Description
Book SynopsisA reexamination of the career of Titian, the only Renaissance artist credited by contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image. Argues that a major part of the artist's legacy is to be found in his charismatic entrance into the tradition of Christian icon painting.
Trade Review“An erudite study of Titian’s small-format paintings of biblical subjects. Through a careful analysis of this group of paintings, and with particular attention to the early modern conflicts between the traditions of devotional images and theorizations of art, Nygren’s book revises our understanding of Titian’s position in the history of early modern sacred art.”
—Jodi Cranston,author of Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
“This searching and lucid study tactfully sets Titian’s art into contexts of Christian devotional traditions and reform thought, not to dress the artist in pious robes but to reveal Titian’s blazing pictorial intelligence at work at the very foundations of religious art.”
—Alexander Nagel,author of Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time
“In this groundbreaking investigation of Titian’s understudied small-scale religious paintings, Christopher Nygren convincingly demonstrates in his rich and erudite analysis that these were high-stakes painterly performances that prompted—even scripted—certain devotional responses from their sophisticated beholders. Provocatively referring to these polyvalent paintings as ‘icons,’ Nygren aligns Titian’s art with early modern understandings about miraculous agency, votive petition, vibrant matter, and spiritual comportment.”
—Megan Holmes,author of The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence
“This book deserves careful attention. It is as much a history of religion in Titian's time as it is a history of his paintings—specifically those that Nygren . . . calls icons, i.e., small, devotional, nontheatrical paintings with a tight focus on one or very few figures.”
—J. T. Paoletti Choice
“With its penetrating visual analysis and carefully conceived theoretical structure, this book makes a significant and innovative contribution not only to the field of Titian studies, but more broadly to the study of premodern visual culture.”
—Giorgio Tagliaferro Burlington Magazine
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Titian, Charismatic Painter
1. Icons and Agency: The San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross
2. Icons and Exegesis in Ferrara: Christ with the Coin and Judith/Salome
3. Erasmian Icons: Visualizing the Philosophia Christi
4. Icons and Community: Rome and the Network of Ecce Homos
5. Rupestrian Icons: Ecce Homo on Slate, Mater Dolorosa on Marble, and the Matter of Devotion
6. Explicit Icons: Historicity Between Tradition and Self
7. The Twilight of the Icon? Titian’s Pietà in the Gallerie dell’Accademia
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliograph
Index
