Signed lower left: TITIANVS. P.

Jupiter, the most powerful of the gods, is in love with the princess Europa. He has taken on the form of a beautiful white bull, and with seemingly tame behavior induced the girl to climb upon his back. As soon as she does, the bull makes for the sea and bears the terrified Europa from her native Sidon to the island of Crete, where he consummates his passion. Titian is unequivocal about the fact that this is a scene of rape: Europa is sprawled helplessly on her back, her clothes in disarray. At the same time, he conveys the mythic import of the story: that is, to be coerced by a god is no ordinary human experience of sexual violence. Rather, it is a terrifying but transformative experience of supernatural possession or ecstasy, which may have a positive outcome.

Much of what makes this painting so intriguing, and indeed disturbing for us today, is Titian’s insistence on the paradoxical aspects of Europa’s ordeal: the pathos of the victim also affords pleasure – hers, as well as the viewer’s. Titian thus could be said to idealize rape, yet the painting is about more than sexual coercion. His artistic goal is also a psychological one. The challenge is to show a moment when a state of terror becomes a state of rapture: both are experiences of being “acted upon” – of being in the grip of forces that seem to possess one from the outside. In fact, the English language preserves the kind of association that inspired Titian’s painting, in that the words rape and rapture share a common root in Latin.

Thus Europa is in the grip of a terrifying experience: snatched away from her home and family, she is precariously balanced on the back of the bull, in real danger of sliding to another terrible fate in the dark sea below. Titian has visualized the fearfulness of the deep with the two scaly, spiny ocean predators that gleam in the turbulent waters, the fanged mouth of one agape as it follows the thrashing motion of the animal. But something else is happening; the band of shadow across her upturned face makes us particularly conscious of Europa’s rolling eyes, and the direction of their glance. Europa has caught sight of two cupids (spiritelli d’amore or little spirits of love), personifying another passion which is yet more powerful than that of fear. This notion is itself expressed by a third Cupid who rides (and, according to Renaissance visual conventions, has thus mastered) one of the monstrous fish. Titian confronts us with the perception that a person assailed by physical danger and panic can look like a person in the extreme throes of physical ecstasy: the limbs flail and the spine flexes, all modesty and self-composure are abandoned. Just as Europa scrambles desperately so as not to loose her position on the bull, so she turns her breast towards Cupid; her fear will yield to the arrows of the god of love.

She must, in fact, because she has no choice. Like the rape of Helen by Paris, this is an act of sexual coercion with historically portentous consequences: Europa’s rape will literally give rise to Europe. From her union with Jupiter, Minos will be born, and the most ancient of European civilizations on the island of Crete. Her brother Cadmus, the inventor of writing, will search for her, and found the great ancient city of Thebes. The painting records no less than the birth of civilization.

It may have been these features of the myth of Europa that led Titian to select the subject for the most powerful prince in Europe, Philip II of Spain, ruler of a vast empire that included the Netherlands as well as possessions in the New World and Asia. It befitted Philip’s status that he could command the services of the most celebrated painter in Europe, thereby also enhancing his own cultural prestige. The king owned no less than thirty paintings by Titian. For the most part, these were religious pictures: Philip saw himself as a champion of the Roman Catholic faith, and he is often remembered as a militant and notorious promoter of its mounting campaign to re-establish its supremacy in the face of Protestantism. Philip also supported the church’s increasingly rigorous pronouncements on orthodoxy in faith and morals, which meant that the Inquisition could operate with sweeping authority within his dominions. Yet Titian also painted mythological subjects for this most austerely catholic of sovereigns. Known as poesie because their subject matter derived from the works of classical poets such as Ovid, these works were “pagan” both in their depiction of fables of the ancient gods and in their markedly non-Christian character. They are frankly sensuous and erotic, sometimes violent, and seem devised to highlight Titian’s virtuoso treatment of the naked female body in a variety of situations and in a range of different poses. The series of poesie began in 1553 or 1554 with another portrayal of female forbearance in the face of divine rapacity: Danae, followed by Venus and Adonis (both in the Prado, Madrid), Perseus and Andromeda (1554–56, long thought to be the version in the Wallace Collection, London, but possibly lost), Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto (1559, Duke of Sutherland, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), and the Europa, completed in 1562. As Titian told Philip in a letter of that year, the painting of Europa “set the seal” on the series of works he had made for the king.

What would Philip II want with such images? The idea that they were conceived for the king’s private and purely sensual enjoyment is too simple, as is the notion that they provided him with a sexualized allegory of his own masculine authority through images of the dominated female body. Clearly they are not without an element of what one modern commentator has called “political titillation.” Philip was, perhaps inevitably, compared to Jupiter by contemporaries, and stories of the power of gods – Diana or Jupiter – over mortals would have publicized an image of the irresistible mastery and unlimited prerogatives of an absolutist monarch. Yet Titian’s approach to these subjects makes them no more reducible to the ends of propaganda than of pornography. There is always a dark side to his portrayal of the gods and their amorous and imperious ways that indicates a more questioning or ambivalent attitude.

The viewer is allowed no unalloyed erotic pleasure in the image of Europa; eros is there, but the viewer is reminded of the discomfiting proximity of the passions of eros with the perturbations of terror and of physical distress. Bravura brushwork produces a powerful sensation of air, water, and light, but also of the lurking monstrosity which materializes in the eddies of oil pigment that define the ocean waves. In her helplessness Europa evokes not only sexual enjoyment (the viewer’s or her own), but the pathos of tortured martyrs and victims in Christian art, including those in Titian’s own work. The head, raised right arm and upper torso are a self-quotation from the murdered wife of the Miracle of the Jealous Husband (Scuola di Sant’Antonio), painted a full forty-eight years before; a similar configuration occurs in the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, painted for the Venetian Church of the Gesuiti in 1548–57. Finally, viewers who knew their Ovid would know that in the Metamorphoses Europa is twice associated with criticism or ridicule of the almighty gods. Regarding Jupiter’s bestial self-transformation, Ovid remarks that “Majesty and Love do not sit well together.” In his account of the weaving contest between the mortal Arachne and the jealous goddess Minerva, Arachne adds insult to injury by creating a superior tapestry showing the violent sexual crimes of the gods, including the stories of Danae and Europa. Ovid was also the source for the two stories of Diana in the series of poesie for Philip. In his account of how the goddess cruelly punished Actaeon for inadvertently stumbling upon her while she was bathing, or Callisto for the misfortune of being impregnated against her will by Jupiter, Ovid pointedly cast doubts on the justice of the gods in their relations with mortals. The Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez appears to have been struck by the analogy between Ovid’s protest at divine rapacity and the tone of Titian’s painting. When, seventy years later, he came to depict the story of Arachne, Velázquez reproduced Titian’s Europa to stand for the tapestry of Arachne.

Titian was no mere illustrator of Ovid. Instead he deliberately sought to compete with him, pitting the resources of painting against those of the word. The fact that Ovid had described Europa as the subject of a work of art only made this competitive dimension more charged. Just as classical writers had described paintings in order to illustrate the superior descriptive powers of language, so Titian responds competitively with the unparalleled vivacity of color and brushwork. Moreover, Titian did not merely draw upon easily available Italian translations of Ovid, he drew upon more rarefied texts such as that of Achilles Tatius. Titian alters some details and invents others of his own, and thus inserts his own work into a tradition of poets who had “portrayed” the story of Europa, which included not only Ovid and Tatius, but more recently the Italian poet Angelo Poliziano. In other words, Titian lays claim to the power of poetic invention on the order of these canonical ancient and modern writers.

Yet the desire to advertise artistic mastery does not preclude other concerns. In Titian’s case, this encompasses a remarkable exploration of the psychology of human passion, the intertwined causes and effects of different emotional states. The viewer is asked to reflect on the consequences of unbridled expression of masculine libido on one hand (Jupiter), and on the effects of interdiction and renunciation on the other (Diana). It has been too readily assumed that the viewer only identifies with Diana and Jupiter; also available for identification are a series of emotional transformations defined by their victims: in the sixteenth century the experience of passion was an experience of being “acted upon” (passio meaning “I suffer,” or “I undergo”). Thus Danae, Europa, Actaeon, and Callisto undergo states ranging from rapture to terror to bestializing transformation and disintegration of the self.

Source: Stephen J. Campbell, "Europa," in Eye of the Beholder, edited by Alan Chong et al. (Boston: ISGM and Beacon Press, 2003): 103-107.

Purchased in 1896 from Colnaghi, London, through Berenson.