Titian's "Concert Champêtre" Coming to the U.S.

Masterpiece to Be Part of Groundbreaking Venetian Painting Show

By Stan Parchin
Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. announced quietly last Friday that Pastoral Concert, more popularly known as Concert Champêtre (ca. 1510) and painted by the Italian Renaissance master Titian (ca. 1490-1576), will indeed be included in the museum's upcoming special exhibition entitled Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, to be held from June 18 to September 17, 2006. The masterpiece has only left Paris' Musée du Louvre once, in 1955 for a show in Venice on Giorgione (ca. 1477/8-1510), Titian's artistic elder who died from the plague and was thought for some time, amongst others, to have been the work's painter until two decades ago.

This international loan exhibition, organized with Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (where it will be on view from October 17, 2006 to January 7, 2007), will feature one woodcut and 57 paintings from the first 30 years of the Sixteenth Century in Venice, during the same period as the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome. They were created by Giovanni Bellini (act. by 1459, d. 1516), Giorgione, Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), Palma Vecchio (1480-1528), Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480-1556) and their Venetian contemporaries. Museums and private collections in Florence, London, Madrid, New York and many other cities are contributing to this effort. While focusing on religious painting of the period, the show will also examine rediscovered themes from classical antiquity and how these artists chose to portray them innovatively. The show will be divided into four distinct sections dealing with: the pastoral landscape; the female nude and eroticism; male portraiture; and modern scientific revelations about the painters' techniques. Ideas about love and music, prevalent in the literature of the times, imbued the artists' works with a certain sense of poetry that distinguished their masterpieces from those of other Italian Renaissance painters.

Titian's Concert Champêtre will take centerstage in the exhibition, which will examine the nature of the Venetian idyllic landscape and its influence on the representation of religious subjects. Portraits of women, partially clothed or nude, were unusual for Venetian painting of the time. The introduction of this wholly revolutionary genre will be explored in the show, also tackling the issue of idealization in female portraiture. Male "action" portraits that depicted men in roles such as lovers and poets will be treated in the presentation. Finally, advances made in the scientific examination of some of these paintings, and their results, will be documented in the exhibition's conclusion. X-radiographs will demonstrate how the artists developed their compositions through pentimenti or changes of mind, while infrared reflectograms will illustrate the painters' process of constant revision in their compositions. In addition, as reported in this website last year, recent findings about the ingredients of the artists' pigments will serve to explain definitively the luster of the "Venetian palette" previously not fully understood, truly a startling revelation of monumental proportions in the fields of Art History and Renaissance Studies.

Both the special exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, to be published in English, German and Italian, are bound to be landmarks in the scholarly achievements of Italian Renaissance Art History.

Image Credit:

Titian (Venetian, ca. 1490-1576)
Pastoral Concert (Concert Champêtre), ca. 1510
Oil on canvas
Unframed: 105 x 136.5 cm (41 5/16 x 53 3/4 in.)
Musée du Louvre, Departement des Peintures, Paris
© Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY