The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Titian · oil on canvas, close to square, about 2.1 metres each way, the figures near life size · a late work, generally placed about 1570 to 1576, the subject from Ovid’s Metamorphoses VI · the composition drawn from Giulio Romano’s design of the subject for the Palazzo Te, Mantua · at Kroměříž since the later seventeenth century, bought for the bishops of Olomouc · Archbishop’s Palace, Kroměříž (Archdiocesan Museum Olomouc)
Mode
Late mythology, a poesia turned to the punishment that ends a contest of music; a design from a decorative scheme made into a meditative object
Mythos
Apollo against Marsyas, the lyre against the pipe, measure against ecstasy; the carcass hung to be skinned; the inverted martyr; the judge who chose wrongly, become the witness
Phase
One moment, the flaying under way and the music still playing; generally placed about 1570 to 1576
Presentation
Oil on canvas, close to square, about 2.1 metres each way; figures near life size; the paint left open, broken and rubbed
Register
Terror and a grave, almost liturgical beauty at one temperature; a smoked gold air over browns and smouldering reds
Scale
One event in a clearing: god, satyr, king, boy and beasts; music, butchery and thought
Governing Proposition
In a clearing at dusk the satyr Marsyas, beaten by Apollo in a contest of music, hangs head down by his goat’s legs from a tree while two men take off his skin, one kneeling close at the chest, one at the leg. A youth plays a bowed instrument above them, a crowned king sits at the right with his head on his hand, and a small dog laps the blood. The wager of the picture is that a body losing its surface can be painted in a surface that will not close over the body: that the flaying and the facture can be one act, and that a witness who can only think is the place a viewer should stand.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The picture is oil on canvas, close to square, about 2.1 metres each way, its figures near life size. It hangs in the Archbishop’s Palace at Kroměříž, in Moravia. Its subject is from the sixth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the satyr Marsyas, beaten by Apollo in a contest of music, is flayed alive. At the centre he hangs head down from a tree by his goat’s legs. Above him, in the branches, hang the pipes he played.
Around the body the picture gathers its company. A flayer in a laurel wreath, usually taken for Apollo, kneels close and cuts at the chest. A second, in a cap, often called a Scythian, works at the leg. A satyr brings a bucket. At the upper left a youth plays a lira da braccio, his eyes raised. At the right Midas sits crowned, his head on his hand. Beside him a boy or young satyr holds back a large dog, and at the foot of the tree a small dog laps the blood.
Ovid gives the satyr a cry: “quid me mihi detrahis?” (“why do you tear me from myself?”). The line could stand under the picture. The inverted body is the most luminous thing on the canvas, a pale vertical of flesh against browns and smouldering reds, and it is the thing being undone. Everything else in the clearing is ranked by how it attends to it.
Movement II
The disposition of the figures is not Titian’s invention. Giulio Romano had designed the subject for the Palazzo Te in Mantua, as part of a mannerist decorative scheme, and the picture follows that design in its arrangement: the hung satyr, the flayers, the attendant with the bucket. The inheritance is plain, and it is charged. The satyr with the bucket is a narrative help carried over from Giulio more than required by this picture, and the crowding at the right edge is an inheritance the canvas does not resolve.
What Giulio’s scheme did not have is the seated thinker at the edge and the dark that surrounds everything. Titian’s own inheritance was the Venetian poesia, his own above all, the mythologies he painted for Philip II in the 1550s and 1560s. Those were finished pictures for a king. This one was made for no known patron, and it was probably still in the studio when the painter died at Venice in 1576. Whether it is finished is debated.
The canvas turns a decorative design into a meditative object. Midas, in the myth the judge of the contest who chose wrongly, sits here as the human witness, still, after the event, unable to intervene. The face given him is widely taken as the painter’s own; that is an identification, not a fact, and the picture does not need it. Its centre of gravity moves to him all the same: the one figure in the clearing who neither works, plays nor feeds, and only thinks.
Movement III
The departure is in the paint. Forms are left open, built from broken touches and scumbles; contour dissolves into atmosphere; the surface admits its own making. Palma Giovane reported, as Boschini recorded, that the old painter worked with his fingers. Contemporaries judged the late manner as unfinish or as failing sight, and Vasari’s account of late works that must be seen from a distance and not from near is the documented form of that doubt. The painter held his course.
Here the manner is not a style laid over a subject. The picture is about the removal of a surface from a body, and it is made of a surface that will not close over the body: paint applied, rubbed and broken, so that the flesh seems to be coming apart into light. The flaying and the facture are one act. In the closed, enamelled surface of the painter’s middle years the same design would be an illustration of cruelty. Made as a print it would lose the burning air that binds the witnesses to the victim.
The scale is part of the form. With the figures near life size, the inverted head hangs at about the height of a seated viewer’s knee, and the viewer stands where Midas sits. Not every passage enacts the subject. At the right edge, where the boy and the great dog are crowded in, and in the lower foreground, the dissolution loses the form rather than carrying it; the drawing there is summary to the point of illegibility. Those are the picture’s real costs, and they are charged where they fall.
Movement IV
The music does not stop. The youth at the upper left draws his bow across the strings with his eyes raised while the satyr below is skinned, and the pipes that lost the contest hang dead in the tree. The contest of Apollo and Marsyas is the archetype of the divine and the animal in art, measure against ecstasy, the lyre against the pipe, and the composition builds it rather than citing it. Whether the musician is Apollo again in a second moment, Orpheus, or a stranger is not settled.
The punishment is done calmly. The kneeling flayer bends over the wound with absorbed attention, a face so tender that it is the worst thing in the picture; the second works at the leg like a butcher. They are the punishment’s two faces, care and labour, and both serve an order they believe in. The inverted body carries a second archetype into the first: the hunter’s carcass hung to be skinned, and the shape of the inverted martyr, so that the pagan sacrifice takes the posture of Christian suffering without becoming an allegory of it. Dante invoked Apollo with this flaying in mind, asking the god to enter him as when he drew Marsyas “de la vagina de le membra sue”.
One law governs the clearing. Everything is laid in the same smouldering touch under the same light, a smoked, flickering gold, so that the air seems to burn; colour is reduced to a small chord, and the blood sits in the same register as the reds of cloth and cap. Cruelty and beauty share one world and one measure. The register is single, dread and reverence at one temperature, with nothing of joy and no breadth of space. The picture holds that pitch from the musician’s raised eyes to the dog at the blood.
Movement V
The canvas left Venice and came, by the later seventeenth century, to Kroměříž, bought for the bishops of Olomouc. There it stayed, in a bishop’s palace in Moravia, outside the main traffic of attention for nearly three centuries, little seen and seldom reproduced. The late manner reached Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt through other works and through the studio, not through this picture. Its own reach began only when it was recovered in the twentieth century, and since then it has stood at the centre of every account of late Titian.
Its reading is therefore about a hundred years deep, and the questions it raised have not closed. One line, from Edgar Wind, reads it as a Neoplatonic allegory, Apollo’s victory the soul freed from the body’s sheath. Another reads it as a political image of Venetian justice. Some have connected it with the public flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin at Famagusta in 1571, a fact of the decade whose bearing on the picture is conjecture. Another reads it as a private meditation in which Midas is the painter. Whether it is finished, and what the calm of the executioners means, remain open.
The form is whole: the image is the one the painter left, and whether he meant to work it further is a question of finish, not of loss. The fabric has had the ordinary history of a large old oil, and a dissolved surface is more exposed than a closed one. What the picture brings into the open does not depend on its title or its century. Punishment can be done with skill and devotion; music can go on over it; and the one who sees the whole may be able only to think. Midas sits with his head on his hand, and the viewer stands beside him.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure. Marsyas cannot go: the inverted body is the picture’s axis and its event. The two flayers cannot go: one in reverent closeness at the chest, one at the leg like a butcher, they are the two faces of the punishment, care and labour. The musician cannot go: music continues while a musician is skinned, and that is the argument. Midas cannot go; he is the one who thinks, and the picture’s weight moves to him. The small dog at the blood says what the body now is. What yields is the boy with the large dog at the right, which repeats the dog’s office, and the satyr with the bucket, a help carried over from the inherited design. Required at its core, permitted at two points.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What can be stated. Punishment is done calmly, with skill and attention, by those who believe in the order it serves: the flayers bend over the work as over a craft. Beauty and cruelty share one world and one measure; the music does not stop. And the one who sees the whole, Midas, can only contemplate it: the stillness of judgement after the event, of the witness who cannot intervene. These are claims about people that hold outside the myth and outside Venice in the 1570s. Held below the top because the meaning is contested at its root, purification of the soul or violence of an order, and the picture does not say which; part of what it discloses is a mood, a solemn dusk, rather than a stated condition.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is of terror and of a grave, almost liturgical beauty, and it recurs across the canvas. The inverted body glows in the half dark, a pale vertical of flesh against browns and smouldering reds, the most luminous thing in the picture and the thing being destroyed. The kneeling flayer’s absorbed face, close to the wound, is tender, which is the worst of it. The musician’s raised eyes and the bow on the strings add a second register, song over butchery. Midas’s bowed head closes the picture in silence. What limits it: one register at one temperature of dread and reverence, nothing of joy, no breadth of space, and passages so dissolved that they read as murk before awe.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The contest of Apollo and Marsyas is the archetype of the divine and the animal in art, measure against ecstasy, the lyre against the pipe, and the composition builds it: the god’s side plays on while the satyr’s pipes hang useless in the tree. The inverted body lays a second archetype into the first, the hunter’s carcass hung to be skinned and the inverted martyr, so that the pagan sacrifice carries the shape of Christian suffering without allegory. Midas, the judge who chose wrongly, sits as the human witness. The particular stays particular: dogs, a bucket, a knife, a cap. Held at the gate rather than above it because the Christian echo is evoked by posture, not built into the narrative.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Venetian poesia, Titian’s own above all, the mythologies for Philip II of the 1550s and 1560s, and behind the composition Giulio Romano’s design for the Palazzo Te, which the picture follows in its disposition. The departure is in the paint: forms left open, built from broken touches and scumbles, worked, on Palma Giovane’s report as Boschini gives it, with the fingers; contour dissolved into air. A mannerist decorative design becomes a dark, meditative object with a seated thinker at its edge, which the source had not. The stake was real: contemporaries judged the late manner unfinish or failing sight, and Vasari set down the doubt. Charged because the borrowed design limits the turn to treatment more than invention.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. The picture is about the removal of a surface from a body, and it is made of a surface that will not close over the body: paint applied, rubbed and broken, so that the flesh seems to come apart into light. The flaying and the facture are one act. Make it in the finished, enamelled surface of the painter’s middle years and it becomes an illustration of cruelty; make it a print and the burning air that binds the witnesses to the victim goes. The near life size matters: the inverted head hangs at about the height of a seated viewer’s knee, and the viewer stands where Midas sits. Held below the top because at the right edge and in the lower foreground the dissolution loses the form rather than enacting it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise, though the evidence is younger than the canvas: the picture was little studied before the twentieth century, and its reading is about a hundred years deep. The questions have not closed. Who the musician is, Apollo again in a second moment, Orpheus, or a stranger; whether the picture is a Neoplatonic allegory of the soul freed from the body’s sheath, as the line of reading from Edgar Wind argues, a political image of Venetian justice, or a private meditation in which Midas is the painter; whether it is finished; what the calm of the executioners means. The surface yields on return: the dog, the bucket, the faces in the gloom. Held below the top because much of the yield is uncertainty about the object itself.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is Venetian painting of the 1570s and, beyond it, European painting after Titian. The force is high: this is among the furthest points of the late manner, the touch made the carrier of meaning, one of the decisive reorganisations of what oil painting could do. The reach is what holds the axis down. The canvas left Venice and has stood at Kroměříž since the seventeenth century, little seen and seldom reproduced until the twentieth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late manner reached Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt through other works and through the studio, not through this one; this picture’s own reach began with its recovery in the twentieth century and is late and particular. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Below the gate.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half centuries. Form: whole. The image is the one the painter left; whether he meant to work it further is a question of finish, not of loss, and is not charged. Presence: thin for most of its life, in a bishop’s palace in Moravia, outside the main traffic of attention for nearly three centuries; recovered in the twentieth century, and since then at the centre of every account of late Titian. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary history of a large old oil, lining and cleaning, and a dissolved surface is more vulnerable than a closed one. The long obscurity holds the axis at the foot of the range a whole form of this age commands.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of oil on canvas at near life size, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The inverted torso is modelled in a few warm and cool scumbles over a dark ground, so that the flesh glows without contour. Blood is laid in short red strokes that sit in the same register as the reds of cloth and cap. The faces of the kneeling flayer and of Midas are built of touches that read as absorption at a step back and as broken paint up close. The gold of the air is a glaze of light over everything. Colour is reduced to a small chord and made to do the work of light, drama and binding. The costs: the right group and the lower foreground are drawn summarily to the point of illegibility, and the crowding at the right edge is an inheritance not resolved.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the musician at the upper left, eyes raised, playing, and the small dog at the bottom, lapping blood. One law holds them. Everything is laid in the same smouldering touch under the same burning light, and everything is ranked by its attention to the body: the god bending close, the labourer at the leg, the musician turned away into his music, the thinker turned inward, the dogs to the blood. Cruelty and beauty are not set in different registers; that is the law. The range is wide, god, satyr, king, boy, beast, music, butchery and thought. Held below the top because the right side holds the law less firmly than the left: the boy and the great dog obey the composition’s crowding more than its logic.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held: the sacred and the divine, in Apollo and in the inverted body’s martyr shape; the animal, in the satyr’s goat legs and the two dogs; art, in the contest itself, the bowed instrument and the pipes; justice and the state, in a punishment done for an order and a king sitting in judgement; labour, in the flayers at their craft; consciousness, in Midas’s meditation; the natural order, in the tree and the dusk. The hanging body at the centre of attention integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no history but the myth’s and what the viewer brings, no social world beyond the scene. It is one event in a clearing, though it holds more than one scene usually does.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.1. A form whole after about four and a half centuries; a command of oil that models flesh without contour and makes a small chord of colour do the work of light, drama and binding; and a surface that will not close over the body, so that the flaying and the facture are one act.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the sacred, the animal, art, justice, labour, thought and the natural order held in one event in a clearing, with no family, no history and no social world beyond the scene. Below the rest, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: the force of the late manner is high, but this canvas spent nearly three centuries at Kroměříž, little seen, and the manner’s reach belongs to other works; its own began in the twentieth century. That axis holds the work at the Epochal Gate.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The twelve sum to 105.3, an average of 8.78 that displays 8.8, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the placement in Tier IV is settled on the gate and on the aggregate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs in the Archbishop’s Palace at Kroměříž (Archdiocesan Museum Olomouc), of its composition, its figures and its literature in outline, not from sight of its surface; the state of every passage is not vouched for. The work scored is the single painting, oil on canvas, generally placed about 1570 to 1576, as it now stands; whether it is finished is debated, and what stands is scored, the dissolution credited where it enacts the subject and charged where it loses the form. Lining and cleaning are weighed only as facts of survival. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: Giulio Romano’s design of the subject for the Palazzo Te, Mantua, on which the composition draws, weighed on the turn; Titian’s other late works and his mythologies for Philip II, which are context; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses VI, the source. The modern readings (Edgar Wind’s Neoplatonic line, the political and the private) are reception, weighed on return. The only words quoted are Ovid’s (Met. VI.385) and Dante’s (Paradiso I.19 to 21); the English gloss of Ovid is the desk’s own. Palma Giovane’s report through Boschini and Vasari’s account of the late manner are paraphrased. The link to Bragadin’s death and the identification of Midas’s face as the painter’s are given as conjecture and identification, not as fact. Not given, as unverified: the exact dimensions, the number of figures, the year of the purchase for Olomouc and the collections the canvas passed through before it, the signature reported on the stone, the exhibitions of the twentieth century at which it was shown, and the picture’s place in modern letters.