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(peaceful classical music)

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- They simply are

amongst the most beautiful paintings ever painted.

- They are a kind of manifesto about what painting is

and what painting could do.

- What we're seeing are very important pictures.

We almost certainly looking at great masterpieces.

- Philip is a young man.

He's on the cusp of having

to assume enormous responsibility.

- [Woman] Anybody who loves painting loves Titian.

- He is the most famous painter in Europe by far.

- Titian did intend them as a series

and Philip II wanted them as a series.

But in fact, very few people had the opportunity

to see them as a series.

Finally, with the show, we can actually

think of them as a whole suite of paintings.

It's a huge thrill for us, and it's

a huge thrill, I'm sure, for everyone.

(classical music)

(PA announcement in foreign language)

It weighs heavily on you to have to lock the doors on a room

that holds some of the greatest pictures ever painted.

They carry with them something significant from the past

and they have an ability to speak to us in the present.

- Should I be enjoying the sight of these naked women?

- There is something we need to

look at, see and recognize here.

- They're bound up with people's fears about love.

They're bound up with people's fears about death

but they're bound up also with this great sense

of celebrating the fact that we are alive.

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(lively classical music)

- Phillip, he's a young man preparing

to take over as king of Spain.

He's on the cusp of having

to assume enormous responsibility.

It's certainly a high-stakes moment for him.

And so he's concerned with establishing himself

as a credible figure.

- He needs paintings.

A great king has great works of art.

You know, if you're an important person

at that time, you should be magnificent.

You should show that in everything you do,

and art has become one of the ways people do that.

- You wanted to cultivate a relationship

with the artist regarded as the best.

(lively classical music)

- Like many of the great potentates of his time,

he had phenomenal power, but technically bankrupt.

So they had to find other ways than cash

often to pay for these huge things.

- It was not Phillip's private wealth that financed this.

It was the Fugger family.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- [Alexander] I'm essentially the 19th generation

of the family since it's been recorded

that they arrived in Augsburg in 1367.

(dramatic orchestral music)

In 1550, Phillip II and a lot of the Habsburg family members

spent a couple of months here in Augsburg,

in the Fugger Palace.

(upbeat music) (talking quietly)

The relationship between Fugger and Phillip II

was essentially funding his needs to finance the state,

to finance the court, to finance his personal interests.

And there weren't that many firms like ours

that were able to fund these kinds of sums.

- When Phillips says, writes to Venice saying

he wants Titian to come to Augsburg.

- They agree on a number of paintings

that he's going to deliver it to Phillip

and it's up to Titian to come up with the subjects.

- That was it. Nothing further was specified.

Nothing further was agreed.

He simply let Titian get on with it.

- So they parted and Titian went back to Venice

and Phillip went back to Spain and they never met again.

They never meet again.

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- By this time, by the 1540s, 1550s,

Titian is already very famous.

He's already carried out several commissions

for lots of European dignitaries.

- By the time that he meets Phillip,

he's become the greatest artist in Venice

and has been for a long time.

He's held the crown of being the grand old man in Venice

in terms of the arts.

(lively classical music)

- This is Titian's garden.

It's completely enveloping, and I think, quite magical.

- You can see that he had a real contact

with the Venetians at that time.

He was part of the city, as not only a painter

but as a Venetian person.

- We have, of course, the written testament

of the dinner parties that Titian used to give

here in this garden and how after,

at the end of the dinner, he would open the gate

and he would arrange to have gondolas

with courtesans and musicians and singers

who would come and entertain his guests.

In Titian's time, the door would have opened,

and it would be the lagoon.

(classical music)

Shall we come in?

The house is very long and narrow,

which is most unusual for Venice.

Living in Titian's house,

it's a presence that you live with.

We have a fireplace, it's sort of warm and cozy.

This is our confessional, and I know

my husband always has need of that.

I think Titian was constantly on our mind

when we were buying things.

This is the drawing room.

I decided to do something creative here.

And that's when we incorporated

landscape scenes from Titian's paintings.

I think there's a butterfly,

there's a butterfly or a dragonfly over there.

And we even have some naked ladies,

there's a naked lady there.

He probably would have approved of her.

Yes, I think he definitely liked the ladies.

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- He brings you in with this kind of

delicious promise of beauty.

And so we see Danae laying on a bed

in a very voluptuous setting.

There's a maidservant with her as well,

watching this golden rain fall down onto her lap area.

(chuckling)

- It is one of the sexiest paintings ever painted

and everything about it suggest the turbulence of sex.

- One of the things that makes it so sexy

is that the sheets are rumpled,

the sheets are painted with broad brush strokes,

they're very, very rumpled.

I mean, there's been something going on in that bed.

- Titian has done has most erotic painting.

And that is saying something,

because he specialized in erotic painting.

He's pioneer of the reclining female nude.

- Titian has, at this period, kind of a specialty

of giving very favored patrons

pictures of naked female nudes on beds

- In 1538, Titian painted this extremely famous nude.

She's doing something with her hand that to some

was considered to be as close to pornography

as art of this period gets.

Then we cut to 1544 and Titian painted

this picture for Alessandro Farnese,

and the Venus of Urbino is about flirtation.

The Farnese Venus is about penetration,

and this one's about passion.

This is about orgasm.

- This golden shower of rain is related

to some kind of metaphor for ejaculation.

- But painted for a man whom Titian

believed to be very sexually active.

Phillip was only 21 at the time that he painted it for him.

- We have many accounts of him being a womanizer

and being very interested in women and so on.

Phillip's in his early 20s.

Titian is in his 60s.

He's also smart, he's a reader of people

and he understands that this is what Phillip likes.

- I can understand why you can say,

"oh, it's just like pornography.

It's just like a pin-up,"

but that's not what it's for.

And these paintings have much more to them.

- Of course, we know that he didn't just

invent alt this out of the top of his head.

I mean, it's based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses."

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- This is where I keep nicely alphabetical order, my Ovid.

I've got him very austerely in Latin only.

I've got him in English on a buy one, get one free offer.

Ovid takes quite a lot of shelf space

because he's one of the most important,

famous, classical and subversive of all Roman poets.

The most famous thing that he ever wrote

is his poem which is called "The Metamorphoses,"

the change of shape.

He's talking fundamentally about what it is to be a human.

What is it to change?

What do we mean by someone becoming different,

and how do human beings change in the course of their lives?

But it spans a whole range of subjects,

all of them slightly naughty.

The first in the series was Danae being impregnated

by the God Jupiter in a shower of gold.

The person who is going to be born

from this strange impregnation is the hero Perseus.

What's going on here is that Titian

is not illustrating of it.

He's reconfiguring some of the main themes of the text.

And that's why I think they're kind of very rich

because it's not as if there's a kind of

simple and straightforward message

and all you've got to do is uncode it.

What we're being asked to do

is to think about this story and what it means.

- Many of these paintings were designed

as kind of talking points for intellectuals.

And the idea was that little references

would be put in there to the nature of painting,

to poetry, to mythology that Phillip's intellectuals,

courtiers and poets would unravel.

(bright classical music)

Venus tries to prevail upon her human lover Adonis

to stop him from going on hunting,

where he's going to be killed.

Needless to say, he pays no attention,

goes off and gets killed.

That's what you get for trifling with the gods.

They will destroy you.

- Titian hasn't Followed the story that Ovid tells us,

because according to Ovid, what happened was

Venus, who is bending the night with her boyfriend Adonis,

says, "Oh, Adonis, promise me you won't go hunting.

I'm frightened," and all the rest of it.

And he says, "Of course I promise I won't."

At dawn she leaves him.

After she's gone, he goes out hunting.

Now Titian has painted it as something quite different,

i.e. he's trying to leave, she's trying to restrain him.

It's after dawn.

- Titian knew perfectly well what he was trying to do,

what he was trying to achieve

with something which was very, very sexy.

- The Venus and Adonis explicitly is about depicting

a female nude from behind, because Titian sends a letter

to Philip and says that he's going to depict the nude,

the female nude from a variety of perspectives.

The way that he presents Venus from the back and sitting,

so you can see the pressure on her buttock,

this is really celebrated in the 16th century, this idea

that you can see the kind of softness of the flesh.

IT's about Titian being really skillful

by making you feel so sexually aroused by this image.

(classical music)

- In the years when it was here in the studio,

it just gave you a thrill every time

you walked in each morning.

it never ceases to do that.

- It's a very erotic picture, I think,

with the back view where so much is sort of

left to the imagination, but you've also got this,

her very prominent bottom.

'Cause there's a variety of bottoms as well.

if you look at them, there's different forms

where the eyes draw, the way that the lines

of the composition.

I like the pressure of sitting.

but there is, it's true though.

It is true. If you look at that,

there's a real sense of weight.

- He began this picture preparatory for producing

the picture for Phillip II.

it was a master template for Titian's Venus and Adonis.

- This is a working piece and he is developing things

on the canvas as he goes along.

Other artists, might've done it in drawings,

or they might've done it in cartoons.

They might've worked away from the canvas.

He works on the canvas.

It's got elements of compositional change

that tell us about his process of thinking.

This has to do with that line,

the sinuosity of that line.

Moving little elements around the top of the boot.

- Yes, that's extraordinary, that the boot gets so much.

The minute he supplied that picture to Phillip II,

it became the most famous picture in the world.

It was his best selling picture.

He got orders for it, and he would sort of

press print on it, as it then was.

it was an absolutely winning composition.

Each of these pictures meant money for Titian's studio.

(slow orchestral music)

- We have here on the table,

three prints by the early Titian.

Titian, in his early career already made it clear

that he had a very strong and very outspoken sense

of the potentialities of various new techniques.

So he had a nose for this and he tried it out.

So he started not just painting, but making prints.

And indeed here we have the figure of Christ

on a chariot, drawn by here, figures,

allegorical figures representing faith, turning around.

Ooh, this is something new.

The new technique gave the possibility to,

as it were, commercialize new inventions on a scale

that was unheard of, and that's exactly what Titian did.

A great example of that is the Venus and Adonis.

Hmm, If I make a print out of one of these paintings

and sell that print, I can make a nice living out of that.

Why not?

- As he grew older and more famous, he was not averse

to copying himself or making variants.

He did it quite often.

- HE made no secret of the fact

that he was interested in money.

He said, in a letter, "my pensions are my passion."

I mean, he made a lot of money out of these pictures.

They were money spinners, I'm afraid,

apart from anything else.

(upbeat music)

- Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess.

And her mother has bragged that she and her daughter

are much more beautiful than the nymphs

who serve the god of the sea Neptune.

So he sends a monster to devour her.

Perseus is flying through the air.

He decides to save her.

The big difference between the Perseus and Andromeda

and the two previous is that it's invented

from the ground up.

It's a new invention for Titian, because he wants

to depict a figure in motion through the air.

It is clear that it's reworked a lot,

over a protracted period.

He couldn't work out whether to stick with Ovid,

in which I believe Perseus is standing on the shore.

So he started by putting her on this side

and Perseus on this side and he changed his mind.

- I think he's also trying to suggest

a slight lack of control in the figure of Perseus,

and that makes him look a little clumsy.

This figure of the tumbling Perseus,

it looks like he's gonna crash into the water

quite some way off from the sea monster.

He looks like he's just fallen off the cliff

and is going headlong into the water,

rather than that he's gonna go and kill this monster.

It reminds me a little bit of the figure

in Tintoretto's The Freeing of the Slave.

- He's working at a time in Venice where

a new generation of artists is coming to the fore

including Jacoba Tintoretto, with whom he has

a very strained relationship.

And Tintoretto has an incredible facility

and is very good at sort of kinetic dynamic action

and pictures flying through the air

is something he's very good at.

And it seems like Titian is also competing with that.

He's very competitive artist.

He always looks at what's going on around him

and measures himself against it and tries to outdo it.

- Many paintings were done to show he could do far better

than someone else who he thought threatened his position.

- The figure that's effortless is the figure of Andromeda.

She's elegant, she has this balletic pose.

She's the one who's restrained, but she's really

the one who is shown with composure

- And it's to do with power.

It's not to do with eroticism

as much as it's to do with power.

He's got this enormous empire, including a new empire

in the new world that he's trying to protect.

There's a relationship between masculinity and virility

and leadership or the ability to lead people,

to be in charge.

(dramatic music)

And so these paintings also, really I suppose,

the implication hidden underneath these paintings

is that say, Phillip II or whoever the commissioner was

is like Perseus sweeping in to save the day.

(fast-paced classical music)

- Phillip is very conscious of the fact

that some of the major decisions he makes

affects the political life and the personal lives

of Europeans all over the continent.

One of the first prints we have here is of

the defenses constructed for the Port of Vera Cruz.

This beautiful and very complex painting

is to illustrate the waterways

leading into the Port of Antwerp.

Having therefore come into possession

of all these territories by inheritance,

Phillip had the advantage, presumably,

of being able to draw income from them.

But at the same time, he had to defend them.

Phillip found, I suppose to his disgust,

that having an empire isn't really always a good thing.

We have an empire which on the face of it

covers all the continents of the globe,

but which in reality creates important obligations

on the king himself to try and defend,

which he never really could.

- Titian is smart, he's a reader of people.

He has a sense of Phillip's situation,

how difficult it is to be a ruler

and the kind of decisions you make.

- There is no letter from Phillip in that period

in which he expresses any reaction to the pictures at all.

- He was very worried about Phillip's reaction

Nothing like this particular treatment of a subject

had ever been seen before, so what was Phillip

going to make of it?

So Phillip had an awful lot on his mind

and he didn't respond, and Titian wrote him at least twice.

- "I Haven't heard anything from you.

It's been so long since I sent these pictures.

I assume that's maybe because you don't like them.

If you don't like them, I'm happy to do them again."

- And he never heard from him, until I think

quite a long time had passed, over a year.

So you can imagine the anxiety.

- But in a sense, you can make the argument

that it just becomes a catalyst for Titian.

(lively classical music)

He has sort of a resurgence of creativity in this period.

To work with an artist, for a patron

who's going to be paying you as long

as you're delivering something, that is remarkable.

(lively classical music)

- This is really the normal size painting brush

which you can imagine Titian using, similar to.

The reason why you've got it long,

you want to hold it so you can actually make marks.

And when you're actually painting,

you can actually see the whole canvas.

When you get kind of close, it's all a blur.

But when you're further away, the actual drawing,

the shape-making comes together

and actually creates form.

- For Titian, the execution on the surface,

on the canvas, is the content.

the way he starts opening up his forms

to where he starts painting even more atmospherically

than he had previously

Titian, straight on there with the brush.

That's the idea.

- He's carving the surface

is where the analogy is, is carving.

- His approach to gestural brushwork,

his approach to layering of color and his use of that

to tell stories with not just narrative precision

but emotional and psychological precision

- And you can imagine Titian doing that.

And when you're involved with a picture,

you become so lost within it.

- Titian is the great precursor of our modern day

idea of painting as self-expression.

- And it's fundamental to remember they are abstract.

And again, it's not about painting every single thing in,

he's getting to an essence as your brain fills the rest in,

again, which you could say as a modern idea.

- He's doing something new in painting that is so radical

that you can't really think about painting

the same way after this.

He's painting the future.

(somber music)

- This is the one that many people think of

as the absolute top of the series.

It's a kind of manifesto about what painting is

and what painting could do.

- Look at this, look at it.

I mean, every texture that you can imagine,

water, stone, glass.

- Things that are vaporous, translucent.

You know, those are things that are notoriously

difficult to paint, and he just puts them in,

masses of them, just to show what he can do.

- These later pictures, they're unusually freely painted

or they give the impression of unusually freely painted.

When you look close to them, you just make out

a mass of color and so forth.

When you stand back, it all falls into place

and they seem to be alive and perfect.

- This is just form that lives straight-through paint,

that has as many dimensions to it as poetry

- Here is the goddess Diana suddenly being surprised

by the hunter Actaeon who, in the course of the chase,

has come across Diana and her followers bathing.

- Which no man must ever do.

It's that startled look of the discomfort every man has felt

at not being wanted in the company of women.

- Then what happens is that Diana sees him,

she transforms him into a stag

and he gets eaten by his own hounds.

He constantly makes you question

why you're looking at these paintings

and your morals for looking at these paintings

and the ethics of looking.

Should I be enjoying this sight of these naked women?

- Mr. Ongaro, the proud owner of Titian's studio.

You've worked here for how many years?

(speaking in foreign language)

60 years.

(speaking in foreign language)

What is this?

(speaking in foreign language)

Ahhh. (chuckling)

(speaking in foreign language)

- Right, so the issue of female life models

is a kind of much-debated question amongst

Renaissance art historians, and it used to be

that people said there weren't any female life models

in the Renaissance, it was just men.

And in some cases you do use male life models

for clothed female figures, but to get female nudes

and particularly female nudes in strange positions,

you have to have a life model.

Otherwise you can't see things like how the breasts fall,

for example, you can't do that with a male model.

So female life models absolutely were used

in the 16th century, and Titian was one of the people

who used them frequently.

(classical music)

- I think I would have loved to sit for Titian,

provided I could keep my clothes on.

This was obviously many years ago,

and it was the first cover of "Cosmopolitan."

(chuckling) They wanted cleavage, and I had cleavage.

The job of the models in Titian's time

was to project whatever image it was

that they were requested to project.

It's not really how I see myself.

- Female bodies are really transgressive,

so you get preachers like Bernardino of Siena

saying "Woman, never let yourself be seen naked,

because you sin and so does your husband.

They should never see your naked body."

So the idea of painting women naked

was indeed a deeply sexual act.

- It's a lot of focused, concentrated time

together in the studio.

And I think, in my memory, it tells me

that I was sort of coming around maybe what would have been

an average of two, two and a half days a week.

Something like this. - Yeah.

- For about four hours, four or five hours each sitting.

- I know it was a difficult pose

and this arm was particularly difficult, wasn't it?

I mean, the artists could often

be criticized for being cruel.

- I remember my body not being very happy.

There were yeah, sort of aches and pains

that I hadn't experienced before.

I don't know what's happening, but this arm

would have to be holding the weight of the body

which seems like, nearly impossible.

- You see that really well.

- If you were really sort of leaning over

and having that as the point that's anchoring the pose,

then there would have to be incredible tension.

I wonder if there wasn't something that was

more vertical that was sort of then tipped over.

Gravity will tell you, and circulation will tell you

that it's not a good idea to have your arms

above your head for a very long time,

but I know that this varies a lot between models.

I know a couple of models that can hold their arms

above their head for a whole hour,

where within 10 minutes at the most,

I would have no blood and there would be pain.

As a naked person in the room,

it can sometimes be or feel vulnerable.

And I think sometimes it could seem very subtle

and I think I've been in situations where

people might have used particular terminology

that they're probably naive to the fact

that that could maybe make one not feel so comfortable

and perhaps a little bit more exposed.

What we're doing has nothing to do with sex,

but I think it would be naive to say

that it can't be, because we're sexual beings.

It's not the case with Andy.

Andy is very, very clear.

- I don't think about sex when I'm painting.

I don't need to go to the next room

and kind of have an orgasm or something

to better paint, to put it crudely.

But I think there probably have been

artists that have done that.

- There is an expectation that artists

have sex with their models.

Writers talk about not letting good girls

go into artists' studios because of

all the things that could happen to them.

So whether this during Titian's case,

I mean, it's lost to history.

Nobody knows.

- We don't know, is the answer,

and I didn't think anybody will,

and I don't think it should change our views

about pictures either.

What people do in the privacy

of their own studios is their affair.

(lively music)

- It may be difficult to know who Titian's models were,

but there's reported difficulty in getting

the right kind of female models.

- They are not professional models, I think,

and nor are they relatives, of course.

they are presumably courtesans, of which

there was a great number in Venice.

- So Venice, this very beautiful city raising out

from the water, was one of the wonders in Europe.

Just an amazing, really beauty, with approximately

a population of 170,000 inhabitants.

11,000 were courtesans.

And here in the middle, over there behind

the Rialto Bridge, you can see this area,

which was the ancient red light district.

In 1565, a catalog was printed, a catalog

of the 220 most important Venetian courtesans.

- It's important to think about courtesans'

cultural relationship to these paintings

because this is a new kind of culture.

You're going to get courtesans

in the early 16th century in Venice,

and Titian is friends with some of these courtesans,

he's very much part of this culture.

(upbeat music)

- Let's go.

Now we are in Castellete in the ancient

red light district of Venice.

So we can also see some very beautiful statues

reminding us of some of their very special

and attractive female attributes, because not far from here

there is also the very famous Bridge of Tits,

where the courtesans there were used,

where they are to show their tits.

Of course, they were totally bare-breasted

to entice clients.

For instance, we can find Ludovica Stella,

living here in Campo Santa Barnaba, just drio la chiesa.

It means behind the church.

let's check how much she charged.

Only two scudi. Two shields, hmm.

Quite good, actually.

For instance, a doctor earned eight scudi,

eight shields, for a month.

So you can imagine the big amount

of money that the courtesans earned.

- Many women would have sexual relations with a man

in exchange for goods and maybe rent or maybe a house,

and that courtesan spent a lot of the time

just creating wonderfully beautiful atmospheres for them.

So we'll write poetry and we'll sing

and we'll be beautiful and entertaining and accessible,

in a way that a lot of aristocratic women weren't.

And so they wouldn't define themselves

necessarily as sex workers

- He's a purveyor of fantasy.

So were the courtesans of Venice.

They're both selling their fantasies to the same people.

(somber orchestral music)

- Here, we've got Diana as the rather commanding

virgin goddess who has discovered that one of her

poor attendants, the sad Callisto here, who has

because they had to get undressed,

she's revealed that she was pregnant.

Callisto was impregnated by the god Jupiter

in the form of Diana.

- She's not allowed to be pregnant because

Diana's nymphs are supposed to be chaste.

- It's a terrible moment where she's being held down

by the other nymphs and they're revealing her pregnancy.

Diana and Callisto is a deeply upsetting painting.

- It's one of the most expressively painted,

possibly the most expressively painted.

What this painting is, essentially,

a rape victim ostracized by her peers,

another innocent victim of fate.

- Diana isn't a wicked woman, she's a goddess,

which means that she can control your fate.

Anything can happen if there's somebody up there,

is going to do something good or bad for you.

All that says that there is no justice in the world.

What happens happens.

- It is interesting that the painting

for Phillip gets so dark.

(soft music)

- Titian is very anxious, there are two pensions

and some other sums that have not been paid to him.

He has not been paid as they had agreed

for a very long time by this point.

- Now that if you work for a duke or a king,

there's nothing you can do about taking them

to court if they don't pay.

They're not gonna give you the contract.

That's how it is.

All you can do is kind of go on and on and on,

"where's my money," and so forth.

(tense music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- Phillip II's ambitions and his budget

was getting bigger and bigger.

He was fighting a lot of wars,

and obviously there were these

very expensive ventures in the Americas.

It led to a point where we as a firm

became a bit more conscientious about the risk.

in this letter that Phillip II sent to Max Fugger,

it's more of a demanding that he would want us

to finance one million ducats.

So our answer is not no, it's more of a

"we have to see if we're able to accommodate that,"

and we sort of tried to buy time.

This is essentially writing together how large

is the outstanding sum that Phillip II owes to us as a firm,

and how is that split within the various pieces of debt

that we have given to him?

And the sum that comes out is rather large.

So we tried to find a way of not going into that request

for financing because the outstanding debt

was 6 million ducats, which in today's terms

is roughly $600 million.

This is essentially sort of the beginning of the end,

at least in terms of the financing relationship

between the Fugger family and the Habsburg family.

- Titian is obviously interested in money and who is not,

but he wasn't doing this stuff for love exclusively.

If he could be paid as well, That's fine.

- When some of the payments do come through,

it was paid in a warrant for rice, which gave him the right

to import and export rice through Naples without paying tax.

So it was this kind of amazingly petty

background to the whole thing.

These sort of sublime paintings

paid for in this torturous charade

of constant promises, constant impeachment.

(bright chime music)

Here, we have Europa, the climax of the series

- Titian painted it at probably a high point in his career.

He was about 70 years old when he painted this painting,

and he was really firing on all cylinders by that moment.

- Here is the bull again, Jupiter in a new form,

who is raping the terrified Europa.

And there's a backstory here about how the bull

comes on to start with, all very sweet

and Europa and her maids play with the bull.

When he's got her confidence, off he goes.

Here she's on his back, she's absolutely terrified.

- Phillip would have identified with Jupiter.

He himself not only identified with the ancient gods

and goddesses, but claimed descent from them.

We know that Titian refers to this painting in 1562

as the seal on the series.

He's pleased with this painting.

There is a level of quality embedded in it,

a level of intentionality, which perhaps he feels

he's come to at the end of a campaign

of over a decade of painting some of the most

fabulous and meaningful paintings in his career.

Traditionally, art historians have appreciated it

for its color and for its technique.

- Every inch of this is a kind of molten ecstasy.

It's ecstatic, isn't it?

Her posture is ecstatic.

That sense of ecstasy extends out into the sky

and the reflections and the luminosity of the water.

- Not only is she half uncovered,

but her right breast is visible.

In the first iteration, her breast was covered.

He then lowered the neckline of her dress

until it was fully exposed, so that clearly suggests

a desire to please his patron in the most basic,

sexualized and erotic way.

If you look at the face of Jupiter, Titian chose

to depict him facing the viewer, facing Phillip.

He looks at us with these wide eyes

and this pink wet nose as if to say, "Who, me?"

And so there's a momentary hesitation

where you look at the painting and realize

there's something pretty awful going on.

But at the same time, you look at the bull

who's the perpetrator and you think, "well, wait,

is it possible that he's the one about to rape this woman?"

I think hat kind of hesitation that Titian

builds into the painting is crucial to opening up

more potential meanings in it.

- It's interesting because it has a lot of

art historical writing about it that completely dismisses

the idea that this is a woman being raped.

We don't look at the subject matter,

we look at brush strokes and we look at, oh, genius

and we look at literature, We just look at everything

apart from what is in front of us a lot of the time

and what is in front of us, if you look at it bluntly,

is abduction and assault and rape.

- I first read Ovid at school and I remember

very clearly at school, we were taught

that we should say it wasn't rape, it was ravishing.

Somehow as if the women enjoyed it.

It's not surprising that recent discussion of Ovid

has been much clearer about what we're reading,

the treatment of women in this very long book

is they are often the victims of assault,

sexual violence, and there's no two ways about it.

They are raped.

(somber orchestral music)

- One thing that one can say about the Titians in general

is that when the major artists did see them,

these pictures had a decisive impact on a number

of really great European artists, in a way

that no other group of pictures ever did.

Reubens was transformed by the experience

of seeing them, Velazquez based his whole life

on the fact that he was familiar with them.

- I think Lucien Freud said this, and this

companion piece, Diana and Callisto.

were the most beautiful painting ever created,

Not a bad claim.

- Titian was sending these works out without ever

having the opportunity for him to see them

together in his own studio.

He did intend them as a series and Phillip II

wanted them as a series, but in fact,

when they all arrived in Spain, they actually

stayed together for a very, very short period.

- We tend to think of them as being together

from the beginning, but in fact, the thing

that was most striking to me when I mapped them

as a group, was to see that almost from the beginning,

they weren't together.

(chime music)

They were really only together for 20 years.

I wanted to animate the facts that these objects

were in constant motion and think about who saw

these artworks, and also what these artworks saw

over the course of their lives.

So the Venus and Adonis, which is now in the Prado,

was sent originally to England when Philip II

was getting married to Mary Tudor,

the Perseus and Andromeda is sent to Ghent.

We can look at the page that we have for Europa

and be able to see all of the places that she traveled.

First, start off in Venice, where the painting was executed,

and then is sent to Spain where Phillip II receives it.

What the project reveals about who's predominantly

looking at these pictures is that it is mostly men.

Francois Louis-Joseph de Laborde-Mereville,

the Bridgewater Syndicate, Lord Berwick,

the Earls of Darnley, the Colnaghi Gallery.

It seems very clear that these artworks

are mostly seen by men and collected by men,

gifted to men, exchanged by men or among men.

That tells us also that artworks with women

depicted in them were important

as transactional items between men.

(somber music)

- 20 years ago or so, a feminist art historian

started to say, hang on a minute.

How about the 70s onwards?

You get these responses to the nudes,

so you start to think of women like Carolee Schneemann,

where she uses her own body to articulate ideas

about power and art and how female sexuality is used

by artists without any recourse

or any real thoughts about women themselves.

The reclining nude is absolutely related to Titian.

It's just the fact of women

being objectified in Western art.

Just a real sense of anger, a real sense of fury

that the art world kind of colludes in this objectification.

- To demand that art ve sort of morally pure

is basically to demand that art not do

what it's always done.

And that's what art helps us do.

Art is not there to provide a moral example.

Art is there to ask us questions

or make us ask questions of each other.

- There's a lot of difficulty now both about

Ovid's poem and about Titian's dialogue with Ovid's poem.

I feel much more doubtful, not to say.

I'm fairly hostile to the view that

that means, so we shouldn't read it

or so we shouldn't look at it.

I think unless we face up to what rape is, we are lost.

That's what we need to know.

There is something we need to

look at, see and recognize here.

Put these in the cupboard, we're depriving ourselves

of something which is gonna make us think harder

and better and more productively

about what sexual violence is.

(chime music)

- The day we knew we had to close the gallery,

the team decided to gather together at course at six,

just before the doors closed to the public

so that we could spend a bit of time together

in the exhibition that all of us had played a part in doing.

So we wanted to enjoy those last

few minutes before the visiting public.

It was a strange moment.

I've never lived a moment like that before, frankly.

In times of stress or in times of crisis,

I think museums and art and music and pictures

can play an enormously important role

where people look for solace, where they look for comfort,

where they look for some kind of guidance.

So it weighs heavily on you to have to lock the doors on

a room that holds some of the greatest pictures ever painted

and you can't allow people to see them.

But we know that we've done something important

and we're very keen to share it when we're able

to open our doors again.

(solemn music)

(doors closing)

(bright music)