Title: Titian's portraits through Aretino's lens
First published: 1995
Description: Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait.

By investigating this unprecedented historical phenomenon, Luba Freedman elucidates the meaning conveyed by the portrait as an artistic form in Renaissance Italy.

Fusing iconographical analysis of the most famous Titian portraits with rhetorical analysis of Aretino's literary legacy as compared to contemporary reactions, Freedman demonstrates that it is due to Titian's many portraits and to Aretino's repeated simultaneous writings about them that the portrait ceased being primarily a social-historical document, preserving the sitter's likeness for posterity.

It gradually became, as it is today, a work of art, the artist's invention, which gives its viewer an aesthetic pleasure.
Subjects: Art and literature, Criticism and interpretation, History, Portrait painting, Renaissance, Renaissance Portrait painting, Titian, approximately 1488-1576, Aretino, pietro, 1492-1556
Places: Italy
People: Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), Titian (ca. 1488-1576)
Time periods: 16th century
LC classification: ND1329.T54 F74 1995