Voluptuous Venetians

In an age of minimalism, there's an orgy of flesh, sensual beauty and voluptuous excess on full display in Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, a new exhibition at the de Young. The elaborate, alliterative title is but a prelude to what awaits in the galleries, where you'll find 50 paintings by the art stars of the 16th century, such as Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Mantegna, and Tintoretto, some of whom had a predilection for substantial feminine pulchritude, representations from classical mythology that tantalized the nobility who patronized their work.

These paintings once belonged to the emperors and archdukes of the Hapsburgs, a dynasty that spanned six centuries. Generous art patrons partial to the 16th-century Renaissance, they may have felt a kinship with the patricians of Venice, an enormously wealthy social stratum which proudly traced its lineage back generations. And like the Dutch a century later, members of the prosperous Venetian merchant class - the city was a clearing house for trade, especially in textiles - commissioned paintings of themselves. They flaunted their plush material lives without reserve - billowing iridescent fabrics are prominently featured - as one can see in a gallery filled with imposing portraits of the city's leaders. Apparently well-fed and dressed in accoutrements of power, these are the Venetian 1%.

Like Dutch Masterworks, a stunning show whose stealth beauty flew under the radar though it was easily one of the best exhibitions of the year, Masters benefits from the exquisite lighting provided by gifted FAMSF designer Bill Huggins, who gives many of the artworks a luminous, celestial glow. I confess this is not my favorite style of art, in part because the swooning eroticism, ethereal, overstuffed mythical landscapes, rolls of flesh and lush technique have often descended into kitsch and melodrama in lesser hands. But I was attracted to several works, particularly several by Mantegna, who employs linear perspective, sculptural forms and gold leaf. "Saint Sebastian" (1457-59), for instance, depicts a third-century Roman officer tied to a carved marble column who has somehow survived being shot through with arrows, including one piercing his martyred head, which is encircled by a gold halo.

Fascinated by classical civilization, Mantegna, who has been compared to Michelangelo and was an exponent of Greek culture, litters the foreground of the scene with broken statuary; a few villagers round the corner of a stone bridge, a white horse bursts forth like Pegasus from a puffy white cloud in a blue sky, and an imaginary town can be seen on the water in the distance. Though this work was done in tempera applied to a panel, Mantegna was one of the first artists to paint on canvas, as he did in "David with the Head of Goliath" (ca. 1490-95), in which the diminutive David of legend, a broken sword at his side, triumphantly holds up the giant's severed head.

Perhaps the greatest innovator of Venetian painting, Giorgione was a revolutionary genius whose aura of mystery extended to his painting. Set against a pitch-black background, a young soldier's armor gleams on his broad shoulders while a nightmarish gorgon head takes shape in the darkness to his right in the enigmatic "Warrior" (ca. 1505-10). His expressive masterpiece, "Youth with an Arrow" (1508-10), a portrait of an exquisite, introspective boy whose face is cast in golden light, bears the influence of Leonardo da Vinci. Giorgione died from the plague in 1510, but not before his short but brilliant 15-year career set the stage for the Venetian High Renaissance.

Titian was the rock star of his era; he was versatile, prolific, painting some 300 artworks, and politic too, as one can see in his idealized "Portrait of Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua" (ca. 1534-36), which transforms the fashionable, erudite 60-year-old doyenne into a woman decades younger. Aggression suddenly rears its ugly head in "The Bravo (The Assassin)" (1515-20); the viewer is complicit in an impending assault as a shrouded, menacing figure with a dagger hidden behind his back grabs a startled man by the collar.

But the artist's most lyrical imagery is found in "Mars, Venus, Cupid," "Danae," and "Nymph and Shepherd," a trio of rapturous paintings that celebrate the sensuality of the reclining female nude as well as the adulterous exploits and amorous desires of mythical gods, goddesses and mortals as Cupid hovers nearby. Geared toward male pleasure, they're a fusion of florid visual poetry and superb technique, and are an acquired taste.

But for sheer voluptuousness, it's difficult to compete with Tintoretto's "Susanna and the Elders" (ca.1555-56), a painting whose blatant eroticism is barely masked by a morally instructive story. Inspired by the Biblical book of Daniel, a popular subject of cinquecento and seicento Italian painting, Tintoretto's version serves up an ample, alabaster-skinned Susanna, naked in a secret garden and preparing to take a dip, while a bald, lecherous elder watches her and hides, not very well, in the rosebush outside her window. Her body shimmers on the canvas as if lit by divine moonlight.

Through Feb. 12.