“Caesar’s Dinar” – an early work of Titian, performed around 1516 for the Duke of Alphonse I of Ferrara. Giorgio Vasari speaks of the painting: “There, on the door of the cupboard, Titian wrote a wonderful and magnificent breast picture of Christ to whom the evil Jew shows the imperial coin.” This is the head, together with the other pictures executed in that room, by our best artists as the most excellent and best-suited of all that Titian ever wrote. “
In the well-shaped forms of the heads, Titian’s closeness to the type that his teacher Giovanni Bellini wrote is still felt. In the picture everything is subordinated to concentration, tension of form, the whole story about the Pharisee, which provoked Christ to the question, then brought to him, reduced Titian to the opposition of two heads and two hands, two characters who have nothing in common.
To the question of the Pharisee, whether it is right that the emperor is paid taxes or not, Christ asked to show the coin and, pointing to the chased portrait of the emperor and the inscription on it said: “Give Caesar the right to Caesar’s, and God to the god.”
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)