Canada’s only Titian now on display in Ottawa

Not surprisingly, Canada’s capital gets more in the way of museums, arts and culture than a city of not quite one million might otherwise expect. Which is a nice bonus for residents and visitors alike.

So, in art news here, the National Gallery wants everyone to know they’ve finally established a fitting display for Canada’s only known painting by renaissance master Tiziano Vecellio, whom we typically know as Titian. (b. 1485? 1490? d. 1576)

Portrait of Daniele Barbaro (1514-1570) by Vecellio, Tiziano (called Titian) 1545

The work being publicized is a 1545 Titian portrait of an Italian cleric and scholar named Daniele Barbaro.

According to Wikipedia, Titian was:

…one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.

This website on Italian Renaissance Art has more images of Titian’s better-known paintings.

Peter Simpson, arts-editor-at-large for The Ottawa Citizen, has an excellent blog called The Big Beat. The most recent post there includes a video of this week’s unveiling of the National Gallery’s “new” Titian – which was actually acquired in 1928. (Note: the video link didn’t work for me when I wrote this, but hopefully it will work for you.)

There’s a great art-detective back story on this painting’s highs and lows.

Back in July, Simpson told how the protrait was rescued from obscurity by the National Gallery’s Stephen Gritt, director of conservation and technical research.

Tenacity pays, and in this case pays big, shifting something dismissed as a copy to multi-million dollar status. (After a lot of hard research and restoration, that is.)

If this sounds worth seeing, seek it out during regular hours at the gallery.

Tags: canada, National Gallery of Canada, Peter Simpson, Stephen Gritt, The Big Beat, Titian