BOSTON — With its small supernova of a show, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here scores an art historical coup that institutions many times its size should envy, and audiences, hungry for old master dazzle, can count themselves lucky to see. Yet the same exhibition raises troubling questions about how, in art from the distant past viewed through the lens of the political present, aesthetics and ethics can clash. At its core is a cycle of six monumental oil paintings of mythological scenes that Titian, who died in Venice in 1576, produced, late in his career, for the Spanish king Philip II. Originally displayed in a single room in the imperial palace in Madrid, the pictures were gradually dispersed. One stayed in Spain; four went to England; and, in 1896, one ended up in Boston, initially in the Beacon Street drawing room of the local art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, then in her faux-palazzo on the Fenway.

Source: New York Times August 12, 2021 17:37 UTC