There remain the two famous Venuses of Titian. The so-called Urbino
Venus (1117)--a motive to some extent borrowed, and slightly coarsened
in the borrowing, from Giorgione's picture at Dresden--is much the
finer of the two. It was painted for Francesco Maria della Rovere,
Duke of Urbino, and, although not a portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, who
was then a middle-aged woman, it was certainly intended to conjure up
the beauty of her youth. What Eleonora really looked like at this
time, you can see in the first of the two Venetian rooms, where
Titian's portrait of her, painted at about the same date, hangs. The
Venus and Cupid (1108) is a later work; the goddess is the likeness of
a model who very frequently appears in the works of Titian and Palma.
SCUOLA TOSCANA.
On the left we pass out of the Tribuna to three rooms devoted to the
Tuscan school.
The first contains the smaller pictures, including several priceless
Angelicos and Botticellis. Fra Angelico's Naming of St. John (1162),
Marriage of the Blessed Virgin to St. Joseph (1178), and her Death
(1184), are excellent examples of his delicate execution and spiritual
expression in his smaller, miniature-like works. Antonio Pollaiuolo's
Labours of Hercules (1153) is one of the masterpieces of this most
uncompromising realist of the Quattrocento. Either by Antonio or his
brother Piero, is also the portrait of that monster of iniquity,
Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan (30). Sandro Botticelli's Calumny
(1182) is supposed to have been painted as a thankoffering to a friend
who had defended him from the assaults of slanderous tongues; it is a
splendid example of his dramatic intensity, the very statues in their
niches taking part in the action. The subject--taken from Lucian's
description of a picture by Apelles of Ephesus--was frequently painted
by artists of the Renaissance, and there is a most magnificent drawing
of the same by Andrea Mantegna at the British Museum, which was copied
by Rembrandt. On the judgment-seat sits a man with ears like those of
Midas, into which Ignorance and Suspicion on either side ever whisper.
Before him stands Envy,--a hideous, pale, and haggard man, seeming
wasted by some slow disease. He is making the accusation and leading
Calumny, a scornful Botticellian beauty, who holds in one hand a torch
and with the other drags her victim by the hair to the judge's feet.
Calumny is tended and adorned by two female figures, Artifice and
Deceit. But Repentance slowly follows, in black mourning habit; while
naked Truth--the Botticellian Venus in another form--raises her hand
in appeal to the heavens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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