SOUVENIR D'ARCADIE (UN)

TITIEN, LE CONCERT CHAMPÊTRE - COLLECTION PALETTES

of JAUBERT Alain

FRANCE, 1994, 00:30:00

Production : DELTA IMAGES, PAINI Dominique, MUSEE DU LOUVRE, LA SEPT-ARTE, REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX, MUSEE D'ORSAY
Collection : Musée du Louvre
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : Art, History of art, Louvre Museum, Painting, Allegory, Sensuality

Summary :
Choosing key-works in the imaginary of the Western culture, the series called “Palettes” tells in each episode the story of a different painting. In a word, it tells the genealogy of the painting. For a painting has its ancestors and its descendants. A double technical and philosophical knowledge, fed on by a long tradition, gave birth to the painting. And the painting itself gave birth, year after year, to a multitude of other images…
Assuming the idea that the deep meaning of a painting is conveyed by the choice of colours and themes, we dissect the canvas from its most visible composition to its deepest significance.

The Pastoral Concert of Titien is an enigmatic work in many respects. The theme at first is unusual. What do two naked women in the countryside next to dressed men who seem to ignore them? Alain Jaubert reports rare certainties and numerous hypotheses which surround the picture, both as regards of its story, technique, attribution and its interpretations.

The pictorial processes are well known. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in good Venetian by adoption, the painter prefers the canvas to the panel. He excels in the art glazes, layering almost infinitely colored translucent layers to give a subtle light pigment. But who is this artist? It was long thought to Giorgione for this pastoral meditation, but the presence of motifs dear to Titian was finally convinced that this was indeed the author. The iconography is less clear: if the flutist and the jug of water nymphs, and if the shepherd and the lute player refer to the bucolic world of Virgil, is it an allegory of poetry or illustration of one of the best seller of early printing "The Arcadia of Sannazaro"? The atmosphere is, in fact, that the return to a golden age ideal, friendly and refined love of the arts in a nature conducive close to that when looking for a few humanists in the mountains of Veneto.

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