At the outset, the recent exhibition Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna was presented as both a close look at sixteenth-century Venetian painting and as a chapter in the history of collecting. The collection of Europe’s dominant imperial family, the Habsburgs, is now housed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; because that museum’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) is undergoing renovations, fifty paintings from the permanent collection were made available for exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Some of the works on display were acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1614–1662), the youngest son of the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II and an avid art collector. The first room of the exhibition encouraged the viewer to see Leopold Wilhelm’s assemblage of paintings as he did—as his own work of creative genius. So proud was the Archduke of his collection that he commissioned his court artist, David Teniers the Younger, to memorialize it in a series of paintings and a forward-looking catalogue, Theatrum pictorium (Brussels, 1660). A copy of the Theatrum pictorium was on display in the opening gallery, along with an oversized reproduction of one of Teniers’s paintings, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Gallery in Brussels (ca. 1651). In this dizzying painted gallery, works are organized by size and mounted on the walls in horizontal rows, in some cases five rows high. The reproduction underscores the sheer number of works in the Archduke’s collection and attests to Habsburg buying power in the seventeenth century. Juxtaposed with photographs of the Gemäldegalerie today, it also showcased the differences between contemporary curatorial methods and approaches to display favored by seventeenth-century collectors.

With two exceptions, the galleries in Masters of Venice were organized largely by artist. All fifty of the paintings included in the exhibition were the work of painters working in and around Venice and the Veneto, and forty-seven were produced in the sixteenth century. Although the Gemäldegalerie does house some early works by artists like Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina, the fifteenth century was represented by only three paintings, all by Andrea Mantegna. A relative by marriage of the Bellini family, Mantegna strongly influenced Giovanni’s early work. Of particular note was Mantegna’s strange and wonderful Saint Sebastian (ca. 1457–59, pl. 1), riddled with arrows and bound to a variegated marble column with a gilded capital. Bloody toe prints on the marble block beneath the figure give the painting a forensic quality. Saint Sebastian’s torso is as chiseled as the broken marble statuary strewn about him. He stands before a ruined triumphal arch that is also portrayed with exquisite attention; even its brick core is exposed where the marble front has crumbled away. Such details allowed the painter to showcase his substantial knowledge of classical antiquity and his ability to imitate and differentiate textures, but they also would have reminded his contemporaries that the glory of pagan antiquity was ephemeral compared with eternal Christian truths.

Although Mantegna’s individual style is distinctive, the inclusion of his works in the show pointed to the sea change that occurred in Venetian painting in the subsequent century. By the end of his life, Venetian artists had shifted toward oil paints rather than tempera, and soon the precise contours and invisible brushwork of the fifteenth century would give way to the looser, more painterly style for which Venice became both renowned and criticized. The harbinger of this change was Giorgione da Castelfranco. In his brief career, Giorgione produced several of the most enigmatic and puzzling paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. Remarkably, five of these were included in the exhibition, including the provocative Portrait of a Lady (Laura) (1506, pl. 6), The Three Philosophers (ca. 1508–9, pl. 7), and Youth with an Arrow (ca. 1508–9, pl. 8). Following on Mantegna’s crisp contours, the smoky softness of Giorgione’s forms is startling. Indeed, within the previously mentioned constraint of organization by artist, many of the works in the exhibition were arranged to heighten such contrasts between painters’ individual styles. For instance, a Christ with the Cross (ca. 1515, pl. 28) attributed to Giovanni Antonio Sacchis, better known as Pordenone, was displayed near another devotional painting, an introspective Christ with the Globe (ca. 1530, pl. 17) attributed to the workshop of Titian. The latter seems conservative when placed in direct comparison with Pordenone’s wary, haunting, and delicately executed Christ.

The arrangement by artist called viewers’ attention to the trade-offs inherent in curatorial choices, for in some cases it precluded the grouping of works that might have been interestingly juxtaposed based on theme or style. For instance, while images of the suicidal Roman matron Lucretia by Titian (ca. 1512–15, pl. 20) and Veronese (1528–88, pl. 48) beg comparison, they were displayed in separate rooms. Nonetheless, while the organizational scheme often precluded direct comparison, many of the works seem to have been included in order to underscore changes in style and narrative approach, to raise questions about standards of beauty and codes of conduct, or to indicate the popularity of certain pictorial formulae or subject matters. For instance, moving among the galleries, one could consider the changes in Titian’s technique across a total of seven portraits produced between the early 1510s and the 1560s. A Giorgionesque sfumato used to render the gray hair in the earliest example, Portrait of Physician Giacomo Bartolotti of Parma (ca. 1512–15, pl. 9), departs dramatically from the meticulously rendered, wiry curls in the beard and hair in Portrait of Johann Friedrich, Elector of Saxony (ca. 1548–51, pl. 12). Portrayed when he was a prisoner of the Holy Roman emperor after the Battle of Mühlberg, Titian’s Johann Friedrich spreads like a mountain across the canvas, implacable in his religious convictions. Looser brushwork and greater dynamism characterize Titian’s later portraits of the self-satisfied merchant Fabrizio Salvaresio (1558, pl. 13) and the pale-eyed and rather furtive-looking Jacopo Strada (ca. 1567–68, pl. 15). Strada, an art dealer and antiquarian, was one of the agents who helped to build the Habsburg collection in the sixteenth century. Given the exhibition’s early emphasis on Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, a fuller explanation of Strada’s role might have helped to establish a more complete picture of the development of this imperial collection over time.

The exhibition included a wide range of paintings of women, from portraits to idealized beauties to famous women from biblical history and classical antiquity. Blonde hair emerges as a hallmark of the feminine ideal; given the golden tresses that adorn the heads of erotic nudes and contemporary Venetian ladies, Giorgione’s stubbornly brunette Laura seems all the more exceptional. A different arrangement of these paintings might have allowed the curators to draw more explicitly upon the wealth of recent scholarship on sexuality and gender in Renaissance art, a theme that was largely ignored in the labels. For instance, one of the exhibition’s highlights was Jacopo Tintoretto’s extraordinary Susanna and the Elders (ca. 1555–56, pl. 39). The chaste Old Testament wife Susanna was a popular subject in the visual arts, for her story and its moral message might simultaneously stimulate the male viewer and instruct the female. Tintoretto’s handling of this biblical subject might have been interestingly contrasted with the unabashed eroticism of Titian’s three poesie (mythological scenes), all of which were in the preceding room.

While Tintoretto’s Susanna is exquisitely curvaceous and lovely, the bodies of her tormenters suggest the shame of illicit voyeurism. One elder, sprawled awkwardly on the ground, shimmies like an earthworm into a better viewing position. The other sneakily shuffles closer to her from the center background. But in neither case does Tintoretto permit the elders to actually look upon the object of their desire. In this and other ways, Tintoretto seems sympathetic to his heroine’s vulnerability and her plight. In a mythological painting, the artist might have used the mirror perched at the edge of the pool to give us another view of his subject’s physical charms, but here he refuses to expose Susanna further: the mirror reflects only a few of the objects she has cast off before her bath. In Masters of Venice, Tintoretto’s painting was mounted alone on a dark wall that accentuated the luminosity of Susanna’s nude body, and the generous amount of open space before it encouraged the viewer to pause and contemplate it at length. In displaying Susanna in this way, the curators cleverly entrapped their audience in the painting’s moral dilemma: such staging demands that we look even as the artist makes us feel slightly ashamed for looking.

The catalogue includes contributions by Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Lynn Federle Orr, Melissa Buron, Francesca del Torre Scheuch, Davide Dossi, and Elke Oberthaler. An introductory essay by Ferino-Pagden briefly discusses the history of the collection. Like the exhibition’s opening gallery, this essay emphasizes the collecting efforts of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. This focus is somewhat confusing, since not all of the fifty paintings included in the exhibition were actually acquired by him. Unfortunately, the provenances of some works are not fully explained in either the catalogue or the labels. Another essay by Ferino-Pagden introduces the reader to the political and religious context of sixteenth-century Venice, discusses the structure of Venetian painters’ workshops, and briefly explains contemporary theoretical debates over the visual arts. An essay by Oberthaler summarizes the findings of recent technical studies.

The catalogue dispenses with the traditional approach of discussing each work individually. Instead, the paintings are addressed collectively in essays organized by artist. Individual catalogue entries are limited to the most basic caption information. Neither the preliminary essays nor those on the artists include footnotes, and the suggested list of further readings is extremely limited. While the essays may briefly mention a work’s provenance or allude to the scholarly literature, detailed information and further references are not provided. For instance, the inscription found in the nineteenth century on the back of Giorgione’s Laura is mentioned in Oberthaler’s technical essay (42) and briefly discussed in Del Torre Scheuch’s entry on Giorgione (62), but nowhere is the complete inscription quoted or translated. Debated attributions are often glossed over; for example, Orr’s essay, “Artists of the Veneto,” acknowledges that there are differences of opinion about the attribution to Pordenone of Christ Carrying the Cross (102–3), but the reader will need to look elsewhere for details. Thus, the specialist may find the catalogue entries frustratingly incomplete.

Perhaps these decisions speak to the haste with which the exhibition was assembled, but a more likely explanation is that this catalogue is targeted at the general reader rather than at the scholarly audience. There is some overlap between the paintings exhibited in Masters of Venice and those included in several other recent exhibitions, such as Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting (David Allen Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, eds., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, issued in conjunction with an exhibition in Washington, DC, and Vienna); Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting (Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ed., Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2008, issued in conjunction with an exhibition in Vienna and Venice); and Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Frederick Ilchman, ed., Boston: MFA Publications, 2009, issued in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). For specialists, the more complete catalogue entries in these publications are available to fill in some of the gaps. Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (Andrea Bayer, ed., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008, issued in conjunction with a 2008 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) brings together much of the recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and love relevant to the works exhibited in Masters of Venice.

While the present catalogue does not appear to be aimed at the scholarly market, for the general audience the essays are lucid introductions to Venetian sixteenth-century painting. Moreover, the exhibition itself was of enormous appeal to all audiences, especially since (as the foreword to the catalogue notes) some of these paintings had never been exhibited before in the United States. It is a testament to the resourcefulness of the curatorial staff at the de Young Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum that they were able to bring them to San Francisco for this brief but exhilarating show.