? Titian, who had never been to Spain, met Philip II in Milan at the end of 1548, when he was still just a prince. He had worked for his father, Charles V, who commissioned religious painting, which Titian also liked, but his enormous prestige among Italian nobles came mainly from his erotic paintings, which he used to precede a mythological title for to cover appearances. . Because the Church, very sensitive in this regard, used to strictly observe the supposedly validated images of mythology, and especially if the painter claimed to have been inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, widely read and revered at the time.
? Philip II commissioned Titian (or proposed and accepted the monarch) six mythological works, which he called “poetry”, precisely because they claimed to be based on classical mythology and sent in Spain over a decade, between 1552 and 1562 According to the English critic Peter Humfrey, the canvases called by Titian “poems” constitute “one of the best known and most influential groups in the history of Western painting.” For various reasons, this group of paintings conceived as an organic whole, as Titian explained in one of his expeditions, which had to be seen continuously and always exposed together, scattered over the years, changing owners, residences and museums and is not even sure that Philip II himself would have ever seen them all together. What we know for sure is that the ladies of the nobility passed quickly in front of them, because they were covered so as not to make the ladies blush. The six works that Titian painted and called “poetry” are now in the Wellington and Wallace collections in London, the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Scottish Galleries in Edinburgh, the National Gallery in London and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. What must have been the correspondence of the director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, who had the idea to reunite this exhibition and is listed as its curator, in the three years that had to materialize, is dizzying. , the coronavirus that devastates the world coincided with the opening of the show in Madrid. No matter: the exhibition is gorgeous, out of the ordinary and locals (and many French newcomers also for the Holy Week holidays) who saw it will not be able to easily forget it. Those of us who were lucky that the wise word of Miguel Falomir himself acted as a guide for the visit and gave us the usual explanations about the exhibition. ion, enriched in this case with paintings by Rubens, Veronese, Allori, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck and Velázquez, even less.
All these paintings are extraordinary and this does not usually happen even in the best exhibitions. And in all of them there is an unlimited freedom that expresses, at the same time, history when it was just myth and fantasy, the deep reasons that lead people to create an art that enriches life and raises it to our height. dreams It also shows the limits of the reality in which we move, as in a prison where we cannot fully express our expectations to live longer and better, to fulfill all our desires, to enrich our circumstances due to beauty and what we call culture. , art, civilization.
In addition to the freedom with which they are made, these paintings x-ray the community of European and Western culture, explain the banality of the boundaries that separate men and women when creating and fantasizing, show that we form a single multiple and versatile society, united by a common denominator. we reveal our intimacy, despite the fact that we speak different languages and profess different religions (or we are against everyone), because when it comes to dreaming and wanting to be the same. How insignificant it seems, when one walks through these pictures, the despair with which certain minorities insist on exaggerating their differences, as if they, which of course exist, would be strong enough to destroy the solidity of a culture rooted in a deeper one. and more visceral unity, in which we all participate, because she is generous enough to include us all in her dreams.
Perhaps this exhibition is a wake-up call to the increasingly frequent deviations and betrayals of Western painting, for so many unscrupulous artists – clowns, deep down – who have forgotten, despite their success with galleries and critics and collectors, the most important thing in his creative endeavor: the invention of forms that are renewed while consolidating tradition. Titian’s paintings are exceptional, but those that accompany him, by Rubens, Allori, Poussin, Van Dyck, Ribera and the exceptional Velázquez are no less.
“The raison d’être of art, in this case painting, as a central complement of existence, is also evident in these few rooms where it seems to live in a different way, not only freer, but also more comfortable and more satiated, more aware of the things that matter and those that don’t matter in order to stimulate life and enrich it. There were times of religious wars and intolerance, but despite this, violence and blood have disappeared in the works of the masters, as shown here, in these precincts of dream and perfection, which dignify and resolve us and in which we see ourselves. depicted, living another life, richer, more intense, freer, more imaginative, than the one we endure every day like a noose.
You are not the same person as before, when you leave an exhibition like this. Something has changed in the way we are and see things. The world looks uglier and its ugliness stands out in front of the beauties and delicacies we just saw, but there is no pessimism worth it, because what we saw is not a miracle, but a human fact, works built with our hands and an intellectual request that it is possible to make with the ability with which the inspired have dedicated themselves to their task, something accessible and without mystery, at the disposal of all those who, like them, work after their inspiration and are not satisfied with it, taking it further, enriching it with details and forms that strengthen and innovate it.
Rarely have I been so impressed by an exhibition like the one currently on display at the Prado: Mythological Passions. Certainly because in these times, when, despite our optimism about what we thought was the victory of science over the natural world, we saw how vulnerable we are, how precarious life and the immensity of art and culture continue to be, lights and shadows from which they are made. I’m sure I’m not optimistic if I say that the best emulsion to protect us from the terror we feel when we see so many unforeseen deaths around and the struggle of health care workers and doctors to save those lives, better than all remedies is to go for a museum walk like the Prado and discover why certain paintings are a hymn of immortality, of survival in the midst of horror.