La Schiavono

I set myself the forty for forty challenge of spending forty minutes with an artwork. The idea had originally came from Oliver Burkeman in his 4,000 weeks book. He’d spent three hours with an artwork. He’d found that in slowing down and looking deeply an artwork he’d found he understood more of it. Spending three hours is not something I want to do, but spending 40 x 40 minutes with various different art works seems valuable. I had previously experimented with this but yesterday was the first as part of my challenge year.

My experience concords with that of Oliver’s. Quickly, you feel as you have seen everything and question how you will spend another 39 minutes with this painting. I had chosen Titian’s La Schiavona, displayed at the National Gallery in London. Clearly, most other people felt the same with my view being momentarily obstructed by tourists looking, approaching, snapping on their phones and then walking away in around 40 seconds. Then, as my mind settled into the rustled quietness of Room Number 8, my thoughts focused onto the black background. Surely, the most uninteresting aspect of the painting but no, Titian has brought shades and light to his black. This was not a uniform pitch blackness but there was light in the dark. So subtle had he achieved this perception by using a range of blacks. Why. Why had Titian done this. It required effort so there had to be a choice. What drove him to make this choice. These were all questions I now had and they were soon joined by ponderances about who she is, who is the statue, what is the stone she’s holding on to. Who is she looking at. Titian had stood here in about 1512 and had made a series of decisions and here I was over five hundred years later in silent conversation with him.

How many other people over those five hundred years had spent even four minutes with her? Many. How many had spent forty? Fewer.

Soon my time was up as the gallery announced closing time and I left La Schiavona. Those forty minutes had been ones of undistracted peace and the chance to engage with a long-dead artist.

Bibliography:

Burkeman, Oliver, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (London, Bodley Head, 2021)

Titian, ‘Portrait of a Lady (La Schiavona)’, about 1510-12, National Gallery website https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-portrait-of-a-lady-la-schiavona
[accessed 29 January 2026].

Burkeman, Oliver, ‘Why patience really is a virtue’, The Guardian, 21 August 2015 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/21/patience-is-form-of-power-oliver-burkeman
[accessed 29 January 2026].