Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
The oeuvre of Titian was subject to a number of shifts in import and sensibility over the course of his career. Whereas the bacchanals, painted for the duke of Alfonso d’Este’s studio in Ferrara, were for the most part joyous and inflected with a certain youthful fervor, during the 1550s Titian worked under the patronage of King Philip II. From 1553 he produced seven mythological paintings, all of which were rather more complex in their treatment of the fallibility of the human condition. Titian defined these paintings as poesie or “painted poems.” These took as their subjects themes from ancient mythology. In