Titian Behind Closed Doors BBC

They simply are amongst the most beautiful paintings ever painted. They are a kind of manifesto about what painting is and what painting could do. What we're seeing are very important pictures. We are most certainly looking at great masterpieces. Philip is a young man, he's on the cusp of having to assume enormous responsibility. Anybody who loves painting loves Titian. He's the most famous painter in Europe, by far. Titian did intend them as a series and Philip II wanted them as a series, but in fact very few people had the opportunity to see them as a series. Finally with the show we can actually think of them as a whole suite of paintings. It's a huge thrill for us and it's a huge thrill I'm sure for everyone. It weighs heavily on you to have to lock the doors on a room that holds some of the greatest pictures ever painted. They carry with them something significant from the past and they have an ability to speak to us in the present. Should I be enjoying this sight of these naked women? There is something we need to look at, see and recognize here. They're bound up with people's fears about love, they're bound up with people's fears about death, but they're bound up also with this great sense of celebrating the fact that we're alive. Philip, he's a young man preparing to take over as king of Spain. He's on the cusp of having to assume enormous responsibility. It's certainly a high stakes moment for him and so he's concerned with establishing himself as a credible figure. He needs paintings, a great king has great works of art. You know if you're an important person at that time you should be magnificent, you should show that in everything you do and art has become one of the ways people do that. He wanted to cultivate a relationship with the artist regarded as the best. Like many of the great potentates of his time he had phenomenal power, technically bankrupt, so they had to find other ways than cash often to pay for these huge things. It was not Philip's private wealth that financed this, it was the Fogger family. I'm essentially the 19th generation of the family since it's been recorded that they arrived in Augsburg in 1367. In 1550 Philip II and a lot of the other Habsburg family members spent a couple months here in Augsburg in the Fogger palace. The relationship between Fogger and Philip II was essentially funding his needs to finance the state, to finance the court, to finance his personal interests and there weren't that many firms like ours that were able to fund these kind of sums. When Philip writes to Venice saying he wants Titian to come to Augsburg. They agree on a number of paintings that he's going to deliver to Philip and it's up to Titian to come up with the subjects. That was it, nothing further was specified, nothing further was agreed, he simply let Titian get on with it. So they parted and Titian went back to Venice and Philip went back to Spain and they never met again, they never meet again. By this time, by the 1540s, 1550s, Titian is already very famous, he's already carried out several commissions for lots of European dignitaries. By the time that he meets Philip he's become the greatest artist in Venice and has been for a long time. He's held the crown of being the grand old man in Venice in terms of the arts. This is Titian's garden, it's completely enveloping and I think quite magical. We can see that he had a real contact with the Venetian at that time, he was part of the city as not only a painter but a Venetian person. We have of course the written testament of the dinner parties that Titian used to give here in this garden and how after, at the end of the dinner, he would open the gate and he would arrange to have a gondolas with courtesans and musicians and singers who would come and entertain his guests. In Titian's time the door would have opened and it would be the lagoon. So we come in, the house is very long and narrow which is most unusual for Venice. Living in Titian's house it's a presence that you live with. We have the fireplace, it's sort of warm and cozy. This is our confessional and I know my husband always has need of that. I think Titian was constantly on our mind when we were buying things. This is the drawing room, I decided to do something creative here and that's when we incorporated landscape scenes from Titian's paintings. I think there's a butterfly, there's a butterfly or a dragonfly over there. And we even have some naked ladies, a naked lady there. He probably would have approved of her, yes. I think he definitely liked the ladies. He brings you in with this kind of delicious promise of beauty and so we see Danai lying on a bed in a very voluptuous setting. There's a maidservant with her as well, watching this golden rain fall down onto her lap area. It is one of the sexiest paintings ever painted and everything about it suggests the turbulence of sex. One of the things that makes it so sexy is the sheets are rumpled, the sheets are painted with broad brush strokes, they're very very rumpled. I mean there's been something going on in that bed. Titian had done his most erotic painting and that is saying something because he specialised in erotic painting. He pioneered the reclining female nude. Titian has at this period a kind of speciality of giving very favoured patrons pictures of naked female nudes on beds. In 1538, Titian painted this extremely famous nude. She's doing something with her hand that some was considered to be as close to pornography as art of his period gets. Then we cut to 1544 and Titian painted this picture for Alessandro Farnese and Venus of Urbino is about flirtation. The Farnese Venus is about penetration and this one's about passion. This is about orgasm. This golden shower of rain is related to some kind of metaphor for ejaculation. It was painted for a man whom Titian believed to be very sexually active. Philip was only 21 at the time that he painted it for him. We have many accounts of him being a womaniser and being very interested in women and so on. Philip is his early 20s. Titian is in his 60s. He's also smart. He's a reader of people and he understands that this is what Philip likes. I can understand why you can say, oh, it's just like pornography. It's just like a pin-up. That's not what it's for and these paintings have much more to them. Of course, we know that he didn't just invent all this out of the top of his head. I mean, it's based on Ovid's metamorphoses. This is where I keep nicely alphabetical order. My Ovid's. I've got him very austerely in Latin only. I've got him in, you know, English on a buy one, get one free offer. Ovid takes quite a lot of shelf space because he's one of the most important, famous, classical and subversive of all Roman poets. The most famous thing that he ever wrote is his poem which is called The Metamorphoses, the change of shape. He's talking fundamentally about what it is to be a human. What is it to change? What do we mean by someone becoming different? And how do human beings change in the course of their lives? And it spans a whole range of subjects, all of them slightly naughty. The first in the series is Danae being impregnated by the god Jupiter in a shower of gold. The person who is going to be born from this strange impregnation is the hero Perseus. What's going on here is that Titian is not illustrating Ovid. He's reconfiguring some of the main themes of the text and that's why I think they're very, they're kind of very rich because it's not as if there's a kind of simple and straightforward message and all you've got to do is encode it. What we're being asked to do is to think about this story and what it means. Many of these paintings were designed as kind of talking points for intellectuals and the idea was that little references would be put in there to the nature of painting, to poetry, to mythology that Philip's intellectuals, courtiers and poets would unravel. Venus tries to prevail upon a human lover, Adonis, to stop him from going on hunting where he's going to be killed. Needless to say, he pays no attention, goes off and gets killed. That's what you get for trifling with the gods. They will destroy you. Titian hasn't followed the story that Ovid tells us because according to Ovid, what happened was Venus, who was spending the night with her boyfriend, Adonis, says, oh, Adonis, promise me you won't go hunting. I'm frightened and all the rest of it. And he says, of course, I promise I won't. At dawn, she leaves him. After she's gone, he goes out hunting. Now, Titian has painted something quite different, i.e. he's trying to leave, she's trying to restrain him. It's after dawn. Titian knew perfectly well what he was trying to do. What he was trying to achieve was something which was very, very sexy. The Venus and Adonis explicitly is about depicting a female nude from behind because Titian sends a letter to Philip and says that he's going to depict the nude, the female nude, from a variety of perspectives. The way that he presents Venus from the back and sitting, so you can see the pressure on her buttocks. This is really celebrated in the 16th century, this idea that you can see the kind of softness of the flesh. It's about Titian being really skillful by making you feel so sexually aroused by this image. In the years when it was here in the studio, it just gave you a thrill every time you walked in. It never ceases to do that. It's a very erotic picture, I think, with the back view where so much is sort of left to the imagination, but you've also got this very prominent bottom, because there's a variety of bottoms as well. If you look at them, there's different forms where the eye's drawn, if you see the way that the lines of the composition. I like the pressure of sitting, but it is true, though. It is true. If you look at that, there's a real sense of weight. He began this picture preparatory to producing the picture for Philip II. It was a master template for Titian's Venus and Adonis. This is a working piece, and he is developing things on the canvas as he goes along. Other artists might have done it in drawings, or they might have done it in cartoons. They might have worked away from the canvas. He works on the canvas. It's got elements of compositional change that tell us about his process of thinking. This is to do with that line, the sinuosity of that line, and moving little elements around the top of the boot. Yes, that's extraordinary that the boot gets so much. The minute he supplied that picture to Philip II, it became the most famous picture in the world. It was his best-selling picture. He got orders for it, and he would sort of press print on it as it then was. It was an absolutely winning composition. Each of these pictures meant money for Titian's studio. We have here on the table three prints by the early Titian. Titian, in his early career, already made it clear that he had a very strong and very outspoken sense of the potentialities of various new techniques. So he had a nose for this, and he tried it out. So he started not just painting, but making prints. And indeed, here we have the figure of Christ on a chariot drawn by, here, figures, allegorical figures, representing faith, turning around. This is something new. The new technique gave the possibility to, as it were, commercialize new inventions on a scale that were unheard of. And that's exactly what Titian did. A great example of that is the Venus and Adonis. If I make a print out of one of these paintings and sell that print, I can make a nice living out of that. Why not? As he grew older and more famous, he was not averse to copying himself or making variants. He did it quite often. He made no secret of the fact that he was interested in money. He said in a letter, my pensions are my passion. I mean, he made a lot of money out of these pictures. They were money spinners, I'm afraid, apart from anything else. Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess, and her mother has bragged that she and her daughter are much more beautiful than the nymphs who serve the god of the sea, Neptune. So he sends a monster to devour her. Perseus is flying through the air. He decides to save her. The big difference between the Perseus and Andromeda and the two previous is that it's invented from the ground up. It's a new invention petition. He wants to depict a figure in motion through the air. It is clear that it's reworked a lot over a protracted period. He couldn't work out whether to stick with Ovid, in which I believe Perseus is standing on the shore. And so he started by putting her on this side and Perseus on this side, and he changed his mind. I think he's also trying to suggest a slight lack of control in the figure of Perseus, and that makes him look a little clumsy. This figure of the tumbling Perseus, it looks like he's going to crash into the water quite some way off from the sea monster. He looks like he's just fallen off the cliff and is going headlong into the water rather than that he's going to go and kill this monster. It reminds me a little bit of the figure in Tintoretto's The Freeing of the Slave. He's working at a time in Venice where a new generation of artists is coming to the fore, including Jacopo Tintoretto, with whom he has a very strained relationship. And Tintoretto has an incredible facility and very good at kinetic, dynamic action. And pictures flying through the air is something he's very good at. And it seems like Titian is also competing with that. He's a very competitive artist. He always looks at what's going on around him and measures himself against it and tries to outdo it. Many paintings were done to show he could do far better than someone else who he thought threatened his position. The figure that's effortless is a figure of Andromeda. She's elegant. She has this poetic pose. She's the one who's restrained, but she's really the one who is shown with composure. And it's to do with power. It's not to do with eroticism as much as it's to do with power. He's got this enormous empire, including a new empire in the New World, that he's trying to protect. There's a relationship between masculinity and virility and leadership. The ability to lead people, to be in charge. And so these paintings also... Really, I suppose the implication hidden underneath these paintings is that, say, Philip II, or whoever the commissioner was, is like Perseus swooping in to save the day. Philip is very conscious of the fact that some of the major decisions he makes affects the political life and the personal lives of Europeans all over the continent. One of the first prints we have here is of the defences constructed for the port of Veracruz. This beautiful and very complex painting is to illustrate the waterways leading into the port of Antwerp. Having therefore come into possession of all these territories by inheritance, Philip had the advantage, presumably, of being able to draw income from them. But at the same time, he had to defend them. Philip found, I suppose to his disgust, that having an empire isn't really always a good thing. We have an empire which, on the face of it, covers all the continents of the globe, but which in reality creates important obligations on the king himself to try and defend, which he never really could. Titian is smart. He's a reader of people. He has a sense of Philip's situation, how difficult it is to be a ruler and the kind of decisions you make. There is no letter from Philip in that period in which he expresses any reaction to the pictures at all. He was very worried about Philip's reaction. Nothing like this particular treatment of a subject had ever been seen before. So what was Philip going to make of them? So Philip had an awful lot on his mind and he didn't respond. And Titian wrote him at least twice. I haven't heard anything from you. It's been so long since I sent these pictures. I assume that's maybe because you don't like them. If you don't like them, I'm happy to do them again. And he never heard from him. Until I think quite a long time had passed, over a year. So you can imagine the anxiety. But in a sense, you can make the argument that this becomes a catalyst for Titian. He has sort of a resurgence of creativity in this period. To work as an artist for a patron who's going to be paying you as long as you're delivering something. That is remarkable. This is really the normal size painting brush which you can imagine Titian using. Similar to the reason why you got it long. You want to hold it so you can actually make marks. And when you actually you're painting, you can actually see the whole canvas. When you get kind of close, it's all a blur. But when you're further away, the actual drawing, the shape making, comes together and actually creates the form. For Titian, the execution on the surface, on the canvas, is the content. The way he starts opening up his forms. The way he starts painting even more atmospherically than he had previously. Titian, straight on there with the brush. That's the idea. He's carving the surface. The analogy is carving. His approach to gestural brushwork. His approach to layering of color. And his use of that to tell stories with not just narrative precision, but emotional and psychological precision. And you can imagine Titian doing that. And when you're involved with a picture, you become so lost within it. Titian is the great precursor of our modern-day idea of painting as self-expression. And it's fundamental to remember that they are abstract. And again, it's not about painting every single thing in. He's getting to an essence as your brain fills the rest in. Again, which you could say is a modern idea. He's doing something new in painting that is so radical that you can't really think about painting the same way afterwards. He's painting the future. This is the one that many people think of as the absolute top of the series. It's a kind of manifesto about what painting is and what painting could do. Look at this. Look at it. I mean, every texture that you can imagine. Water, stone, glass. Things that are vaporous, translucent. You know, those are things that are notoriously difficult to paint. And he just puts them in, masses of them, just to show what he can do. These later pictures, they're unusually freely painted or they give the impression of unduly freely painted. When you look close at them, you just make out a mass of color and so forth. When you stand back, it all falls into place and they seem to be alive and perfect. This is just form that lives straight through paint. That has as many dimensions to it as poetry. Here is the goddess Diana suddenly being surprised by the hunter Actaeon who, in the course of the chase, has come across Diana and her followers bathing. Which no man must ever do. It's that startled look of the discomfort every man has felt at not being wanted in the company of women. Then what happens is that Diana sees him, she transforms him into a stag and he gets eaten by his own hounds. He constantly makes you question why you're looking at these paintings and your morals for looking at these paintings and the ethics of looking. Should I be enjoying this sight of these naked women? Mr. Angaro, the proud owner of Titian Studio. You've worked here for how many years? What is it? Ah, I know. Casanova. Right, so the issue of female life models is a kind of much-debated question amongst Renaissance art historians. And it used to be that people said there weren't any female life models in the Renaissance, it was just men. And in some cases you do use male life models for clothed female figures. But to get a female nude, and particularly female nudes in strange positions, you have to have a life model. Otherwise you can't see things like how the breasts fall, for example. You can't do that with a male model. So female life models absolutely were used in the 16th century. And Titian was one of the people who used them frequently. I think I would have loved to sit for Titian, provided I could keep my clothes on. This was obviously many years ago. And it was the first cover of Cosmopolitan. They wanted cleavage, and I had cleavage. The job of the models in Titian's time was to project whatever image it was that they were requested to project. It's not really how I see myself. Female bodies are really transgressive. So you get preachers like Bernardino of Siena saying, woman, never let yourself be seen naked because you sin. And so does your husband. They should never see your naked body. So the idea of painting women naked was indeed a deeply sexual act. It's a lot of focused, concentrated time together in the studio. And I think my memory tells me that I was sort of coming around maybe what would have been an average of two, two and a half days a week, something like this, for about five hours each sitting. And it was a difficult pose. And again, this arm was particularly difficult, wasn't it? I mean, the artist could often be criticized for being cruel. I remember my body not being very happy. There were aches and pains that I hadn't experienced before. I mean, I don't know what's happening, but this arm would have to be holding the weight of the body, which seems like a nearly impossible task. I think you've seen that really well, Vanessa. If you were really sort of leaning over and having that as the point that's anchoring the pose, then there would have to be incredible tension. I wonder if there wasn't something that was more vertical that was sort of then tipped over. Gravity will tell you and circulation will tell you that it's not a good idea to have your arms above your head for a very long time. But I know that this varies a lot between models. I know a couple of models that can hold their arms above their head for a whole hour, where within 10 minutes the most, I would have no blood and there would be pain. As a naked person in the room, it can sometimes feel vulnerable. And I think sometimes it could seem very subtle. And I think I've been in situations where people might have used particular terminology that they're probably naive to the fact that that could maybe make one not feel so comfortable and perhaps a little bit more exposed. What we're doing has nothing to do with sex. But I think it would be naive to say that it can't be because we're sexual beings. It's not the case with Andy. Andy is very, very clear. I don't think about sex when I'm painting. I don't need to go to the next room and kind of have an orgasm or something to better paint, to put it crudely. I think there probably have been artists that have done that. There is an expectation that artists have sex with their models. Writers talk about not letting kind of good girls go into artists' studios because of all the things that could happen to them. So whether this is true in competition's case, I think it's lost to history. Nobody knows. You don't know is the answer. And I don't think anybody will. And I don't think it should particularly change our views about pictures either. What people do in the privacy of their own studios, they're a flower. Really difficult to know who Titian's models were. But there's reported difficulty in getting the right kind of female models. They are not professional models, I think. And nor are they relatives, of course. They are presumably courtesans, of which there is a great number in Venice. So Venice, this very beautiful city, rising out from the water, was one of the wonders in Europe. Just an amazing, really, beauty, with approximately a population of 170,000 inhabitants. 11,000 were courtesans. And here in the middle, you know, where they are behind the Rialto Bridge, you can see this area, which was the ancient red light district. In 1565, a catalogue was printed, the catalogue of the 220 most important Venetian courtesans. It's important to think about courtesan culture in relationship to these paintings, because this is a new kind of culture. You only get courtesans in the early 16th century in Venice. And Titian is friends with some of these courtesans, he's very much part of this culture. Let's go. Now we are in Castelletto, the ancient red light district of Venice. We can also see some very beautiful statues, reminding us of the very special and attractive female attributes. Because not far from here, there is also the very famous bridge of Tiz, where the courtesans were used, you know, to show their tits. Of course, they were totally bare-breasted to entice clients. For instance, we can find Ludovica Stella living here in Campo Santa Barnaba. It means behind the church. Let's check how much she charged. Only two scudi, two shields. Quite good actually. For instance, a doctor, you know, earned eight scudi, eight shields for a month. So you can imagine the big amount of money, you know, that the courtesans earned. Many women would have sexual relations with a man in exchange for goods and maybe rent or maybe a house. And that courtesans spend a lot of their time just creating wonderfully beautiful atmospheres for them. So we'll write poetry and we'll sing and we'll be beautiful and entertaining and accessible in a way that a lot of aristocratic women weren't. And so they wouldn't define themselves necessarily as sex workers. He's a purveyor of fantasy. So are the courtesans of Venice. They're both selling their fantasies to the same people. Here we've got Diana, the rather commanding virgin goddess who has discovered that one of her poor attendants, the sad Callisto here, who has, because they had to get undressed, she's revealed that she was pregnant. Callisto was impregnated by the god Jupiter in the form of Diana. She's not allowed to be pregnant because Diana's nymphs are supposed to be chaste. It's a terrible moment when she's being held down by the other nymphs and they're revealing her pregnancy. Diana and Callisto is a deeply upsetting painting. It's one of the most expressively painted, possibly the most expressively painted. What he's painting is essentially a rape victim ostracized by her peers, another innocent victim of fate. Diana isn't a wicked woman, she's a goddess, which means that she can control your fate. Anything can happen. There's somebody up there who's going to do something good or bad for you. Ovid says it. There is no justice in the world. What happens, happens. It is interesting that the paintings for Philip get so dark. Titian is very anxious. There are two pensions and some other sums that have not been paid to him. He has not been paid as they had agreed for a very long time by this point. Now that if you work for a duke or a king, there's nothing you can do about taking them to court if they don't pay. They're not going to give you a contract, that's how it is. All you can do is kind of go on and on and on. Where's my money? And so forth. Philip II's ambitions and his budget was getting bigger and bigger. He was fighting a lot of wars. And obviously there were these very expensive ventures in the Americas. It led to a point where we as a firm became a bit more conscientious about the risk. In this letter that Philip II sent to Max Fugger, it's more of a demanding that he would want us to finance one million ducats. So our answer is not no. It's more of a, we have to see if we're able to accommodate that and we sort of try to buy time. This is essentially writing together how large is the outstanding sum that Philip II owes to us as a firm and how is that split within the various pieces of debt that we have given to him. And the sum that comes out is rather large. So we tried to find a way of not going into that request for financing because the outstanding debt was six million ducats, which in today's terms is roughly sort of $600 million. This is essentially sort of the beginning of the end, at least in terms of the financing relationship between the Fugger firm and the Habsburg family. Kishon was obviously interested in money and who is not, but he wasn't doing this stuff for love exclusively. If he could be paid as well, that's fine. And when some of the payments do come through, he was paid in a warrant for rice, which gave him the right to import and export rice through Naples without paying tax. So it was this kind of amazingly petty background to the whole thing of these sort of sublime paintings paid for in this tortuous charade of constant promises, constant impeaching. Here we have Europa, the climax of the series. Kishon painted it at probably a high point in his career. He was about 70 years old when he painted this painting and he was really firing on all cylinders by that moment. Here is the bull, again, Jupiter in a new form, who is raping the terrified Europa. And there's a backstory here about how the bull comes on to start with, you know, all very sweet. And Europa and her mates play with the bull and when he's got her confidence, off he goes. Here she's on his back. She's absolutely terrified. Philip would have identified with Jupiter. He himself not only identified with the ancient gods and goddesses, but claimed descent from them. We know that Kishon refers to this painting in 1562 as the seal on the series. He's pleased with this painting. There is a level of quality embedded in it, a level of intentionality, which perhaps he feels he's come to at the end of a campaign of over a decade of painting some of the most fabulous and meaningful paintings in his career. Traditionally, art historians have appreciated it for its colour and for its technique. Every inch of this is in a kind of molten ecstasy. It's ecstatic, isn't it? Her posture is ecstatic. That sense of ecstasy extends out into the sky and the reflections and the luminosity of the water. Not only is she half uncovered, but her right breast is visible. In the first iteration, her breast was covered. He then lowered the neckline of her dress until it was fully exposed. So that clearly suggests a desire to please his patron in the most basic, sexualised and erotic way. If you look at the face of Jupiter, Kishon chose to depict him facing the viewer, facing Philip. He looks at us with these wide eyes and this pink wet nose as if to say, And so there's a momentary hesitation where you look at the painting and realise there's something pretty awful going on, but at the same time, you look at the bull, the perpetrator, and you think, well, wait, is it possible that he's the one about to rape this woman? I think that kind of hesitation that Kishon builds into the painting is crucial to opening up more potential meanings in it. It's interesting because it has a lot of art historical writing about it that completely dismisses the idea that this is a woman being raped. We don't look at the subject matter. We look at brushstrokes and we look at, oh, genius, and we look at literature and we just look at everything apart from what is in front of us a lot of the time. And what is in front of us, if you look at it bluntly, is abduction and assault and rape. I first read of it at school and I remember very clearly that at school we were taught that we should say it wasn't rape, it was ravishing, somehow as if the women enjoyed it. Now, it's not surprising that recent discussion of it has been much clearer that what we're reading, the treatment of women in this very long book, they are often the victims of assault, sexual violence, and there's no two ways about it, they are raped. One thing one can say about politicians in general is that when the major artists did see them, these pictures had a decisive impact on a number of really great European artists in a way that no other group of pictures ever did. You know, Rubens was transformed by the experience of seeing them. Velázquez based his whole life on the fact that he was familiar with them. I think Lucian Freud said this and its companion piece, Diana and Callisto, were the most beautiful paintings ever created. Not a bad claim. Titian was sending these works out without ever having the opportunity for him to see them together in his own studio. He did intend them as a series and Philip II wanted them as a series. But in fact, when they all arrive in Spain, they actually stay together for a very, very short period. We tend to think of them as being together from the beginning, but in fact, the thing that was most striking to me when I mapped them as a group was to see that almost from the beginning, they weren't together. They're really only together for 20 years. I wanted to animate the fact that these objects were in constant motion and think about who saw these artworks and also what these artworks saw over the course of their lives. So the Venus in Adonis, which is now in the Prado, was sent originally to England when Philip II is getting married to Mary Tudor. The Perseus in Andromeda is sent to Ghent. We can look at the page that we have for Europa and be able to see all of the places that she traveled. First start off in Venice, where the painting was executed and then is sent to Spain where Philip II receives it. What the project reveals about who's predominantly looking at these pictures is that it is mostly men. François-Louis-Joseph de Laborde, Merevelde, the Bridgewater Syndicate, Lord Berwick, the Earls of Darnley, the Colnaghi Gallery. It seems very clear that these artworks are mostly seen by men and collected by men, gifted to men, exchanged by men or among men. That tells us also that artworks with women depicted in them were important as transactional items between men. 20 years ago or so, feminist art historians started to say, hang on a minute, from about the 70s onwards, you get these responses to the nude. So you start to think women like Carolee Schneemann, where she uses her own body to articulate ideas about power and art and how female sexuality is used by artists without any recourse for any real thought about women themselves. So the reclining nude is absolutely late edition. It's just the fact of women being objectified in Western art, just a real sense of anger, a real sense of fury that the art world kind of colludes in this objectification. To demand that art be sort of morally pure is basically to demand that art not do what it's always done. And that's what art helps us do. Art is not there to provide a moral example. Art is there to ask us questions or make us ask questions of each other. There's a lot of difficulty now, both about Ovid's poem and about Titian's dialogue with Ovid's poem. I feel much more doubtful, not to say fairly hostile, to the view that that means so we shouldn't read it or so we shouldn't look at it. I think unless we face up to what rape is, we are lost. That's what we need to know. There is something we need to look at, see and recognise here. Put these in the cupboard, we're depriving ourselves of something which is going to make us think harder and better and more productively about what sexual violence is. The day we knew we had to close the gallery, the team decided to gather together at quarter to six just before the doors closed to the public so that we could spend a bit of time together in the exhibition that all of us have played a part in doing. So we wanted to enjoy those last few minutes for the visiting public. It was a strange moment. It was, I've never lived a moment like that before, frankly. In times of stress or in times of crisis, I think museums and art and music and pictures can play an enormously important role where people look for solace, where they look for comfort, where they look for some kind of guidance. So it weighs heavily on you to have to lock the doors on a room that holds, you know, some of the greatest pictures ever painted, and you can't allow people to see them. But we know that we've done something important and we're very keen to share it when we're able to open our doors again.