Nymph and Shepherd

No information is known about the commissioning of this painting, again referring to Titian’s very late production. By contrast, its provenance from the important collection of the Venetian merchant Bartolomeo dalla Nave, purchased by Viscount Basil Feilding, English ambassador extraordinary to Venice, on behalf of his brother-in-law James, third marquis of Hamilton, is amply established: without paying duty, Feilding was allowed to load onto an English vessel, among other things, twenty crates of paintings, marked on the outside with the ambassador’s coat of arms, which arrived in London in October 1638. The painting, recorded as Venus and Adonis, remained at the Duke of Hamilton’s residence until 1643, when, following the events of the Civil War, the paintings were confiscated, entrusted to Feilding and then, after his death in 1649, put up for sale and purchased by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm going to significantly enrich his art collection, kept until 1656 in Brussels, where the archduke resided as governor of the Netherlands, and then transferred to Vienna, where, before entering the imperial collections (1662), it was at the archduke’s personal residence (Stallburg) recorded by an inventory (1659) as “Nimpfa” and “Hierth,” i.e., Nymph and Shepherd. 

This is an indication that forgoes identifying the protagonists to consider them in a pastoral, but not bucolic, context of the overall setting. In fact, the scene takes place in a landscape, hinted at in its essential elements, traced in “resolute strokes, with massive brushstrokes of colour,” that technique so well described by Palma the Younger, who had been in Titian’s workshop, in the account reported by Marco Boschini. 

Nature, only seemingly shapeless, is the space of action of the young couple and the goat, intent on feeding on a branch silhouetted against the sky, far from looking like a sketch, constructed instead spot upon spot with the precise intention of restoring it dense and restless, by means of “strokes” of red and thicker impastos of white lead.   

The foreground is entirely taken up by the two main protagonists of this tale: the young man is seated on a natural elevation created by the ground, holding the chord of a beak flute that he nevertheless does not play, looking at the woman, with her back turned and lying on her side beside him, caught in the instant of turning toward her companion in this game of love, without, however, coming to meet his gaze. The maiden is lying on a spotted leopard skin, which serves as her bedding, and which, by the tail end, is resting on the young man’s right shoulder; her feet, also barefoot, are stretched out on a grassy carpet, of which the tufts of grass are highlighted by means of “massive brushstrokes” of yellow; she is almost completely naked, and that thin drape on the tone of white mixed with golden yellow covers only one shoulder, then falls softly over her back, left uncovered, until it encircles her waist; she shows only one hand, indolent, with which she seems to caress herself, thus adding erotic charge to an already very explicit context. The two characters are under an oak tree, among the few truly “natural” elements of a nature that is by no means Arcadian: the other is the leafy branch on which the goat feeds, the only living part, but still for a short time, of a tree of which a trunk remains, already partly inexorably dry.     

Closely related to the attempts to understand the scene are the various hypotheses aimed at identifying the two protagonists: from woodland dwellers in a world of nature, and thus a nymph and a shepherd, to an allegory of the relationship in a Platonic key between the senses of sight and hearing, i.e. Diana and Endymion, Daphnis and Cloe, Medorus and Angelica, Orpheus and a Maenad. Or Paris and Enon, according to Erwin Panofksy’s (1969) reading. The two characters have also been identified as Ariadne and Dionysus: Bacchus would be referred to by the wreath of vine leaves encircling the young man’s head and the leopard skin; while the young woman lying down, perhaps barely awake given the extreme looseness of her body, could consequently allude to Ariadne. 

Although the identification of the protagonists may help to circumscribe a context of reference, mythological in all likelihood, the meaning represented is universal, and always traceable for old Titian to a melancholic, useless regret for humanism, and for a lost humanity. It is no coincidence that here a theme is used that was already addressed throughout his production and particularly in the Three Ages of Edinburgh. With some significant differences: in the Edinburgh painting the young man is almost completely naked, here he is well dressed though barefoot; there three flutes are counted-one, the young man’s, resting firmly on the ground, the other two in the maiden’s hands – here the young man holds the chord of the only flute present; there the woman is clothed, and is the protagonist of the amorous gesture, here she is naked, and lying on the ground. The landscape settings of the two painted works are apparently as different as can be imagined, certainly due in part to the chronological distance that separates them: in both scenes, however, they take concrete form in a Nature that is the site of men’s actions and a signifying reflection of their tensions, falls, and ambitions. Which, at the end of a life spent in search of the golden touch, becomes a melancholic thought about the futility of existence, a rejection of the Arcadian dimension and a disruptive presence in history, of time devouring everything.