Renaissance art historians concur that women were characteristically depicted as ideal types in Renaissance portraiture. Nonetheless, the historiography of portraits of women in Renaissance Italy reveals generational shifts between scholars. Male scholars writing in the nineteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century applied formalist and cultural historical methodologies. Recent scholars raise issues that were previously neglected, such as social historical and feminist concerns. Following this rationale, I argue that the changing interests of scholars have altered the interpretations of portraits of Renaissance women. Moreover, this historical difference is split along gender lines in the historiography of Titian's La Bella. A critical review of the literature on this painting shows that male scholars, such as John Pope-Hennessey, Harold E. Wethey, and Charles Hope define the work in formal terms, such as "charming" and "pretty," whereas female scholars such as Elizabeth Cropper, Patricia Simons and Rona Goffen concur the work to be a synecdoche for the beauty of painting itself. A historiography of Titian as a portrait painter confirms that recent scholars have shifted focus from formal studies to an assessment of the social context, conditions of patronage and the feminist issues surrounding the artist's portraits.

By studying several paintings by Venetian artist Tiziano Vicelio, better known as Titian, this thesis explores how the Venetian painter’s works resisted the encroaching arrival of a masculine identity and reflected on the ramifications inherent in its performance. I will provide evidence that the contemporary discourses and/or criticisms of artistic production that informed Titian’s style allow us to situate his feminized male within both the historical framework of sixteenth-century Venice, and the delicate negotiation of gender that was taking place at the same time. This thesis also situates Titian’s works within contemporary literary acknowledgements about the fluidity of gender. I will begin by examining Titian’s painting of David and Goliath in the church of Santo Spirito in Venice, as a prelude to my main analysis of the whole cycle. Next I will study his painting of Tarquin and Lucretia, concluding with an evaluation of his enigmatic Il Bravo. I will argue that, using the metaphorical power of contrast in his paintings Titian was highlighting the violent nature of masculinity and the tragic consequences of its performance, while simultaneously offering the image of the feminized male as an exemplar.

Paintings of Raphael and Titian were chosen for study (1) to ascertain the extent to which they used geometry, and (2) to determine, if possible, the differences and likenesses in their underlying schemas, and (3) to determine how geometrical divisions, if used, affected the character of their paintings.

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The thesis examines the classical motifs in the works of Titian. The author focuses on a closed set of works inspired by classical motifs (i.e. motifs of classical mythology), which were created for the Spanish king Philippe II. The thesis deals with the question of possible literary or material sources which could have been at the painter's disposal or could have served as his inspiration. The set of works is defined by themes chosen from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The question is whether Titian based his compositions on their classical version or on a Renaissance adapted or commented translation, or whether he even inspired himself by other classical authors.

Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, canvas substituted panel or wall as the preferred support for painting in Venice, moving from the periphery to the core of artmaking. As it did so, canvas became key to the artistic processes and novel pictorial language developed by painters like Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Sixteenth-century critics associated canvas with painting in Venice, a connection that has persisted to become a veritable trope of Venetian art history. Despite this, we have hitherto lacked a convincing account of Venetian canvas supports and their impact. This dissertation, by examining the adoption, development, and significance of canvas in Venetian art over the period 1400 to 1600, attempts to provide one. Approaching canvas from multiple perspectives, this project offers a deeper understanding of what early modern canvas was at a material level, how it was made and supplied to painters, and its catalyzing role in early modern Venetian art. By tracing precisely how canvas operates within paintings, focusing on lodestar examples whilst drawing on extensive and intensive object-based research carried out on a large corpus, this thesis demonstrates how actively canvas participated in the elaboration of the pictorial poetics of mature Cinquecento art in Venice. It argues that we owe the existence of this distinctive artistic idiom in no small part to the twist of a yarn, the roughness of a thread, the thickness of a stitch. Canvas was critical to both the making and the meaning of these pictures. The wider aims of the project are twofold: on the one hand, to model a methodology that integrates approaches such as visual, textual, and sociocultural analysis with technical art history and conservation-informed comprehension of the materially altered nature of art objects; on the other, to contribute to an account of the history of an art form—the canvas picture—that still occupies a central role in the global art world today.

My project examines the pictorial and theoretical dimensions of the concept of melancholy as they were understood, expressed, and, most importantly, figured by Renaissance artists. By focusing on the figural pose traditionally associated with the melancholic state and humor, it presents a hitherto unexplored connection between Northern and Southern Europe, considering the different ways in which artists self-identified as melancholics and expressed this understanding in their art. In both Italy and the North, the basic figural structure is appropriated for somewhat different ends. The relationship of the isolated figure to its cultural context varies, either declaring a special creative status, responsive to a higher inspiration, or setting the figure apart as an outsider with special insight into the follies of this lower world. Chapter One serves as an introduction to the pose of melancholy, its historical weight and the visual meaning carried by the isolated, brooding figure, generally wth lowered head supported by a hand and often with legs crossed. This is the figure epitomized in Dürer's Melancolia I. Chapter Two considers Michelangelo as the exemplar of a melancholic and addresses the cultural and personal identification of him as such. The relevance of the melancholy pose to the identification of the artist in sixteenth-century Italy is demonstrated by Raphael's depiction of the melancholy Heraclitus in The School of Athens, which I accept as portrait of Michelangelo; articulated in his poetry, the artist's self-identification as melancholic is visually declared in his Last Judgment. Chapter Three addresses the works of Hieronymus Bosch, in whose art the figure of melancholy runs as something of a leitmotif, although it has remained generally unobserved; the figure serves as a running comment on the thematic concerns of the paintings--such as The Garden of Earthly Delights and Death and the Miser--at once participant and outsider. Chapter Four explores the role of melancholics in specific paintings by Bruegel, especially The Triumph of Death, and the relationship between melancholics and fools in the artist's oeuvre. Chapter Five has at its focus Titian's Flaying of Marsyas and the artist's self-inclusion in the guise of the melancholy Midas. As a conclusion, this chapter reflects on the personal significance of melancholy for Renaissance artists.

This thesis analyses selected paintings and aspects of life of the Italian Renaissance in terms of the aesthetic properties of sadistic and masochistic symptomatologies and creative production, as these have been explored by philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Marcel Henaff, and Gilles Deleuze. One question which arises from this analysis, and is considered in this thesis, is of the relation between sexual perversion and history, and in particular between experiences of violence, (dis)pleasure and desire, and historically specific forms of discourse and power, such as legislation on rape; myths and practices concerning marriage alliance; the depiction of such myths and practices in art; religion; and family structures. A second question which this thesis explores is the manners in which sadistic and masochistic artistic production function politically, to bolster pre-existing gender ideologies or to subvert them. Finally, this thesis considers the relation between sadism and masochism and visuality, both by bringing literary models of perversion to an interpretation of paintings, and by exploring the amenability of different genres of visual art to sadism and masochism respectively.