Can We Ever Look at Titian’s Paintings the Same Way Again?

Great is what this art is, yet it raises doubts about whether any art, however “great,” can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.

BOSTON — With its small supernova of a show, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here scores an art historical coup that institutions many times its size should envy, and audiences, hungry for old master dazzle, can count themselves lucky to see. Yet the same exhibition raises troubling questions about how, in art from the distant past viewed through the lens of the political present, aesthetics and ethics can clash. The show first appeared at the National Gallery in London, moved on to the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and is making its last, and only American stop at the Gardner. At its core is a cycle of six monumental oil paintings of mythological scenes that Titian, who died in Venice in 1576, produced, late in his career, for the Spanish king Philip II. Originally displayed in a single room in the imperial palace in Madrid, the pictures were gradually dispersed. One stayed in Spain; four went to England; and, in 1896, one ended up in Boston, initially in the Beacon Street drawing room of the local art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, then in her faux-palazzo on the Fenway. Its arrival detonated an explosion of buzz. It was widely advertised as the most expensive painting in the United States (Gardner bought it for what was then about $100,000, or around $3.2 million today), which automatically made it, for some, the greatest painting anywhere.