Leseprobe

51 The imposing appearance of a bearded man in his full maturity looms up in front of us and looks slightly down on the viewer from out of the picture (ill. 1). The portrayed man is wearing the long toga of black vel- vet (vesta) over a white shirt and blue silk gown that makes him recognizable as a citizen (cittadino) of Venice of the early modern era. He has placed his right hand on a stole (beco) that he has befittingly thrown over his left shoulder. The wide sleeves (dogalina) of the arm resting on a piece of furniture reveal the lining (zendado) of black silk that was worn in Venice during the warm months of the year. 1 He is also holding a dark green palm leaf that rises up over his shoulder and stands out against the brown-green wall behind him. On the left, a narrow, framed window shines like a prismatic crack of light and offers a view of the land- scape. Using a broad brush and dry color, the artist actually needs very little to capture an ephemeral evening mood. Dark brown trees tower up above the low, misty horizon and appear like silhouettes against the yellow, ocher-colored clouds glowing from the last rays of the sun reaching them. Higher up, rosy reflexes mix with dark blue and black-gray clouds. The crescent of the waning moon shines through the clouds. There is a gold casket, separated into several compartments in which ten various-colored powders are heaped, lying on the windowsill. A spoon-like, two-sided metal spatula lies diagonally across the casket and juts out into the freely painted landscape. Above this, in the shadow, we discover a painted in- scription. The composition is dominated by the light yellow sections of the sky, the glowing hands and the hier- atic face of the bald-headed man. The head, which stands out vividly against the dark background on the left is shadowed on the right in front of the bright- ened surface. The static arrangement is broken rhyth- mically and invested with a feeling of vitality through the colorfulness of the landscape and incarnate ar- eas. The plastic presence of the portrayed person is brought together in his fixating gaze that produces an interplay between the immediate effect on the viewer and his esthetic experience. We are con- fronted with a masterful portrait created out of the material of color. Pietro Aretino, poet and martyr of morals? The portrait of a man, whose old attribution to Titian has remained unquestioned, was listed for the first time among those works that the former Italian gal- lery inspector Pietro Maria Guarienti and other agents had purchased for the Dresden art collection of Au- gust II in Venice and Bologna in 1748/49 in the agenda of an inventory begun in 1747. 2 Most of the numerous new acquisitions were hung provisionally in the Inner Gallery of the royal-electoral painting collection at Jüdenhof or stored in the not-yet-furnished Outer Gallery. Shortly thereafter, Guarienti’s new inventory doc- umented that the painting was at the top of one of the pilasters in the Inner Gallery on which new acqui- sitions, as well as lesser works, were placed (ill. 2). In his catalogo , Guarienti claims that the portrait shows the man of letters Pietro Arentino and was formerly in the possession of the noble Venetian Marcello fam- ily. 3 Guarienti positioned the newly purchased paint- ing on the pilaster accordingly: The portrait of the infamous polygraph and pornographer Aretino found itself in the company of the almost-as-large luxurious portrait of a Venetian woman attributed to Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, which was also said to have come from a noble Venetian collection, as the appropriate female accompaniment. He also squeezed Willem Drost’s “Mercury Putting Argus to Sleep with his Sto- ries” in between the two as a comment on the rhetor- ical potency of the poet. 4 It is hard to determine which branch of the casa Marcello is meant seeing that Guarienti’s information on the painting’s provenience remained a singular case and was possibly only intended to invest the man – who only had the half-bald head in common with Aretino – with a sound family tree. Of course, it could have been that family whose collection the art Tristan Weddigen Gregor J.M. Weber The Alchemy of Colors Titian Portrays his Pigment Merchant Alvise “dai colori” dalla Scala Ill. 1 Titian, “Portrait of the Pigment Merchant Alvise dalla Scala” 1561/62, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister