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Titian's most important subject was Charles V, whom he met in 1530, the year Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor was so taken with the artist that when Titian dropped a brush during a sitting, the ruler himself picked it up. Titian protested, but Charles replied, "Titian is worthy of being served by Caesar." In addition to captivating the state, Titian also wooed the church. In Rome, he encountered the older Michelangelo, who admired the Venetian's style and color but said it was a pity Titian never learned to draw properly. Pope Paul III, an art lover, divided work between the two rivals. He pressed Michelangelo for The Last Judgment, but asked Titian to do his portraits.
The power of portraiture continues, though with a 200-year interruption (sorry, Rembrandt) with Portraits Public, Portraits Private, 17701830, Oct. 4 to Jan. 8 at Paris' Galeries Nationale du Grand Palais (then Feb. 3 to April 20 at London's Royal Academy and on to the Guggenheim in New York City). The first room dramatically contrasts a full-length George Washington by Gilbert Stuart with a portrait of George III by Thomas Lawrence. The contrasts continue: Antoine François Callet presents Louis XVI on the eve of the French Revolution, resplendently effete in ermine, velvet and Old Regime wig; while Jacques-Louis David shows a uniformed, hair-combed-forward Napoleon in his well-appointed office working, as the clock and the spent candles testify, until after 4 a.m.
Thus an important theme is set for the rest of this 140-work blockbuster. Between 1790 and 1830, political upheaval and the rise of industrialism put a new emphasis on the individual, both aristocratic and bourgeois. Demand for portraits exploded, and painters and sculptors got rich satisfying this new market.
The democratic spirit infused public portraits with a sense of the private person, as in François Gérard's sumptuous rendering of Napoleon's stepdaughter and sister-in-law, Queen Hortense of Holland, holding the hand of her little son. At the same time pictures of less exalted men and women often took on regal attributes, as in the startling portrait of Mrs. Abington — actress and former prostitute — by Joshua Reynolds. Though her fine silks, elegantly powdered coiffure and cute dog follow contemporary conventions depicting nobles, the fact that she leans on the back of a Chippendale chair and has her thumb seductively touching her lips definitely do not.
Critics during that era were not always enthusiastic about the expansion of portraiture to society's lesser ranks. "What is tedious and sometimes revolting is to find a crowd of busts, portraits of anonymous men these faces seem to say: I have paid out of pride to be here on the canvas or in marble," one contemporary observer wrote. Clearly, a man behind even his own times.