Excerpts from The Oregonian.
After a lifetime in Italy (except for 15 years at the Louvre in Paris, where she was taken in 1800 as booty from the Napoleonic Wars), [Titian’s “La Bella” has] crossed the ocean from her luxuriant quarters in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence for a brief tour. Following stops at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, she’s taken up lodging through Jan. 29 at the Portland Art Museum, in a second-floor gallery that is ordinarily given over to the display of ancient and classical objects and art.
In the 16th century or the 21st, La Bella is beautiful. For many visitors, that will be enough. For historians and other scholars, who want to know everything about the past and are dauntingly aware that much, probably most, of it will forever be a mystery, the stakes seem higher.
… Titian used this model, or this invented idea of beauty, in several paintings. The face of “La Bella” is also recognizable in his famous reclining nude, “Venus of Urbino,” at the Uffizi in Florence, from 1538; in the bare-shouldered and bare-breasted “Woman in a Fur Coat,” at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, from 1536; and in the same year’s “Woman With a Plumed Hat,” at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
One of the reasons “La Bella” is visiting the United States for the first time is to show off her most recent conservation, which has literally put the blush back in her cheeks.
Titian’s portrait has had the good fortune over the centuries to be cleaned both regularly and carefully — “rather than being subjected to complicated and invasive restorations, the painting has instead been the object of constant maintenance,” Gabriella Incerpi writes in the exhibition catalog — and that meticulousness has made things easier for modern conservators, who seek the least obtrusive ways to strip away the dulling effects of decades of varnish and restore a painting’s original brightness and tones.
The process can be controversial, as the uproar over the gleaming new colors in the Sistine Chapel suggests: In cleaning an old work of art, do conservators also eliminate its history? As Ferriso puts it: “You don’t want to strip away the pigment. On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the painting.”
You can see “La Bella” — beautifully. And, despite the restored brilliance of her colors and the immediacy of her presence, in no way as if she were born yesterday.
Up close, you can glimpse the painting’s craquelure — the tiny patterns of cracking in the oil paint as it gradually shrinks on the canvas — but not overmuch. It ages but does not dilute the painting, which with its restoration has become not so much new as revivified, showing its age in the best possible light.
Whoever she was, “La Bella” has aged well. She’s still a looker.