Blue Period
Tiziano Vecelli (1488/90 - 1576) eminence grise of the rebirth Venetian, had a blue period of a single Julian year, 1511 A.D., producing Risen Christ.
The seed of Christianity’s own demise were buried when the desert religion was transplanted into the Black Forest consecutive with the rich Fugger northwards pioneering stock market futures for his copper mine monopoly (around the same crux of century where Tiziano was painting): soon anybody could model for Mary, any cracker could be flesh, and no church more enthusiastically celebrates the leap from image to symbol than Trinity on our Wall Street.
Though a virtuosic Catholic, Tiziano’s private religion was anatomy. This Risen Christ: a torso waiting for Modigliani to be born, a rapture in the convolutions of linen, a half-healed spear wound placed a little closer to the heart than typical, and a three-dimensional nipple possible only by Venetian softening of hard Florentine perspective. But I have never seen something so blue. Ultramarine, azurite and indigo: these pigments were more expensive by weight than gold so Tiziano often underpainted blue with bargain pink or lilac not for lack of patronage but from a comprehension of economy in its complete sense.
Pierre Reverdy remained a Catholic even when it so upset him because of a certain shade of crimson and I still dare the juvenile indulgence of a favorite color, blue, because I am a Jew. I’m watching a top 300 Titian compilation on YouTube. Christ is always so busy and suddenly here he is, still. Like I suspect so many viewers do, I comfort myself with the category of “just Christ again” a bulwark against really looking that makes certain wings of long museums bearable. But Tiziano has made me look at Christ, even with my most cynical eye. I sympathize with the brevity of this blue period. Risen Christ, 1511 is something so perfect it is immediately obsolete. Its world, wholly mastered, is by the same mastery rigid and therefore impossibly brittle, brittle to even passing time. Like Olivier’s King Henry or Dante’s theology: profoundly famous but with zero influence. James Dean was already born, learning how to lean on Cadillacs, and Boccaccio was already next door mixing adultery, birds and flowers. So blue slept in the history of art, the way the sidewalk is sometimes wet in the morning but, for the life of you, you can’t remember last night’s rain.