Poets Inspired by Titian - Seamus heaney - Metamorphosis - Titian 2012 - The national gallery, London
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I felt either you do this immediately or you won’t do it at all. It will be too slow,
and you’ll get anxious and it will build up. So, I plunged in with the Actaeon I knew,
basically [The Death of Actaeon]. I worked on a free range, so to speak, on a blank canvas
almost. I think if you actually stayed with the picture beforehand and dwelt with it,
if I did, it might hamper me more than anything else, because it’s so absolute and so much
itself that I don’t know what else you could do with it.
I think the tumult of bodies in the other two, Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon,
that kind of terrific, vivid, living congregation of flesh and pattern at the same time, beautifully,
draws Ovid out far more. I suppose all the nymphs get a half a line or so in Ovid – she’s
with her nymphs – but in the Titian the nymphs are very much part of the story, thoroughly
present. Titian turned it to his own needs, obviously.
I read much more about the paintings since I wrote the poem, and coming to the National
Gallery after that kind of absorption in the material gave the paintings a different kind
of purchase and added much more sense of occasion going to see them. So, it will make me attend
to Titian much more elsewhere, everywhere, you know. He wasn’t a painter that I inhabited,
but he now inhabits me a bit more, definitely, yes. They’re great masterpieces.
