Venus with the Organ Player

Especially in later years, Titian was hardly averse to repeating and further developing his pictorial inventions in varied forms – often with the participation of his workshop – in order to accommodate the wishes of clients. Among such works are his depictions of Venus, which were produced between 1545 and circa 1565/70.
On December 8, 1545, Titian sent a letter from Rome to the Emperor Charles V in which he expressed the desire to personally deliver a picture of Venus, which he had executed in the Emperor’s name. In 1547, the Emperor invited Titian to attend the Imperial Diet in Augsburg. Titian arrived from Venice in January of 1548 with his son Orazio, travelling home in mid-September, the imperial retinue having departed for Brussels on August 12. On September 1, in a letter addressed to Antoine Perrenot de Granvella, the Bishop of Arras, the son of the Chancellor of Charles V and his advisor in Brussels, Titian mentions a “Venus” he had painted on a commission from the Emperor, and had brought with him from Venice to Augsburg, and was now evidently shipping it to Brussels. Subsequently, Titian – residing again in Augsburg in 1550/51 – produced a series of further Venus pictures, the Berlin picture evidently among them.
Italian research, as well as (with reservations) H. Wethey (1971, 1975), assume that the Venus of 1545 is identical with the one mentioned in a letter written by Granvella in 1548, and that the Emperor gave it to Granvella as a gift. This is however, disputed by C. Hope (1980). In fact, Granvella later owned the signed Venus with Organ Player that is today in the Prado in Madrid (Venus with Organist and Amor). According to the Italian research and Wethey, this picture is the oldest surviving version of the series, and the immediate precursor of the Berlin picture, which has been dated by recent research in general to circa 1550–52, with the exception of Wethey, who dates it circa 1548/49 based on the assumption that it was produced in connection with Titian’s meeting with Prince Philip, later the King of Spain, in Milan in late December of 1548, and is among “certain portraits” for which he received 1000 ducats on January 29, 1549. In opposition to this, V. Herzner (1993) asserts that the Madrid picture derives from the one in Berlin. Hope and Herzner reject Wethey’s hypothesis, as well as the identification of the organ player with Philip II.
The relationship between the various versions, their temporal sequence, the question of Titian’s degree of responsibility for their execution, their dating, along with their interpretation: all remain contested matters in the research. O. Brendel’s proposal (1946), taken up and developed further by Panofsky (1969), for interpreting the picture in the spirit of the Renaissance Neoplatonism, and according
to which it embodies the idea of a rivalry between hearing and sight vis à vis the recognition of beauty under the sign of love, has been decisively rejected by Herzner (1993), Hope (1980), and E. Goodman (1983). Goodman explains the image in relation to the spirit of romantic poetry found in Petrarchism (going back to the poet Petrarch). Hope and Goodman believed that the nude female form in the versions with a male partner (whether an organ or lute player) represented not Venus, but instead a lady or courtesan being courted by a cavalier. The Cupid is interpreted here not as the attribute of his mother Venus, but instead as a messenger of love sent by the cavalier.
Cupid snuggles up to the woman’s face, which turns toward him, and whispers a declaration of love into her ear. This reading is rejected by Herzner, who again identifies the female figure as Venus. Hope believes that the version in Florence, which displays Venus (with Cupid) without a male partner, is a workshop copy of the original painting of Venus that was executed for Charles V in 1545, and which he regards as lost. With reference to the draperies, he claims that the three pictures in Florence, Madrid (Venus with Organist and Amor), and Cambridge can be traced directly to the original version, and are closer to it than the other three pictures in Berlin, Madrid (Venus with Dog and Organist), and New York, which he considers second-rate derivatives. Herzner (1993) has emphasized that the Granvella version in Madrid (Venus with Organist and Amor) is dependent upon the Berlin picture, and not the reverse, as asserted by Hope. Incomprehensibly, and like T. Hetzer (1940) before him, Hope perceives in the Berlin picture only a weak workshop product. But its painterly quality and the presence of pentimenti (particularly with the organist) would seem to support the belief that the painting comes from Titian’s own hand.
Both of the pictures of Venus with a lute player, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, date from the 1560s. The somewhat earlier picture in Cambridge was regarded by Zeri (1973) as entirely from the artists own hand, while both Pallucchini (1969) and Wethey (1975) perceived workshop participation. The somewhat later New York picture is regarded as by Titian’s own hand, although it was left unfinished by the artist in the studio, and completed later by a different hand. It shares the provenance from the collection of the Pio princes of Rome with the Berlin picture. Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019