Titian’s ‘Pietà’ Is the Work of an Artist Responding to a Pandemic

ARTNEWS
By Maximiliano Duron

Titian, Pietà, ca. 1576. GALLERIE DELL'ACCADEMIA, VENICE

How can artists creatively respond to a health crisis? Many are pondering this question right now amid a coronavirus pandemic, though it’s one that’s been asked for centuries. Titian, one of the High Renaissance’s greatest masters, was among the artists to mull it, and he did so as he made his final work, Pietà (ca. 1576), while Venice was ravaged by a bubonic plague outbreak. “The picture becomes an artistic testament of sorts in that sense, something that he intended to be associated with his afterlife,” said Matthias Wivel, a curator of 16th-century Italian paintings at the National Gallery in London who organized the museum’s “Titian: Love, Desire, Death” exhibition, now closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. [More]