Michelangelo and Titian, Titans of the Renaissance, Were the Ultimate Artistic Frenemies

“Michelangelo & Titian,” from the art historian William Wallace, is less a dual biography than something much rarer and trickier to pull off — an investigation into influence. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni and Tiziano Vecellio are known to have met only twice, but Mr. Wallace contends that the pair, like orbiting planets, shaped the trajectories of each other’s art. Mr. Wallace calls it “a tale of genius and rivalry.” Luckily, we don’t have to choose a winner.“Too bad the Venetians never learned to draw” was Michelangelo’s quip about the artists who, like Titian, hailed from La Serenessima, “The Most Serene” — the Republic of Venice. That burst of bravado from the Florentine, though, shortchanges the influence that each of these geniuses exerted on the other. The Venetians were known for colorito, or “color.” The Florentines for disegno, or “drawing.” Each had much to learn from and teach the other.Michelangelo, born in 1475, was a decade older than Titian. They both lived and worked deep into old age, dying just a few years short of 90, staggering longevity for the diversely dangerous 16th century. Michelangelo, called “Il Divino” by contemporaries, learned just as much from Titian as the other way around. Mr. Wallace calls their relationship a “sub-rosa competition between worthy and respectful rivals.” They were the Matisse and Picasso of their day. What emerges is a more nuanced dynamic than one might expect when anyone save perhaps another contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, is held up against the creator of the “Pietà,” “David,” “Moses,” Sistine ceiling, and the “Last Judgment.” Titian, though, knew things about painting that Michelangelo would have to learn, just as Michelangelo was fluent in the tendons and muscles of the body, having surfaced skin from stone. ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ by Titian Vecellio. The National Gallery London. 1520-23. Via Wikimedia Commons Mr. Wallace imagines Michelangelo’s first encounter with Titian’s work. The elder artist would have been taken by the “brilliant color of oil paints … especially startling were the crimson reds and ultramarine blues, rare and expensive pigment” that would have been more abundant at Venice than more provincial Florence. Michelangelo also would have been captivated by “the many figures in active poses and convincing movement.” Mr. Wallace leans heavily on the notion of a bocca, Italian for “word of mouth.” By this he means the endless and often edifying stream of gossip and rumor that would have flowed between Florence, Venice, and Rome among the painters, patrons, politicians and pontiffs of the High Renaissance. The archival record is hardly bereft — the biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote about both men — but much of what mattered, then and now, was passed a bocca. The most persuasive case for the dynamic between the two men is made by the paintings themselves and the leaps of invenzione, or “invention,” that kept Titian and Michelangelo’s art dynamic over decades. Mr. Wallace takes interpretive risks, but also hedges. Weighing the similarity between a Titian drawing of “St. Sebastian” and Michelangelo’s “Rebellious Slave” from five years earlier, Mr. Wallace concludes “we need not trace every nude to Michelangelo.”Mr. Wallace is prepared to take bigger interpretive swings. Michelangelo was one of the first to see Titian’s “Death of St. Peter Martyr” in person. The work, now lost, was so explosive that one contemporary likened viewing it to “hearing a shriek.” An extraordinary “Resurrection” drawing by Michelangelo, now at Windsor Castle’s collection, shows that what Mr. Wallace called his “vice-like memory” had retained Titian’s teaching on torque.Titian would have gawked, neck straining like a contemporary tourist or cardinal aiming for St. Peter’s Throne, at Michelangelo’s “Fall of Man” on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Decades later, he would paint his own “Adam and Eve,” which now hangs at Madrid’s Prado. Titian’s is more sensual and turbulent — he finds motion in the surfacing of sin. Mr. Wallace calls Titian’s edition an “original invention informed by his experience of Michelangelo.”‘The Assumption of the Virgin’ by Titian Vecellio. Santa Maria Gloriosa de Frari. Venice, 1518. Detail. Via Wikimedia CommonsTitian’s last major work, undertaken in his eighties when Michelangelo was already dead, is a large oil painting, “Pietà.” It is a convincing rendering of a ragged grief and raw suffering, completed in a manner called alla macchia, or “stained.” The scene is set in what looks like a Roman niche, and Titian paints himself in as a penitent. Its roughly finished style anticipates Diego Velázquez and most especially Francisco Goya’s Pinturas Negras. The longer one looks at it, though, the more clear it is that at its heart sits Michelangelo’s Pietà, a masterpiece from some 80 years earlier. The medium is different — oil as opposed to stone — but what carries over is not only the subject but the structure. The literary critic Harold Bloom defined influence as “love, tempered by defense,” an apt description for how an octogenarian Titian held on to the triumph of his rival’s long ago youth. There were themes, though, on which Titian was hardly Michelangelo’s apprentice. On mythological subjects the Venetian had the Florentine beat, and Titian’s feel for depicting a woman’s body was something Michelangelo lacked almost entirely. Nobody could paint Annunciations like Titian. One, from 1564, is described by Mr. Wallace as a “Venetian Baroque opera,” and an “extravaganza that explodes with light and color.”Mr. Wallace’s most daring exegesis emerges in respect of Titian’s late “Judith With the Head of Holofernes,” from 1568, now on view at Detroit. The Biblical story centers on an Jewish heroine who slays an Assyrian general. The decapitated head, Mr. Wallace ventures, bears a startling resemblance to none other than Michelangelo. Titian, who outlived Michelangelo, declares himself as victor for eternity.

Michelangelo and Titian, Titans of the Renaissance, Were the Ultimate Artistic Frenemies

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