The past decade or so has seen a steady march of publications—and particularly monographic studies—on Titian. Several exhibitions, beginning with the masterful show at the Prado (2004) and culminating most recently with the exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale (2013), have brought the artworks in dialogue with various themes (such as late style, artistic competition, replicas, etc.) and prompted the enormously helpful scientific evaluation of several pictures. These exhibitions included catalogues with the same titles: among them are Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting (Venice: Marsilio, 2008) (click here for review); Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Boston: MFA Publications, 2009) (click here for review); Tiziano (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013); and Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2010) (click here for review). Complementing these curatorial activities, and the publications of their conclusions, have been the monographic studies of Titian’s paintings written by academic authors, including Nicola Suthor’s Augenlust bei Tizian: zur Konzeption sensueller Malerei in der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2004); Una Roman D’Elia’s The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Thomas Puttfarken’s Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s “Poetics” and the Rise of the Modern Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Michael Overdick’s Tizian: Die späten Porträts 1545–1568 (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2010); and my own The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010). Joining this group is Tom Nichols’s Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance, which attempts to consider Titian’s entire career and his total output of paintings against, rather than within, the artistic traditions associated with Renaissance Venice.

Richly illustrated with many more color than black-and-white reproductions, Nichols’s book undertakes a roughly chronological survey of an impressive number of Titian’s attributed paintings in order to make the opposite claim proposed by most recent scholarship on Venice, particularly those studies that are focused on global exchange: that the vector of influential artistic exchange led out of Venice rather than into the lagoon. Titian, who is often characterized as Venice’s native-adopted son and as the artist who established the normative expectations of what has comprised our historical understanding of Venetian painting, is presented by Nichols as an opportunistic individual who self-consciously rejected and reacted against the artistic (and, oftentimes, more generally, civic) ideals of Venice. According to Nichols, indications of this reaction are found not only in specific decisions made in his career, but also in those made for specific compositions and his style of painting.

Nichols explores his hypothesis through five chapters, which are organized roughly according to image types. After outlining his argument and briefly articulating the career of Giovanni Bellini as representative of the author’s baseline conception of Venetian artistic tradition, Nichols considers in sequence Titian’s religious pictures, portraiture, poesie, and other mythological pictures. His final two chapters devote some portion to a consideration of Titian’s late style. Nichols’s ambitious effort to consider all of Titian’s oeuvre in order to establish his hypothesis is admirable, yet it also inevitably and understandably results in only a cursory treatment of most of the artworks. However, Nichols compensates for this limitation by including a helpful, up-to-date bibliography and footnotes for any reader interested in pursuing an in-depth consideration of a specific painting.

By framing Titian with the oftentimes conflicting concepts of Venetian tradition and critical fortune, Nichols’s book is a conceptual pendant to his earlier monograph, Tintoretto: Identity and Tradition (London: Reaktion, 1999). Tradition is a tricky art-historical concept: on the one hand, tradition and its beginnings and endings underpin the entire discipline; on the other hand, tradition is difficult to define without entering into a tautological trap, especially for time periods and locations that witness great diversity in artistic production. How to decide, for example, what artistic tradition means for sixteenth-century Venice? Does it depend on establishing a baseline, normative style? How intentional is adherence to or deviation from the artistic tradition? How to measure the impact and relevance of circumstantial or contextual factors? When multiple artists deviate from a perceived tradition, it motivates a rethinking of that tradition.

Nichols approaches the concept of tradition as unproblematic and self-evident, and never specifically or critically articulates his own particular version. In the current book he considers tradition as an all-encompassing category, which, for Nichols’s Titian, comprises primarily the work of Bellini and generalized concepts of Venetian politics and society. Nichols’s interpretive lens often results in seemingly forced readings of artworks and even historical events. One such example (20) is when he connects the contemporary perception of Bellini’s artistic license in his dealings with Isabella d’Este to an expression of freedom and independence aligned with similar values and ideals that are manifested by the so-called “myth of Venice.” Most early modern scholars have considered this praise of artistic freedom as relating more to the elevation of painting throughout Italy—and beyond—and less to the propagandistic, regional celebration of Venice’s political and civic ideals. Similarly, according to Nichols, Titian’s history of moving freely between different types of patrons “owes something to the mercantile or business-oriented mentality of Venice” (121), despite the fact that many other Venetian artists did not follow similar patterns of patronage, and many non-Venetian artists did. Finally, many of Titian’s earliest pictures, such as those for Alfonso d’Este, are read by Nichols as deliberate attempts to make the work of Bellini seem “old”—which, although not impossible, imposes an overly competitive and manipulative veneer on imitation and emulation, particularly at a moment when Venetian workshop collaboration remains the predominant artistic practice.

The comparative frame, inevitable—even necessary—in a consideration of artistic tradition, often forces and exaggerates relationships when there might be none or there might be other explanations for the differences and similarities. One example of this is Nichols’s following of recent trends in Venetian Renaissance art history to frame differences between the work of Titian and Tintoretto as indicative of fierce competition between rivals. Such rivalry could very well have been in operation given the agonistic perspective of many cinquecento writers on the arts, but just as likely is the possibility for productive emulation. Furthermore, how does the theme of competition extend a consideration of the pictures themselves? Isn’t it mostly a historically specific way to compare and contrast? Another example of this perspective is Nichols’s understanding of Titian’s approach to portraiture as a rejection of Venetian models and official usage of portraits. Titian’s depiction of a variety of courtly and aristocratic sitters marks a noteworthy expansion within his portraiture, but this is a change that could also be generalized for much of cinquecento Italian portraiture. Nichols’s analysis reflects one of the central challenges of how artistic tradition is defined: does a changing tradition in a selected region trump the significance of a generic change, and, more generally, how do these categorical priorities become established in the first place? How is cause and effect assigned?

Toward the end of his book, Nichols tackles the difficult issue of how Titian has become associated with endings—not only within the painter’s own career, but also the end of the Venetian Renaissance. The timing of Titian’s death and of the deaths of many other Venetian painters near the close of the sixteenth century results in a convenient endpoint for Renaissance historians. Consequently, seicento Venetian art rarely figures in studies of Titian. Nichols argues that this omission is justifiable because of the simultaneous deaths of multiple Venetian painters and, more importantly, because of, according to Nichols, a “black hole” of influence created by Titian himself: “Titian and the all-powerful cultural icon he became in later life was, in a complex yet central way, the prime cause of the end of Venetian Renaissance painting” (200). Another factor not discussed by Nichols might be at work: the quick departure from Venice of nearly half of Titian’s paintings, which must have created a kind of vacuum of influence. Quite simply: seicento artists in Venice could not see all of Titian’s work. Regardless of the precise explanation, Nichols raises the idea of an ending without strictly intertwining the artist’s biography in his conception—which would be productive for more studies in art history to embrace, regardless of the potential collateral damage to the discipline’s well-worn concept of tradition. Despite this innovative suggestion, Nichols still adheres to the broader concept of the Renaissance valorization of the individual in his consideration of Titian’s late style as “a wholly individuated form of expression” and as “self-consciously individualistic” (201).

In the end, Nichols’s book tries to disturb the valorizing of Titian as the exemplar of a Venetian Renaissance painter. Even if there are problems and inconsistencies in how Nichols argues adherence to and deviation from tradition and arrives at his conclusions, his book asks us to take a valuable step back and think about why we have circulated and adhered to so many clichés about Titian’s venezianità and what lies behind them.