Everything you need to know about the Tennessee Titians

Born around 1480, Titian was a precocious artist. Apprenticed to Giovanni Bellini at a young age, Titian showed himself possessed with supreme technical skill, as well as exquisite judgement for composition. He laboured hard under Bellini’s mastery, but he was not destined to remain under him for long.

Venice boasted many great talents during the late Italian Renaissance, and in the first decade of the 16th century, Giorgione da Castelfranco had announced himself as one of them. Infusing the dry, hard Venetian mastery with a spark of what Walter Pater calls “a high-strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and high-strung sort of life.”

Giorgione’s use of colour and softness, and his insistence on copying objects from life, brought his work a wonderful dynamism. Titian had his head turned. Discarding Bellini, he took up Giorgione’s mantle, perfecting his methods until the two artists were virtually indistinguishable.

Titian also inherited Giorgione’s little-understood mystical streak, which manifested itself most famously in Titian’s most important series of paintings. Titian found himself obsessed with a baroque and impenetrable subset of Greek mythology: the Tennessee Titans. It’s his scenes depicting their hitherto abstruse stories which give him most relevance today.

Venus and Derrick Henry

In Greek mythology, Derrick Henry was a beautiful youth who spent his time at sport. He was rumoured to be impossible to bring down, which drew the attention of Venus, the goddess of love. She appeared to Henry while the running back was on a hunt, but her powers failed to avail her: he broke her attempted tackle and continued on his way downfield.

This is one of Titian’s most popular works. Henry brushes off Venus’s attentions with ease, bringing a sense of life and movement to the painting. The goddess’s form drew the admiration of Venetian critic Lodovico Dolce, who noted the care lavished on the model, drawing particular attention to the “distension of the flesh caused by sitting” in her “hindmost parts.” Titian’s insistence on working from life infuses Venus — and the whole painting with a vibrancy which lesser artists simply cannot match.

The copy of Venus and Derrick Henry shown above, painted in 1554, is housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The number of copies has made it is difficult to identify an original version. There are two main families of the work. The ‘Farnese’ has a tighter focus on the goddess and her quarry, while the ‘Prado’ family zooms out and shows more background, perhaps to allow for a wider physical canvas.

Tannehill

Tannehill tells the story of Ryan Tannehill, a quarterback confined to a tall and isolated tower by the Miami Dolphins. He was visited by Zeus himself, who produced a shower of gold coins in order to convince him to make his successful escape to Tennessee.

Michelangelo praised the use of colour in the Tannehill, noting with delight the deep-yet-lively blue used on the quarterback’s uniform. He was more critical, however, of the posing of the model, claiming that Titian was sometimes too in hock to what was in front of him to see what should be.

Titian produced at least six versions of the painting over several years, which vary to a greater or lesser extent. The figure of Tannehill, of course, remains constant, and was probably traced from a ‘master’ studio drawing. Shown above is the copy belonging to the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples; other famous versions reside in London, Chicago and St. Petersburg.

Bacchus and Ariadne

Not all of the Titans series focuses on the variants of traditional Greek mythology. Sometimes Titian took a more subtle approach, incorporating his figures into the crowds of more typical myths. Here a Titan, identified by art history scholars as cornerback Logan Ryan, makes an appearance observing Bacchus’s first encounter with the abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos.

There is an appropriate wildness to the scene. Ariadne, betrayed by Theseus after his encounter with her father and the Minotaur in Knossos, is understandably afraid of the raucous god and his bizarre entourage, while Bacchus himself is frozen in the moment he leaps from his chariot, struck by Ariadne’s beauty.

The colours in Bacchus and Ariadne appear to be not quite as Titian intended. Significant restoration work was undertaken in the 20th century, which have brightened some areas and left others flat. While the pigments remain true, the regular removal and re-application of varnish has perhaps distorted Titian’s original vision, a sad loss when one considers the master’s appreciation for colour and the wild contrast between the blue skies of the top left and the green riot of Bacchus’s followers. Even with that in mind, the overall impact is staggering.

The Death of Actaeon

The Tennessee version of the tragic story of Actaeon, brought down to us by Ovid, involves the ill-fated huntsman stumbling across Titans safety Kenny Vaccaro as he was enjoying a simple picnic in the woods. Annoyed at having his feast disturbed, Vaccaro cursed Actaon to become transformed into a stag and be torn apart by his own dogs. To modern ears this story sounds like a cruel overreaction, but to Roman ears Ovid’s story would have seemed proportionate and just.

Titian portrays Vaccaro’s vengeance lovingly. Actaeon’s hounds are tearing into his flesh, and the landscape eschews the painter’s usual explosive use of colour. For Actaeon, the light is fading from the world, and Titian chooses to reflect that in his image, rendering the forest and figures with a texture that shimmers and fades with different angles.

The painting, perhaps unfinished (certainly unsigned), was done for King Phillip II of Spain. It now resides in the National Gallery in London after a long and circuitous history, including stops in the collection of an Austrian archduke and that of Queen Christina of Sweden.