Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Titian

  • Titian: The mastery of color and the perils of paint

    Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/90–1576) hailed from Pieve di Cadore, near Venice. He trained first in the workshop of the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccato and subsequently with the acclaimed Giovanni Bellini, while his close relationship and collaboration with the influential Giorgione greatly shaped his early style. Titian’s early commissions included the Scuola di San Antonio frescoes in…

  • Girolamo Fracastoro and syphilis

    JMS Pearce Hull, England In 1924, London’s National Gallery received a bequest from the Mond family, an oil painting titled Portrait of Girolamo Fracastoro, attributed to Titian about 1528. What special attributes of a Veronese physician made him a suitable subject for the renowned artist Titian? Girolamo Fracastoro or Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483–1553) became famous because…

  • Melville’s Bartleby: An absurd casualty

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French writer and philosopher. He did not want to be pinned down as an existentialist or an absurdist, or indeed a nihilist. Nevertheless, he is well known for coining the expression ‘the absurd hero’. Camus used the Greek myth of Sisyphus to illustrate this idea. Sisyphus’s…

  • Fracastorius, the man who named syphilis

    One of the great names in medical history, Girolamo Fracastoro appears in the National Gallery painting by Titian in full regalia. We owe him the name syphilis, derived from his poem (1530) Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (“Syphilis or The French Disease”) in which a shepherd boy named Syphilus was punished by Apollo with a horrible…