Titian’s Late Pictures

Martin Gayford at The Spectator:

To ‘review’ such supreme paintings is slightly absurd. These are the touchstones from which Rubens, Velazquez and Rembrandt learnt and their successors still do. Van Dyck actually owned ‘Perseus and Andromeda’; Lucian Freud confessed that he, too, would have liked to have had one of these Titians on his wall. He couldn’t choose between ‘Diana and Actaeon’ and ‘Diana and Callisto’, which he considered jointly ‘simply the most beautiful pictures in the world’.

Frank Bowling, a contemporary master of abstraction, returns again and again to ‘The Death of Actaeon’ — in part because he finds it so modern. ‘There’s something amazing in the stirring up of the paint,’ he told me. ‘It just comes across at you — whoosh! — like a De Kooning.’

more here.