Intimacy

Vision and touch are the terms of a dialectic that lies at the foundations of modern art history, in the optical and haptic values of Riegl and the painterly/linear opposition of Wölfflin. This dialectic was also prominent in Renaissance art theory and was frequently thematized in Renaissance pictures. Few Renaissance artists explored the relationship between the tactile and the visual more movingly or elaborated its implications more eloquently than Titian, especially in his late works. The visual and tactile interactions that define the figural composition of Titian's Allegory of Marriage (Plate 1)—an interpersonal dynamic among five figures that is articulated by a circuit of expressive, receptive, withdrawn, or isolating gestures—is accompanied by a more direct appeal to the viewer in its evocation of embodied experiences and their accompanying states of mind. Attention to the interplay of vision and touch in the Allegory of Marriage provides the basis for an understanding of the painting that is attuned to its phenomenological and affective dimensions. This is a mode of interpretation distinct from iconographic or allegorical approaches, not to mention historical or contextual ones—indeed, coexistent with them, but more responsive to the work's pictorial specificity. On one level, the depiction of tactile and optical experiences in Titian's painting is a means of expressing an ambivalent moment of intimacy shared by a couple, in which those around them also participate, articulating the emotional complexity of their relationship in pictorial terms.