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Listen to our latest podcast episode with William E. Wallace, internationally recognized expert on Michelangelo, discussing his new book Michelangelo and Titian: A Tale of Rivalry and Genius, published by Princeton University Press.
Wallace has spent more than forty years studying Michelangelo, and one of the things that makes this book unusual is its honesty about the limits of the historical record. Much of what passed between these two artists was spoken, not written—what Wallace calls boca, word of mouth—and traditional historians, who require documentation, have largely set it aside. Wallace's response is what he calls "informed imagination": a method of bridging the gaps between documented facts using everything the surviving evidence implies. It's a rigorous approach to a relationship that was largely unspoken, and it allows him to make a case the scholarship has missed.
Our conversation covers the theoretical debate that defined their two worlds: disegno, the Florentine belief that drawing was the foundation of all art, versus colorito, the Venetian mastery of colour and paint and Wallace's observation that neither artist actually cared about it. The academic dispute belonged to critics and theorists. Michelangelo and Titian were too busy trying to outdo each other. We also discuss the extraordinary shared social world they moved through: the same popes, the same patrons, the same courts — and Pietro Aretino, Titian's closest friend and the most dangerous writer in Europe, whose published letters give us a rare record of what was actually said.
The conversation closes with Wallace drawing a parallel to Matisse and Picasso—another forty-year rivalry that provoked both artists to greater heights—and argues that this kind of sustained, mutual attention to a worthy competitor may be one of the most powerful engines of creativity we know of.
Recognition of the greatness of somebody else is going to spur you on to try and equal that or surpass it. And I think that's a fundamental characteristic of our art world today.
– William E. Wallace
About the Author
William E. Wallace the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author and editor of nine books on Michelangelo, has consulted for the Vatican on the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and has served as a principal consultant for three BBC television programmes on Michelangelo. He is the recipient of fellowships at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the American Academy in Rome.