Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice

Women of desire: female nudes in Venice

Women in peril

During his long career, Titian would work on representations of classical myths in which women found themselves in danger, such as Lucretia being raped by Tarquin or Andromeda given over to the monster. He reenacts the scene of the rape of Lucretia through a stark, palpable depiction, in which the viewer is made to participate.
Unlike Titian, Tintoretto never relied on a classical text but rather on a more personal vision. In his representation of the rape of Lucretia the scene is one of violence—everything seems to crumble beneath the man’s onslaught as he tears away Lucretia’s last remaining garments in her precarious situation, body hurled forward.
For Veronese, timing was all-important. In the Lucretia drama he chooses to depict not the instant of the rape, as do Titian and Tintoretto, but the moment just prior to the young woman’s suicide. In Perseus and Andromeda, the woman is already aware of her salvation. Elegance of line and harmony of color soften the drama.

Women of desire: female nudes in Venice

Women on offer

In the sixteenth century, Venice was famous for its freethinking, but erotic images were prohibited in public; Titian’s prestigious nudes were therefore reserved for a closed circle of (often foreign) patrons. Titian’s profane nudes are imbued with great sensuality, even if they are based upon mythological themes and are in keeping with the codes of representation. While being freely inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the pictorial program of the poesie (mythological scenes) painted for Philip II corresponds to a dialectic of love—requited or rejected, happy or tragic—and also allowed Titian to answer to the pre-eminence of painting over sculpture.
Neither Veronese, Tintoretto, nor indeed any other of his youthful “rivals” would manage to equal Titian. Veronese treated profane themes in a more classical, more sculptural vein—a style of great chromatic richness but much less sensual. Tintoretto abandoned nudes offered to delight the viewer’s gaze in favor of dramatic compositions full of movement. His rare representations of female nudes contain few sensual poetic elements.

Women of desire: female nudes in Venice

Female subjects as decorative elements

While we do not know for sure whether they are decorative elements from wedding chests, dressers, or wall panels, there exist a large number of small rectangular or oblong panels generally depicting scenes from mythology, antiquity, or the Bible in which female subjects are portrayed with great sensuality.
Probably commissioned, these panels appear to have been painted in the early years of artists such as Schiavone, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Sustris, sometimes brought together to work on the same décor, just as each was finding his own voice. Such works are evidence of great sophistication in ornament.