Titian’s Poetics: Selected Essays by David Rosand

The present volume offers an extensive compendium of the late Professor David Rosand’s writings on Titian through a collection of essays published between 1971 and 2014. Throughout his illustrious career at Columbia University, Rosand indefatigably investigated the Venetian artist’s pictorial intelligence, and much as the continuous conversation of an enduring friendship creates ever new levels of intimacy and understanding, this lifelong engagement resulted in some of the most convincing interpretations of Titian’s artworks penned to date. While his scholarship has been extremely influential on Titian studies, Rosand’s most significant texts on the artist are chapters in books with a broader subject or papers disseminated in journals and collective volumes. Through a careful selection of essays, curated around Rosand’s primary concerns with ＂Titian the painter and on the affective structures of his art, his technique and mimetic power, on its poetry,＂ this book reconstitutes the many facets of his vision of the artist. The reader is invited to enjoy this volume both as a means to gain deeper insight into the art of Renaissance Venice, and also the shifting priorities in the field of art history in the second half of the twentieth century, which Rosand himself did much to mold. His ground-breaking interrogation of the relationship between making and meaning in Titian’s art remains remarkably fresh and will doubtless continue to offer prompts to future generations of scholars. At the same time, his lively and inimitable style means his essays will engage any individual curious about art, its creation, and its connection to literature and society.