Portaiture

1334 Words3 Pages

As a principal painter in the Venice, Titian quickly became internationally famous for his commissioned larger portrait paintings that included personal accessories, which gave a deeper insight into each sitter. He was patronized by a large variance of people so his portraits additionally vary in both the gender of the sitter and the number of portraits within the painting. Titian began his portraits with commissions from the middle class, like his Portrait of a Man done in 1510. This portrait highlights Titian’s ability to use his artistic upbringing in Venetian colore to fully model the sitter’s sleeve to appear life-like. He models and highlights the sleeve so much that the blue silk seems to glisten right on the canvas. His puffy sleeve is also highlighted by the strong textural contrast to the parapet distinguishing between the viewer’s space and the subject’s space. In this portrait, the sitter’s sleeve overlaps onto the parapet and he emerges out of the shadow and into our space. This portrait displays the subject as man worthy of recognition who demands our attention as he makes eye contact with the viewer and moves towards the foreground. As seen in this portrait and many others, Titian did not use fanciful or distracting backgrounds but rather made them dull to attract more attention to both the sitter and the simple additions Titian adds to the sitter to build a character study. For this painting, the addition is the silky puffy sleeve, which alludes to his rising wealth and social status. Ultimately, Titian depicted the sitter with his typical style of a dignified and lordly appearance, even though the sitter is only from the rising middle class. But not all of Titian’s commissioned portraits were from the middle class... ... middle of paper ... ...ese’s application of bright colors and a strong light source to create a naturalistic sheen off the drapery. This material splendor really allowed Veronese to show off his variance in brush stroke from the sweeping design of the furs to the strong and tight brush stroke modeling of the drapery. Additionally, Veronese depicts Livia as continuously chaste by including her daughter in the portrait. After marriage, women were expected to remain chaste which mean that sexual activity was meant only for procreation. A child is a living object to signify that the sitter is still chaste in her marriage by producing children. This portrait, along with the marriage portrait, was a chance for Veronese to depict a noble woman and gain the favor of his patrons through his use of color to show opulent fashion and little details that hint at the strongly required female chastity.

Open Document