 Welcome to Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Crane, Collections Research Coordinator at the Barnes Foundation. Today I'm going to talk to you about this painting right here, this long, short painting. It's on the west wall of Room 3. I'm going to zoom in right here. So this painting is by the Venetian painter Titian. He was born around 1490. We don't know his exact year that he was born. His real name is Titiano Veccello, but he went by Titian. He was born in a small town in the foot of the Dolomites on the Venetian side of the Alps. He's considered one of the great painters of the 16th century. He has started his artistic training in the workshop of the mosaicist Sebastiano Zucato, but he later briefly then joined Gentile Bellini's workshop. But when he died, he actually joined his brother's workshop, Giovanni Bellini. And that's presumably where he met Giorgio Ne, or at least through some sort of association. Giorgio Ne had previously trained with Giovanni Bellini. And Titian ended up training with Giorgio Ne, and that's where he really developed his early style. And this painting is from early Titian's career. So it's kind of representative of the style of Giorgio Ne, of that influence of him. So this painting is largely a landscape. It's this really long format. If I'm not mistaken, it's about 50 inches wide, but only about 10 inches tall. So the focus is really on this verticality. And it allows the artist to create these two different scenes. This one scene over here, which is more in the foreground, and then this kind of sweeping landscape in the background with varying scenes like this river right here. We'll zoom into a little bit. And then this town over here, and then these very strange mountainous kind of almost, they look like mountains, but they are this very strange feeling into them. And then some more mountains in the background. And then also this kind of sense of forest over here across the river. But the main focus of this painting in the foreground is this sleeping figure. And then you see his flock to the left, his flock of sheep, who will be able to be grazing. And he's resting right there. It's possible he's sleeping, but you kind of almost get this feeling like he is waking up or he's just seen the viewer. He could be sleeping, like I said, but this kind of the way that he's almost propping himself up, and it looks as if his gaze is really coming out to the viewer. But all in all, this painting really feels like the celebration of the landscape in particular because of these opportunities that the artist has given himself to display these really lush forests on either side, and then these mountains in the background, this very varying landscape. And this is partially because of the subject itself and in the 16th century, what artists were doing with this kind of subject. So this figure could be a person from the ancient time called Endymion, and he was often depicted as a sleeping figure. He was also described as a shepherd, as he is here, who was put into this eternal slumber by Zeus at the request of the goddess of the moon, Celine. And this was so that she could admire him because she liked the way he looked when they slept. There's varying accounts of him, but he is usually described as a shepherd. So sometimes in scenes like this, a sleeping shepherd could be Endymion. But the figure may also just be an idyllic depiction of a shepherd who's caught sleeping, or like we looked at, has just awoken from slumber when he's seeing the viewer, when he's seeing somebody enter his domain. So like I said, it provided the artist with an ability to celebrate the beauty of nature and man's place in it because we see man right here. And we also see an indication of man with the town in the background. And this is an important aspect of the genre of pastoral landscapes. So pastoral landscape came from pastoral poetry. And that originated from the Greek poet Theogratis. And it saw a revival in the Renaissance, particularly in Venice, as poets looked to emulate the Greeks in Romans, as did they in painting and sculpture. So pastoral poetry idealized rural life and landscape. And it had this idea, created the sense of the idea of Arcadia, or an idealized utopia. And pastoral landscape came out of this genre. It was reflecting the principle of ut pictore polices, or as poetry, so is painting. So it showed the idea that painting was not only just a manual production, but it was also this conceptual activity of the artist's mind, this creative creation in the artist's mind. And it was a visual equivalent of the poetry, of this written poetry. So the genre was very flexible and it allowed for the inclusion of many different themes. But they often always reflected man's relationship to nature. So something about man in nature. And many of these paintings also included shepherds because shepherds had this connotation of, in Arcadia, this idyllic place where shepherds could play music and spend time in nature. And you often also would see goddesses and gods, things of this mythological nature. So many of these paintings were produced for private collections, and they were for patrons who understood this kind of poetic subject matter. So it may have provided them with this mental retreat so that they could look at this painting and recall some sort of written poetry. Not necessarily anything specific, but something that brought them, called that to mind and brought them into this kind of reflective state so that they could contemplate man and contemplate nature in man's place in nature. So this painting, because of its strange format, it's a really long format, it could have been for a cassone, which was a marriage wedding chest, an Italian marriage wedding chest. They often were lined with these panel paintings. It could have also been for decoration over a door, something that could have been viewed from slightly below, or to decorate a wall or another piece of furniture, which was common during the time period. I hope you enjoyed taking a closer look at this painting. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. And if you'd like to hear more about our paintings or sculpture, please subscribe to our channel. Thank you. Thank you very much for watching.