Portrait of a man, and of a soul

Forget pyrotechnics. The magnificent Titian portrait recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum operates at a different, more nuanced frequency of perceptual feeling. It’s a slow-burn picture -- the kind of work that literally dawns, like the morning sun peeling back darkness.

Until last November, Titian’s “Portrait of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchesa del Vasto, in Armor With a Page” was hanging at the Louvre in Paris. It had been on loan for the previous 10 years from its corporate owner, but just before Thanksgiving, the Getty announced it had purchased the picture, for the proverbial “undisclosed sum.”

Now it’s installed in a gallery of Renaissance painting atop a Brentwood hill, given pride of place in the center of the room, on a wall covered in soft red fabric. Across the way is “Venus and Adonis,” painted by Titian with the help of his workshop, a later version of a canvas long installed in Madrid’s Prado Museum. The portrait will remain on view until the end of next month, so that visitors might get an early glimpse of the newest major addition to the Getty’s collection. Then it will disappear briefly into the conservation lab for cleaning, revarnishing and study, before returning to the gallery.

Three other Titian portraits hang in public collections in Los Angeles, but none comes close to the greatness of the Getty work.

Titian created a virtual portrait industry over the course of a celebrated career, which spanned an amazing six decades in 16th century Venice. The fine pictures of dignitaries at the L.A. County Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Museum show how high he raised the bar for routine portrait commissions. (The Simon also owns a religious work, which features an earthy, almost homespun Madonna.) The bland, perfunctory example at the UCLA Hammer Museum -- which, like the Getty’s portrait, shows a man posed in dress armor -- demonstrates how a less-than-discerning sitter might be satisfied with a reasonable likeness and a couple of tossed-off flourishes from the great man’s brush.

There’s nothing tossed off in the exceptional Getty portrait -- except, perhaps, an old way of painting. Titian was about 45 when he made it, in the first month or two of 1533. His exact date of birth in the little Dolomite mountain village of Cadore isn’t known, but in accord with a late claim by the contemporaneous chronicler Giorgio Vasari, the Getty uses circa 1488. (He died a gray eminence in 1576.) Titian had yet to visit Florence or Rome.

Still, he forged a profound technical alteration in brushwork that was to change European art for generations. Although partly anticipated by predecessors as diverse as Jan van Eyck in Flanders and Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, in whose Venetian studios Titian worked, he brought finality to the shift. Look at the Getty portrait; that way lies Rubens, then Velazquez.

Titian’s epochal transformation can be seen by comparing “Alfonso” to the Getty’s other knockout Renaissance portrait, Jacopo Pontormo’s slightly earlier picture of a preening young nobleman, installed in an adjacent gallery. Helpfully, the Titian has been hung so you can see it in the next room while looking at Pontormo’s work.

Elegant and arrogant, Pontormo’s showy teenage aristocrat is peacock-proud. The startling palette -- crimson, emerald and satiny cream, with weighty accents of gold -- grabs you by the lapels. Strangely, this aggressive sense of display adds to the sitter’s remote hauteur.

The fearsome battle-ax on which he leans is less a soldierly weapon of choice than a bald symbol of power -- the muscle inherent in his elevated social status. By contrast, Titian’s quiet, golden-brown portrait at first appears almost dull.

But not for long. Titian’s genius was to separate paint from its long established job, which was to faithfully describe detailed surfaces or tactile volumes of mass and space. Instead, his paint became a vehicle for the perception of light, apprehended through scrupulously veiled layers of color.

The result: Light in Titian’s greatest works seems suspended, shimmering and vivacious, within the tonal richness of the picture plane. The luminous image seems to unfold through time.

How did he do it? Study in the Getty’s conservation lab will answer specific questions about “Alfonso,” but here’s the short answer: What Michelangelo was to drawing, Titian was to color. Typically, the artist began with a reddish ground, or underpainting, to lend warmth to the surface. Luminous oil color was laid over that. Drawing played almost no role.

Titian used layer upon layer of thin glazes -- velatura, as the Italians called it, to evoke the quality of veiling -- which tamped down the color and helped unify the tonal range. At the end, flicks of lead white, often smudged with his fingertips, added reflective sparkle.

For all that, Titian’s Alfonso is as stolid and immovable as the Great Pyramid of Cheops -- as might befit a military commander of his grand accomplishments. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the great patron that Titian met the same year he painted this portrait, made Alfonso commander general of all Italy. The proportions of the figure are duly monumental.

Titian’s famous method of composing in triangles (to lend stability) punctuated by diagonals (to suggest dynamic movement) undergirds the portrait. Measured by the width of the canvas across the bottom, an exact equilateral triangle finds its apex at Alfonso’s neck. There the point is ringed below by the gold trim of his armor and crowned above by his serenely poised head.

The heavily armored triangle of Alfonso’s body finds gentle counterpoint in energetic diagonal movement. Decorated golden rays on his armor shoot out in one direction, while the main compositional axis goes in the other. Starting with Alfonso’s face, continuing down through the shiny circular shoulder plate and to the helmet nestled in the crook of his arm, it ends at the young pageboy. He gazes up reverently at Alfonso’s side.

Here, nestled in the lower left corner, resides the painting’s wholly unexpected masterstroke.

The young page reaches up, his small hand cupping the chin of the general’s helmet. Look closely between the peasant boy’s innocent face and his beseeching hand; there you’ll glimpse the glistening chain mail of Alfonso’s gloved fingers, in which he holds his helmet. The mighty general’s hand rests at the tip of the young boy’s chin, mirroring the boy’s own action. A reciprocal gesture of affection plays out between them, aristocrat and commoner.

Titian amended a distinguished formal portrait of exalted military power, all glinting metal and dispassionate display, with a moving sign of tender humanity. The poignant contradiction speaks volumes about the portrait’s subject -- and about the artist’s unparalleled gifts.

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‘Portrait of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchesa del Vasto, in Armor With a Page’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-

6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-

9 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 29

Price: Free; parking $5