After months of closures, museums were slowly starting to reopen, so I took my birthday off work and planned a few days out. My first stop was the Titian: Love, Desire, Death exhibition at the National Gallery.
Organised by the National Gallery, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Museo Nacional del Prado, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, the exhibition brings together all six paintings in the series commissioned by Philip of Spain, the future King Philip II, in 1551. Philip requested Titian, who at the time was the most famous painter in Europe, to produce a group of paintings representing classical myths, taken mostly from the Metamorphoses of the poet Ovid.
The paintings include ‘Diana and Actaeon’ and ‘Diana and Callisto’, works owned jointly by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland; ‘Venus and Adonis’, owned by the Prado, Madrid; ‘Danaë’, in the care of English Heritage and usually displayed at Apsley House; ‘Rape of Europa’, belonging to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and ‘Perseus and Andromeda’, part of the Wallace Collection.
The exhibition is certainly about quality rather than quantity; Titian described the works as his ‘poesie’, a visual equivalent of poetry, and they are certainly impressive even to a non-art expert like me. They are dramatic and full of detail, powerfully conveying a range of emotions: anger, shame, lust, guilt, sadness.
