The Social Implications of Modernist Syntax: The Radical Meaning of Non-Determinism

by Michael Phillips

If one goes to the Accademia Museum in Venice, there in the main gallery is Titian’s great Pieta. Unlike his earlier work, this monumental canvas shows a tendency toward less balance more dramatic shifting of lights and darks and scale that leaves a feeling of anxiety and uncertainty about the composition. This is particularly true also of Titian’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, 1557, in the Church of the Gesuiti in Venice where large areas of darkness consume the painting with the figures crowded into the lower corners in confusion and instability. The issues of Modern Art are apparent already in aspects of the late Renaissance.