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Thumbing Through Titians
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2016/01 - Winter
When I started teaching high school art I’d pass out college level art history books to my beginning students. Believing students must be exposed to great art in order to learn how to draw well, I’d have them read about any artist whose work they found intriguing. Sometimes, after reading, students were asked to render an apple, a flower, or an animal in the style of Renoir or Picasso or whomever they had chosen.
The text we used was a 700+ page volume chock full of the world’s most famous painters, sculptors, architects, and photographers. I taught my 9th through 12th graders about aesthetics, the study of beauty. I told them artists consider the most beautiful and most challenging subject to be the human form.
Of course we could not use unclothed models in high school drawing sessions, but the subjects in the text were often unencumbered by garments. This was in Central Florida in a high income demographic where most students had been introduced to fine art early on, so nude painting and drawing was acceptable to administrators and parents.
One day, as I was walking around the room, making sure students were on task I overheard a freshman boy mumbling something as he carefully thumbed through the chapter on the Renaissance.
I padded up behind him in time to hear him slowly, methodically say the word, na-ked. As he turned each page and looked at another photo, again he’d say, “Na-ked.”
He continued to do this for several pages until he got to a two page spread of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, when he suddenly shouted, “WHOA!! REALLY NAKED!”
Two decades later, whenever I see Titian’s work I halfway expect the Propriety Police to give me a ticket. I wonder where that kid is now. He’s probably a professor in an Italian Art Academy…or the owner of a chain of topless bars in Biloxi.
