Focus on Flaying of Marsyas (Titian) and explore the Technique and style.
The technique is characteristic of Titian's late style.  Nicholas Penny commented that there are "intense greens and blues and reds (vermilion as well as crimson) ... after 1560 Titian began to apply these colours in scumbles, often with his fingers, so that they only half belong to any of the forms and seem to float on the surface of the painting: evidently he painted them last. ... one can still see passages of smoky preliminary painting (notably the ghostly body of Apollo) but the blood, dogs' tongues and the ribbons in the trees are brilliant red."Describing a group of late works which he considers finished, including this, and contrasting them with the Death of Actaeon, which he considers unfinished, Penny notes "the impact of blurred areas of painting (... indecipherable distances, light piercing foliage) is enhanced by contrast with forms that were more fully modelled, if still often roughly painted, and, indeed, with some that were more detailed (Midas's diadem ...)".  There are strong white highlights on the knife blades, the bucket, and elsewhere, comparable with those in Tarquin and Lucretia, which Titian delivered in 1571.Beyond the purely technical means, many critics have tried to articulate evocations of Titian's pictorial language in this and other very late paintings.  According to Sydney Freedberg, "the surfaces of bodies make a silvered incanescence and the atmosphere, almost unbreathably dense, is like dulled fire.  ...There is a wry comedy within the cruelty, ugliness and strangeness within the magisterial beauty, and terror accompanies the sense of the sublime."  For John Steer "it is not individual colours that tell, but an all-over emanation of broken touches, evoking a greenish-gold, that is splattered, appropriately to the theme, with reds like splotches of blood.  Vision and expression are here so much one that they cannot, even for the purposes of discussion, be separated.  .... Titian's intense struggle to grasp in paint, through tone and colour, the physical realities of the scene is a fundamental part of their meaning."
Titian diadem vermilion Tarquin and Lucretia John Steer crimson Sydney Freedberg scumbles Apollo Death of Actaeon Midas Nicholas Penny