Vision and Touch in the Allegory of Marriage

Abstract

Titian’s Allegory of Marriage depicts an equivocal moment of intimacy through a network of visual and tactile interactions. This dialectic of touch and vision evokes a range of embodied experiences that, through empathetic identification, also implicate the viewer and define a phenomenology of viewer response. Furthermore, the interplay of optical and haptic values invokes Titian’s painterly practice itself, mediating between the picture as window and the brushstroke as touch. The interpretive possibilities of this dialectic culminate in the crystal sphere, a discrete object receptive to human touch that also relates abstractly to the scattering of light in space, suggesting a more radical phenomenology of intimacy that transcends the limitations of bodily Gestalt and the separation between picture and viewer alike.