In this seminar, organized by the ICI of Toronto, part of the #Raffaello500 series, prof. Giorgio Tagliaferro will discuss how Titian and Raphael, who arguably never met, although in different cultural contexts and under different circumstances, developed somewhat and at the same time, similar innovative techniques and pictorial representations in order to engage the viewers in new, more compelling ways.
It will also highlight how Titian, still many years after Raphael’s death, looked at the late fellow artist not only as a source of inspiration due to his extraordinary inventiveness and the supreme quality of his art, but also as an ideal of excellence to surpass, which spurred Titian to promote himself as the greatest of all artists, giving Venice its own ‘Raphael’.
Titian’s art has been often compared to Michelangelo’s. The similarities between Titian and Raphael, on the contrary, have been largely underestimated, despite the fact that the two painters were revered as paradigms of artistic perfection until well into the nineteenth century. In today’s perception, the two artists are hardly, if any, conceived of in parallel terms, inasmuch as sixteenth-century Venice and Rome are seen as separate historical entities.
Tuesday, September 8 | 3:00pm EDT
Giorgio Tagliaferro (PhD Venice, Ca’ Foscari) is Associate Professor in Renaissance Art at the University of Warwick. He specializes in Renaissance/Early-Modern European art, with a main focus on Venice. His research areas include: visual arts and the display of power; painting and representation; drawing and the creative process; artists’ workshops and art market.
He was the main author of the book Le botteghe di Tiziano (Florence, 2009), which stemmed from a research project on Titian’s workshop, funded by the Fondazione Centro Studi Tiziano e Cadore (2004-09). He was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute (2012), the recipient of a British Academy Small Grant (2015-16), and of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2016-17). He is currently working on a book project on the sixteenth-century pictorial cycle of the Great Council hall, in Venice’s Ducal Palace.