Anything about Venice is likely to be good, its just that sort of place, and this account of research into Titian - his time and place, his contemporaries, patrons and family members, has its moments. It is a lush setting and Mark Hudson carries one along, though his detailed musing on detailed elements of individual paintings (of which I am not immediately familiar) risked my interest wandering. ( )

I was really looking forward to this book and so was very disappointed in it when it turned out not to meet my expectations. The book should have been called "My Search for the Last Days of Titian" as the author spends just as much time writing about the process of his search and research as he does about Titian's life and work. That is not what I look for in a book on an artist but obviously others will be perfectly happy having those details included. The book also skips around a great deal from the beginning of Titian's painting career to the end then the middle and back to the beginning, at all times asking how old was he really? I prefer linear books so that was also a feature I did not appreciate though others might.

Full disclosure: I got this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway. ( )

If ever there was a Venetian artist that deserved a book about him to be written Titian is it. Unfortunately this book doesn’t live up to its subject.
The author has at least two books here, one about Titian and another about his search for information on Titian. Unfortunately he combines it in such a way as to make it less than compelling. The author jumps from Titian’s old age to his being discovered as an artist to his old age again with the occasional interspersing of his own story. The author also has the irritating habit of asking the reader questions at just the time you start falling into the narrative. The information (if not nearly enough pictures) is all there but it could have been written better.

Can you imagine attending an entire semester’s worth of art history classes only to have the professor discuss in excess of fifty paintings while showing you reproductions of only 5? Then you’ve already experienced the droning that is Titian: The Last Days. That characterization is overly harsh since the writing is actually quite good in some places. The lack of color pictures, or the less expensive but also less expressive alternative of black whites, is probably more the fault of the publisher than the writer, but the outcome for the reader is the same: Mark Hudson’s book is not nearly as captivating as it could be. The title misleads since the book isn't just about Titian's last days, as the book merely starts and ends with them.

Ample amounts of navel gazing by Hudson make me doubt some of his analysis and makes the fact that so few reproductions of the paintings being included even more irksome. For instance, he portrays Marsyas in the The Flaying of Marsyas as being in the shape of an upside down cross and analogizes the mythical death of Marsyas with the death and crucifixion of Jesus. That's quite a stretch. The Flaying of Marsyas is one of the scant reproductions tucked into the book's center. I held the book upside down in one hand, peered at the reproduction, squinted my eyes all while holding a vodka martini in my other hand--I just couldn’t see it. For me, the most interesting portions are those about Phillip V. Hudson obviously adores Titian and knows his works well, but that takes the book only so far.

I do appreciate the approach that Mark Hudson takes to Art History. He writes for a wider audience than just art critics and professors. He makes no bones about the fact that he isn't writing just for them. I'd be interested in reading some of his other books that don't rely so heavily on critique of either books I haven't read or paintings I haven't seen and can't find. ( )

This book is called Titian's Last Days, and yet its subject matter is not confined to the days immediately before and after the artist's death during an outbreak of the plague—it's a full-length biography the scope of which also encompasses the world, artistic and otherwise, which Titian inhabited. For someone like me, who knows almost nothing about later Renaissance painting, this biography was interesting and informative, but I imagine that for anyone more than the curious novice, Hudson is not saying anything new. I also found it frustrating that at least my copy—which is an ARC—had no illustrations, which meant that I was constantly having to Google in order to know what the painting being described looked like. I appreciated the way in which Hudson grounded Titian's work in the mundanity of being a jobbing artist—the entrepreneurship, the searching for contracts, the network of connections and patronage—but often found his analysis of the paintings themselves disappointing, if not a little sexist. His description of 'Diana and Actaeon' in particular, with its unquestioning presumption of a male gaze, made me roll my eyes. ( )