The Muddied Mirror

Ideal painting in the Renaissance was an art of illusionism that eliminated for the viewer any overt sense of its making. Titians paintings, in contrast, with their roughly worked and open surfaces, unexpected glazes, and thick impasto brushstrokes, made the fact of the paint increasingly visible. Previous scholars have read these paintings as unfinished or the product of lesser studio hands, but in The Muddied Mirror, Jodi Cranston argues that this approach to paint is integral to Titians later work. Rather than presenting in paint a precise reflection of the visible world, the artist imparted an intrinsic corporeality to his subjects through the varying mass and thickness of the paint. It is precisely the materiality and disfiguration of these paintings that offer us the key to understanding their meanings. More important, the subjects of Titians late paintings are directly related to the materiality of the bodythey represent physical changes wrought through violence, metamorphosis, and desire.