Titian  c. 1490–1576
NG 3948 
The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ

Nicholas Penny, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

c. 1565–75

Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm

Support

The dimensions given above are those of the stretcher. The canvas is of a coarse and open tabby weave. Cusping is apparent at the lower and upper edges, but not at the sides, where the canvas has been cleanly cut. Two sets of tacking holes are visible at the lower edge, inside the painted area, suggesting that the height of the painting was decreased at an early date, perhaps by Titian himself. The canvas has been lined with a wax resin on to a modern tabby‐weave canvas of medium weight on a modern stretcher, with crossbars, of varnished pine.

Materials and Technique

The gesso ground is covered with a dark grey imprimitura. Originally, there were pink lake glazes in the shadows of the Virgin’s lavender‐grey dress, a hint of which survives by the child’s feet. The feet themselves are both faded and worn. The lead white drapery between the child’s legs is now sufficiently abraded for it to be clear that much of it was painted over the Virgin’s dress.

A trail of loosely dragged lead white to the right of the child’s hand is perhaps best explained as part of some preliminary compositional brush drawing that was made by the artist on the dark ground. This white would have been concealed by layers of paint which have now been abraded.

Conservation

On acquisition in 1924 the painting included a thin strip of putty at the upper edge, and a broad one (between 1.25 and 1.90 cm) at the lower edge. The latter had been scratched in such a way as to create a texture imitating that of the original canvas. Cavalcaselle maintained that the painting’s merits were more apparent when it had been part of the Bisenzo collection, but that it had been subjected to cleaning and repainting soon after it left that collection.¹ Thus a date in the late 1840s seems likely for the putty extensions. However, the evidence of prints and copies (see below (a, b)) suggests that the picture had been lengthened in some way before it was a hundred years old.

The painting was recorded as having a darkened varnish when it was acquired by the Gallery in 1924, and suspicions that the varnish had been deliberately toned were confirmed in August 1961 when analysis revealed the presence of bitumen.² The manuscript catalogue stated that the painting had been cleaned shortly before acquisition, but this was probably a superficial cleaning, and the toned varnish is more likely to have been applied in the late 1840s, the probable date of the treatment alluded to by Cavalcaselle. Polishing was recorded in 1945 and 1956. In August 1961 the toned varnish was removed and in February 1962 cleaning and restoration were completed, treatment which had been proposed to the Trustees by Philip Hendy in May 1948. Relining, which preceded restoration, entailed removing the extensions described above.

Condition

There are numerous small paint losses. The surface has been flattened and worn from ironing during relining and cleaning. In some areas the abraded appearance may have been exacerbated by the grainy effect of small residues of the old, darkened varnish having been driven into the interstices of the canvas weave. The wrinkling of the paint in the Virgin’s sleeve may be due to excessive oil. For possible changes in the colour, see below.

Subject

Although the painting was captioned as depicting the Virgin and Child in a seventeenth‐century print (see below), and clearly regarded as such by the artists who adapted the composition as a Sacra Conversazione (see below), and described as such in the nineteenth century, it was catalogued in the National Gallery as Mother and Child,³ a designation perhaps chosen by the director, Charles Holmes, and certainly favoured in his own publications.⁴

Paintings of an anonymous mother and child were as rare in the sixteenth century as they were common in Holmes’s lifetime, and the claim that Titian’s painting belongs to the former category reflects the widespread conviction that it was in some sense a modern work (as is discussed further below). Cecil Gould rightly reverted to the traditional Madonna and Child.⁵ We have modified this because it was relatively rare in art to show the infant Christ at his mother’s breast (there are perhaps half a dozen other examples in the National Gallery⁶) and because, in the centuries when most women in families likely to own good paintings did not nurse their own infants, the subject had a significance which we easily neglect.⁷

Attribution, Dating, Style

The earliest observation on the painting in print seems to have been made by Gustav Waagen in his survey of Lord Ward’s collection, published in 1854: ‘Titian. – The Virgin and Child: a work not agreeing with the master’s characteristics – tenderer and more pleasing in the heads, and much more broken, though very harmonious, in colour.’⁸ This reads like a poor translation but it certainly seems to indicate that Waagen had doubts about Titian’s authorship on account of both the tender sentiment and the colouring. The former is perhaps less characteristic than the latter, and by 1898, when Claude Phillips wrote his monograph on the artist, the broken brushwork and ‘restrained scheme of colour’ in the painting were acknowledged as typical of Titian’s late work as exemplified by the Christ Crowned with Thorns in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, or the Nymph and Shepherd in Vienna.⁹ Since then it has been generally agreed that NG 3948 dates from very late in Titian’s life.

Gould, however, suggested that the painting was perhaps a revision of an earlier composition¹⁰ (as was the case with [page 269][page 270]Christ Crowned with Thorns and perhaps the Nymph and Shepherd). He cited the fact that an early copy of the composition is in an earlier style (and thus may record an earlier lost painting by Titian). More significant perhaps is the fact that Schiavone’s Holy Family with Saint John in the Castle Museum, Prague, in which an unusually heavy infant has his legs in the same position, looks as if it was derived from Titian’s composition but must date from the mid‐1550s.¹¹

The torsion of the child and the heroic build of the Virgin represent one of Titian’s most notable attempts to appropriate something of the sublime grandeur of Michelangelo, which had been an intermittent ambition throughout his life. This grandeur is here poignantly combined with a fragile tenderness in the Virgin’s pensive face and delicate fingers. Cecil Gould compared the painting to the altarpiece in Titian’s family chapel in the Chiesa Arcipretale of Pieve di Cadore, a work mentioned by Vasari and thus not executed later than 1567.¹² The Virgin and Child in that altarpiece do indeed have something of the same largeness of form and roughness of surface, but there is a tremulous touch in NG 3948 which suggests a later date, and the inconclusive character of the painting may even indicate that it was a work which the artist kept in his studio and tinkered with in the last years of his life.

Matteo Mancini has published documents concerning how greatly moved Antonio de Gúzman y Zúñiga, Marchese di Ayamonte, was by a painting of the Madonna which he saw when he visited Titian together with the Spanish ambassador, Diego Guzmán de Silva, in the second half of July 1573. Mancini suggests that this picture, which was sent to Ayamonte in November, may have been NG 3948. But if so it is surprising that the payment made to Orazio Vecellio on 19 February 1574 was for only 20 scudi.¹³ If the painting was not NG 3948 it may have been a workshop painting derived from it, perhaps one of the copies listed in the relevant section below, but there are many other possibilities.

Reputation

NG 3948 was both copied and engraved at an early date but it was not much commented on in the mid‐nineteenth century, perhaps partly because it was not lent to the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition. This may be explained by the fact that it was among the ten pictures that Lord Ward had earlier agreed to lend to Dublin (see the section on Exhibitions and Loans). The picture only became celebrated after 1892, when it was sold to Ludwig Mond for a high price at the Dudley sale. It is not coincidental that 1892 was also the year in which the magnificent new imperial art gallery, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, was opened in Vienna. An unanticipated by‐product of the opening was a new conception of Titian’s late style, for the artist’s Nymph and Shepherd, which had not even been included in Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s comprehensive survey of the artist’s work, was given prominence and excited great interest. It was a ‘picture which the world had forgotten until it was added, or rather restored, to the State collection on its transference from the Belvedere to the gorgeous palace which it now occupies’.¹⁴ For Wickhoff, writing in the Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, the painting in Vienna was perhaps the last genuine painting by the artist and extraordinary for its pursuit of an ‘effet d’unité’ reminiscent of Rembrandt but with the underlying tonality not coming from the darkness of an interior but from ‘the soft pink glow of dusk’ (‘la lumière rose du soir’).¹⁵ These same qualities were obvious in NG 3948, which excited much more interest when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1894 than it had done in 1871. It was illustrated in Claude Phillips’s monograph in 1898 and praised there as one of Titian’s last and most original creations: ‘in its almost monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver the canvas embodies more absolutely … the ideal of tone‐harmony towards which the master in his late time has been steadily tending.’¹⁶ It is surely significant that the enthusiasm for Titian’s late style coincided with an interest in rough or smudgy handling and deliberately blurred form in contemporary art: Eugène Carrière’s near monochrome pictures of solemn maternal subjects were then enjoying especial popularity and critical acclaim (fig. 9, p. xxi).¹⁷

Mond displayed the painting on an easel in his library, where, in his old age, he found special comfort in contemplating it.¹⁸ Not surprisingly, the critic, historian and dealer Jean‐Paul Richter, who must have advised Mond to buy the painting at the Dudley sale, praised it in the highest terms in the luxurious two‐volume book he devoted to Mond’s pictures in 1910. Having drawn attention to the harmony both of colour and of composition, to the way that the line of the child’s back was adjusted ‘in order to force the eye to travel up it to the apex of the pyramid’, to ‘the deep red‐brown of the sturdy little round head’ in the ‘quieter chestnut’ of the ‘kerchief’, and to the fringe of the kerchief, which matches the child’s ruddy cheek, he then managed to associate the painting with the art of Byzantium, which was at that moment being rediscovered and imitated by the avant‐garde.¹⁹

Richter declared that the ‘rich mosaic of tender colour’ applied within a silhouette of ‘melodious unity’ reflected what Titian had ‘learned on his knees from ancient ancones gleaming above the altars of old Venetian churches’²⁰ – a charming variation on the speculative literature concerning the artist’s youth, which had not previously supposed that he had travelled from Cadore to Venice at this early stage in his development. Later in the twentieth century the affinities between Titian’s broken colour and fragmentation of form and the earlier mosaics of Venice were often emphasised.²¹ It was also possible to associate Titian with the most spiritual art of the seventeenth century: for Charles Holmes, director of the Gallery when the painting was acquired, this was a ‘most exquisite and tender example’ of a late phase in Titian’s art, when he favoured ‘darker, almost hueless, pigment lit as it were from within by murky and fitful fires … attaining thereby to a depth and mystery like Rembrandt’.²²

Dissenting voices are not easily detected in the early twentieth century, but Harold Isherwood Kay, annotating the catalogue of the National Loan Exhibition held at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1913–14, faintly praised the painting as ‘pretty’ and added that it was ‘a little weak’.²³ Cecil Gould, when he came to catalogue the painting in the 1950s, clearly [page 271]felt unable to share in the general enthusiasm, and merely considered it as ‘accepted and acceptable as a work of his old age’.²⁴

Provenance

Bisenzo Collection, Rome, where seen by Cavalcaselle; Lord Ward (later Earl of Dudley) c. 1843, and certainly by 1850 (see p. 453). Bought by Ludwig Mond at the Dudley sale,Christie’s, London, on 25 June 1892, lot 89, for 2,400 guineas (£2,520)²⁵ and bequeathed by him to the National Gallery, which received the painting on the death of his widow (who retained a life interest in it) in 1924.

Prints

The painting is reproduced in a three‐block chiaroscuro woodcut (fig. 2) measuring 21.6 × 16.2 cm. Recorded by Bartsch as after Andrea del Sarto, it was, when published as such in the volume of the Illustrated Bartsch devoted to prints of this kind which appeared in 1983,²⁶ recognised as after the National Gallery’s painting by more than one scholar.²⁷ If, as is easily assumed, this print was made in Venice in the last decades of the sixteenth century, it suggests that the painting must have been well known then.

The painting was certainly reproduced in an engraving inscribed ‘Petrus de lode iunior fecit’ which was published in Paris by A. Bonenfant under royal licence (fig. 1).²⁸ Pieter de Jode the Younger (1604–?1674) was working for Bonenfant in 1631/2, which is a probable date for the print. It must certainly have been made before the death of Pieter’s father in 1634, after which the ‘iunior’ was no longer used. ‘Titian Inv’ is inscribed on the right side of the legend, which is chiefly taken up by a Latin quatrain on the Holy Virgin and the significance of her milk. The print seems likely to have been made with direct reference to the original painting, which may therefore have been in Paris or in the Low Countries around 1630. Pieter de Jode was admitted to the Antwerp guild in 1628/9. He is not known to have visited Italy.

Both woodcut and engraving extend the format of the painting, which may reflect the fact that the canvas had already been lengthened. The similarities between the prints are suspect. There is no detail in the woodcut which is certainly derived from the painting, whereas several details are closer to the engraving – especially the Child’s fingers. Neither the woodcut nor the engraving includes the fringe of the Virgin’s veil. One print derives from the other and, since the woodcut excludes the curtain, it must be the later work (reversing the composition back to its original direction), therefore the woodcut was made not in the sixteenth century but in the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth. Caroline Karpinski kindly informs me that she will date the woodcut to the seventeenth century on grounds of style in her forthcoming catalogue volume for the Illustrated Bartsch.²⁹

Copies

Copies of the painting are not uncommon. One such was exported in 1943; others have appeared at auction: lot 117 at Christie’s, London, on 6 February 1953; lot 43 at Sotheby’s, London, on 15 December 1954; and lot 60 at Sotheby’s, London, on 11 April 1968 (fig. 3). Of these, the third mentioned (the one sold in 1954) was horizontal in format and seemed to Gould to be painted in a style more like that of Titian’s maturity. But none of the pictures attempts to imitate the artist’s late manner.

Several examples of the composition, with a saint added to the right and the left to form a Sacra Conversazione, are recorded: one was in the collection of Gustave Gluck;³⁰ another, very schematic in character, was in the Worcester Art Museum;³¹ and a third was published in 1928 as an original by Titian by Hadeln, the great scholar of Venetian art. This last work is a fascinating document in the history of taste, which cannot be dismissed as an aberration of Hadeln’s since The Burlington Magazine agreed to publish it. To Hadeln it seemed reminiscent of Cézanne (with whom it was then, of course, even more distinguished to be associated than with Byzantine mosaics or with Rembrandt) and as Gould later mischievously observed it almost looked as if it had been painted by him.³² It was surely a modern interpretation of Titian made for modernists and as such interesting to compare with the painting exhibited by Vanessa Bell at the Storran Gallery in February 1939 as one of a series of ‘paraphrases’ by ‘about twenty artists’.³³

Exhibitions and Loans

Dublin 1853, Exhibition Hall, Merrion Square, Irish Industrial Exhibition (93); Dublin 1854, Irish Institution, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts (101);³⁶ London 1871, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition (331); London 1894, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition (110); London 1913–14, Grosvenor Gallery (47); London 2003, National Gallery (35); Madrid 2003, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Frame

There seems to be no trace or record of the frame or frames in which the painting was displayed when it was in the Dudley and Mond collections. Its present frame was chosen for it by Philip Hendy,³⁴ presumably in 1962 after a relining had altered the size. It is a gilt cassetta frame with a fluted outer moulding of a pattern typical of Tuscany in the early seventeenth century.³⁵ The frame has certainly been reduced in size and the collision of the flutes at the corners has been masked with smudged putty. Some at least of the clumsy rosettes and piecrust cherubim with awkward foliate attachments in the flat are surely remade. The toning layer, as well as muffling the gilding, conceals the alterations. Old frames with coarse ornament and matt, often repellent, textures were much favoured for modern paintings in the mid‐twentieth century and perhaps seemed appropriate for the rough late style of Titian as well.

Notes