All We Know for Certain: Titian
All We Know for Certain: Titian
Marjorie Stelmach
After Pietà (1575-76)
I think I am beginning to learn
something about painting.
— Titian (age 77)
He had meant the Pietà* to hang above his grave.
He was ninety-one years old.
Or maybe eighty-five.
Or perhaps a centenarian.
All we know for certain
is he died in a year of raging plague
and that his son, already deathly ill,
would follow in four days.
Plague or no, it was rare back then
for a man to live to fifty.
He had to know his Pietà
would be finished by another hand.
There’s little disagreement
that Mary, Christ, and Nicodemus—
or is it St. Jerome—
are his.
As to which saint he envisioned,
kneeling there, in the lower right corner
holding Christ’s hand
and wearing Titian’s face—
that remains a mystery.
Nicodemus?
A Pharisee, a man of consequence,
who risked the dark Jerusalem streets
to meet with a blasphemer, a heretic
(or was he, indeed,
the son of God?)
in whom he couldn’t quite believe.
(How can a man be born again?)
Or Jerome?
A Christian born to wealth who died
an undisputed saint,
depicted, as a rule, in his study,
bent, bespectacled,
turning Hebrew into Latin.
His attributes: a skull Memento Mori,
and a lion from whose paw
he’d pulled a thorn.
Which?
Of Titian’s later work, reviews are mixed.
To some, they show a sad diminishment—
the fingerprints, the murkiness,
the looseness of the strokes.
He was, after all, an old man, weary,
hemmed in every way
by death.
Others see him differently—unshackled, daring.
Some would call his work abstract—
a Renaissance master, born again
as an expressionist.
What, then, to make of his Pietà?
An audacious masterpiece?
A botched ex-voto, begging God
to spare his son?
With artists, as with saints, so much
remains a mystery.
Centuries have come and gone,
and all we know for certain
is Titian on his knees.
Marjorie Stelmach
Poet & Author
Marjorie Stelmach’s seventh volume of poems, The Angel of Absolute Zero appeared in the Poiema series of Cascade Books, 2022. Individual poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and others.
Photography by Parrish Freeman