Venice in Edinburgh: 'The age of Titian' at the National Gallery of Scotland brings together works from renaissance Venice with a Scottish provenance, and includes several exciting discoveries as well as familiar masterpieces. Caroline Campbell reviews a major highlight of the year's exhibitions

Apollo, Sept, 2004 by Caroline Campbell

Immediately after World War II the Duke of Sutherland placed a superlative group of paintings on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland. Among these were a number of Titians, including two renowned poesie, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, dispatched to Philip II of Spain in 1559. These great paintings are at the heart of 'The age of Titian', curated by Sir Timothy Clifford, Peter Humfrey, Aidan Weston-Lewis and Michael Bury. But this ambitiously conceived and lavishly presented exhibition aims to celebrate the whole range of Venetian Renaissance art through its acquisition by Scottish collectors.

'The age of Titian' is indebted to two earlier exhibitions, 'Le Sicle du Titien' and 'The Genius of Venice'. (1) Unlike these precedents, 'The age of Titian' includes both fine and decorative arts. Paintings, drawings, textiles, prints, ceramics, books, sculpture and metalwork, lent from British, European and American collections, are among the 249 exhibits. Covering the main areas of artistic activity in Venice and the Veneto during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they range from very small objects, such as a wax Medallion of Titian and his son Orazio, to the almost four-metre wide Hunting scene attributed to Beccaruzzi.

However, it is the paintings, well displayed in the top-lit galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy, that really give the show its focus. The exhibition begins with works by Bartolomeo Vivarini and Giovanni Bellini, and moves swiftly to the new style of Titian and Giorgione, exemplified by the problematic Christ and the Adulteress from Glasgow, attributed here convincingly to Titian, due to resonances with his Padua frescoes. The next five rooms move chronologically and thematically through Titian and his contemporaries in the early sixteenth century: paintings for palaces; portraiture; religious and secular genre paintings; and the Counter-Reformation. It ends with a gallery devoted to old age, both of sitters and artists.

There is a further significant difference between this exhibition and any of its predecessors. It is the first Old Master exhibition drawn exclusively from objects with a Scottish provenance, and this gives it visual novelty. As Peter Humfrey's catalogue essay argues, the Scots did not differ from the European mainstream in their artistic tastes: they preferred works attributable to masters whose reputation has never faltered, such as Titian and Veronese. Some of these collections are not widely known, and the exhibition contains a number of noteworthy new discoveries and interesting attributions. Several of these are contentious. It is hard to accept some of the paintings here attributed at least partially to Titian (such as Doge Dona, from Mount Stuart), even given the variety of his workshop production. In particular, comparison with the group of child portraits assembled in London last year, (2) makes the partial attribution of the portrait of Two boys to Titian difficult in sustain.

But other--and less familiar--objects from Scottish collections are both interesting in themselves and cast new light onto well-known works of art. Lotto's powerful Portrait of a man, probably an architect, is an important find, although somewhat compromised by condition. A fine and rarely seen Portrait of a man by Moroni, exhibiting his characteristic disparity between head and body, is perhaps even stronger than the two more conventional and grand portraits by the same artist which flank it. Among the fine works on paper displayed in a separate suite of rooms, Palma Vecchio's sensitive chalk Self-portrait, Lotto's Portrait of a bearded man and a pair of preparatory drawings by Battista Franco for an altarpiece stand out. Also worthy of mention is the star of the print show, Sanuto's ambitious three-plate engraving of Apollo and Marsyas, which provides the vista for these galleries.

Upstairs, Veronese's mid-period Adoration of the Shepherds is more appealing than such familiar paintings as the Getty Baptism of Christ and Washington's Martyrdom of St Lucy, while the interesting group of Leandro Bassanos might encourage a re-assessment of one of the youngest members of tiffs great artistic dynasty. Perhaps the artist best served by this exhibition is Paris Bordon, one of the most famous painters of his day, but underestimated in England because there are few good examples of his work in public collections. Two lovely compositions of the Virgin and Child with Saints in a landscape in Room Two make strong counterpoints to similar paintings by Titian and Francesco Vecellio. In Room Five, Bordon's Courtesans with a procuress and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt are not outdone by Jacopo Bassano's early masterpiece, the Adoration of the Kings.

The main challenge lacing the curators of 'The age of Titian' is how to create a sense of visual unity, since great works such as the Sutherland Titians have a tendency to undermine all competition. Much thought has been devoted to visitors making connections throughout the exhibition, and there are some clever visual juxtapositions. For example, a fine enamelled copper dish draws attention to similar jewel-like colours in the small paintings displayed nearby'. It is also fascinating to see Leandro Bassano's fine Portrait of a widow at her devotions, beside a small devotional painting of a type pictured in the image. Equally informative is the placement of Niccolo Fiorentino's Virgin and Child relief above Giovanni Bellini's paintings of the same subject.