Buying into culture.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

Undressed but unabashed, The Venus of Urbino has been staring slyly back at her admirers for almost 500 years. Completed by the Venetian master painter Titian in 1538, and frequently cited as one of his two or three greatest achievements, Venus was soon clothed by her contemporaries in the flimsiest of classical allusions; in fact, there's almost nothing in the portrait suggestive of the mythology that provides an excuse for its eroticism. Generations of critics and art lovers have, in their turn, covered Titian's goddess in a thick drapery of their own: opaque layers of interpretation and explanation of who she is and what she means. Today she hangs in the Uffizi, one of the great art temples of Florence, at once a symbol of fleshy Renaissance humanism and of the spirit of art that is not of this world. For a woman without clothes, Venus has worn a lot of guises.

Lately, however, much of this intellectual wrapping is falling away. Emerging from beneath is neither a goddess nor a symbol; nor does the meaning she has been keeping to herself have anything to do with Olympic allegory. Her secret is actually much more interesting, because it is about the forgotten foundations of contemporary culture.

Titian's mythological paintings have drawn a great deal of expert commentary, with people, as usual, seeing what they want to see. Some observers have seen the themes of Latin poetry symbolically expressed, and have turned Venus into a literary exercise. Some have placed this painting in the context of Titian's other nudes (he painted many, though this Venus is notably more relaxed than most); the modern aesthete Bernard Berenson pronounced these works to be "truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs - the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate the sun." Others have focused on such details as the clump of myrtle Venus clutches, and have interpreted the whole painting from that. In the symbolic language of flowers, myrtle indicates marital fidelity; thus, according to one 1963 interpretation, Titian's work is an expression of "harmonious, faithful love."

Maybe it is. But listen to the account of this painting and its contemporary reception offered by Lisa Jardine in her 1996 history of the Renaissance, Worldly Goods: "Titian's canvases of statuesque naked women in recumbent poses were regarded as learnedly symbolic by nineteenth century art historians....Only recently did contemporary correspondence come to light which showed that these works of art were painted to meet a vigorous demand for bedroom paintings depicting erotic nudes in salacious poses. When Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, was negotiating to buy the painting now known as The Venus of Urbino from Titian in 1538, he referred to it simply as a painting of 'a naked woman'....In 1542, the churchman Cardinal Farnese saw the painting at Guidobaldo's summer residence and rushed off to commission a similarly erotic nude of his own from Titian in Venice. Reporting back on the progress of the painting some time later, the Papal Nuncio in Venice expressed the view that the Cardinal's nude...made The Venus of Urbino look like a frigid nun. In 1600, in response to a request from an admirer of The Venus of Urbino to acquire a copy, the then Duke agreed, on condition that the identity of the owner of the original be kept a secret - he did not wish it to be widely known that he was the owner of that kind of painting."

That kind of painting? What about the poetry, the symbolism, and the Dionysiac triumph? According to Jardine, a painter's reputation in Titian's time rested "not on some intrinsic criteria of intellectual worth," but rather "on his ability to arouse commercial interest" in his work.

It may not be immediately apparent how radical a judgment this is. After all, that Renaissance culture was deeply interested in the passions is well known. The many paintings of nude women, despite being labelled "Venus" or "Eve," were perceived erotically by their purchasers. Though they are now revered in museums, their original owners often concealed the paintings behind closed curtains, or kept them rolled up and hidden. Many such paintings were probably destroyed when subsequently discovered. But modern students of such work usually examine this phenomenon in light of such specialized interests as the origins of "the pornographic discourse." This has become yet another battlefield of gender studies and sexual identity politics, skirting the central issue of the changing social function of such images.

For that matter, the association of Renaissance cultural genius and accelerating commerce is even more of a commonplace. The sociology of Renaissance art has been well worked over, with critics and historians explaining changes in painterly style and content in terms of a new, social-climbing class, a bourgeois interest in "realism," the status role of patronage, and a variety of similar factors. Scholar Peter Burke, for example, recognized the social and economic process that produced the Renaissance when, in 1972, he demonstrated the significance of the new merchant class that was so quick to patronize new arts. Marx himself argued that such art was shaped more by demand than by supply.

But Jardine is addressing a great deal more than the eroticism of Titian or the commerce that made his patrons rich. She is describing Renaissance painting itself as a specifically commercial process. She doesn't deny that its works were shaped by painterly genius; she does believe that such genius expressed itself with an eye on the next commission, and that the paintings reflect both seller and buyer. And not only paintings; Jardine's point in Worldly Goods is that the whole of the Renaissance - art, printing, humanist learning, expanding science, etc. - resulted not only from the release of creative genius made possible by increased wealth and learning (itself a consequence of trade), but from the release of human acquisitiveness and the ability of genius to address it (or, as appears to be the case in her tale of Titian, actually to pander to it).

Worldly Goods represents Renaissance culture as a process, the dynamic result of an expanding cultural market. In her view, this culture did not merely depend on a material foundation, it was concerned - to an extraordinary degree - with material ends. Her examination of Carlo Crivelli's 1486 painting, The Annunciation With St. Emidius, details the work as a display - if not a boast on the part of the city that commissioned it - of highly desirable consumer goods: embroidered clothing, valuable tapestry, imported carpet, carved reading desk, gilded frieze, brass candlestick, leather-bound books, porcelain dishes, majolica pot, crystal vase, terra cotta carvings, earthenware pots, marble floor, and an array of architectural form and detail. One must look closely to find the Holy Spirit in the crowded painting, not to mention a Virgin whom Crivelli depicts as if she were a proto-shopaholic.

Jardine is as unabashed about her argument as Venus is about her nakedness. "[T]hose impulses which we today disparage as 'consumerism,'" she writes, must "occupy a respectable place in the characterization of the new Renaissance mind." Here is cultural achievement that does not necessarily seek to transcend the material world; it may do so, but it remains ever rooted in that world. The implications of such an understanding of culture - especially of the culture that undergirds the Western aesthetic heritage - are considerable.

Jardine, who is dean of the faculty of arts at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, is not alone in addressing culture's debt to the material world that provides its structure, in understanding imaginative creativity as a part of a continuing process, and in celebrating culture as a means not only of self-expression, but of pleasure, however both creator and audience agree to define it. But it is not only the appearance of such a vision that is noteworthy; its timing is particularly striking.

An age of politics is ending, The Wall Street Journal announced in March; a new cultural age has already begun. The paper was inaugurating a new, weekly "Taste" page, to be devoted to cultural controversy, and its introductory remarks were intended as a manifesto. The great ideological struggles of the century have concluded; indeed, argued the Journal, the Soviet empire fell not to invading armies, but crumbled under the force of...