The muddied mirror : materiality and figuration in Titian's later paintings

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Bibliographic Information

The muddied mirror : materiality and figuration in Titian's later paintings

Jodi Cranston

Pennsylvania State University Press, c2010

  • cloth : alk. paper

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-143) and index

Summary: "Extends formalism to facture and situates the materiality of Titian's later works within the late sixteenth-century interest in embodiment and violence rather than within the Renaissance ideals of classicizing beauty and perfection"--Provided by publisher

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Ideal painting in the Renaissance was an art of illusionism that eliminated for the viewer any overt sense of its making. Titian's paintings, in contrast, with their roughly worked and "open" surfaces, unexpected glazes, and thick impasto brushstrokes, made the fact of the paint increasingly visible. Previous scholars have read these paintings as unfinished or the product of lesser studio hands, but in The Muddied Mirror, Jodi Cranston argues that this approach to paint is integral to Titian's later work. Rather than presenting in paint a precise reflection of the visible world, the artist imparted an intrinsic corporeality to his subjects through the varying mass and thickness of the paint. It is precisely the materiality and "disfiguration" of these paintings that offer us the key to understanding their meanings. More important, the subjects of Titian's late paintings are directly related to the materiality of the body-they represent physical changes wrought through violence, metamorphosis, and desire.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Substance of Renaissance 1. "Speculum cum macula": Materiality and Desire 2. Myths of (Un)Making 3. Violence and Retrospection Notes Bibliography Index

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