Books, Luca Nannipieri tells of Titian’s love for Cecilia

It is entitled “The fate of a love. Tiziano Vecellio and Cecilia” (Skira, 112 pages, 15 euros), the first purely literary test of the art critic Luca Nannipieri. This book is the story behind one of the most powerful paintings of the Renaissance, which has become an eternal emblem of beauty: the Venus that Titian painted in 1538. Her name was Cecilia Soldani. For history she will always be a stranger: a name among billions of names, a woman among billions of women. She was the wife of the painter Tiziano Vecellio, one of the most acclaimed artists of his time, called by emperors, rulers, doges, patriarchs, patricians. She was pregnant. Pregnant with their third child. But the pregnancy was complicated. That belly of hers was too swollen, swollen with life and blood. The doctor said you had to choose: either the baby’s life or the mother’s. At first Cecilia wanted to have an abortion, to stay alive and to continue to love the painter. Titian, on the other hand, wanted that son. Impassive to the pain entrenched in the walls of each house, Venice all around, in the docks, in the moorings, in the piers, let itself be smoothed by the coaxing of the sea, like a spoiled cat waiting for the loving cuddles of its master. Finally, after a long inner struggle, Cecilia chose to give the world the child, Lavinia.Tiziano, who until then had only followed glory, fame and money, will be devastated by that terrible and magnificent love, discovered only in the moment of death and birth. Cecilia will often paint her in her future paintings. Without ever mentioning it. He will paint her with all the pain and love that over the years he never managed to give her. But if we look at the Venus made in 1538, now kept in the Uffizi, secretly, silently, Titian represented their life there. The life they never had. Nannipieri’s volume anticipates the great exhibition “Titian and the image of woman”, promoted by Skira editore, in collaboration with the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna, which will be held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan from 21 February to June 5, 2022. The volume, like all of Nannipieri’s latest titles, is published by Skira but this time in the fiction series, a precious series that accompanies art books and hosts in its catalog, among others, Andrea Camilleri and Paolo Sorrentino, Aldo Nove, Maurizio De Giovanni and Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, up to Giuseppe Sgarbi, from whose story Pupi Avati drew his latest film.