4 June 2020. Nymph and Shepherd.
Precisely in that interval between art and life, and just yesterday--I could hardly believe I was witness--a young deer, over by the back fence, up on her hind legs, reaching for new leaves on the ivy. An image I'd seen so many times over the years--but always in a painting, Titian's Nymph and Shepherd. A very late work--one of those rough, open-ended canvasses--among my very favorites--I'd found it in a catalogue picked up at one of the used bookstores in downtown Oakland, nearby the old studio--so that would have been in the early 1980's. Reproduced in black and white, from an obscure picture gallery somewhere in Hungary. At least that's how I remember it.
Which is how it was then--knowledge of such things being hard to come by. Inadvertent. Happenstance. Even the museum obscure. Whereas today images of paintings are so readily available--there's even a Wikipedia article on this one, listed as being in the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm Collection, now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, with an accurate color reproduction showing all of Titian's subtle warm-cool tonalities.
When I first found the painting, even in black and white, I already sensed it was crucial. Came at the time I was looking at a lot of Titian--as a kind of guide-- the way he let the painting itself precede the drawing--the massing of form rather than the Florentine outline. That Venitian sensibility--color over linear edge. (Which may seem funny, today, since I've allowed myself to return so much to line in these drawings--but the malerische is in there too--hidden away in all the erasures and pauses...you can see this especially when they're enlarged, becoming a kind of autobiography.)
The meaning of Titian's painting became apparent as well--or at least the way I understood it. Two young figures, shepherd and nymph, reclining in the foreground, music, love--while close behind, buttressed on a slope, a broken tree. Just one living branch--and reaching up to seize it, the figure of a deer. (I'd say young stag from the look of his male appurtenances.) I would have been in my mid-thirties then, but I knew Titian was speaking to me--clearly he'd painted himself here, reaching up for that last branch. (He'd have been in his eighties at the time--this was painted a year or two before he died.) I found the arc of time in the painting astounding--and Titian's vigor--how he saw himself as a painter, even at the end...
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Yesterday's deer was astounding, too--I'd seen them reach of for plumb branches before, of course, deer will do this--but yesterday's pose was exactly the same as in the painting. And just after I'd been talking with a friend about the meaning of ultimate things--and the phrase choose life. The story of the midwives again, the vigor of the young Israelite mothers. It's a matter of what one choses to focus on, always, in the balance--an image of opening...
