Showing their true colors
Exhibits highlight great artists' different methods
When Michelangelo went to visit Titian, the great Venetian painter who was in Rome working for Cardinal Farnese, Titian had just finished painting his lustrous nude "Danaë."
It's easy to imagine how tense this meeting would have been. Michelangelo and Titian were the two greatest artists alive. They hailed from rival city-states, and yet they were working in Rome for the same patrons.
Michelangelo praised "Danaë" warmly ("as one would do with the artist present," recounts Giorgio Vasari, who was there). But after they had left, Michelangelo could not restrain himself. Admitting that Titian's coloring "pleased him very much," he even noted Titian's "fine spirit and lively and entrancing style." But there was just no getting around it: The Venetian's drawing was off.
The anecdote, told by Vasari, provides the foundation myth for a commonplace of art history: that the competition between the art of Florence and the art of Venice was really a battle for supremacy between drawing and color.
In the 16th century, the Venetians favored "colorito" (the direct application of color to the canvas, making painting essentially a one-step process), while the Florentines favored drawing, or "disegno" (a two-step process: drawing, then coloring in).
The distinction has echoed down the ages. But it was not just a distinction between methods of making a picture. It carried a philosophical dimension. Disegno meant more than just drawing. It referred to the "design" of a work, its very conception.
Disegno has always been associated with intellectualism, and with art's noble status as an invented product of the mind - something better, in other words, than nature. It was what elevated art above the status of "mere" craft. It was to be regarded as a bulwark against the sensual and the irrational, whereas colorito was associated, often pejoratively, with the senses, with instinct, with the indulgence of unharnessed perception.
But color would not be suppressed. Throughout art history, the colorists kept emerging to challenge the claims of the classical, academic tradition, and the competition between the disegno of Michelangelo and the colorito of Titian was revived in tussles between Rubens and Poussin, Delacroix and Ingres, and Matisse and Picasso.
Of course, as visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts show "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice," which includes "Danaë," will have noticed, an allegiance to "colorito" did not necessarily amount to painting in bright colors. Rather, it meant composing with color, and making the most of color's ability to conjure atmosphere, texture, and the illusion of space on its own.
Visitors to the show will also have noticed that there is more than one way of being a colorist. Where Veronese favored lighter, pastel hues - gorgeously day-lit oranges, blues, pinks, and greens - his rival Tintoretto had a more penumbral bent: His greens were dark and cool, he adored black, and he was incredibly bold in his use of shadow.
Getting the chance to compare the great colorists of the Renaissance is a treat. It's no less of a treat to shoot forward three and a half centuries and compare the two greatest colorists of the 20th century: Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. Now is a good time to make the comparison (although sadly, as with many aspects of modern art, you'll have to leave Boston for the pleasure). New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is entering the final week of a scintillating show, "Pierre Bonnard: the Late Still Lifes and
Matisse and Bonnard were friends. They spent their later years living less than an hour apart by car - Matisse in Nice, Bonnard just outside Cannes. I have a slim volume of the correspondence between the two old men, which is concentrated around the years 1940-1942, when both were battling life-threatening illnesses, incipient blindness, and the deaths of loved ones - not to mention the small matters of a foreign occupation and a world war.
All of which makes their letters incredibly moving. The two men offer each other practical advice as well as morale-boosting support, sincere expressions of mutual admiration, and the odd self-deprecating joke.
It's easy to see why Matisse and Bonnard were drawn to each other. They had exchanged works early on in their careers. Matisse bought Bonnard's "La Soiree au Salon" in 1911 and always kept it close (you can feel its spirit of quietude and intimacy in many of Matisse's greatest paintings of reading and music-making); and Bonnard owned Matisse's "The Open Window" - a classic Matisse subject, rehearsed repeatedly by Bonnard, too - all his life.
"When I think of you," wrote Bonnard to Matisse, "I think of a mind cleansed of every old aesthetic convention, and it is that alone that permits a direct view of nature, the greatest joy that can befall a painter."
Both painters obviously loved the color, the light, and the life of the Mediterranean. But they shared a great deal more - above all, the conviction that a painting must live a life of its own. A great painting is not an imitation of life, they both felt, but a transcription of an emotion felt in the presence of what is seen.
And yet what separates these two great colorists is impossible to miss. Although he painted directly in front of his subjects, and keyed his entire being to capturing the emotions he felt before them, Matisse strove ultimately for coherence and lucidity. Looking at his paintings, which can be grasped immediately and all at once, you have a sensation of ringing clarity and finality. That's why, for so many people, Matisse epitomizes color in the modern age.
Bonnard, on the other hand, although he has long been a favorite of practicing artists, was always tainted by Picasso's scorching dismissal of his work as "a potpourri of indecision." Also, by his reputation as "the last of the Impressionists." Impressionism was a 19th-century phenomenon. Thus, Bonnard - although he lived to 1947 - has tended to be regarded as the end of a line, a man out of time.
Dull prejudices like these need to be ditched if we are to get the most out of these two great colorists. In fact, comparing Bonnard and Matisse is so stimulating because it makes us realize that everything about color, and indeed about the distinction between disegno and colorito, is suffused with paradox and instability.
Bonnard, it has to be said, embraced this instability. "I see things differently every day," he said. "The sky, objects, everything changes continually, you can drown in it. But that's what brings life."
At times, Bonnard seemed happy to plead guilty to the accusation (made by the proponents of disegno) that composing a picture with color did not make sense; it could not be done. His paintings can feel almost excruciatingly provisional. Forms drift sideways out of his pictures. Everything feels spineless and untethered, and there is at times something almost pathetic about them - a sense of torpor, of optical quicksand. In the end, Bonnard was all about articulating the elusiveness of experience, and especially of memory.
His incandescent colors, applied with hesitant dashes and dabs, slide about, creating the sensation of a tremulous vibrato one moment and the equivalent of a flower bed collapsing into a rising torrent the next.
Matisse had different ideas. Having unleashed color and its attendant emotions in his early Fauvist period, he spent the rest of his career trying to keep the chaos at bay. He really did want to compose with color - to give structure and calm to his powerful, unruly sensations.
Looking at a Bonnard alongside a Matisse, it's easy to see how these two different ways of thinking played out on the canvas. Where Bonnard believed that a picture is, as he put it, "a series of interconnected marks that finally form the object, the area over which the eye travels without a hitch," Matisse maintained that a picture "consists of the combination of variously colored surfaces."
Matisse, in other words, saw color as a function of surface area, whereas Bonnard modulated every tiny patch of color with flickering shades of darkness and light and shifting hues, sometimes harmonized, often brazenly clashing, but always suffused with a spirit of contingency, as if every sensation, every memory, verged on deliquescence.
The wonder is that each artist saw merit - and real, enviable advantages - in the approach of the other. "My painting," wrote Matisse in a letter to Bonnard in 1940, "is hampered by the new convention of flat areas of color, which I must use exclusively to express myself, with . . . no shadows or surface relief that might react on each other to suggest light and spiritual space. That hardly suits my spontaneity."
Similarly, Bonnard, after falling under the spell of two Matisse paintings that he borrowed in 1946, grew distressed at not being able to use flat areas of color in Matisse's manner. (But he did try, as the Met show demonstrates: "Work Table," for instance, is dominated by a large rug with bold patterns and a large flat area of intense, unmodulated blue, while "Villa Bosquet, Le Cannet, Morning" pays homage to Matisse's near abstract "Open Window" of 1914.)
Just as the differences between Bonnard and Matisse's conceptions of color tend to be less clear-cut than they first appear, so does the color-drawing dichotomy fall apart when prodded. The great colorists in art history, including Rubens and Delacroix, have often been scintillating draftsmen, and classicists such as Poussin and Ingres have been great colorists.
Bonnard, for his part, began his career as a wonderful graphic artist (heavily dependent, in other words, on "disegno"). And Matisse, although everyone associates him almost exclusively with color, was constantly drawing, not only in black and white but with scissors applied to colored paper.
In fact, not only was Matisse one of art's most original and captivating draftsmen; he did more than any artist in history to unite the competing claims of disegno and colorito. By grasping that the intensity of a color was in large part a function of how much space it took up, he placed renewed emphasis on the lines that circumscribe those colors. He used line to make color swell and shrink, setting up rhythms and echoes of sensation across his canvases.
Indeed, if he had only been present at that tense meeting between Titian and Michelangelo, Matisse would have been the perfect mediator.
Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com. 
