Time.news – The Borghese Gallery celebrates the return of one of its masterpieces, Venus who blindfolds lovewho in recent months has traveled to Vienna and Milan, dedicating a small but very refined exhibition to him, “Titian. Dialogues of Nature and Love”.
The painting found is accompanied by another painting by the Venetian master from the Kunsthistorische museum in Vienna, one of the last made by the ninety-year-old painter, Ninfa and Shepherd.
The room of the Gallery dedicated to Titian, XXII, was set up according to this “dialogue”: in front of the famous sacred love and profane love, the painting “returned” was placed, Venus blindfolding Love, while on the other two sides they face each other the Nymph and, on the opposite wall, a late-seventeenth-century copy of the Three Ages of Manthe original of which is in Edinburgh, painted by Sassoferrato.
Tomorrow will be open Titian. Dialogues of Nature and Love, a dossier exhibition that stemmed from the loan of Titian’s painting Nymph and Shepherd by the @KHM_Vienna as part of a programme of cultural exchange between the two institutions.https://t.co/b3dkP6dnaV pic.twitter.com/yZW4HRKY31
– Borghese Gallery (@GallBorghese) June 13, 2022
“In reality – explains the curator of the exhibition, Maria Giovanna Sarti – there are three dialogues: the first is on the theme of love, personified in the various paintings by Venus, the bride, the nymph, the second on nature, and on the time that it passes, thanks to the marvelous landscapes that are not only backgrounds but protagonists of Titian’s work. The third dialogue is that on time, declared in the Three Ages of Man but also in the evolution of the painter’s style “.
© M.Coen © Galleria Borghese
Nymph and shepherd by Titian
The artist, recalls the art historian, would have died a year after completing the Nymph and the Shepherd, and “he took the liberty of reflecting on the recurring themes for him, the conjugal theme, the erotic and fertile love that must be regulated, nature, with the landscapes that in the last paintings return to his beloved Cadore and those mountains, time knocking on the relentless door “.
Barely thirty when he painted, on commission for a wedding, Amor sacro and Amor profano, eighty at the time of Venus who blindfolds love and almost ninety for the Nymph, Titian has dramatically changed his pictorial technique, and this evolution, which has been causing art historians to discuss so much for centuries, is particularly evident in the hall of the Gallery founded by the collector, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, only a few years after Titian’s death.
The style of the master had changed a lot during the 1500s in which he works, with the passing of the years, he adapts to a context that matures, but changes above all by the will of the painter.
In his last years, as is now widely recognized, Titian was an innovator, to the point of remembering, in the last angry brushstrokes that describe the nature in which the musical and love duet of Ninfa and shepherd takes place, the style that would have made famous, more than three centuries later, by another great teacher, Vincent Van Gogh.