Conservation funded by the Boston chapter of Save Venice Inc.

Titian designed this dramatic painting to grace his own burial site in the church of the Frari. It was already in place in 1575, at the altar of the Crocefisso, where it replaced an older venerated crucifix; it was presumably the objection of the friars to the loss of that image that led to the removal of the canvas.

The Pietà itself is a work of tragic pathos, in which the figure of Mary Magdalene sounds aloud a stringent note of lamentation. This is a deeply personal painting, in which Titian portrayed himself as Saint Jerome reaching out to the body of Christ; through his art, the painter effectively puts himself in perpetual touch with the body of his savior. A further personal note is the simple votive tablet behind the saint in which the figures of Titian and his son, his chief assistant and presumed heir, Orazio Vecellio, are depicted in prayer before a heavenly vision of the Pietà. Behind the tablet is the coat of arms of the Vecellio family, the double-headed Hapsburg eagle symbolizing the knighthood conferred upon the painter by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

In the course of the plague of 1576, both Titian and Orazio died. The canvas was evidently left in the studio and eventually acquired by Titian’s pupil Jacopo Palma il Giovane, who added his touches to the flying angel and the Latin text on the platform below, declaring “what Titian left incomplete, Palma reverently completed and dedicated to God.” The question of the non-finito in Titian’s late art was a vexed one: nonetheless, that Titian himself did not consider the Pietà unfinished is indicated by the fact that he had already installed the painting in the Frari in 1575.

Following Palma’s death in 1628, the canvas passed to the church of Sant’Angelo in 1631, where it remained until the destruction of that church in the early eighteenth century. The Pietà became part of the collection of the Accademia Galleries in 1814. The gilded wooden frame is made up of intricately carved pieces from a reconfigured sixteenth-century ceiling cornice. In the 1920s, this frame was adapted to Titian’s monumental painting.

The Boston Chapter of Save Venice funded maintenance conservation on Titian’s last painting, the Pietà, in preparation for its role as the climax of the Late Titian exhibition held from January through April 2008 at the Accademia Galleries.

Restorers Alfeo Michieletto and Erika Bianchini from the Accademia removed dust and grime from the surface of the painting, on top of the protective varnish, in order to reestablish the delicate balance of contrast and re-emphasize the depth of the painting.

The painting’s sixteenth-century frame was subject to a complete restoration to protect it from an active infestation of wood-boring insects. Conservator Thomas Charles Nelson painstakingly re-attached flaking gold leaf and consolidated losses in the carved wooden decoration.

For select projects, conservation dossiers in Italian containing limited textual and photographic documentation may be available for consultation by appointment at the Venice office of Save Venice and the Rosand Library & Study Center. For inquiries, please contact us at venice@savevenice.org.

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488/90–1576)
Pietà
1576, oil on canvas
353 x 347 cm

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