This is a fascinating account of British attitudes to Titian in the period between Joshua Reynolds and John Ruskin—a period characterized by ambivalence, uncertainty, contradiction, and puzzlement. Though many Renaissance Venetian painters fell foul of the neoclassical objection to their being merely “decorative” or “pretty,” Titian was always revered as one of the greats. Nevertheless the exact nature of his status was unstable since the definition of greatness in art was under constant revision.

In the opening chapter Martin Postle sums up the contradictions in the attitudes to Titian generally in the eighteenth century through the work of one man, Sir Joshua Reynolds. On the one hand, Reynolds repeatedly condemned the seductive dangers of Venetian art while attempting to disentangle the “divine” Titian from general opprobrium. On the other hand he relentlessly studied, copied, and analyzed Venetian work to enhance his own practice. The widespread ambiguity about the status of Titian's use of color fueled the scandal known as the “Venetian secret.” In 1797 Gillray caricatured the event with “seven wise men” wishing to buy from Ann Provis the supposed secret of Venetian coloring while she is occupied reviving Titian from the grave by tickling his testicles with her paint brush (242).

As Postle reminds us, one of the problems about assessing the work, not only of Titian but of the Venetians in general, was actually seeing them clearly at first hand. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were relatively few pictures by Titian in Britain, and engravings contained so little information. In spite of this, as Stephen Lloyd points out, some of Titian's paintings achieved huge renown. It is significant in this context that Johann Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–78) gives center stage to the Venus of Urbino surrounded by her male admirers (241). During the years of the Napoleonic Wars pictures by Titian flooded into Britain, and with the famous Orléans collection Titian's standing as an artist was reassessed. As Peter Humphrey points out, William Hazlitt was not the only art lover to be “staggered” by these paintings (13). At this point, neoclassical objections to Titian's lack of “design,” “drawing” and structure rapidly gave way to a Romantic set of criteria that prioritized the personal, subjective response to his work. In his fascinating account of Hazlitt's response to Titian, Tom Nichols stresses the visceral reaction in Hazlitt's delight in “the limbs of Titian's female figures” and their “luxurious softness and delicacy” (129). Why was it, one wonders, that Reynolds and all the subsequent Professors of Painting never passed comment on the erotic element in Titian? The depiction of the female body in the Venus of Urbino must rank highly in its power to arouse, but in this collection of essays only the casual traveler, Mark Twain, was, as Philippa Simpson records, driven mad by “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest [sic] picture the world possesses” (107).

Though courtesan flesh in Venetian art may have gone unremarked, the use of color was anathematized as dangerously seductive and morally subversive. Rosie Dias addresses the issue of Titian's place in the struggle over color, where she points out that Titian was exonerated from censure by what John Constable called his “admirable union of history and landscape” (78).

The names of Constable and Titian are linked again in an essay by Anne Lyles. The connection seems an unlikely one, but she goes a long way to showing a significant debt, specifically noting how, in his Lectures on the History of Landscape Painting, Constable singles out Titian's The Death of Saint Peter Martyr for special praise (112). The number of painters who were influenced by Titian in the nineteenth century is larger than that included in these essays. One misses, for example, the names of Frederic Leighton or William Etty, and it is surprising that there is no reference to Turner's version of Bacchus and Ariadne (1840). In compensation, however, Jason Rosenfeld's argument about John Everett Millais's interest in Titian is both unusual and convincing. In the chapter that deals with Titian and British fiction, Caroline Campbell treats only two texts, Robert Shelton Mackenzie's Titian: a Romance of Venice (1843) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876). Much more mysterious and perhaps more interesting is Thomas Hardy's version of that same Bacchus and Ariadne in his novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).

The familiarity with Titian's work in Britain was enormously enhanced first by copyists, then by personal collectors, and finally by officials like Charles Eastlake, who bought pictures for the nation. The promulgation of copies is deftly dealt with by Jonathan Yarker; the collectors, first by Linda Borean then by Godfrey Evans. Yarker points out that not only did Sir Abraham Hume write the first monograph in English on Titian in 1829, he acquired twenty-one pictures he thought were by Titian for his collection. Even when their authenticity was questioned their presence in the collection increased the general appetite for works by the master. Evans turns to the world-renowned collection of the dukes of Sutherland and its “stellar” collection of Venetian and other Renaissance paintings including numerous works by Titian (135). Many of these were sold off in 1882–84 and 1919, but some were retained and entered national collections once again raising the profile of the artist. The important history of public collections is dealt with adroitly and sensitively first by Catherine Whistler on the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and then by Susanna Avery-Quash, who has written the first “potted” (her word) history of the relationship between the National Gallery and its policy of adding to its remarkably representative group of paintings by Titian.

The editor, Peter Humfrey, puts his whole volume into context with a prolegomena that preceded the period under scrutiny, Reynolds to Ruskin. But he has done a fine job in the body of this text. His choice of topics is wonderfully varied, and if his book asks more questions than it answers, those questions have now been clearly and candidly posed by his team of art historians.