Titian Read Free

picture
A Boy with Dogs
. There’s no other painting like it, and I tend to agree with the experts who mostly dismiss the idea that this is a detail taken from a larger canvas. What we see is more or less what the old man meant us to see. A boy – how old do you think he is? Three? Four at the most? – alone in a dark landscape with two dogs and two young pups (perhaps four weeks old?). The boy puts his arm round the white dog – who, I guess, is male – for reassurance. The mother, the bitch, is the only one looking at us, and the pups have nosed their way through the fur to her teats.
    Despite the dusk, the scene is calm, peaceful,
comblé
as the French would say. Nobody wants anything more.
    The dogs are the boy’s family. I would even say parents. The boy’s legs and the two visible legs of the white dog are like four legs of the same table – practically interchangeable. Everyone is waiting – which is to say living.
    Isn’t waiting the essential occupation of dogs? Learnt maybe because of their proximity to humans. Waiting for the next event or the next arrival. Here the last important event, it seems, was birth. Pups and boy born into this bitch of a life. Born to wait for death. Yet meanwhile there’s warmth, milk, the mysteries of the fur, and eyes which are speechless.
    The old man, of course, wanted your sympathy. No, not sympathy, your interest. Because if you were interested, youwould pose for him, and he wanted to paint you! Painting women, he forgot his doubt. But each time he forgot, he was adding to his worry. All the women he painted – from Adriane to the Repentant Magdalene – represented this worry, which wasn’t about women. Each one consoled and at the same time reinforced his worry.
    The painting with the dogs is about the consolation. It’s a honeyed painting. It’s about bliss. The pups have discovered bliss in the fur – as Jove will never find it with Danaë or Danaë with Jove.
    Meanwhile the other three (the boy and the two adult dogs) are waiting … And the two waiting dogs, watching, are the old man’s accomplices. They are the nearest he can find to what he has dreamt of painting and to what he paints with. They can bite and they are innocent.
    I love you, John
    ATHENS
    John
,
    I try to find an answer to the question ‘What made him paint?’ And I can hear only one word, coming from all the chaos of physical matter, as if from the bottom of a black well.
    Desire. His desire (as befits an eminently virile painter) was, if not to cut into appearances, at least to penetrate and lose himselfin the skin of things. Yet, being human and being a painter, he came up against the impossibility of doing this: the heart of nature, the animal in humans, the world’s pelt can never be seized, and, above all, they are unrepeatable, unreproducible. And so, for a while, like many of his contemporaries, he used his skill to show that everything was vanity,
vanitas vanitatis
: beauty, wealth, art.
    The women in his pictures – or rather
the
Titian woman, with her special simplicity and innocence – is to him a relentless reminder of his artistic impotence and defeat. Him the master! Perhaps it was women who embodied the doubt you talk about? Naked, the colours of their flesh are for drowning in. Never have the painted bodies of women demanded as much as his do, to be touched, to be pressed with the hands – as Mary Magdalene presses her hand through her hair against her own breast. Yet like all other bodies in paintings across the whole world, those painted by Titian can be neither touched nor plunged into.
    Gradually, he came to understand that in the very impotence of his art (this art which continually underlined the virility of the men it depicted), there might be a hidden miracle. With the sables and bristles of his brushes – instead of rendering the texture of the world’s hide – he could