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Titian. Dialogues of Nature and Love is a dossier exhibition that stemmed from the loan of Titian’s painting Nymph and Shepherd by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna as part of a programme of cultural exchange between the two institutions.

The encounter between the Vienna canvas and the works by Titian in the Galleria Borghese – Sacred and Profane Love and Venus Blindfolding Cupid – enables the paintings to interact with each other around two themes that were a constant feature of the artist’s production: Nature, as symbolic landscape and place of human action, and Love, depicted in its various forms – divine, natural and matrimonial love – personified by Venus or a nymph, a young girl or a bride.

Nature and Love are closely intertwined and represent part of the life cycle, in a harmonious relationship to which alludes the romantic and musical allegory of the Nymph and Shepherd. This is the final episode of a recurrent theme addressed for the first time by the young Titian with the Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh), here presented in the form of a copy by Sassoferrato (from Museum storage), who, during the 17th century, reproduced – almost certainly for the Borghese family – a version of Titian’s painting that was on view in Rome.

The dossier exhibition finds its natural location in room XX (20), where the works of Titian and the Venetian school are on display. The dialogues of Nature and Love are prompted by Sacred and Profane Love and Venus blindfolding Cupid – already facing one another – and between Nymph and Shepherd and The Three Ages of Man, both placed along the other axis.

In that room there are also other paintings that can be considered as commentary to these dialogues. Among them, the problematic painting of Venus, Cupid and a Satyr, in tight correlation with Venus blindfolding Cupid.




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