Customer Reviews

Titian: The Complete Paintings (Classical Art)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Length:: 0:19 Mins

Titian hardcover book by Phaidon has done another wonderful job in presenting color plates in large size while keeping the details. The pages are slightly on the thicker side, but don't limit the numbers of paintings presented within.

Peter Humfrey does a very good job in covering the life and artistic output of one of the most successful artists of all time: Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian. The book covers his major works and the different phases of his life very well. The plentiful color plates are generally very good, although some are a bit too dark. However, a few of the pictures are actually better presented here than in any other book available. I think it is also very positive that the author included color plates of some copies of Titian's work in cases where the originals are sadly lost.

One minor complaint is the fact that the author's opinion on certain subjects interfer with the text in a few places. For instance, he complains that some of Titian's nudes include erotic or even pornographic elements which may diminish the communcative power of the works to modern viewers. This view seems to echo Mark Twain's similarly puritanical view of the Venus of Urbino, although in a more modern (feministic?) point of view. I find it hard to take these comments seriously, as I have seen far more shocking nudes in modern art than in Titian's oeuvre. In my personal view, the world of Renaissance Venice seems refreshingly modern in that it occasionally would accept erotic art for what it was, without the need to constantly veil it in allegorical subject matter, although Titian was well-known for latter practice as well.

All in all, the positives far outweigh the negatives, and this book is a must for anybody interested in the glowing artworks of Titian.

Be very careful when you order this book from Amazon. I am from the UK and ordered this in 2007 from Amazon.com in the US. Rather than the Abrams edition advertised, I was shipped the Ludion edition, which looks entirely different from the video shown by one of the other reviewers (who labels his as a Phaidon edition, which is confusing). His video shows text mainly separate from illustrations, whereas the Ludion edition I was shipped has fewer pages and a totally different layout where about 7cm of text lies below every illustration so that with the white borders, the reproductions of paintings are pretty small. The reproductions are also dark and not terribly well focused (as opposed to say books by the French publisher Flammarion or the Yale series of the catalogue raisonne of John Singer Sargent, where even small reproductions of paintings are sharp and clear.)

This Ludion edition seems to be a cheap reprint, and I feel that the quality would hardly merit a $40 price, much less what is asked for, even at a deep discount. This was a very disappointing book. Don't buy it unless you get the correct edition. I would return mine if it were not for the prohibitive airmail fees, and feel that Amazon has been very negligent in sending a cheap alternative to what is advertised. (I only found this out by reviewing their advert again recently 3 years after purchasing the book).