by Sheila Hale
Nevertheless, although Titian has sometimes been accused of shallow religious beliefs, at least in his early life, no artist of little faith could have painted the intensely moving Entombment of Christ (Paris, Louvre),22 a painting that glimmers with what has been aptly described as a ‘mysterious weirdness’,23 in which Giorgionesque dreaminess gives way to the tumultuous emotion of each mourner as the slack but perfect body of Christ, already cast in shadow, is lowered into the tomb. This intensely moving study in grief has been unjustly neglected, possibly because until recently it hung next to the Mona Lisa and was difficult to see through the crowds determined to focus their attention on the most famous painting in the world.24 The patron is unknown, but if, as has been suggested,25 Titian portrayed himself as the young bearded mourner who supports Christ’s legs26 it is not unreasonable to speculate that he identified with this sacred subject, one to which he would return later in life.
At around the same time Titian was working on these paintings he was also designing one of the most astonishing of all visual celebrations of the Christian faith. It is not a painting but a woodcut illustrating the Triumph of Christ;27 and like all of Titian’s woodcuts he drew it directly on the blocks in collaboration with the master cutter. Although the sources differ about exactly when Titian began the composition, the first multiple impressions were sold in 1517, at the end of a war in which the forces of evil had tried and failed to destroy God’s chosen city. The main inscription describes the Saints singing of how Christ has triumphed over death and is leading all to peace through the gates of heaven. The ‘infinity of figures’, as described by Vasari, are taken from the Old Testament and the Gospels: ‘the first parents, the patriarchs, the prophets, the sibyls, the innocents, the martyrs, the apostles, and Jesus Christ on the triumphal car, drawn by the four evangelists and the four doctors, with the holy confessors behind …’. The woodcut, which is made from ten blocks, incorporates motifs borrowed from several other artists: Mantegna, Michelangelo, Raphael. Titian probably intended it as an answer to Jacopo de’ Barbari’s three-block Triumph of Man over Satyrs and to rival Dürer’s woodcut-in-progress of the Triumph of Maximilian, begun in 1512. The subject may refer to Savonarola’s famous treatise, The Triumph of the Cross, published in Florence in 1497, the year before his execution. If so it conveys a different message. Savonarola describes Christ wearing a crown of thorns, holding the Bible in His right hand and in His left the cross and instruments of His Passion. In Titian’s image Christ carries only a sceptre, the sign of the worldly domination of His Church, as He returns in triumph from a victorious campaign against the forces of evil.
The Triumph of Christ was commissioned by an entrepreneurial publisher, Gregorio de’ Gregoriis. Although it is the only masterpiece de’ Gregoriis ever published, he did not mention Titian’s name in his application for copyright. Perhaps he banked on the subject more than the artist to appeal to an international market large enough to bring a return on his considerable investment. All woodcuts were expensive to produce, Titian’s Triumph of Christ was unusually elaborate, and since he had not yet established an international reputation de’ Gregoriis doubtless decided that his name would not encourage buyers. De’ Gregoriis, in any case, cannot have anticipated the huge success of the woodcut. Although the impressions can’t have been cheap to buy, Titian’s image of the triumphant Saviour restoring order to the Christian world was an international bestseller, hung or pasted on the walls of domestic households throughout Christendom by people who had never heard of Titian and who would never see his paintings. Later in the century motifs from it were used for a stained-glass window in Burgundy.28 It was copied in a painting in the cathedral of Prague, and became so popular that six separate woodcut versions of it were produced in the decades that saw Titian’s fame as the greatest colourist in Europe soar above his genius for designing complex images in black and white.
SEVEN
‘Some Little Bit of Fame’
Since childhood, Most Serene Prince and Most Excellent Lords, I TICIAN, your servant from Cadore, have devoted myself to learning the art of painting, not so much from the desire for profit as to acquire some little bit of fame, and to be counted among those who at the present time practise this art as a profession.
PETITION BY TITIAN TO THE COUNCIL OF TEN, MAY 1513
Titian in his mid-twenties was not yet internationally famous, but he was the best-known young painter in Venice. His frescos on the German exchange house were one of the talking points of the city; and his only rival as the painter of choice for wealthy clients was the aged Giovanni Bellini. Some of his keenest admirers were members of the ruling nobility, not least Pietro Bembo and Andrea Navagero, prominent intellectuals and connoisseurs of modern art. In the spring of 1513 Bembo invited Titian to join him in Rome, where he had been appointed secretary to Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had been elected to the papacy on 4 March following the sudden death from fever of Julius II. Titian had been in touch with the Bembo family since his days in Giovanni Bellini’s studio and later in Padua. The exhilarating although now damaged and overpainted Tobias and the Angel Raphael (Venice, Accademia)1 bears the Bembo coat of arms prominently displayed next to the little dog – the first of Titian’s delightful portraits of animals.2 The apocryphal story of Tobias’ journey in search of a cure for his father’s blindness was a popular subject in Renaissance mercantile communities, but more so in fifteenth-century Florence than in Venice. The main figure is always the archangel Raphael, the guide and guardian of Tobias, who is his identifying attribute. Bernardo Bembo, who served as Venetian ambassador in Florence, and his son Pietro, who had been educated there, might well have appreciated the Tuscan theme and style of the painting. Vasari said that Bembo had sat for Titian before the invitation to Rome, but his only surviving portrait by Titian is the much later one of 1539 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), when he was nearly seventy, wearing the scarlet cape and hat of a cardinal, a position to which he had been elevated by Pope Paul III.3
As a young man Bembo had hoped to follow the example of his father by serving the Republic as an ambassador. But five attempts to obtain an ambassadorship were voted down in government, each time by a large majority. He was considered too young for a responsible position in government; and he spent too much time away from Venice gallivanting in the princely courts of Italy where he had numerous affairs, some no doubt platonic. He pursued Maria Savorgnan, the love of his life, to Ferrara, where he also fell in love with Lucrezia Borgia, the beautiful daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who had recently married Alfonso d’Este, the future Duke of Ferrara. In 1506, after the publication of Gli Asolani, which he dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia, Bembo decided to devote more time to his writing while pursuing a career in the Church, which he hoped would make fewer demands on his time than a career in politics. He spent seven years at the splendid court of the Duke of Urbino. Called to Rome by Leo X he secured a living as a cleric after taking the vow of chastity, and then produced three children by his Roman mistress, Morosina, the younger sister of a courtesan serving the Vatican.
His libidinous behaviour as a young man would not have bothered the ebulliently hedonistic Leo, to whom a Venetian ambassador in Rome later attributed the famous remark: ‘Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.’ Best known to posterity as the pope whose sale of indulgences to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s caused Martin Luther to publish his Ninety-Five Theses and thus precipitated the Reformation, Leo made Bembo his secretary because he enjoyed the company of literary men. But when he renewed the alliance with Maximilian against the Republic Bembo found himself technically in the service of an enemy of his country. The association with Leo would not have been regarded as exactly traitorous in that age of continually shifting alliances. But it was a card for Titian to keep up his sleeve.
As Dolce tells the story, the great lyrical poet Andrea Navagero, who understood Titian’s painting ‘just as if it were poetry, and particularly Lati
n poetry, which was such a great forte of his’, tried to dissuade him from accepting Bembo’s invitation because he feared that ‘Venice, in losing him, would be despoiled of one of its greatest adornments’. Navagero, who was a master of Latin rhetoric as well as poetry, is less read today than Bembo, who made his name writing in a Tuscan Italian that is still accessible. But at the time, although thirteen years younger than Bembo, Navagero commanded at least as much respect in intellectual and artistic circles, and more as a reliable member of the Venetian government.
Titian must have been tempted to pay at least a short visit to Rome, the city that under Julius II had replaced Florence as the leading artistic centre of Italy. Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, the creators of the Italian High Renaissance, were only the starring geniuses among scores of talented artists attracted to the papal court from elsewhere in Italy. Michelangelo had only just finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The young prodigy Raphael was completing the decorations of the first of the papal apartments, the Stanze della Segnatura, with a team of assistants that included the wandering Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto. Leonardo arrived later in 1513 to work for Giuliano de’ Medici, the pope’s brother and captain general of his militia, and spent most of the next three years living in the Belvedere, the pope’s summer residence, while bickering with Leo, who complained not without reason that Leonardo never finished anything. Rome, then, was the place to be: to meet and learn from the greatest living artists; and to study and draw the ancient buildings and the antique relief carvings and sculptures that were causing sensations as they were discovered beneath the ground of the Holy City and that were considered an essential part of a young artist’s formative education.
The single most exciting archaeological discovery in the entire Renaissance of classical art and literature was the late Hellenistic sculpture of a group of writhing figures unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506, when the subject was purportedly identified by Michelangelo as the unfortunate Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons wrestling with snakes. According to the story as told by Virgil in the Aeneid Laocoön was punished by the Roman goddess Minerva for warning the Trojans that the wooden horse the Greeks had brought into their city was a trick. The sculpture group had been praised by Pliny as one of the greatest of all antique sculptures, and for the rest of the sixteenth century and into the next writers, sculptors and painters vied with one another to find ways of evoking the dynamism, and the sexual connotations, of the writhing, twisting figures.
Although it was later said that Titian would have been an even greater painter had he seen the antiquities in Rome as a young artist, he demonstrated that he could work just as well from sketches and models. Long before he finally saw the originals many years later, he incorporated in his pictures references to the Laocoön and other antique sculptures, as well as figures from paintings by central Italian artists that he knew only from sketches or cartoons. In Rome, furthermore, Titian would have been one of many, while in Venice he was in a unique position. Giorgione was dead, Sebastiano was in Rome, Giovanni Bellini was very old, and Cima da Conegliano and Carpaccio had failed to keep pace with the modern manner. Titian had a clear field and good connections in high places. He could paint more or less at his own pace free from the pressures to meet deadlines and to paint banners and theatrical sets at the whim of a prince, and free from the personality clashes that complicated the lives of artists at the papal court. Even Raphael, the very paradigm of a courtly artist, had been known to complain that he had sacrificed his freedom by attending the court of Julius II.4 Titian in any case never liked to be too far away from Cadore, or from Francesco.
Despite the hard times, there were still private patrons in Venice who could afford to buy or commission paintings. And the Venetian government needed painters to complete the cycle of canvases for the Great Council Hall5 depicting that fundamental self-glorifying Venetian legend according to which a Venetian doge in 1177 had made peace between the two top rulers of the world, Pope Alexander III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and was rewarded by the pope with a series of gifts symbolizing Venice’s role as peacekeeper and that of the doge as the equal in power and status of both pope and emperor. The story was of course especially appropriate at a time when Venice was at war against a modern pope and emperor.
On 31 May 1513 when, following the treaty of alliance with France negotiated at Blois two months earlier, the government was in a more optimistic frame of mind than it had been since the beginning of the war, a petition was read out to the Council of Ten on Titian’s behalf. Although he may have had help in phrasing it, perhaps from Navagero or another of his literary friends in high places, and the record of the petition is not in his hand, it is precious as the first document that reveals Titian’s confidence in his own powers and his skill in manipulating powerful patrons.
Since childhood, Most Serene Prince and Most Excellent Lords, I TICIAN, your servant from Cadore, have devoted myself to learning the art of painting, not so much from the desire for profit as to acquire some little bit of fame, and to be counted among those who at the present time practise this art as a profession. And even though I have been insistently requested, previously and even now, both by His Holiness the Pope and by other lords to go and serve them: nevertheless, as Your Sublimity’s most faithful subject, and desiring to leave some memorial in this illustrious city, I have resolved, if it seems feasible, to paint in the Great Council Hall and to put into that task all my intellect and spirit for as long as I live, beginning, if it please Your Sublimity, with the canvas of the battle for the side facing the Piazza which is the most difficult and which no man until now has had the courage to attempt.
Titian then turned to the terms he hoped to be granted:
I, Most Excellent Lords, will be content to receive in compensation for the work I will do whatever payment is judged proper and much less. But because, as I have said above, I value nothing more than my own honour, and wish only to have enough on which to live, may it please Your Sublimity to award me for my lifetime the first sanseria [brokerage] in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi that becomes vacant, irrespective of other requests, and on the same terms, conditions, obligations and exemptions as Mr Giovanni Bellini, that is: two young men whom I wish to keep with me as assistants to be paid by the Salt Office, together with the colours and other necessities, as in the past months were awarded by the above mentioned Illustrious Council to Mr Giovanni. In return for which I promise your Most Excellent Lords to make this work, and with such speed and excellence that you will be very happy with it. To whom I beg to be humbly recommended.
It was a bold proposal. Not only would Titian be the youngest artist ever to paint in the ducal palace, he was requesting the same terms as the venerable Giovanni Bellini, including the sanseria, an honorary brokerage in the Fondaco worth an annual tax-free income of something in excess of 100 ducats. It was customary, but not a contractual obligation, that an artist receiving the brokerage would also contribute to the cycle of paired portraits of doges that since the ninth century had been placed in a frieze that ran above the main cycle of history paintings.6 The holders of sanserie, of whom there were only thirty at any one time, were in effect tax farmers. They paid an agent to collect money from the German merchants on behalf of the government and in return were allowed to keep a certain proportion of the funds. Although both Bellini brothers had enjoyed these lucrative brokerages, Alvise Vivarini, who had joined them as an assistant in 1488, had asked to be paid in cash for each completed picture, while Carpaccio, Giovanni Bellini’s assistant and some twenty-five years older than Titian, had only a spettativa, an indication that he would receive the next available brokerage. Titian’s request is all the more striking considering that the Bellini brothers and Carpaccio were members of the cittadini caste while he was an outsider from a deeply provincial background. Nevertheless, he, Titian of Cadore and proud of his origins, intended to demonstrate his patriotism by serving Venice rather than the pope and other foreign lords who w
ere insistently requesting him to paint for them. The scene he proposed to paint was the Battle of Spoleto, an episode in the Alexandrine legend in which Spoleto was destroyed by Barbarossa for its loyalty to the pope, who had previously taken refuge in Venice. Although Titian didn’t say as much, the subject of a battle would give him the opportunity to compete with Michelangelo and Leonardo, both of whom had begun, but never finished, battle scenes for the Great Council Hall of Florence. The painting required courage because it would be hung high up on the south wall between windows facing the lagoon and thus would have to be seen against dazzling light flooding into the Hall.