Titian by John Berger Read Free Book Online

everything. Their vases communicate.
    As I’m thinking this, the bus no. 222 crosses a large building site, where work is being done on the future metro line. I notice a huge cement mixer. It has the word
Titan
printed on it. Straightaway I take these letters to be a sign (or an appeal?) from the old man. He’s trying to tell me something. Urgently. At this moment. What does the sign with the ‘I’ missing mean? How to read it?
    The
Flaying of Marsyas
, the fur portraits, the men with their dogs, the Magdalenes clothed in their own curls, naked among the rocks, the nymphs adopted by the forest, the sleeping courtesans dressed in their nudity, the hairs, the canvases of ‘peach stone’ – doesn’t all this belong to the same ‘homogeneity’?
    I’m tempted to call it a Classic homogeneity, for the ‘inside-outness’ comes not only from climate and geography but also from the heritage of the Classic philosophers, from a certain view of the cosmos, a certain acceptance, lost over the centuries in other countries less attached to tradition and more open to dissidence, schisms, and Progress.
    Finally, in the old man’s art one finds a frankness, a familiarity, which is the consequence of going backwards and forwards between the inside and the outside and of a kind of contempt for the frontier, seen as a heresy. It’s as if both Titian and the people of this country assume their role as sinners and at the same time avidly bite into every forbidden fruit!
    They insist on continual communication between the two sides of any barrier; they refuse divisions and distinctions. In this Promethean attitude, there’s an arrogance, a defiance, even an aggression; they usurp the prerogatives of the gods, and they pummel everything with their hands, ignoring any hierarchy.
    Thus the timeless old man of the south was so faithful to his own instinct and senses that he brushed the world as if it belonged to him – as if it was his own beard.
    You find the same magnificent arrogance in Mayakovsky, in Fellini, in Courbet, in all those who wanted to eat the universe, who communed by interfering, and who gave by seizing.
    When Titian looked, he saw himself. When he painted, he painted himself. And vice versa! All the barriers are down. When he makes gold rain on Danaë, it floods the world. And his art begins – against all rational argument – with the equivalence between the act of receiving and the act of spilling.
    Looking at his paintings and seeing this triumph, we feel a sense of relief. So much joy and such a promise of a cosmic reconciliation take nearly all the weight off our shoulders. With the barriers down, we are swept away and consoled.
    Could it be that beauty – as distinct from that which stimulates intellectually and feeds on differences, alternatives, paradoxes, conventions being knocked down and rebuilt,categories continually being redefined, every kind of line drawn in order to separate – could it be that beauty is born of a soup of everything mixed together, gushing out without any order or priority, its arm round the waist of life, and with none of the primness which comes from classifying – could it be that beauty is born of coloured stuff spread out for the love of life?
    Just as our brain likes to follow lines traced by rational thought, so our senses and our soul need the communion which begins with the rubbing out of those lines, and the abolition of any frontier between inside and outside, the self and the world, the sea and the earth, the Creation by God and the creation by a simple titan.
    Love, Katya

    PARIS
    Kut
,
    I forward a postcard to you from the island of Telos, dated 327 BC. The poem is signed by Erinna, who died when she was nineteen.
    This drawing
came
from subtle hands
    (Prometheus,
there are men
with skill
equal to yours)
    Yes,
he who
made this girl
had he but added voice
made Agatharchis
    John

A Note on the