Woman with the Mirror/Femme au Miroir

Eni is back in Milan, along with the Louvre and the city council, for a new appointment with a great masterpiece of Italian art, Titian’s Woman with a Mirror (Donna allo specchio).
The Sala Alessi of the Palazzo Marino will abandon its usual function to be transformed into an exhibition space that is the ideal location for bringing culture and citizens together. It will also be an opportunity to admire an extraordinary work, learn about its history and become more familiar with it. The display and lighting, as always designed to get the best from the painting, will highlight the particulars, the colours and all of the details that Titian wanted to represent but which, under normal circumstances, are more difficult to appreciate.

Woman with a Mirror is a canvas of rare fascination, that is able to communicate its greatness and that of its extraordinary creator and it is not a coincidence that it occupies a special place on the first floor of the Louvre, next to the Mona Lisa, with which it shares a magnetic glance and a capacity to enchant viewers. The opening of the exhibition will follow the kind of launch for which Eni has become known after those dedicated to Caravaggio’s Saul and Leonardo’s St John the Baptist, providing, among the many cultural offerings available in Milan, another piece of the jigsaw of our knowledge of the great art of the past.

Indeed it was the very success of the previous exhibitions that has driven the company to pursue the idea of an exhibition featuring a single work. From 2008 to 2009 the two masterpieces shown at Palazzo Marino attracted some 350,000 visitors, a figure that rewards a model studied and presented by Eni and which has been shown to work even when “exported‘ to cities other than Milan, in terms both of the pool of potential visitors and cultural milieu. Shown at the small church of Sant’Erasmo in Porto Ercole, Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist attracted 42,000 visitors in a period of the year – the month of August – that is not normally especially appealing for exhibitions. The numbers have made it possible for Eni to become the promoter of an exhibition model that has made the critical focus on a single work and the clarification of all the aspects of the work concerned an authentic point of strength. Enriching the perception of a masterpiece with a range of points of view, the help of scientific study and the comments of art historians and experts present in the room, appears to appeal to, and has consequently been rewarded by, the public, at a time in which the spread and proliferation of information risks becoming disorienting.  Indeed, thanks to a detailed examination, we think that it is in fact easier to appreciated the many and divergent needs of an audience that can include experts or simple art enthusiasts, families and single individuals, teenagers and children. To achieve this objective it was necessary to put together something for everyone in a way that personalises the experience by making every citizen a guest of honour who can be led, if he or she so desires, through the history of art. In other words, what we hope to do is to transform into a cultural appointment what has always characterised our approach of recognising the needs of an area and studying a way of responding by listening, paying attention and cooperating.
The exhibitions staged by Eni in recent years, which have seen thousands of Milanese patiently waiting in line outside the Palazzo Marino, tell us that a targeted and quality offer is the best way of meeting people’s cultural needs.

Indeed it was the very success of the previous exhibitions that has driven the company to pursue the idea of an exhibition featuring a single work. From 2008 to 2009 the two masterpieces shown at Palazzo Marino attracted some 350,000 visitors, a figure that rewards a model studied and presented by Eni and which has been shown to work even when “exported‘ to cities other than Milan, in terms both of the pool of potential visitors and cultural milieu. Shown at the small church of Sant’Erasmo in Porto Ercole, Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist attracted 42,000 visitors in a period of the year – the month of August – that is not normally especially appealing for exhibitions. The numbers have made it possible for Eni to become the promoter of an exhibition model that has made the critical focus on a single work and the clarification of all the aspects of the work concerned an authentic point of strength. Enriching the perception of a masterpiece with a range of points of view, the help of scientific study and the comments of art historians and experts present in the room, appears to appeal to, and has consequently been rewarded by, the public, at a time in which the spread and proliferation of information risks becoming disorienting.  Indeed, thanks to a detailed examination, we think that it is in fact easier to appreciated the many and divergent needs of an audience that can include experts or simple art enthusiasts, families and single individuals, teenagers and children. To achieve this objective it was necessary to put together something for everyone in a way that personalises the experience by making every citizen a guest of honour who can be led, if he or she so desires, through the history of art. In other words, what we hope to do is to transform into a cultural appointment what has always characterised our approach of recognising the needs of an area and studying a way of responding by listening, paying attention and cooperating.
The exhibitions staged by Eni in recent years, which have seen thousands of Milanese patiently waiting in line outside the Palazzo Marino, tell us that a targeted and quality offer is the best way of meeting people’s cultural needs.

Constantly engaged in facilitating a dialogue with the principal figures in cultural policy, both in Italy and abroad, Eni has made the broad-based design of its events a defining characteristic. The men and women at Eni have also shown that project management can be an appropriate response not just in the world of energy, but also to that of culture and the arts, music and literature, by becoming a voice for a more active, aware and dynamic vision of the relationship between business and culture.

The clothes
The clothes worn by the young woman painted by Titian is full fine white linen shirt supported across her chest by an invisible drawstring. The style corresponds exactly to that described in the celebrated trousseau of Lucrezia Borgia. Over the shirt the woman wears a modest frock, of either dark green twill or grosgrain, also known as mosco, a sort of skirt. It is simple household apparel, without sleeves and therefore, in the presence of outsiders, requiring an over-garment or dressing gown, a suggestion of which is perhaps given by the light blue shawl that covers her left wrist. The skirt is also adorned by a band of rolled silk around the waist, which serves as a belt tied in a single knot.

The hair
The young woman holds a plait of hair in her right hand, pointing at her face with her index finger and dipping with her left hand into a jar of ointment. Perhaps betrothed, she is finishing treating her hair with perfumed or neroli oil. Her hair is long and there is no sign of scissors on the table. So she is not cutting it, but rather simply dressing it. Non coincidentally, in the reflection in the mirror we can see the shoulders of a maid and the rest of her hair falling down her back. On her head she also has a variously folded Venetian-style kerchief and the portrait is an anonymous and idealised representation of a typical, blonde female beauty that refers to a sumptuary and moral code typical of the age.  

The young assistant
Excluding the possibility that he is a fiancé, a consort or even a lover, all of whom would have been precluded from participating in a lady’s toilet, the young man in the painting may have been a hair dresser, who, on account of his specific skills, would easily have been able to approach any woman offering as a provider of a range of remedies and sometimes offering advice, and in this way sometimes acting as a go-between. The figure of the barber, artisan or general hack, which in the time of Titian was slowly climbing the social ladder, was one of the few men permitted to wear just a jacket and to remain hatless in the intimacy of the bedroom of a young woman.

The mirrors
The type of convex mirror that the young boy is holding behind the woman is a typical barber’s mirror.
Mirrors, which were considered magical objects, were surrounded by numerous beliefs. Not by chance the same scene appears in the fresco at the Villa dei Misteri in Pompei with well-known initiatic implications. Mirrors were supposed to be covered because it was believed that they could become charged with negative atoms that could affect the viewer or mark with the look of impure women. The round mirror was symbolically linked to the feminine, the moon and predictions of the future. In fact there was a widespread practice of fortune-telling involving mirrors known as catoptromancy. This would explain the mysterious air of disquiet in the woman’s facial expression that was noted by Panofsky, as if she had had a vision of her future, as well as of her own reflected image.

The ring
A detail that seems to be easily missed is at the edge of the painting; the small ring with a small mounted stone worn on the small finger of the left hand by the woman in the picture. The single circle is an expression of the uniqueness of the person, and if it has been placed on the small finger, rather than the ring finger, the link is likely not to have been matrimonial as has often been suggested. With the pretext and the appearance of a scene of this kind, the painting offers a glimpse of a society in flux: a woman at a crossroads, perhaps before a choice that she must make. The small ring on the little finger of her left hand reminds us that she is alone, mistress of herself and of her body, her mind and her destiny; there is no family to guide her, control her or treat her as prestigious goods.

Morwena Joly, Reconstructing the "illusory effect" of The Woman with a Mirror?

The samples taken from the canvas prior to its restoration showed the excellent quality of the paint used by Titian. This is a determining element in that the transparent copper greens or the lacquered reds are usually quite unstable and tend to either darken or fade, which in the case of The Woman with a Mirror has not occurred. With no intermediary tones in the palette, there are no mixtures on the canvas, which explains the astonishing stability of the colours. However well preserved, can we still say that they create that “illusory effect‘ that must have been the feature of the work when it was completed by the artist? Apart form the fact that some pigments change naturally over time, certain chromatic variations are also the result of the growing transparency of the paint as it gradually ages: the increase in the level of refraction of the fixative (usually oil), which is less than that of the paint, means that over time the combination fixative-paint becomes more homogenous with regard to the penetration of light compared with what would have happened initially. New techniques for the capturing of images now allow us, if not to answer all our questions, at least to closely examine the current state of the layers of The Woman with a Mirror. Thanks to very high-definition images we can scrutinise the canvas in very considerable detail, which is enough to answer at least some of our questions.

In fact, the shadows on the face of the subject have been rendered so finely thanks to a grey underlay that emerges at different points, which had been put on before the application of the colours. Consequently the colours are not the result of increasingly dark over-layering, but, rather, of increasingly rarefied layering.

Go to the site C2RMF

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) was born sometime in the 1480s in Cadore to a family of influential and respected business people.
His father, Gregorio di Conte Vecellio, had held a number of important posts in the Venetian Republic, such as provveditore (a sort of overseer) at the grain warehouse, an inspector of mines and captain of the centuria.
An undoubted lover of money, Titian commanded very high prices for his work and ably invested his earnings in property, trade and in gold, accumulating funds and pensions that he managed carefully also engaging in pecunia a pegno (extending credit against collateral). Despite this he was considered generous and loyal; a gentleman who loved music and enjoyed very close friendships with brilliant and cultivated men like Pietro l’Aretino, as well as with many other artists, including Jacopo Sansovino, to whom he became very close. A pupil of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, in 1508 he joined Giorgione working with him on important works such as the external decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. In 1510, during an epidemic of the plague, Giorgione died and Titian fled to Padua to escape the contagion. On his return to Venice his rise was rapid and uninterrupted and his patrons included Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, brother of Isabella d’Este, and soon after also her son, Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. But the meeting that did most to change the painter’s life was with Charles V, which came about thanks to the intercession of Federico Gonzaga, who apparently made the introduction on 25 February 1530, the day of the emperor’s coronation in Bologna.
Thirty years later, the emperor called him twice as a portraitist at Augusta, where he was able to consolidate his relationship with
Filippo, for the first time in Milan in 1548-1549.
Filippo became the inspiration of all of his future creativity, almost entirely monopolising his production for around twenty-five years.
Titian had an unlucky family life. His wife, Cecilia, who he had married in 1525 having already given him two children, gave birth to a third soon after their official marriage, died in 1530. Orazio, his eldest and closest son, was a modest painter. Pomponio, who entered the priesthood, turned out to be a waster and squandered his inheritance soon after his father’s death and died himself in poverty. Lavinia, his favoured daughter, was to abandon him when she was still very young.
But in his long and successful career he painted an incredible number of works, over a period of time that was quite remarkable for a man of that period. A symbolic work of the early period of Titian is
Amor sacro e Amor profane (Sacred and Profane Love), the complex symbolism of which is still the subject of debate but which establishes some of the elements of the technique that was to characterise his entire artistic development.
Evidence of a continuous stylistic development, particularly with regard to his material use of paint, is clearly evident in the work of the 1530s such as the Madonna With Child, Saint John and Saint Catherine, now in the Louvre.
Titian developed new expressive forms and pictorial styles, and signalled big changes in the rules of painting. One of the most notable was a use of softer and more identifiable brush strokes.
According to legend, Francisco Varga, an ambassador of Charles V, asked the artist why he worked with such daring brushstrokes rather than the sublime manner of his contemporaries. Titian responded that he didn’t feel himself to be at the level of elegance and beauty of the pictorial styles of Michelangelo, Raphael or Correggio, but, that even if he were, he would have been judged only against these other painters or, worse still, considered their imitator.
His paintings were the result of continuous evolution and, in some cases, didn’t even seem finished when they had left the artist’s studio.
He used an enormous variety of brushes and brushstrokes and their traces, including clearly visible hairs, can be seen in the x-rays that have been made of some of the densest areas of the canvases, as indicated by Carmen Garrido in her valuable study of the paintings in the Prado in Madrid. The range of colours used was also vast and includes the entire spectrum of materials in use in Venetian painting during the Renaissance.
Based on scientific studies, all this is undisputable, despite the enormous stylistic differences that even the layman can see between Woman with a Mirror in the Louvre and The Flaying of Marsyas in Kromeríz, but if we look carefully the blonde plait the falls down the dress made of fabric that seems extraordinarily real, those rapid and moving brushstrokes show us the still embryonic potential of what was to come: an evolutionary vortex, and quite remarkable leap into the future, a bridge that in the arc of the life of just one man took painting from Leonardo to Rubens.
Titian died on 27 August 1576, at the age of over ninety, during an outbreak of the plague that was also to take the life of Orazio, who had remained loyal to the end.