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The Three Ages of Man, from Titian

Titian


Giovan Battista Salvi, known as Sassoferrato, The Three Ages of Man, from Titian, c. 1682 oil on canvas, 93 x 153.5 cm. Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. 346

The painting is a seventeenth-century version, attributed to Sassoferrato, of the Three Ages that Titian executed at the beginning of the second decade of the sixteenth century and now in the National Gallery of Scotland. 

As in Titian’s original, the scene takes place in a landscape. On the left, a young couple is reclining on a flowery meadow: the boy is almost nude, rests his flute on the ground, and exchanges his gaze intensely with that of a young girl with her hair adorned with a wreath of myrtle. The girl has two flutes: one closer to her lips, the other alluding to the obvious erotic tension between the two, who are the protagonists of a musical duet that has just been interrupted and is on the verge of moving from musical to amorous experience. On the right, two putti sleep embraced, overlooked by a Cupid who seems to be holding up the trunk of a dry tree. Just behind, a seated old man holds a skull, surrounded by three others (and some bones) in the Borghese example, limited to two in the Edinburgh painting: this is the most important compositional difference between the two paintings.   

In the Three Ages of Edinburgh, Titian stages the life of man, which flows under the banner of the subtle balance between voluptas and virtus, and which unfolds and rewinds from childhood (two are the putti watched over by Love) to maturity (two are the young figures intent on amorous interaction), which in the old man generates only regret of useless vanity (two are the skulls he reflects on), destined to die like all things. It is a continuous, inevitable, self-same cycle, within which humanity is always faced with universal choices, between possible downfalls and longed-for eternity: themes central to the young Titian’s production, and differently declined in his later and final activity, as in the Nymph and Shepherd of Vienna, presented in this exhibition.

X-rays of the Edinburgh painting, published in 1971, showed an idea of the work that was originally different, and close, especially in the number of skulls, to precisely the two known versions of Titian’s canvas, which are almost identical to each other: the Borghese and Doria Pamphilj exemplars. 

The subject is widely debated, and critics have advanced the possibility that at least two versions of this allegory on human life had come out of the same Titian workshop, only one of which has come down to us, present in Rome between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the latter in all likelihood was taken the Doria canvas, already recorded in the Aldobrandini collection in 1603 as Titian and held as such for almost all of the seventeenth century, in a context such as the Roman one in which workshop works or made in the manner of the master circulated and crowded aristocratic and cardinal collections as Titian tout court, arousing admiration of amateurs, soliciting the attention of traveling or resident artists, originating copies. 

Within this horizon in all likelihood the Borghese exemplar is produced, perhaps in the early 1780s, when following the death of Olimpia Aldobrandini the division of property between the two heirs was initiated, in part merging into the Borghese picture gallery, which must have been the occasion to have a copy of the painting made, which remained with the Doria Pamphilj branch, and then considered to be an original by Titian. Hence the stylistic gap between the two versions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the compositional similarity almost to the point of overlap. In addition, the Borghese example has been remembered in the family collection only since 1700.




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