Jesuses and Venuses: Venetian Painting at the MFA

The exhibition puts the work of the three Venetian masters in conversation with each other. It's an exercise in contextualization, but it doesn't, ultimately, diminish the individual achievement of each painter. It's didactic, but, thankfully, it lets the paintings do most of the talking.

Sixteenth century Venice was an uncommonly cramped and cosmopolitan city, a point that the curators make at the outset with a carefully detailed map showing the location of major works by the three masters. The city was hardly larger than New York's Central Park, and, if you were a Venetian artist, you couldn't help but bump into your rival's work, even on your lunch break. The city was enthralled with piety and commerce; clergymen and bankers were its most powerful citizens and provided the market for the commissions that artists fought to secure. And the majority of those commissions went to the workshops of three artists: Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

Titian was the oldest of the three, twenty years older than Tintoretto, but he lived such a long life that there were four decades when the three men were actively competing for commissions and renown. Titian hated Tintoretto, a talented schemer who wasn't above bribing critics with free art. Veronese was Titian's protege, a man careful enough to flatter the older artist without challenging his formal supremacy.

Before this exhibition, Bostonist never imagined an entire wall devoted to the Supper at Emmaus, the dinner that the risen Jesus famously ruined by disappearing into thin air. But there it was: three paintings, three Jesuses, three sets of dogs and cats fighting under three tables. And three tablecloths.

Titian's rendering, the most famous of the three, was familiarly known as "The Tablecloth" by nineteenth century scholars. Titian's tablecloth looks crisply pressed, smartly folded, with the precise weave of the cloth painted in for good measure. It's uncannily realistic. By contrast, Tintoretto's tablecloth is a whirl of color that looks as if it is about to take flight and follow Jesus into oblivion. And between the two tablecloths is practically everything you need to know about the rivalry between the two men. The precise, sumptuous textures of Titian and the chaotic, mocking ambition of Tintoretto.

(Veronese's tablecloth? A carefully rendered knock-off of Titian's.)

The Venetian workshops painted with an improvisatory flair, neglecting initial sketches and changing the composition of paintings several times before finishing them. This loose atmosphere might have had something to do with the quick spread of canvas, a new medium at the time that supplanted wooden boards. Canvas was more portable that wood and more resilient. Its textures gave artists a new way to render brushstrokes more pointedly and flesh and fabric more realistically. The exhibition demonstrates the difference by pairing an early Titian canvas painting with a wood block work from the workshop of Bellini, Titian's mentor.

Canvas also allowed artists to assemble paintings in novel ways. Renaissance artists were businessmen who would protect the bottom line by any means necessary. Scraps of canvas were reused, sewn together until the dimensions were right. And, in at least one instance, parts of paintings would be reused, sewn together to make a new work.

Using science and expert sleuthing, the exhibition's curators determined that a famous Tintoretto Nativity painting actually started out as a depiction of the crucifixion. How's that for the cycle of life? Suitably proud of their accomplishment, the curators devoted an entire gallery to the science and deduction behind the discovery. Have you ever checked out a painting's x-ray? Now's your chance.

The exhibition isn't all science and Christianity, of course. There's also plenty of sex and death. Bostonist is pervy enough to have spent extra time in the room of the Venuses, a collection of the masters' erotic paintings. As curator Frederick Illchman pointed out, it's a reminder of DeKooning's famous quip, "Flesh is the reason oil painting was invented." But, for our money, the best gallery was the one devoted to the late style of the three masters, where decrepitude, mortality, and increasing abstraction of line were the order of the day. It's a nice way to end the tour; it prepares the viewer to re-enter a world of austerity and economic panic.