Titian (1485–1576), Perseus and Andromeda, 1554–6, Oil on canvas, 230 x 243 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
In September 1554, Titian dispatched his Venus and Adonis from Venice to Prince Philip in London, where the young Habsburg was preparing for his marriage to Mary Tudor. The painter enclosed a letter, explaining that because his earlier Danaë had shown Venus entirely from the front, he had chosen in this second ‘poesia’ to show the figure from behind, so that the room in which they hung would be ‘more appealing to the eye’ (Panofsky, 1969, p. 153). It was a quiet but extraordinary claim: the word ‘poesia’ recast what a painting could be, lifting it from decoration or devotional aid into something closer to verse in oil. The Perseus and Andromeda, painted over the following two years and probably sent to Philip in 1556, belongs to the same cycle and extends the same argument.
The relationship between Titian and the Habsburgs had been forged a generation earlier. Charles V sat to the painter at Bologna in 1530 and again at Augsburg in 1548, and the bond between emperor and artist became one of the most celebrated in European court culture. Carlo Ridolfi, writing in 1648, reported that Charles once stooped to retrieve a brush Titian had dropped, remarking that the painter deserved to be served by Caesar. Whether or not the anecdote is true, and there are reasons to doubt it, it speaks to a genuine shift in the social standing of painters at the Habsburg court. Titian was ennobled as a Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur, distinctions that placed him well above the artisan class from which most painters still struggled to escape (Wethey, 1975, vol. I, p. 29).
Philip inherited both the empire and the painter. Yet his relationship with Titian was conducted almost entirely through intermediaries and correspondence, which gives the poesie a peculiar intimacy: these are intensely sensual pictures, painted for a patron the artist barely knew in person. Philip did not prescribe the subjects. Titian chose them himself, arranging the series so that each canvas would present the female nude from a different angle, inviting sustained comparison across the group (Panofsky, 1969, p. 153). The Perseus and Andromeda draws on Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses [Transformations], lines 663 to 752, in which Perseus, returning from his killing of Medusa, spots Andromeda chained to a coastal rock as an offering to a sea creature sent by Poseidon. Titian stages the rescue as a headlong plunge: Perseus dives from the upper right in armour, his body twisting against an agitated sky, while Andromeda strains against her bonds, her pale flesh isolated against dark stone. The sea monster, half-submerged and already wounded, is almost grotesque, a reminder that Titian read Ovid as a painter rather than a philologist, selecting what served the drama and discarding what did not.
Scientific imaging has revealed that Titian struggled with this composition more than any other in the poesie cycle. Infrared reflectography and X-radiography show an unusually large number of pentimenti: Andromeda was originally positioned on the right side of the canvas before being shifted to the left, Perseus’s flight path and arm positions were revised several times, and the sea monster once rose higher out of the water (Wallace Collection, online catalogue entry). A drawing in Antoon van Dyck’s Italian sketchbook, records an intermediate stage, probably copying a lost preparatory drawing by Titian himself (Wethey, 1975, vol. III, p. 171). The painting is therefore the survivor of a long and restless working process. It has also suffered physically: it was already described as damaged in a 1605 inventory, and the canvas has been cut down along all four edges, meaning its original dimensions were considerably larger than the 175 × 189.5 cm it now measures.
What makes the painting so absorbing is the freedom of its execution. Titian was well into his sixties (perhaps older, since his birth date remains disputed between c.1488 and c.1490) and had begun to work in a manner that bewildered some contemporaries. Vasari, visiting the studio in 1566, described the late technique as painted ‘with bold strokes, broadly applied’ so that the pictures ‘cannot be seen close up but from a distance appear perfect’ (Vasari, 1568, ed. Milanesi, vol. VII, p. 452). In the Perseus and Andromeda, this is visible throughout: the sky, where thinly dragged pigment creates effects of luminosity that no amount of careful blending could achieve; Andromeda’s skin, built from layered glazes; the almost reckless energy of Perseus’s descent. It is worth asking whether Philip, receiving these canvases in the relatively austere surroundings of the Spanish court, fully grasped what Titian was attempting with his brush.
The commission arrived at a moment of political strain. Charles V abdicated in 1555 and 1556, dividing his territories between Philip and his brother Ferdinand. Philip’s inheritance brought the full weight of the Counter-Reformation, and the sensual mythological subjects that had been acceptable for private chambers began to sit uneasily alongside an increasingly austere religious programme. The poesie were never publicly displayed; they were kept in restricted rooms, accessible only to the king and his closest circle. They occupied a space between pleasure and policy, private indulgences that could not quite be squared with the public face of Habsburg piety (Checa Cremades, 1994, pp. 267–269). It is a curious thing that Titian, working far away in Venice, may have been producing the most intellectually ambitious pictures of his career for a patron who was already beginning to look away from precisely the kind of art they represented.
The painting’s later journey through European collections is itself a measure of its standing among artists and collectors. By the mid-1580s it had entered the possession of Pompeo Leoni, the Milanese sculptor who served the Spanish crown in Madrid, though exactly how the painting left the royal collection remains unclear. The Leoni family may have acquired it from the dispersed collections of Antonio Pérez, Philip’s disgraced secretary of state, or received it directly as a gift (Wethey, 1975, vol. III, pp. 171–172). It appeared in the 1609 death inventory of Pompeo Leoni in Milan, described as ‘una tabla grande de la Andromeda con Mercurio que mata a un dragón que viene del Ticiano.’ Van Dyck likely purchased it from the Leoni heirs during his Italian sojourn of 1621 to 1627 and brought it to London sometime after 1623. After Van Dyck’s death in 1641, the canvas passed to his widow Mary Ruthven and eventually entered the collection of Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, in Paris. It was auctioned in London in 1798, went unsold at the first sale, changed hands, and was finally sold at the second Orléans sale in 1805, before being acquired by the 3rd Marquess of Hertford in 1815 (Ingamells, 1985, p. 296).
The canvas has been cut down, damaged, sold and moved many times. It is not in good condition, and anyone standing in front of it at the the Wallace Colection should know that what they are seeing is a diminished version of what left Titian’s studio. Even so, there is enough left to understand why Van Dyck wanted it. Titian told Philip these were poems. Four and a half centuries on, nobody has found a better word.
References
Barkan, L. (2023) ‘Titian the Poet’, I Tatti Studies, 26(2), pp. 203–224. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/726847 (Accessed: 5 August 2024)
Campbell, S.J. (2023) ‘The Poesie and Their Legacy: Tintoretto, the Carracci, and Tasso’s Poetics’, I Tatti Studies, 26(2). Available at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/726741 (Accessed: 5 August 2024)
Hills, P. (2020) ‘Titian’s Transformations: Colour and Emotion in the Poesie’, in Wivel, M. (ed.) Titian: Love, Desire, Death. London: National Gallery Company/Yale University Press. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/44389164 (Accessed: 5 August 2024)
Ingamells, J. (1985) The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures, vol. I: British, German, Italian, Spanish. London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection.
Tanner, M. (2018) Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain. London: Harvey Miller/Brepols. Reviewed in: Lisot-Nelson, E.A. (2021) Renaissance Quarterly, 74(1), pp. 251–253. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2020.337 (Accessed: 5 August 2024)
Wallace Collection (n.d.) Perseus and Andromeda, online catalogue entry. Available at: https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=64901&viewType=detailView (Accessed: 5 August 2024)
Wivel, M. (ed.) (2020) Titian: Love, Desire, Death. London: National Gallery Company/Yale University Press. With contributions by B.L. Brown, T. Dalla Costa, J. Dunkerton, P. Hills, L. Packer, J. Portús, N. Silver and A. Weston-Lewis.
Panofsky, E. (1969) Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic. London: Phaidon.
Wethey, H.E. (1975) The Paintings of Titian, vol. I: The Religious Paintings; vol. III: The Mythological and Historical Paintings. London: Phaidon