Titian - The Entombment

The canvas was commissioned by Philip II in 1559 and was sent to him in the same year. It has capital importance in the development of Titian's style. The portrayal of the tragedy, which the painter had masterfully achieved in epic form in a youthful work now in the Louvre, is here shown in terms of a living, suffering participation to which the pictorial language is extraordinarily appropriate.

It is significant that the bearded Joseph of Arimathea, who supports the body of Christ, is more than probably a self-portrait. Knowingly composed, the figures are distributed in a fan-like scheme and are racked by spasms of grief. But it is the colour that controls all the elements, starting from the livid body of Christ and from the white shroud falling over the side of the tomb, which is decorated with bas-reliefs. The last are the only unessential, ornamental notes in this tragic group. The bloodless body of Christ and the weight of His listless arm are unforgettable.

Unforgettable, too, is the figure of the Magdalen. Most extraordinary, however, is how colour creates the individual figures, so that the space is reduced, attenuated and leaves us breathless. Dvorak rightly suggested that in this moment Titian, "renouncing the intoxication of the senses of his youthful works, had sought to find himself in a higher and more remote region of the spirit."

There is much to say about Titian's sense of religion, which is not to be confused with any didactic or pietistic zeal of the type that activated Counter-Reformation policy in the arts and was urged on him by some patrons - as exemplified in a canvas in the Prado titled Spain Succouring Religion which in fact consists of two feminine beauties counterpoised, one richly dressed, the other nude. Yet a dramatic concept of humanity in terms of its myths and its history, and of the nature that seems to echo it, is more and more apparent in the works of the last period, from the late Entombment and St. Lawrence, also in the Prado, to the St. Sebastian in St. Petersburg and Apollo and Marsyas in Kormeriz, Czech Republic.