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In memory of Joseph Shub
I
Titian and his studio produced many versions of bust-length devotional paintings such as the Ecce Homo and the Mater Dolorosa but his most successful and most frequently repeated was the Penitent Magdalen - also the longest-lived, spanning some forty years.1 Some critics have turned aside from such paintings as 'commercial' and evidence of Titian's avarice, but many painters past and present have produced suites of variations of the same invention, and their wish to do so need not be ascribed solely to 'cupido de guadagno'. That an owner of a painting knows it to be very like one the artist has produced previously need not diminish his or her pleasure in it, or devalue his or her emotional engagement with it: indeed, many patrons - Philip II among them - specifically commissioned Titian to execute repetitions or variants of earlier works. And why should it be thought questionable, artistically or ethically - or even financially - to satisfy a demand? The widest possible distribution of pleasure or consolation is surely a legitimate aim for any artist; and if a twenty-first century sensibility might prefer one of Francis Bacon's many Screaming Popes to one of Titian's many Penitent Magdalens, that is an issue of taste, not morality. Nor should intimations of sex concern us. The Penitent Magdalens are sometimes treated as though they were lightly fig-leafed centre-folds, but Titian had no need to offer-up delectation in disguise: he was well able - who better? - to deliver erotica to those who wanted it. Images that could elicit admiration and compassion from Vasari, an artist, from Vittoria Colonna, a poet of deep spirituality, and from Cardinal Borromeo, a theologian, and which could be displayed above an altar, do not require defence from modern prurience.
As well as a great composer, Titian was a - perhaps the - supreme instrumentalist and each performance - indeed, each rehearsal - was subtly different. Repetition and revision (re-vision) of the subject of the Penitent Magdalen kept his hand and mind exercised and helped sate - however temporarily - the hunger that drives all serious artists to achieve a more satisfactory result, to seize a new pictorial effect or to reinstate an emotional nuance previously sacrificed....