The Poetics of Titian's Religious Paintings

This book examines issues of sensuality and violence in Titian's religious paintings in context of the changing religious climate of sixteenth-century Venice. Titian's literary friends struggled with the same issues of decorum in their writings. Many writers had books banned, or were tried for heresy, while others became Inquisitors. D'Elia has assembled a catalog documenting Titian's relationships with over sixty writers. She reveals that Titian, like many of the writers he knew, did not distinguish between sacred or secular subjects, instead using different decorum for paintings of different sizes, locations, or subjects. Titian painted according to the principles of genre: high subjects requiring grandiloquent rhetoric, pastoral ones humility, tragic martyrdom with violence, and the passion of the Magdalene, eroticism. Titian's decorous, but hardly restrained paintings became central models for Baroque painting, which suggests new ways to interpret the Counter Reformation and art.