The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections
Until December 5; Royal Scottish Academy

If you know anyone who thinks that all old oil paintings are brown and boring, get them along to The Age of Titian for a blast of fresh colour. Those Venetians knew how to blow away the cobwebs, with ice-cream pinks, vivid blues, and sumptuous reds. Titian’s paintings sizzle with unadulterated colour, the throbbing flesh tones luminescent and alive.

While Titian was the undoubted master, 16th century Venice was overflowing with painters of great talent and innovation, like Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto. There are stunning examples of their work here, illustrating the breadth of achievement in Venice at that time, but also clearly demonstrating their common devotion to colour.

This was the High Renaissance in Venice. In Florence and Rome, Michelangelo and Raphael were creating impeccably crisp figures, drawn with precision and scientific vigour. Their disegno contrasted with the shimmery, fluid, soft-edged paintings of Venetians, whose defining feature was colorito. Titian was king of colorito, learning from the classicised figures of Rome and Florence, but instead of incising them like cut-outs, he would mould his characters out of light and colour.

Oil paint was a relatively new medium in the 16th century, and Titian was the first to realise its full potential. The smoothness of egg tempera had forced painters to create polished pictures with a high degree of finish. Liberated by the joint freedoms of oil and canvas, artists could now play with texture and light, leaving thick brush marks if they wanted to, mixing wet and dry, and building layer upon layer of luminous oil.

All of these innovations are seen in two of Titian’s masterpieces, Diana and Acteon and Diana and Calisto, both mythological tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Both gave the artist plenty of scope for doing what he did best – painting fleshy, naked women in idyllic landscape settings. The two paintings are among the finest in the gallery’s permanent collection, but it is in this context, as stars of the show, that their power is really apparent.

The two Titians hang next to Paris Bordon’s newly rediscovered Christ and the Centurion, and the three paintings together are a lesson in difference. Although painted virtually at the same time, Bordon’s hard-edged crowd of figures is lined up in a row, like a clever group portrait. In comparison, Titian’s nymphs are a visual symphony, clustered in dynamic groups and very much a rhythmic part of the idealised countryside they inhabit.

It was during this period in Venice that painters learned how to let go. There are brush strokes in this show so exuberant that even the Impressionists, 300 years later, might have been tempted to smooth them out. The dress in Paolo Veronese’s Martyrdom and Last Communion of St Lucy is a wonderful example. Blood may be spurting from her bosom, but the untempered crimson slashes running through St Lucy’s satin gown create the most compelling drama.

It is a precious gift that so few of the paintings in the show are glazed. You can look at the colours and the brushstrokes without seeing yourself looking back. Another rare gift is the chance to see works previously unknown and unpublished. There is of course the rich and shadowy Salome, newly attributed to Titian and his workshop. But my favourite is Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of an Architect, which with its muted grey and black is perhaps the least colourful painting in the entire show.

The gowned man is a vast expanse of black, leaning so far to his right that he makes a triangle of himself. The background is nothing but space, and every aspect of this picture, down to the set square on the table, points to the structuring of space and volume. This painting has gone unnoticed till now, hanging above the mantelpiece in a private Scottish home. That is the sub-plot of the exhibition. Every single picture, at one time or another, has been in Scottish ownership, largely due to the good taste and opportunism of three 19th century Scottish dealers.

Venice was in the midst of social and political upheaval after revolution swept Europe, and the failing aristocracy was forced to sell its treasures. Their loss was our gain. Now of course we have our own failing aristocracy, and many of the paintings have found new homes around the world. Fortunately we’ve been allowed to borrow them back for a while, and the result is magnificent.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 08.08.04