Acquisition of the year: Venus anadyomene by Titian at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Apollo, Dec, 2003

This year, the two museum acquisitions that have attracted the most publicity have also coincidentally shared the peculiar distinction of not yet having reached the institutions in pursuit of them. In consequence, neither is eligible to be our Acquisition of the Year.

In the case of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, it remains entirely unclear whether it is destined to stay at the National Gallery (where it is still on loan) or head across the seas to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and--according to some reports--there is even a remote possibility that an exasperated Duke of Northumberland may simply decide to keep it, although presumably not in order to return it to the obscurity of the corridor at Alnwick from which it was plucked thanks to the eagle eye of Dr. Nicholas Penny (formerly of the National Gallery). The uncertainties surrounding the Portrait of Omai by Sir Joshua Reynolds are of a different order: it was sold at auction by the Honourable Simon Howard of Castle Howard, and has been refused an export licence. The Tate received exceptionally generous financial support from a private--and resolutely anonymous--benefactor, which means it may still be in a position to make an offer acceptable to Omai's new owner, but it remains to be seen whether it will come to rest at Millbank or whether it will be retained in this country by its proud--and no less anonymous--purchaser. In the meantime, the acquisition of what is arguably an even more distinguished work of art than either of these two magnificent pictures has gone almost unnoticed, principally because it was so painlessly managed.

There are numerous more extensive private collections in existence than that of the Duke of Sutherland, but even if one includes the Royal Collection--which is generally regarded as a case apart--it is not clear that anyone can boast a better top ten. The Duke has at least two Raphaels that many of us would rank above the Madonna of the Pinks, as well as Poussin's second set of The Seven Sacraments, and a stupendously gloomy late Rembrandt Self-portrait. Nevertheless, not even this roll-call of masterpieces can compare with the best of the Duke's Titians. Titian is all but unique among painters by virtue of never having fallen out of favour, but this year two remarkably impressive exhibitions in the National Gallery and the Prado (for which, see p. 9) have only added to his prominence. The only Sutherland picture to be lent to either, the Three Ages of Man, was one of the undoubted stars of the London show, even in a room that also housed the Bacchanals painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino d'Alabastro in Ferrara. By contrast, the two great late mythologies-the Diana and Actaeon and the Diana and Callisto--remained at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, where they have been on loan since 1945. So did the Holy Family with St John the Baptist--a fine enough work, but the least impressive of the group--and the Venus anadyomene (Fig. 1), which was at that time in the process of being acquired.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Venus is currently one of the stars of 'Saved', the exhibition at the Hayward celebrating the National Art Collections Fund's centenary, so this is the moment for north o' the border-shy sassenachs to see what they have been missing. It is generally agreed that it must date from around 1520-25, which would make it more or less contemporary with the two paintings of Venus executed for Count Nicola Maffei of Mantua by Correggio. When it comes to painting sensual female nudes, Correggio is Titian's main rival in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the obvious comparisons are between the standing Venus in Correggio's so-called School of Love and Titian's Venus anadyomene, and between the reclining Venus in Corrreggio's so-called Jupiter and Antiope and the foreground nude in Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians.

In both instances, it less clear than might be expected that Titian outstrips his rival in the representation of rapturous abandon, here principally because the goddess looks away to one side, and indeed this confrontation is above all instructive because it allows us to recognise that Titian's Venus is decorous as well as luscious. The iconography of the newborn goddess wringing out her hair is classically sanctioned, and either Titian--or at the very least his patron or an adviser--must have been familiar with the reference in Pliny the Younger's Natural History to a painting by the legendary Apelles of precisely this subject. In order to avoid the narrative movement that Botticelli essayed in his Birth of Venus, Titian has deliberately made the figure as static as possible, and has separated her from the cockle-shell that wafted her in to land. Instead, the shell is represented floating by her side, but on far too diminutive a scale ever to have served as her chariot, and has undergone the kind of shrinkage often visited upon the identifying attributes of saints in this period.

The other classicising touch is the way the goddess is presented almost as if she were an antique sculptural fragment, in literal terms, this is a simple consequence of the water reaching halfway up her thighs, but as a matter of fact even marine Venuses are habitually represented full length. Here, the truncation occurs at the sort of place where a marble statue might actually break in two, and the way the legs function as a single unit only adds to this impression. Further up, the arms are of course separated from the body, but even they do not stray far from the central block. The theme may well have been suggested to Titian, but the opportunities it offered not just to bring to life an expanse of female flesh, but especially to show hair falling caressingly across that flesh, made it the perfect subject for the painter of the Doria Salome and the Galleria Borghese's so-called Sacred and Profane Love. Nobody would deny that Titian painted many even more remarkable pictures than the Venus anadyomene, but that happy circumstance does not make this particular canvas any less worthy a winner of the title of APOLLO'S Acquisition of the Year for 2003.