What does the future hold for the Rape of Europa? Although the painting, over five centuries old, is in surprisingly good condition, having suffered no more than a number of minor restorations, reflecting the care with which it has been treated by its successive owners, its fragility, as well as the terms of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will, means that it is most unlikely ever to leave the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum again. The Rape of Europa has enjoyed a rich history, but now that it is housed in a museum, its fascinating journey, as it has moved progressively from Venice to Spain, France and Britain, before crossing the Atlantic to America, is over. One can only speculate what might have happened if it was still subject to market forces. Would it have been acquired by a Russian oligarch, or an oil-rich Arab, perhaps from Qatar, where the government is building some of the most impressive art museums in the world, or perhaps a wealthy Chinese, benefiting from China’s fast-growing economy to begin collecting Western art in earnest?
The reality, however, is that the painting will remain in Boston, where 200,000 visitors every year come to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to enjoy the collection housed in her palatial residence at Fenway. Visiting the museum is like entering a time warp, wandering through rooms that have remained unchanged since Isabella’s death. Having traversed the lower floors, you find yourself upstairs in the Titian Room, where the sight of the Rape of Europa is enough to lift the flagging spirits of all art lovers. This room alone shows Isabella Stewart Gardner to have been a worthy successor to some of the most notable art collectors in history. They constitute a diverse group, ranging from the secretive and repressed Philip II and his grandson Philip IV, indulging in their passion for the erotic figure of Europa in solitary splendour in their private apartments, to the libertine Dukes of Orléans carrying on their scandalous lifestyle beneath the gaze of Europa and her bull.
What united these collectors, and Isabella herself, was the desire to possess the finest works of Titian. They regarded the painter as without peer in his ability to use colour as a way of expressing feeling. In a long and fruitful career, the painter produced a large oeuvre, but it was his poesie, painted when the artist was at the height of his powers, which best demonstrate this ability and, consequently, have been the most sought after of all his works. The Rape of Europa, representing the culmination of this series, has not only been highly sought after, but also exerted a profound influence on Titian’s fellow artists, ranging from Rubens and Velázquez in Spain, Watteau and Boucher in France, Reynolds and Lawrence in England and Whistler and Sargent in America.
It is the one painting, above all, that the National Gallery in London regrets losing when it left British shores back in the 1890s, and was one of the main reasons why the recently retired director Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery (2008–15), a notable Titian scholar, was so determined to purchase Diana and Actaeon, and Diana and Callisto, the two paintings most closely associated with the Rape of Europa. As Penny has written: ‘Recollection of how the National Gallery allowed the Rape of Europa to leave the country strengthened the determination to secure the other two for public ownership over a century later.’ The success of the National Gallery’s campaign to raise £100 million to acquire the two Diana paintings, and the crowds that have flocked to see them, like those who troop into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to see the Rape of Europa, show why these great mythological works of Titian have always been placed at the pinnacle of Old Master painting.