by Sheila Hale
Alfonso’s Bacchus and Ariadne was delivered to Ferrara over Christmas by Altobello Averoldi, who had been appointed governor of Bologna and had offered to drop it off on his way to take up his post. Titian, then, may not have been present when his painting, still unfinished, was unpacked from its crate. Although Alfonso had paid for the full range of the most expensive pigments, the overall effect would not be achieved until Titian applied the final scumbles and glazes (most of which have been removed in subsequent restorations).16 Nevertheless those of us who have stood entranced in front of the Bacchus and Ariadne at the London National Gallery may imagine the duke’s reaction to his first sight of the picture that had haunted his dreams for more than two years. This time, possibly at Alfonso’s suggestion – or perhaps at Ariosto’s – Titian had mixed his mythological sources. The subject, like that of the Worship of Venus, was taken from Philostratus. In the Imagines, however, Ariadne was asleep when Bacchus arrived on the island of Naxos, and his unruly followers were ordered to tiptoe in silence so as not to awake her. Titian would certainly have preferred the more dramatic versions as told by Catullus and Ovid, which permitted him to depict the clashing cymbals and general mayhem of the trail of bacchants accompanying their leader on his way back from India. Bacchus, the embodiment of youth, beauty and enjoyment, sees the despairing Ariadne, who has been abandoned by Theseus. He leaps from the side of his chariot. Their eyes meet. Ariadne is at once frightened and seduced. He promises that she will be immortalized as a constellation of stars, which appear in the sky above her. In the exact centre of the foreground the drunken baby satyr, dragging the bleeding head of a dismembered bullock like a toy, gives us a knowing stare. (Titian softened the glaze on one of his eyes with the tip of a finger.) The tigers, which Ovid said might frighten the girl, are wittily transformed into cuddly adolescent cheetahs, portraits of two of the hunting animals in Alfonso’s menagerie. The bearded bacchant on the right is one of Titian’s most obvious quotations of the Laocoön,17 this time snakes and all, and is taken from the same side view he had used for Averoldi’s St Sebastian. Ariadne’s face could be a portrait of Laura Dianti, but the broad-shouldered model for her body, the pose of which was much revised, looks more like a man’s.
Titian’s two assistants delivered another consignment of his effects by 30 January 1523 when the ducal accounts record payments for a barge that had delivered a painting on panel18 sent from Venice by ‘Maestro Titiano to His Most Illustrious Highness’, and for the porters who had carried the panel and Titian’s trunk from the port of Francolino to the castle. His assistants were lodged at the castle inn, where they consumed twenty-four meals, for which the host was reimbursed from the Este bank on 7 February. Titian meanwhile had made a second brief visit to the court of Alfonso’s nephew, Federico Gonzaga,19 the twenty-three-year-old 5th Marquis of Mantua. He went with Alfonso’s permission – it was normal practice for the two courts, which were so closely related by blood and geography, to exchange artists – but on the understanding that the completion of Bacchus and Ariadne and other works for the duke must take priority and he could therefore not stay for long in Mantua. He set off from Venice for Mantua on 26 January, carrying with him a letter of recommendation from Federico’s ambassador in Venice, Giambattista Malatesta:
Most Illustrious and Excellent Signor and my most cherished patron. The present bearer is maestro Ticiano, most excellent in his art, and also a modest and gentlemanly person in every respect, who has postponed many of his works of the moment to come to kiss the hand of Your Excellency, as you have deigned to request me. Whereby I cannot do otherwise than recommend him.
The letter was a formality. Federico had been asking Malatesta to invite Titian to his court since Christmas of the previous year, when he had hoped that ‘Maestro Tutiano pittor’ might spend the holidays with him. Titian had refused but promised the ambassador that he would certainly be in Mantua to kiss the hand of the marquis by the end of the first week in January. When he finally reached Mantua, late as usual, the marquis greeted him warmly, and before he reluctantly allowed him to depart for Ferrara ordered some work, which he seems to have wanted or needed to be done very soon. There is a note of urgency in the letter he wrote to his uncle on 3 February for delivery by Titian along with some presents; and its tone is very different from Alfonso’s temper tantrums:
Most Illustrious and excellent Lord Uncle – Having asked Titian, the bearer of these presents, to execute certain works for me, he declares that he cannot serve me at present because he has promised to do some things for Your Excellency which will take a long time. For this reason I send him to attend you. But I beg you to send him back at once to expedite the work that I want from him, which will take only a few days, and as soon as he has done that he will return to the service of Your Excellency, who will have done me a most singular favour, and to whom I stand greatly recommended.
Federico Gonzaga had come of age less than two years before Titian’s visit. Twenty-four years younger than his uncle Alfonso, he was a more sensitive, more self-indulgent and altogether more polished character. While he was still under the regency of his mother Isabella d’Este, Baldassare Castiglione, who would later be Federico’s ambassador in Rome, praised him in an early version of The Courtier as one of the most gifted of the sons of illustrious lords, ‘who may not have the power of their ancestors but make up for it in talent … In addition to his excellent manners and the discretion he shows at so tender an age he is said by those in charge of him to be wonderful in wit, desire for honour, courtesy and love of justice.’ He was a godson to Cesare Borgia, and as a boy of only ten had been sent, as a pledge for his father’s loyalty, to the magnificent court of Julius II, where he was pampered and indulged by the warrior pope and his cardinals. He developed a taste for luxury, especially the work of goldsmiths and jewellers, and his interest in painting was stimulated by the masterpieces by Michelangelo who was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and by Raphael, who made a sketch of him in armour and included a portrait of him in the School of Athens. At seventeen his father had contracted for him a dynastic marriage to Maria Paleologo, the eight-year-old daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat, to be consummated when the bride reached fifteen in 1524. (By that time, however, Federico, who was a notorious womanizer, had conceived a passion for Isabella Boschetti, the wife of one of his courtiers.) He and his mother kept a palace in Venice, where they often went for pleasure and where Federico was a member of one of the companies of the hose.
Appointed captain of the Church by Leo X at the age of twenty, Federico had fought enthusiastically with the papal and imperial troops against the French in northern Italy. By the time Titian accepted his invitation to Mantua he had lost his taste for military campaigning and turned his attention to women, to fine food, to buying and breeding rare breeds of horses, dogs and falcons, and to glorifying his reign and dynasty with new buildings and works of art that departed from his mother’s more academic tastes. He purchased antiques from Rome, and tried without success to obtain paintings by Sebastiano, Michelangelo and Raphael. (When he tried to purchase Raphael’s group portrait of Leo X he was sent a close copy by Andrea del Sarto.) But he did, with Castiglione’s help, persuade the architect and painter Giulio Romano to come as his court artist to Mantua, where Giulio undertook commissions to design everything from jewellery, tapestries, majolica, silverware, furnishings and a marble tomb for one of the marquis’s dogs to the extraordinary Mannerist Palazzo Tè, the interior of which he and his assistants painted with the spectacular and explicitly erotic illusionist frescos that are still in situ and where Federico reserved an apartment as a love nest for his assignations with Isabella Boschetti.
Why then was Federico, in the early winter of 1523, so eager to have Titian back in Mantua just for a few days? What was the work he so urgently wanted him to undertake or perhaps to finish? In the absence of any further evidence we can only make an educated guess. Federico’s younger brother Ferrante was about to depart f
or the Habsburg court in Spain, which was a kind of finishing school for the European high aristocracy. As a result of the contacts he made there he later became a prominent member of the international circle of talented nobility who worked in the service of the emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain. A staunchly loyal imperialist, Ferrante went on to play a significant, and sometimes brutal, part in the wars and international politics of the coming decades.20 But in 1523 he was only sixteen and, since journeys across Europe were long and dangerous, Federico might well have wanted a commemoration of his brother’s appearance. The surviving portrait by Titian that most closely fits his style and that of his sitter’s dress around 1523 is the Man with a Glove,21 one of the most alluring representations of the polished personality, dress and demeanour of a socially assured young aristocrat of the period. It was painted by an artist who refused to serve any court on a permanent basis, but who was more than enough of a gentleman to put his high-born sitters at ease, and who knew better than any other artist of the time how to convey the dignity of elevated social status. Federico Gonzaga was perhaps not yet mature enough to appreciate Titian’s qualities as a portraitist – we do not in any case have a record of his reaction to this portrait. He was, however, the first foreign aristocrat to become his friend. Federico, who liked to be amused, must have enjoyed Titian’s intelligence, poise and dry sense of humour. Before the decade was out he would come to understand and appreciate Titian’s temperament and genius in a way that his uncle Alfonso had not, and would open the door that eventually brought the painter to the attention of the emperor himself and would make him the portraitist of choice in the greatest courts of Renaissance Europe.
THREE
A New Doge, a River of Wine and Marriage
The stream of wine which is on the island of Andros, and the Andrians who have become drunken from the river, are the subject of this painting … if you have water in mind the quantity is not great, but if wine, it is a great river – yes, divine! … These things, methinks, the men, crowned with ivy and bryony, are singing to their wives and children, some dancing on either bank, some reclining … This is what you should imagine you hear and what some of them really are singing, though their voices are thick with wine.
PHILOSTRATUS, IMAGINES I, XXV1
Titian spent the rest of February 1523 and the first few days of March in Ferrara finishing Bacchus and Ariadne, and probably discussing his next major order from Alfonso, this one set on the mythological island of Andros where Bacchus creates a river of wine to celebrate his arrival by boat, and the inhabitants get madly drunk. There is, however, no mention of the Andrians (Madrid, Prado) in the surviving correspondence between Alfonso d’Este and his ambassador. There are in fact no surviving letters between them at all about Titian until the following March.2 It may be that the duke had accepted that it was useless to nag the maestro and trusted him well enough by this time to give him a freer hand. Alfonso was in any case more preoccupied than ever by the problem of how best to use the struggle between Francis I and Charles V to protect his state, and particularly his claim against the papacy to the much-disputed towns of Reggio and Modena.
In the previous November Charles had sent the able Genoese aristocrat Girolamo Adorno to Ferrara with a mission to lay the foundations of an alliance with the duke. Although Adorno suffered from acute attacks of crippling gout he was a shrewd appointment. As an Italian he was welcomed in a way that a Spanish envoy might not have been; and he was liked and admired in aristocratic and intellectual circles, not least by his friend the historian Paolo Giovio, who accompanied him to Ferrara and later described him as ‘a singular man on account of the quality of his intellect and his experience in the affairs of war’3. Having struck a deal with Alfonso, who, without formally breaking his alliance with France, agreed to allow free passage of imperial troops through his territories in return for possession of Reggio and Modena, Adorno carried on with an entourage of forty men to Venice where, limping after one of his attacks of gout, he was formally presented as the emperor’s ‘orator’ to the very old and doddering Doge Antonio Grimani. In March he sat to Titian for his portrait – possibly the Portrait of a Man with his Hand in his Belt (Paris, Louvre), which is Titian’s first known attempt at a three-quarter-length pose. But at the end of the month, while the Venetian government was considering his proposals for a formal imperial alliance, he fell gravely ill and died. He was given a magnificent state funeral in the great Gothic church of Santo Stefano, but after his death negotiations about the terms of the alliance lost their momentum.
The debate about the pros and cons of switching to the imperial side continued after the death of Doge Grimani and the election on 20 May 1523 of the sixty-eight-year-old procurator, Andrea Gritti. Gritti assumed his doge’s hat at a critical time for the whole of Christian Europe. The Lutheran Reformation in Germany was threatening the monopoly of the Catholic Church. The Turks, after two decades of peaceful coexistence with Europe, had marched into Hungary. The most immediately pressing problem for Venice was the war in Lombardy between the Habsburg emperor and the French king, who were using Italy as a convenient battleground in their wider struggle for possession of Burgundy and control of the western Mediterranean. The first months of Gritti’s reign were dominated by heated, often highly emotional debates in government about the advantages and the morality of breaking with France, the Republic’s ally since the closing years of the Cambrai war. Gritti, an outspoken Francophile, probably did his cause more harm than good by defying the traditional requirement that the doge should remain neutral. But at the end of July, when the emperor’s Spanish troops had the upper hand in northern Italy, the new doge bowed to the majority decision to form a ‘perpetual’ alliance with Charles V.
The election of Andrea Gritti, who served the Republic as its most formidable doge until his death in 1538, was a turning point in the political and urban history of Venice and of Titian’s career there. Gritti had been angling for the office at least since 1514 when he made sure that Sanudo recorded the comment of a visiting Turkish dignitary who, on a guided tour of the treasury of San Marco, had exclaimed that the doge’s cap was made to order for the head of Andrea Gritti. He had, however, lost to Antonio Grimani in 1521, and managed to win the election in 1523 only by a very narrow majority, after the withdrawal of the favourite, Antonio Tron. When the outcome of the balloting was announced in the Piazza, the crowds responded with cries of ‘Tron, Tron, Tron.’ An anonymous verse was circulated advising the government to save itself by sentencing the tyrant doge to death. He was seen by the popolani and in government as high-handed, impatient with the traditional constraints on ducal power, a warmonger, a sycophantic Francophile, a sensualist, too arrogant even to dress properly. Sanudo was shocked by the ducal bareta he wore for his first mass as doge, which was far too small. The diarist disapproved, furthermore, of the crimson satin mantle slashed open at the sides to make armholes, like ‘a mantle with windows’, that he wore in the first two winters of his reign. Later his dress sense improved and his ducal robes set new fashions for the colours old rose and violet. The puritans in government, however, continued to disapprove of his excessive fondness for the pleasures of the table and of his vigorous and complicated love life – he had fathered four bastards in Turkey and produced at least two more, one by a nun – which he carried on until he was well into his seventies, by which time he had got very fat.
But Andrea Gritti’s positive qualities were more significant than his faults. He was a man of the world, highly intelligent, intellectually cultivated, tough minded, completely lacking in self-doubt, physically strong, heroically energetic. He was also a patriot who modelled his behaviour on that of the self-sacrificing heroes of ancient Rome. And he was genuinely concerned about the socially disruptive but growing gap between rich and poor patricians: Sanudo reported him declaring shortly after his election that ‘in this state there are rich, middling and poor, and it is very fitting that the rich aid the middling and the m
iddling the poor’. Titian’s freely painted, psychologically penetrating posthumous Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti4 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), from the late 1540s or early 1550s, gives an idea of the mettle of the most enlightened, forceful and longest-serving of sixteenth-century doges, the one who would drag the provincial architecture of urban Venice into a Romanized High Renaissance and steer its government through good times and bad for the next fifteen years.
As a boy Andrea Gritti had been privately tutored in the house of a maternal grandfather, a diplomat who sent him to the University of Padua and took him on missions to England, France and Spain. Twice widowed by the age of twenty-five he spent the next twenty years in Ottoman Turkey, where he made a fortune as a grain merchant in Constantinople, won the friendship of the vizier and the respect of the sultan, and fathered his four bastard sons by a young Greek woman. As the tension between Venice and the Ottoman Empire worsened in the late 1490s he acted as a secret agent for the Venetian government, sending coded messages concealed in consignments of carpets about the movements and sizes of the Turkish fleets and troops. He was arrested, but after thirty-two months in prison – during which he was greatly missed by his many Venetian and Turkish friends, and particularly, so they said, by the numerous women who had fallen in love with him – he was released in order to begin prolonged negotiations for a peace treaty, which, thanks to his diplomatic skills, his fluent Greek and Turkish and his understanding of the Turkish mentality, was more favourable to Venice than it might have been.