Titian and the gold of the Assumption – Il Sole 24 ORE
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Entering the basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, in Venice, means witnessing an epiphany every time, an extraordinary staging whose centerpiece is the altarpiece of the Assumption by Titian that illuminates the entire vision inside the large church.
The Assumption is one of the cornerstones of art history, a masterpiece that when it appeared on the Renaissance scene upset the canons of painting. In front of that altarpiece, generations of faithful and visitors, scholars and tourists have delighted.
That Blessed Virgin, so glorious yet so human, is physically disturbing but above all conceptual; that body raised to heaven by hosts of angels is flesh and spirit, the very mystery of the humanity of the divine.
Titian
Titian was not yet 30 when he made this masterpiece for the Conventual Friars Minor of Venice; the altarpiece was commissioned from him in 1516 by Fra ‘Germano, superior of the Convent of the Frari, and placed in the apse of the basilica on May 19, 1518. It is the first official commission that Titian receives in Venice.
An impressive restoration
For its first 500 years, Titian’s Assumption received as a gift an impressive restoration that brought it back in time and returned all its original freshness to it.The oil painting by Titian is one of the most extensive in the world: it is almost seven meters high, three and a half wide, weighs about 700 kilos and is inserted in a monumental aedicule in Istrian stone.The wooden plank is made up of 20 boards of white poplar arranged horizontally and glued together at an edge I live; on the back, the containment structure is made up of a system of vertical sliding larch crosspieces held by wooden corbels nailed to the boards. Two oblique crosspieces and three horizontal crosspieces nailed to the vertical crosspieces guarantee the tightness of the entire structure.
A vibrant and bright color palette
To paint the Assumption Titian used a vibrant and luminous color palette, because he knew that the work would be against the light of the very luminous Frari apse; the painter then worked on a bright color tone, with powerful reds. It is precisely those reds, pinks, golds, greens and celestials that we find today after the restoration work carried out in situ, so as not to subject the masterpiece to further environmental stress. Four years of painstaking work in which dozens of professionals they took turns for the diagnostic investigations, the installation of the scaffolding, the removal of the organ that had been anchored to the back of the blade, the disinfestation of woodworms of the wooden support, the restoration of the gaps between the boards and an effective support system and anchoring the work with vibration absorbers, up to the actual restoration of the pictorial surface and the stone aedicule. Almost nine thousand hours of work for the sole cleaning of the work, 28 square meters wide, rolling slightly larger wads of wadding of a cotton swab soaked in a mild solvent mixture. A very delicate work carried out by the skilled hands of Giulio Bono and his team of restorers under the supervision of works entrusted to Giulio Manieri Elia – director of the Galleries of the Academy of Venice – and in collaboration with the Scientific Laboratory of Mercy and the Superintendence of Artistic Heritage and Landscape of Venice and Lagoon.
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