Titian, Madonna of the Pesaro Family, 1519-26, oil on canvas, 16′ x 9′ (Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Church of the Frari in Venice, and we’re looking at Titian’s “Pesaro Altarpiece.”
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:10] Right now where we’re looking at it is in a chapel right next to the altar, but originally, and for a long time, this painting stood on a wall along the left side of the nave.
Dr. Zucker: [0:21] This is important, because it was in back of the altar of the Pesaros, and people would come and pray to it as they walked directly up to it, but also many people would walk by it on their way to the high altar, and so people would see it at a kind of angle, and this is something that Titian took into account.
Dr. Harris: [0:40] Titian had painted the “Assumption of the Virgin” before this for the altar of this church, so he was very familiar with walking its spaces, and he would have thought about the line of sight as one approached this painting from the left.
[0:55] You can see how that makes total sense. The Virgin looks down past Saint Peter toward the patron, Jacopo Pesaro, at the lower left of the painting.
Dr. Zucker: [1:06] Now, Jacopo Pesaro was the leader of the papal navy, and he had won a significant victory against the Turks. This was seen as a Christian victory over Islam.
Dr. Harris: [1:18] You can see the coat of arms of the pope in the banner that’s carried on the left.
Dr. Zucker: [1:22] There are also the coat of arms of the Pesaro family. We can see a prisoner of war wearing a turban.
Dr. Harris: [1:27] And a soldier behind him. We understand this as giving thanks for a military victory.
Dr. Zucker: [1:33] That soldier in the background has been interpreted by some as possibly being Saint George. Saint George is often seen as being victorious over evil. So what we have is a Western Christian viewpoint very much rooted in the thinking of the 16th century.
Dr. Harris: [1:49] When we think about this type of painting, we might remember Bellini’s “San Giobbe Altarpiece” or “San Zaccaria Altarpiece,” both important precedents in Venetian painting, that idea of the Madonna and child surrounded by saints.
[2:04] Of course, this painting also includes the donor, Jacopo Pesaro, on the left, and his family on the right. It’s different than a straightforward sacra conversazione.
Dr. Zucker: [2:14] It’s different from a traditional painting by Bellini in a lot of ways, in large part because of the way that it is offset. Look at the angle that the architecture comes towards us. The Virgin Mary is not enthroned dead center.
[2:27] Instead, she’s up high, as she has always been, but she looks down to her right, while Christ looks down to his left to Saint Francis, who in turn offers the Pesaro family up to the Virgin, up to Christ. On the other side, we see Saint Peter, a key at his feet. He seems to be making a notation in a kind of register of those that are permitted into heaven.
Dr. Harris: [2:50] He looks down at Jacopo Pesaro as a mediator or intercessor between him and the Virgin. The pairing of the Virgin’s head moving one way and Christ moving the other, giving us that sense of divided attention between these two important groups in this painting. We think that the two columns, which are so large here, were not painted by Titian, but were added later.
Dr. Zucker: [3:16] What they do is obscure a barrel vault that would have rose up the right wall and then disappeared somewhere near the apex of the painting. What is important for me is the color. Look at the vividness of that blue. Look at the vividness of the gold, especially worn by Saint Peter. That gold is right in the center near that white book. Then, on three sides of that, we have this brilliant red.
Dr. Harris: [3:39] Unlike the spiritual figures in this painting, who sit on those stairs in the court of heaven, Mary high up on the top step as though on the throne of heaven, the spiritual figures in the painting are all filled with movement and dramatic energy.
[3:55] The patron and his family are in profile. They have a flatness to them. They register to our eye as occupying a different world. Except, of course, for the youngest member of the Pesaro family who looks out at us.
Dr. Zucker: [4:09] That’s Leonardo Pesaro.
Dr. Harris: [4:11] You can see that the way that Mary moves, the way that Christ moves, and even the way that Peter moves, in their elegance and in the complexity of their bodies is very High Renaissance and can remind us of the work of Raphael or Leonardo. There’s a fluidity there.
Dr. Zucker: [4:31] There’s also a wonderful playfulness. Look at the Christ Child, the way that he lifts Mary’s veil and encloses himself in that.
Dr. Harris: [4:38] Like a halo.
Dr. Zucker: [4:39] Like a halo, and the way a child really would play around his mother.
Dr. Harris: [4:44] He does look as though he needs to be held back. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for Mary’s anxiousness for Christ’s future.
Dr. Zucker: [4:51] If you look closely, Christ’s left foot is up. He’s about to take a step out of Mary’s palm. Some art historians have seen that stepping as a precursor of the moment when Christ steps out of the tomb. So even shown here as a child, we have this view forward of the triumphant end when Christ is resurrected.
Dr. Harris: [5:16] Look at that brilliant illumination on Saint Peter and on Mary, the light coming from the left. From the direction of the entrance of the church. From the direction we would approach this painting, which unified our space with the spiritual space of the figures.
Dr. Zucker: [5:32] That’s done in part through a really complex geometry of this painting. There’s this pyramidal composition that brings our eye not only up towards the Virgin Mary and Christ but also deeper into this pictorial space of the painting.
Dr. Harris: [5:45] You could see also a pyramid with Peter at its apex, too. With the donors on either side. A compositional shape [that] is often used in the High Renaissance.
Dr. Zucker: [5:55] Look at the way that the mass of the flag helps to offset and balance the mass of the Virgin Mary.
Dr. Harris: [6:02] The sense of illumination. The depth of the color. All of this only possible, of course, with oil paint, which Titian is a master of.
Dr. Zucker: [6:11] There’s another painting that Titian must have seen, it’s just off the nave in a side chapel near the cloister, by Paolo Veneziano.
Dr. Harris: [6:21] A painter from the 14th century in Venice. It shows a very similar image, with the Virgin and Child, two saints and two donors. Like the Titian, Mary and Christ tilt their heads and move in different directions.
Dr. Zucker: [6:36] There’s also, just like in the “Pesaro Altarpiece,” an image of Saint Francis, who is shepherding the donor to Christ and the Virgin Mary. Titian would have been familiar with this painting. We see a painting that looks in no way like the Titian, but that has subject elements that are very similar.
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