by Sheila Hale
The Divine Aretino, who looks inordinately pleased with himself, does not hold a book or any other attribute that indicates his profession as a writer. The gold chain of honour around his neck, one of a large collection that he had amassed over the years, testifies to his celebrity and success in extracting valuable gifts from wealthy patrons. He had just turned fifty-three, but, as he boasted to Cosimo de’ Medici a year later, remained remarkably youthful for that great age, apart from the strands of grey in his beard, which he had noticed a few years earlier.9 (He started dyeing it at some time after Titian indicated them in his portrait, but had abandoned the practice by 1548.) His gaze is directed to his left at what was to be a pendant portrait of Cosimo’s father, the mercenary commander Giovanni de’ Medici whom he had also commissioned Titian to portray from a death mask. Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, who died in Mantua of a battle wound in the winter of 1526, had been Aretino’s closest friend before he met Titian. Although the unlikely bond between the dashing, aristocratic soldier and the fearless, self-made writer had been wholly genuine, Aretino now saw it as an opportunity to remind Cosimo of his own quasi-aristocratic status by association while at the same time making an audacious attempt to introduce an example of the Venetian painterly style to Florence, where Cosimo’s court painter was Agnolo Bronzino, Mannerist painter of inhumanly elegant, minutely detailed and polished portraits.
In Titian’s portrait of his friend, Aretino’s bulky body, the maimed right hand concealed behind his back, strains against the edges of the canvas as though too big and restless to be contained. From the highlights rapidly scribbled across the red satin coat and brown doublet, from the naked brushmarks stabbed on the right lapel, and the left hand stuffed into a thick glove as though he couldn’t be bothered with the difficult task of painting a realistic hand, one might guess that Titian executed the whole of Aretino’s costume at high speed, or that he left it unfinished. And knowing, as we do, that he reused a canvas on which he had previously painted a discarded portrait of a different, younger man, it would be reasonable to conclude that Titian tossed off the composition in an inspired afternoon. But did he? Why would he, who normally worked so slowly, take such little care with a likeness of his dearest friend that was intended to capture the attention of one of the most powerful lords in Italy? In fact the brushmarks that appear so spontaneous were applied over carefully prepared ground and were intended to produce an optical illusion. Look closely and they make an exciting but apparently random pattern. Stand back and you see a realistic impression of light playing on red satin.10
It is hard to believe that Aretino, who was so interested in the techniques of painting and enjoyed watching Titian at work, did not put his two cents’ worth into the painting of his portrait. Nevertheless, when he dispatched it to Cosimo in October 1545 he wrote two letters, one to Titian and one to Cosimo, which contain the only negative comments he is known to have made in writing about the artist whom he routinely praised as a miracle of nature, the very spirit, indeed, of nature’s inmost soul. To Titian he wrote that the portrait of himself was ‘more of a sketch than a finished work of art’ and that he was angry because he had neglected to portray Giovanni dalle Bande Nere from the death mask he loaned him for that purpose. To Cosimo he maintained that Titian was interested only in work that brought large rewards and apologized for his failure to portray the duke’s immortal father, who had been as much his boon companion as his servant and whom he had obeyed in the saddle and the stalls. But he would shortly send a portrait by another artist ‘of that unruffled and energetic man that will perhaps be as true to life as anything that might have come from the hand of the aforesaid painter’. As for Titian’s portrait of himself:
Truly it breathes, its pulses beat, and it is animated with the same spirit with which I am in actual life, and if only I had counted out more crowns to him the clothes I wore would likewise have been as shining and soft, yet firm to the touch as are actual satin, velvet and brocade.
Aretino was looking at his portrait through the eyes of the Florentine duke, who preferred the high finish of Bronzino. Although he clearly knew very well that Titian’s portrait was a masterpiece, he was anticipating the duke’s reaction to a degree of painterly freedom that might strike him as strange or even shocking.
He felt on safer ground about the reception in Florence of the portrait of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in profile (Florence, Uffizi), which he commissioned from Gian Paolo Pace when Titian was too busy with other commitments to take it on. When Pace’s portrait was finished by November Aretino wrote to the artist that he had ‘transfixed living colour’ into Giovanni’s death mask, ‘an effigy dully transfixed in the amber of death’, and that it gave him immense satisfaction ‘to restore the immortal father to his fortunate son’. Unfortunately, however, a ducal aide who was a champion of Bronzino concealed Titian’s portrait of Aretino from Cosimo; and when the duke finally acknowledged it in April of 1546 his reply was civil enough but made it clear that he knew how to beat Aretino at his own game. He used the very bond between them that Aretino had tried to secure with the portraits – and with the dedication to Cosimo of the third volume of his letters – as an excuse for a very small payment for them: ‘Between us there is no need to behave as one does with foreigners or those with whom one has little other business.’ Aretino had to make do with the satisfaction of knowing that his portrait by Titian was hung in the Medici private gallery side by side with Pace’s of his other dearest friend. And they remained together for two centuries until the Pace was sent across the Arno to the Uffizi Gallery.
In September 1544, when Giovanni della Casa wrote to Alessandro Farnese on Titian’s behalf, Charles V and Francis I signed a peace treaty at Crépy-en-Laonnais according to which Francis promised to help fight the Turks and to support reform of the Church and a meeting of its General Council. Alessandro, who had been acting as itinerant papal legate to the courts of the emperor and the French king charged with making the peace between them upon which his grandfather’s ambitions for a General Council depended, had reason to believe he had succeeded. Three months later Titian felt confident enough of gaining Alessandro’s ear to urge his interest in his lawsuit against the canons of Santo Spirito over the ruined Pentecost. But still he heard nothing further from the cardinal about Pomponio’s benefice on San Pietro in Colle or the visit della Casa had promised he would make to Rome.
The treaty held good for only one year. At its core was Francis’s claim to Milan for his second son the Duke of Orleans on condition that Orleans would marry either Charles’s daughter Mary or his brother Ferdinand’s daughter Anne. The death of the Duke of Orleans in September 1545 broke Francis’s heart, but came as a relief to Charles, who retained control of Milan. ‘This death came just in time,’ he wrote in his memoirs five years later. ‘And, being a natural one, it could be said that God had sent it to accomplish his secret designs.’ Fortunately for the prospects of the General Council that would meet at Trent in three months’ time, neither Charles nor Francis was keen to restart an expensive war that was distracting them both from other more urgent objectives. Most of the Farnese were in Rome with enough leisure to sit for the portraits Titian had promised to paint of them all, including their cats.
But it was not the Farnese who invited Titian to Rome. It was the Venetian patriarch Girolamo Querini who advised the painter that the time was ripe to make the journey to the Holy City in pursuit of Pomponio’s papal benefice. Querini persuaded Guidobaldo della Rovere – who had hoped to attract Titian to his own court at Pesaro for an extended visit – to come in person to Venice to fetch Titian and Orazio. The ducal suite took father and son by way of Ferrara to Pesaro, where, as Aretino wrote thanking Guidobaldo on Titian’s behalf, the painter was plied with ‘caresses, honours, presents and the hospitality of a palace which he was bidden to treat as his own’. Reluctant though Guidobaldo was to let the artist go, he provided him with an escort that carried him safely and as comfortably as possible through th
e Papal States.
On 10 October Pietro Bembo wrote from Rome to Girolamo Querini, ‘Your Titian, or rather our Titian, is here.’ He went on:
And he tells me that he is under great obligation to you for having been the main cause of his coming hither, and encouraging him by the kindest words to make the trip, of which he is more contented than he can say. He has already seen so many fine antiques that he is filled with wonder, and glad that he came.
Immediately after his arrival Titian wrote enthusiastically and often to Aretino: he was astounded by his first sight of Rome and wished he had come twenty years earlier: the pope had greeted him in the friendliest of ways; Bembo had wept with joy when he conveyed Aretino’s greetings. Aretino replied11 that he could hardly wait for Titian’s return so that he could hear his friend’s thoughts about the art he had seen in Rome:
about the skill of the ancients in carving marble, and whether in his art Buonarrotti was greater or less than they, and whether Raphael does not come up to him or surpasses him in painting … Do keep in mind the accomplishments of every painter, and especially those of our friend, Fra Sebastiano … and compare in your own mind the status of our gossip Messer Jacopo [Sansovino], with those carved by men who, since they compete with him without justification, are rightly criticized. Come back here, too, as well informed about the court and all the doing of the courtiers as you are of the masterworks of paintbrush and chisel, but pay special attention to the works of Perin del Vaga for he has remarkable genius.
But although Titian could hardly have failed to be interested in the artistic splendours he was seeing for the first time, Aretino was aware that the real grail of his pilgrimage to the Holy City was the benefice for Pomponio. And about this Aretino issued, as he had done in the past, a warning:
It is a characteristic of the house of Farnese to abound in a great plenty of kindly deeds, for it is well known that they are the mother of those hopes provided by nature for the enjoyment of mankind – mankind which is ordinarily fed upon promises which are only certain in their great uncertainty.
FOUR
Rome
Do not trust the Pope, who neither honours his word nor has the general interests of Christianity at heart.
FROM CHARLES V’S INSTRUCTIONS TO HIS SON PHILIP, 1548
With a single glance the great Venetian master revealed in this painting what Italians at that time thought of politics: it was as though he had summarized with a few magisterial brush strokes some of the most famous chapters of Machiavelli’s Prince without ever having read them.
ROBERTO ZAPPERI, TIZIANO, PAOLO III E I SUOI NIPOTI, 1990
Titian and Orazio were given lodgings and a studio in the Vatican’s Villa Belvedere where they could communicate easily with the Farnese family, who, as Titian could hardly fail to notice, were getting on very badly.1 Alessandro, his principal contact in Rome, was colossally wealthy, a powerful fixer and consummate patron of art and literature, but also deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life and bitterly jealous of his three younger brothers. Ottavio and Margaret had been blessed with twin sons, named Carlo and Alessandro after their respective grandfathers, born on the very day after the investiture of Ottavio’s father Pier Luigi as Duke of Piacenza and Parma. The pope’s youngest grandson, Orazio, was being groomed at the court of Francis I while Paul negotiated his marriage to Diana, the natural daughter of the dauphin, the future Henry II. Three days after the opening of the Council of Trent on 11 December 1545 he added to the list of Alessandro’s grievances by investing Ranuccio with a cardinalate. Alessandro had tried hard to block his younger brother’s nomination. Paul’s explanation that an additional Farnese cardinal would insure against Alessandro’s premature death was hardly a comfort.
The underdrawings for Titian’s Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (Naples, Capodimonte)2 suggest that the painter might have taken as much trouble to conceal his first gut feelings about his subject as he had with the earlier Portrait of Paul III. Alessandro’s features as originally sketched are coarser, the right arm pushes towards the edge of the canvas with its elbow more pronounced. But in the finished work the twenty-five-year-old cardinal’s dark, apparently candid eyes set in a handsome oval face gaze straight out at the viewer. The red, sensuous lower lip hovers between a pout and a smile. His pose is more elegant, the watered silk of his red cape superbly realized. The glove held lightly in his left hand indicates that he is a gentleman about town as well as a dignitary of the Church – a daring challenge to the Counter-Reformation ideal that prelates should behave like poor honest priests.
There can be little doubt that the lascivious Alessandro was delighted by the copy of a reclining nude, on to which Titian had promised della Casa that he would attach the head of the cardinal’s courtesan mistress Angela, as well as by the enlarged portrait of Angela in the demure guise of a young Venetian patrician (Naples, Capodimonte).3 At a time when Petrarchan poets separated the kind of women with whom a man has carnal relations from the nobler creature who can only be desired from afar, Titian had already exploited the arousing paradox that the same woman can in fact be (as we would put it) a lady in the drawing room and a whore in bed when he had put clothes on the original Venus of Urbino for the portrait acquired by Francesco Maria della Rovere that we know as La Bella. But this time there was a problem. Behaviour that had been more or less acceptable when Paul, as a young cardinal, had himself kept a mistress and sired children by her was now, as the Nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Church began its first sitting at Trent, an embarrassment. Gossip about the relentless womanizing of the gran cardinale was flying up and down the corridors of the Vatican. It had reached the ears of some of the older cardinals that the pope intended to make Alessandro his successor to the papal throne. That, some said, would at least stop him from skirt chasing.
Titian’s naked and clothed Angela would not of course have been on public display. They were to hang in Alessandro’s private chambers where they would be covered by curtains; but they could not be hidden altogether from servants and prying courtiers, and it would not be long before the pope heard about them. It was necessary therefore to take evasive action. Alessandro asked Titian, who had succeeded all too well in producing a recognizable likeness of the notorious Angela from the miniature sent to him in Venice, to reorganize her features in both paintings to those of an anonymous young woman.4 But the more ingenious solution was to clothe the naked girl in the decency of a classical myth, to which Paul, who was at that time having his own apartments in Castel Sant’Angelo decorated with erotic frescos of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, could hardly object.
Ovid’s story of Danaë was an ideal disguise. Danaë was the daughter of the king of Argos, who, to safeguard himself from a prophecy that he would be killed by his daughter’s son, locked her in a bronze tower where no man could reach her. But Jupiter penetrated the tower and impregnated her with a shower of golden rain. (In the end their son, Perseus, did in fact accidentally kill his grandfather.) It may have been Alessandro who ordered the transformation of the naked courtesan into Danaë (Naples, Capodimonte), or it may have been a collaborative idea. Either way, it was Titian who made it happen with his magical brushes and genius for turning a good story into a great painting.
On his numerous visits to Mantua, he had often had occasion to admire Correggio’s Danaë (Rome, Galleria Borghese) commissioned in the early 1530s by his old patron Federico Gonzaga. But if the memory of Correggio’s glorious version of the story was one of his starting points, the challenge of transforming the body of his Venus of Urbino, a Venetian courtesan inviting sex in a contemporary domestic setting, into a mythological woman engaging in the act of love with a Greek god inspired a masterpiece of modelling, chiaroscuro and high drama. The curtain that divided the composition of the Venus of Urbino in half is swept aside to reveal a dark grey plinth and the shaft of a pillar which rises through a shower not of golden rain but of coins, intended, perhaps, to suggest the seductive power of money. He replaced th
e little dog and two maidservants in his copy of the Venus of Urbino with a plump cupid – a boy rather than a baby and reminiscent of antique statues that Titian could have seen in the Grimani collection in Venice and in the Vatican collection in Rome – who gives a backward look as he departs from the scene on Jupiter’s orders while the god’s golden sperm descends between Danaë’s open legs. Although her face is partly cast in shadow, Danaë is evidently enjoying herself as she gazes rapturously at the invasive shower of gold. Her body, propped up a little higher than her predecessor’s on white sheets, bolster and pillows, is more robustly Michelangelesque, apparently inspired by a sketch of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night in the Medici tombs in Florence5 and by the same artist’s Leda.6
The Danaë was probably finished by the second half of November 1545 when Vasari, who had been summoned to Rome by the Farnese to fresco a room in the Cancelleria,7 acted as Titian’s guide. Vasari, who by his own account brought Michelangelo to Titian’s studio, described the reaction of the greatest central Italian artist in one of the most frequently cited passages of his ‘Life of Titian’.
Then one day Michelangelo and Vasari went along to visit Titian in the Belvedere, where they saw a picture he had finished of a nude woman, representing Danaë, who had in her lap Jove transformed into a rain of gold; and naturally, as one would do with the artist present, they praised it warmly. After they had left they started to discuss Titian’s method and Buonarroti commended it highly, saying that his colouring and his style pleased him very much but that it was a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well from the beginning and that those painters did not pursue their studies with more method. For the truth was, he went on, that if Titian had been assisted by art and design as much as he was by nature, and especially in reproducing living subjects, then no one could achieve more or work better, for he had a fine spirit and a lively and entrancing style. To be sure, what Michelangelo said was nothing but the truth …8