'These marvellous ancient stones': Tiziano in Rome (1545-1546)

CYCLE: Artists' Journeys and Stays in Rome 
SPEAKER: Marsel Grosso, Associate Professor of History of Modern Art, University of Padua
DATE: Thursday 4 July, 6 p.m.

Between the autumn of 1545 and the summer of 1546, Tiziano travelled to Rome as the guest of Pope Paul III and his powerful nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, with the expectation of obtaining an ecclesiastical benefice for his son Pomponio.
In Rome, his enthusiasm was all for classical art, which he was privileged to see under the guidance of Giorgio Vasari and Sebastiano del Piombo. Despite the lack of graphic documents relating to this sojourn amidst the ruins of ancient monuments and art collections, some passages from letters by Cardinal Pietro Bembo, Pietro Aretino and Vasari's biography (1568) - which will be read and commented on during the lecture - are sufficiently explicit in this sense. It was precisely in the Urbe that Tiziano created one of the highest pages of style of his entire career, the Portrait of Paul III with his nephews Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese in Capodimonte, and on the secular painting side he completed the Danae, preserved in the same Neapolitan museum. It was around this masterpiece that Vasari created the evocative tale of his encounter with Michelangelo, all centred on the heated debate between drawing and colour, form and nature.

Marsel Grosso is Associate Professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Padua. Her areas of research concern Venetian painting and 16th century art literature, in particular Titian, whose critical fortune in Spanish Italy she has reconstructed, Vasari's relationship with Venetian figurative culture, and Tintoretto in the transition between the fourth and sixth decade of the 16th century, during which the painter's encounter with contemporary literature (Aretino, Doni, Sansovino) takes place.

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