Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
Titian: The Sacred and Profane
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Titian's Women
by Rona Goffen
Yale University Press, 342 pp., $60.00
Tiziano: Amor Sacro e Amor Profano
edited by Maria Grazia Bernardini
Milan: Electa, 471 pp., (out of print)
Tiziano Vecellio was one of the European painters who achieved truly international stature in his own day, like Raphael before him and Rubens afterward, and like both those artists he owed a good deal of his fame to his singular ability at portraying women. A distinguished scholar of Italian art, and especially the art of Venice, Rona Goffen brings knowledge and passion to the subject of Titian's women. She has also brought to this enterprise the ravening appetite for 'new approaches' that has now become a characteristic feature of professional art-historical writing. Taken as a whole, Titian's Women addresses its shifty subject (who are Titian's women?) with a dizzying unevenness. Were books conversations, this one would be deeply engaging for its range of ideas—good, bad, and brilliant—but books make other, peculiar demands on their writers. Above all, as sustained monologues, books need to anticipate the questions we ask in conversation, especially the questions that help to keep a voluble speaker on track.
Review, 4412 words
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