Anyone who frequents a contemporary museum or gallery knows more or less what Untitled means—that the artist who has produced this work has chosen not to name it and implicitly prefers that the painting speak for itself. Yet I suspect few pause to register how the label acquires its meaning from the convention it violates: Untitled signifies precisely because we have learned to expect that in the ordinary course of things, a painting will have a title. Every time our eyes search for one only to find its negation instead, we testify to the force of that convention.

Under modern circumstances of display and reproduction, in fact, Untitled, too, is a kind of title: a word that routinely accompanies the work as it circulates in the culture and that instructs us, if only by negation, how to view it. But if we attend to the history of the paintings on our museum walls rather than to the labels that accompany them, the problem of the untitled work appears quite different. For the vast majority of European paintings before the eighteenth century, the absence of a title testified not to a deliberate refusal of prevailing custom but to the default condition of artistic practice. That these are not the works we presently designate as Untitled has more to do with reception, broadly understood, than it does with production. Such pictures have their names, but we do not owe those names to their makers. With rare exceptions, the work of baptizing them has been the province of middlemen.

To say that most pictures before the eighteenth century lacked titles in the modern sense is not to say that they lacked subjects, or that the viewers for whom they were intended would have failed to understand what they were seeing. On the contrary: the need for titles is more likely to be felt when such understanding threatens to break down, whether because geographical distance makes face-to-face explanation impossible or because artist and viewer no longer share a common culture. Titling, as E. H. Gombrich has observed, “is a by-product of the mobility of images”; and before the rise of the art market, the growth of public exhibitions, and the development of the reproductive print, the mobility of images was distinctly limited. As long as European art was dominated by a system of patronage, much work was site-specific and literally incapable of motion: think of a fresco on the wall of a monastery, for example, or the decorated ceiling of a princely palace. Easel paintings, of course, were free to move; and it was the increasing circulation of such images through Europe that would eventually make the need for titles salient.

Yet to the degree that such images originated in commissions rather than the open market—as did most Italian painting before the eighteenth century—they, too, were often designed for a particular space, where most viewers could be expected to recognize what they were seeing. The person who worshipped at the altar of a local church or chapel, the family and friends afforded access to the private quarters of a nobleman: such viewers could rely on a common culture and informal means of exchange to identify the images before them. Even today, few pictures that hang in private homes are provided with labels.

Sacred images in particular could be recognized by a wide audience; but in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy the vast majority of secular paintings were based on a comparatively limited stock of classical narratives, whose iconographic conventions became more or less codified over the years. When a Florentine scholar named Giovan Battista Adriani was consulted for a suitable story to inspire some tapestries being made for Cosimo I in the late 1550s, he argued against “novel inventions” and opted instead for the pleasures of recognition: “I would be of the opinion that it would be risky to deviate from stories that are known to many people,” he wrote—adding later, “For in my opinion he who paints something entirely unknown, or known by very few, will give less satisfaction, especially as these decorations are being made for display and are meant to please a wide audience… Nor does it disturb me in the least if this subject has already been painted by other artists; on the contrary, the more frequently and skilfully it is represented the happier I shall be.” He suggested the story of Theseus, “the details of which are very well known.”