Following the outstretched arms of the apostles, we look up to Mary and arrive at a circle of light.
Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] We’re in the church of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice, looking at the giant altarpiece by Titian of the Assumption of the Virgin.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:14] It’s 23 feet tall. It’s a big painting.
Dr. Harris: [0:17] That means that the figures at the bottom, the apostles who gesture up toward Mary, are over life-size.
Dr. Zucker: [0:23] There’s a frenetic quality to those apostles. We don’t even see the figure on the right in red’s face, but he reaches up, creating this wonderful entrance place for our eye. As he reaches up to Mary, so our eye reaches up to Mary.
[0:37] She has her arms open in a position of prayer, but also of acceptance to God the Father above her, whose arms are even more outstretched as he receives her in heaven. That’s precisely what the subject of the Assumption is. It is her moving from the physical world at her death and being assumed into heaven.
Dr. Harris: [0:59] You get the sense of the earthbound figures wanting to lift against the force of gravity and move with her up to heaven.
Dr. Zucker: [1:09] There’s an interesting play of scale here. As we look up to God, who is even further away, the scale doesn’t change, so he is even more massive and expands across the sky.
Dr. Harris: [1:22] The Virgin Mary looks somewhat foreshortened. We’re looking at her from below. Mary is encircled by a halo of golden light. Surrounding that are figures of angels supporting her on clouds.
[1:38] It is like a burst of spiritual golden light that emerges from the altar of this church, and it’s surrounded by Gothic windows. This circle of light is framed by yet another circle of real light.
Dr. Zucker: [1:53] There’s a wonderful way that Titian has taken a straight-on composition — remember [this] is over the high altar in the church. It is completely central. When you walk in, you look straight down the nave, right at this massive painting, and because it is so large, because you look at it so directly, it could become a symmetrical structure, but what the artist has done instead is to create asymmetry, even in the frieze of figures below because they gesticulate in so many varied ways.
[2:22] Mary is a series of soft arcs and diagonals. Look at the way that the shadow of her drape moves around her left arm and then moves diagonally across the front of her body, becoming a diagonal that offsets the centrality of this image.
Dr. Harris: [2:38] When you walk into the church, you look directly at it down the nave. In addition, it’s framed by a choir screen that has an arched opening, and so your gaze is directed toward this painting.
[2:53] It’s especially difficult to experience this painting and the other painting that Titian made for this church, the “Pesaro Madonna,” in a reproduction. These are paintings that need to be seen in situ.
Dr. Zucker: [3:04] They need to overwhelm you from their scale, from the richness of their color, and from the complexity of not only their theological programs but also their compositions.
[3:13] [music]
Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
The Renaissance altarpiece
Who is the audience for a work of art? The Assumption of the Virgin painted by Titian for the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice demonstrates the dual goals of many Renaissance altarpieces: to support liturgical functions within the church and, as an artwork, to address contemporary art theory—and critics. Artists crafting works for churches balanced the desires of the patron and church officials while also entering an object into an increasingly sophisticated cultural conversation about artworks as aesthetic objects that were valued for their artistic merits.
Mary surrounded by putti and angels (detail), Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
Altarpieces were prestigious commissions for artists working in 16th-century Italy. Sitting on or behind the altar, painted and sculpted altarpieces served to focus attention during the Eucharist, the ritual sacrament performed at the altar during the Catholic Mass worship service. Because altarpieces were typically located in publicly accessible spaces, artists could expect a large viewership interested in a new addition to the city’s art. In the early modern period, altarpieces demonstrated both artistic ambitions and served a specific religious function.
Assumption of the Virgin
Rising over twenty-two feet above the main altar, Titian’s Assumption inevitably attracts attention even within the cavernous Gothic space of the Frari church. Framed by the opening within the church’s stone rood screen, the painting can be seen from the main entrance. It depicts the Virgin Mary as she ascends to heaven from her deathbed. Christ’s apostles witness the miracle from below. Titian placed the Madonna on clouds, borne aloft by putti and angels, as she moves from the earthly realm of the apostles and the golden light of heaven.
Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice showing the rood screen with Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin at the center (photo: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The altarpiece relates the last episode of the Life of the Virgin Mary. As the hour of her death grew near, Christ’s apostles gathered at Mary’s deathbed. Versions varied until Pope Pius XII officially declared the Assumption one of the Marian dogmas of the Catholic Church in 1950. The Virgin Mary’s life ended in another miracle. At the moment of death, she directly ascended to heaven. Visual representations of the story sometimes emphasize her soul joining Christ and other times her entire physical body as well. The story underscores Mary’s special status in Catholicism as a person born without sin, an idea expressed by the Immaculate Conception of Mary that was made dogma officially in 1854. A century later, the Assumption of Mary was also declared to be Catholic dogma. Though these dogmas weren’t made official until centuries later, the stories were commonplace in the 16th century. Overall, Mary parallels Christ both through miraculous conception and bodily assumption into heaven.
Left: Virgin Mary with orant gesture, north side of Saint Mark’s Basilica, marble (Saint Mark’s Basilica, Venice); right: Mary with orant gesture (detail), Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
Composition and genres
Unlike other paintings of the same subject, Titian’s composition for the Assumption ambitiously combines previously separate approaches to altarpieces.
1. a devotional figure
Devotional images generally include only a single figure, who could be the focus of prayer. To ensure the figure of the Virgin could serve as a devotional image, Titian centered the Virgin Mary in the composition in a position ready to receive prayers from the congregation and petition God on their behalf. She stands in an orant gesture with raised arms and palms open. This was understood as an intercessory gesture—a worshipper would pray to the Virgin Mary who could then plead for the supplicant to Christ and God the Father. The orant gesture can be found widely in Byzantine icons and locally in Venice in the mosaics of the Basilica San Marco Church and relief sculptures on the church’s façade. Titian’s Madonna with raised arms therefore joins this Venetian iconographic tradition.
2. narrative or history painting
Titian pushes the painting into the genre of narrative or history painting (also known as istoria in Italian). On her toes, the Virgin steps forward as if approaching heaven of her own volition as well as God’s divine miracle. The centrifuge of putti seems to rotate as the babes writhe, limbs jutting out of the angelic ring. Adding to the impression of movement, its force billows the Virgin’s blue mantle and twists her red dress around her legs.
Left: Raphael, The Deposition, 1507, oil on wood panel, 179 x 174 cm (Borghese Gallery, Rome); right: Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
Narrative altarpieces had become prestigious as Italian art theory and writers such as Leon Battista Alberti established istoria (history painting) as primary and above other genres such as portraiture and still life. Considered intellectual and technically difficult, history paintings, which related stories from history, the Bible, or mythology, required multiple figures engaging in significant actions. Raphael’s The Deposition is a good example of this type of altarpiece.
Left: A sacra conversazione (detail), Giovanni Bellini, San Zaccaria Altarpiece, 1505, oil on wood transferred to canvas, 500 x 235 cm (San Zaccaria, Venice); right: Apostles witness Mary’s assumption in sacre conversazione (detail), Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
3. a sacred conversation (sacra conversazione)
The apostles in Titian’s Assumption will not say their final goodbyes at the Virgin’s deathbed, but instead witness her miraculous assumption into heaven. As characters who perform actions, the apostles are an integral part of the narrative; as holy saints, they can also be understood as forming a sacred conversation (sacra conversazione) type of altarpiece. This type of altarpiece, popular in Venice, gathered multiple saints together in a unified space even if they had not lived during the same historical time. A good example of this is Giovanni Bellini’s, San Zaccaria Altarpiece.
Commission & reception
Art historians have wondered what role commission stipulations played in the unusual composition of the Frari’s main altarpiece. There were more senior (and famous) artists in Venice. The choice of the younger Titian over Giovanni Bellini might be explained by the elder artist’s death on November 16, 1516. No contract for the Frari’s main altarpiece has survived. It is assumed the order’s prior, Fra Germano de Casale, organized the commission along with other altarpieces in the choir to focus on the Virgin Mary. [1] Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo mentions Germano’s name when recording the Assumption’s installation date as May 19, 1518. Titian did not return to Venice from Ferrara until April 1516 at the earliest, which implies a fast timeline for the production of the Assumption of the Virgin.
The stakes for Titian were high. When he received the commission, he would have known that the location alone conferred prestige on the project. The state of Venice granted the land to the Franciscan order in 1250 and their popularity was such that the church they built needed to be enlarged in the 14th century. As the most visible painting in one of the two most important mendicant churches in Venice, the main altarpiece not only had to function as a religious artwork, but as an expression of Venetian civic identity as well.
While the painting now enjoys near-universal acclaim, 16th-century arts writer Ludovico Dolce tells us the friars of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari initially struggled to make sense of Titian’s dynamic rendition of the Assumption of the Virgin before coming to appreciate Titian’s innovations. Titian’s solution for the Assumption of the Virgin iconography eventually became a standard model to imitate, reference, or work against.
