A Thousand Words
The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea by Tiziano Vecellio (Titian)
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
When we think of Titian, we conjure up images of lushly painted jewel tones and golden Venetian light, and not of stark black and white. Yet he was a surprising master of the graphic arts, too, especially of the woodcut medium, as is evidenced by The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea. This woodcut measures four feet by just over seven feet and is printed from twelve separate blocks. The artist must have drawn directly on the blocks with a broad-nibbed pen; the wood between the pen lines was then cut away so that the lines stood up in relief and could be inked for printing, all in all an extraordinary undertaking.
Extraordinary Image
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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more on art from the online archives
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33.2—March/April 2020
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