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The marvelous thing about the Royal Academy's exhibition is the freshness and intelligence with which so much work is placed before the eye. This show is no routine "blockbuster," no flabby "Gold of the Gorgonzolas." It has been meticulously chosen by a committee of leading English and Italian scholars. It will open up areas of Venetian art that few but specialists were aware of. One is the print, part of the legacy of the 16th century publisher Aldus Minutius. The skill and beauty of the Aldine editions of illustrated works like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili fostered an unsurpassed quality in Venetian woodblock cutting. Indeed, Titian's twelve-sheet print The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red tonal vigor and grandeur of notation, is to woodcut what the Sistine Chapel is to fresco.
Inevitably, though, the big draw of the exhibition is the prints nor the admirable selection of drawings, but the paintings.
Their selection seems to have been shaped, as far as possible, by the desire to get away from the too familiar masterpieces. In this case, familiarity ought to mean immovability, since one would not want to imagine the Scuola di San Rocco lending its Tintorettos to England, or the Frari, in a fit of lunatic generosity, contributing its Titian Annunciation.
The outstanding painting in the exhibition has been all but lost to view for generations. It is Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, normally tucked away in a former episcopal palace in Kromefiz, Czechoslovakia.
This enormous late work casts its ghostly and turbulent shadow over the whole gallery where other Titians, Veroneses and Moronis hang. Its subject is probably the most repulsive in the classical lexicon: the implacably vain Apollo has beaten the satyr Marsyas in a music contest judged by the nine Muses; now he collects his forfeit, which is to skin Marsyas alive. Renaissance humanists turned this myth into a fable of reason triumphing over darker instincts, and it was in that sense that Titian meant to paint it.
It is hard to decide which is more horrible, the matter-of-factness of the Venetian lap dog, familiar from many a Carpaccio, licking up the satyr's blood, or the prim, detached attentiveness of Apollo as he peels the skin. Yet the whole unlikely scene is anchored by one riveting device: Titian must have seen boar hunts in the woods around his native Cadore, and the satyr is strung on the tree like a wild pig ready for dressing, every stiff hair on his matted legs contributing its realism to the myth. On the right is another of Apollo's victims: Midas, the Phrygian king who voted against Apollo in another music contest and was given ass's ears by the angry god. His face is Titian's self-portrait.
So much for the dignity of age. The marsh light that flickers over the figures, their darting, angled geometry of posture and gaze, the colors—lead, bronze and dirty raspberry—are all beyond praise.
Titian got wilder as he grew older, and his range, well represented in this show, now seems a wholly epic form of human character. It moves from the tenderness of his child portraits and the demure, precise eroticism of early works like Salome through the powerful confidence of his portraits and the majestic diction of the Escorial's recently cleaned Christ on the Cross, and so on to the late works.