<i>Il Bravo</i>

<i>Il Bravo</i>

16th century · Oil painting · 58.3 × 73.6 cm

Sul dipinto

Titian (c. ?1485–90-1576) was a Venetian painter, draughtsman and printmaker and treated all manners of subjects from religious subjects to portraits and allegories and scenes from Classical mythology and history. His work marks the transition from the 15th-century tradition characterised by meticulous finish and the use of bright local colours to the 16th century interest in a broader technique, with less defined outlines and more congruous colouring. Although based in Venice, Titian received commissions for royal and noble patrons outside Venice and Italy, notably for Philip II of Spain and his works had a formative influence on major European painters of the 17th century, including Rubens and Velázquez.

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CAI.97 appears to be a 16th century copy of Titian's painting of ca. 1521-23 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna of roughly the same dimensions. The Vienna picture is recorded as in the home of Zuan Antonio Venier in Venice in 1528 and in the collection of Bartolomeo della Nave in the same city by 1648, suggesting that the V&A copy was painted there around this time. However, the V&A picture lacks the luminescent colouring, skilled handling of light and the same attention to detail visible in Titian's original. There are also some differences in the facial expression of the youth.

The subject represented is still debated, with scholars divided as to whether it depicts an episode from Plutarch's Life of Marius in which Caius Lucius attacks Trebonius or a subject derived from Euripides' Bacchae and Ovid's Metamorphoses,: Bacchus' arrest by Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who opposed the spread of his cult. The identification of the scene with Bacchus is supported by the crown of vine leaves worn by the young man and his mane of blond hair, also visible in Titian's representation of the god in the Bacchus and Ariadne (London, National Gallery, NG35). Several other copies of the Vienna picture are known.

Victoria and Albert Museum