Exhibition - Titian. St. John the Baptist

The aim of this small exhibition is to present the public and academic community with the Saint John the Baptist that you see behind me. This painting belongs to the Museo del Prado but for one hundred and twenty years, from 1886 to 2008, it was on deposit with the parish church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Cantoria in the province of Almeria, as it was thought to be by an anonymous, seventeenth-century Madrid artist. In 2008 this deposit was cancelled as part of the research project that I am currently undertaking for my catalogue raisonné of Titian. To our surprise, we realised that this is not an anonymous, Madrid School work but an autograph painting by Titian. The painting arrived in a truly deplorable state, as can be seen in photographs prior to its restoration. It has now been restored in an almost miraculous manner, firstly allowing the image to be read correctly, which was previously almost impossible, while in the least damaged areas - the landscape and sky - the original quality of the painting is once again visible. Sadly, as it is now, the painting does not possess any significant aesthetic merit due to its poor condition but it is certainly of documentary importance, in fact of enormous importance for various reasons. Firstly, because once it became possible to see the image we realised that within Spain this was one of Titian’s most appreciated religious compositions, which is an extremely significant fact as he was the artist most highly esteemed by Spanish clients. Copies of this painting have appeared right across Spain but the earliest are to be found in the Zaragoza and its surrounding area, which has led me to think that the work arrived during the artist’s lifetime in Zaragoza, probably owned by the 4th Duke of Villahermosa. It than went to Madrid as the property of the Admiral of Castile and was housed in the convent of San Pascual Bailón. It subsequently entered the Museo de la Trinidad and from there passed to the Museo del Prado. Another important feature of this painting is the way it offers an example of how Titian made replicas of his paintings. In the present exhibition we have brought together the three paintings by the artist on Saint John the Baptist, painted over a 35-year span. We know that Titian was enormously in demand as a painter and that clients requested replicas of all his paintings. So, when he executed a work he immediately made a copy of it by tracing. This copy remained in his workshop in the expectation of requests for replicas. When such commissions arrived Titian made small modifications to the copy, to the landscape, the gestures and the colours, resulting in a new original. For this reason no two works by Titian are identical. As a result of this working practice, x-radiographs of the paintings reveal the previous composition beneath the surface one. This is perfectly clear in the exhibition and to some extent the exhibition focuses on this procedure. As a result, if we look at the last of the three versions, which is the one now in El Escorial dating from around 1565 to 1570, the x-radiograph shows the immediately preceding composition, which is the version in the Prado dating from around 1555, while the x-radiograph of the Prado painting reveals the compositions of the Accademia version, which dates from around 1530 to 1532. Finally, the appearance of this new Saint John the Baptist allows for a better understanding of the other two versions. In the case of the El Escorial canvas this is because it supports a firm attribution, which has recently been inexplicably questioned in my opinion, while in the case of the painting in the Accademia it offers information on its creation and on Titian’s initial intentions for that painting, which he subsequently rejected and rethought in this version in the Museo del Prado.