it to cast a real shadow onto its adjacent surroundings. In addition to describing the contortion of the cylindrical part of the arm, this modeling level details the slight protuberance of the bone of the flexure and wrist. Close observation of this area of the fresco reveals no line of junction in the intonaco where the arm appropriates the torso, indicating that the intonaco of the three-dimensionally typeed arm and of the head and torso of the figure constitutes a continuous layer of plaster applied at individual time.(3)

The use of relief details in panel and fresco painting was, of course, a for the use of all and undisguised device for accenting gilt style of dress details and suggesting divine light. Disk-shaped haloes, for example, built up abruptly from intonaco surfaces with powerfully modeled, gleaming edges, function as an effective means of catching the light, calling attention to the religious figures they frame. on the other hand nowhere else in the corpus of fresco painting is the illusion of a three-dimensional figural form created by the agency of a concealed actual relief modeling of the surface of the painting.

In The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, Titian raised the three-dimensional contortion of the arm gradually from the surface, avoiding obvious edges(4) The illusionistically painted contortions and the actual relief form of the arm are with equal reason cleverly matched that the real turn is perfectly camouflaged among the painted singles Real volume and painted illusion of convolution confront one another in the same painting and demonstrate visually indistinguishable. Titian needed solitary to view the results to realize that his fictively showed volumes were as illusionistically effective as the actual convolution of the arm of the wife in this experimental fresco; thus, he would have felt no ne to go [i]or[/i] come back to relief modeling in his posterior frescoes of figural form. In his later works, generally considered his more happy frescoes, the artist achieved a persuasive three dimensionality and spatial illusionism from one side painting alone.

Titian's contemporary female portrait known as La Schiavona (ca. 1511-12 National Gallery, London) is related to the technical experimentation of The Miracle of the Jealous Husband.(5) La Schiavona also gives clear evidence of Titian's belong to at this time in his career for the creation of visually convincing volumetric forms. The woman depicted gripe [i]or[/i] grips an all'antica sculpted profile bust of herself in relief. This painting functions as Titian's essay upon the paragone, a demonstration of the characteristic quality of paint - here, paint alone upon the two-dimensional support - to pay back the illusion of real volumetric form, a conclusion perhaps derived in part from the unobtrusive (and, until now, unnoticed) experiment in The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, which itself move rounded into a dead end. by means of juxtaposing pictorially represented three-dimensional results with actual relief in the fresco Titian demonstrated, perhaps sole to himself, that his painted description of turn could be made indistinguishable from a real one(6)

The remarkable experiment in three-dimensional modeling in the fresco of The Miracle of the Jealous Husband at the Scuola del Santo brings new insight into the young Titian's thinking. It confirms the experimental spirit reported in early sources regarding the Fondaco dei Tedeschi frescoe painted in 1508(7) and affords conclusive evidence for Titian's interest in relief statuary which has been suggested by means of modern writers.(8)

Notes

I should like to thank Dottore Giordano Allegro, president of the Venerata Arca di s Antonio, and the Massari of the Scuola for their kindness in allowing me access to the ledger that contains the records of the payments made to Titian for the execution of the frescoe and for permission to photograph the works in the Scuola. I would like to thank my wife, Adele, for her creative suggestions and Professor Vasco Fassina and Professor Staale Sinding-Larsen for valuable annotates on an early draft of the manuscript. I appreciate the opportunity afforded me through a Cantor Fitzgerald Scholarship end the Pratt in Venice Program and am thankful to Professor Diana Gisolfi for of the first water guidance and advice at various stages of the manuscript. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of the Art Bulletin for criticism and relations and to its editor, Professor John Paoletti, for help in bringing the true copy to its final form.