ABSTRACT
From its very inception early in the sixteenth century, the Venetian Renaissance mythological cabinet painting was defined by its distinction from the visual mode familiar in the sacred art of the city. One only needs to recall pioneering examples such as Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c.1510, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), featuring a female nude sensuously reclining in a lush landscape, or Titian’s multi-figured Bacchanals for the court in Ferrara (1518-24), in order to establish this point.1 These works employ a horizontal ‘landscape’ format, which supports their emphasis on idyllic rural settings, and have an insistent emphasis on the fleshy corporeality of nude or semi-nude figures placed close to the picture surface. Many of the forms either recall specific antique sculptures, or make more generic reference to classical relief composition in the planar arrangement of their figure groups. The approach to the classical subject-matter typically asserts a generic association with the nostalgic sensuality of classical and Renaissance pastoral poetry, in spite of the fact that the poetic sources are not typically drawn from this literary genre.2 But while the classical forms and meanings recovered in this tradition were quickly fed back into the mainstream tradition of Christian art (Titian’s early religious paintings, for example, have neatly been described as a form of ‘Christian
1 See Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: The Painter of ‘Poetic Brevity’ (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), pp. 307-8; Harold Wethey, The Paintings of Titian III: The Mythological and Historical Paintings (London: Phaidon, 1975), nos. 12, 13, 14, 15.
