by Sheila Hale
Vasari, whose ‘Life of Titian’ was not published until two decades after that meeting, was using Michelangelo to record his own theory that art in its most mature phase, of which Michelangelo was in his view the highest representative, supersedes nature; and that Venetian spontaneity and use of colour and shaded outlines to imitate reality was, for all its charm, less noble than the Florentine method based on the discipline of drawing. But if, as seems unlikely, Vasari’s famous anecdote about the encounter of the two artists was based on a real conversation, it may be that Michelangelo was annoyed, or even repelled, to see Titian’s womanly version of two of his own mannish figures in the act of heterosexual sex.
Although Michelangelo was too lofty a figure to be threatened by the presence in Rome of the Venetian master, other lesser artists, including perhaps Vasari himself, feared that they could lose commissions to the foreign painter who was for the time being a favourite of the Farnese. In his biography of Perino del Vaga (the Tuscan artist Aretino had asked Titian to study while in Rome), Vasari wrote that Perino, who was very worried about competition from Titian, shared the general hostility in Rome to Venetian masters. The convivial Sebastiano del Piombo, as he had been known for over a decade, had no reason to resent Titian’s presence. He and Titian were friends from the old days in Venice, and Titian had demonstrated his continuing loyalty by turning down his office of the piombatore. Sebastiano had, however, been marginalized in Rome since the Sack had cast its long shadow over the last years of his patron Clement VII. He had a reputation for laziness and vanity (he had once described himself in a letter to Aretino as the most beautiful friar in Rome), and what with one thing and another had never received one of the major decorative commissions that were the hallmarks of success in the Holy City. Dolce, in his L’Aretino, was referring to the supporting role in which Michelangelo cast Sebastiano during his artistic battle with Raphael when he had his fictional Aretino dismiss him as ‘the lance of Michelangelo’,9 and went on to tell the story of a visit Titian and Sebastiano had paid to the Vatican Stanze to admire Raphael’s frescos.
Lutheran soldiers occupying the Vatican during the Sack had damaged parts of Raphael’s work, and after the troops had left Pope Clement had commissioned Sebastiano to restore some of the heads.
Now when Titian came to be in Rome, and was passing through these rooms one day in Sebastiano’s company, he concentrated his thoughts and his eyes on a study of the Raphael frescoes, which he had never seen before; and when he reached the part where Sebastiano had restored the heads, he asked the latter who the presumptuous and ignorant fellow was who had put daubs on these faces – in ignorance, of course, that Sebastiano had re-worked them, and seeing only the unbecoming contrast between the other heads and these.10
If Dolce’s anecdote is true Titian may have regretted an unintentional insult that would have been especially distressing at a time when Sebastiano’s reputation was at a low ebb.
But Titian was more concerned at the time about another friend. News had reached him from Venice about a disaster that had struck Jacopo Sansovino just as his library of St Mark, on which no expense had been spared, was nearing completion. On the night of 18–19 December the vault of the first bay of the great hall of the library collapsed silently and without warning. Immediately afterwards Sansovino was arrested and thrown into jail. It took four days for letters from Venice to reach Rome, but as soon as Titian heard the news he rallied to Sansovino’s defence, as did Bembo, Hurtado de Mendoza and Aretino. It was a stroke of good luck that Francesco Donà, a friend of the Triumvirate – Titian had begun a portrait of him shortly before leaving for Rome when he was still a senator – had been elected doge only weeks before the calamitous event. Thanks to powerful supporters, including some members of the Council of Ten, the architect was released. Sansovino, in a letter to Bembo, put the blame on the severe winter weather, on the vibrations from artillery salutes fired that night from a galley on the Grand Canal, and on unskilled workmen who had removed the props from the vault too soon, although he admitted privately that his insistence on introducing vaults instead of the flat timber ceilings that were normally used in Venice because they were more flexible was part of the problem. His reputation suffered in the short term, and his salary was not restored for more than two years. It seemed, as Aretino later wrote to Titian, ‘a strange and cruel trick of fate that the very building which was to have been the temple of our brother’s glory should have become the cemetery of his good name’.
Aretino meanwhile had resumed his pursuit of a cardinal’s hat, a prize that he was as blindly determined to obtain as Titian was to have the benefice of San Pietro for Pomponio. Early in the New Year the Scourge rejoiced when he received a letter from a friend in Rome11 who was a valet in Pier Luigi Farnese’s bedchamber. While his attendants were putting him to bed Pier Luigi had told them about a conversation he had had with his father the pope. ‘Holy father,’ the Duke of Piacenza had said,
you make cardinals of men who are poor and of low station for no other reason than that they have served our family faithfully, a thing that is certainly well done and laudable. But if such persons have seemed to you fit for such high promotion, what would you not gain by bestowing a similar advancement on Pietro Aretino? He may be poor and baseborn, but he is on good terms with every prince in the world. If he should receive this dignity he would render you immortal.
But the pope was evidently unimpressed by his son’s intervention, and when by the spring Aretino realized he had failed once again he circulated an obnoxious sonnet, in which he listed all the old denunciations of Paul, true and false. He called the pope an old coxcomb, vindictive, iniquitous, seditious, an ugly lecher, born of incest, guilty of incestuous relations with his daughter Costanza and thus both grandfather and father to her sons. The latter charges were entirely untrue. Paul was the legitimate son of Pier Luigi Farnese the Elder and Giovanella Caetani. Although he adored Costanza, he had certainly not taken her to bed, and Aretino’s outrageous charge was particularly painful coming as it did less than a year after her death.
Titian must have been aware of his friend’s latest attack on the pope, or at least of the opinions it expressed, while he was working on his Portrait of Paul III with his Grandsons Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese (Naples, Capodimonte). But it would be a mistake to deduce from its apparent atmosphere of evil intrigue that the painting was intended as a criticism of the Farnese family or, as some have guessed, of the pope’s nepotism. It would not have been in Titian’s interests to reveal a negative judgement about the behaviour or characters of patrons upon whom Pomponio’s benefice, the reason he was in Rome, depended. And nepotism, as Titian was well aware, was traditional papal practice, openly celebrated in previous paintings by other artists that were intended to promote dynastic succession.12 Titian’s artistic starting point was the copy by Andrea del Sarto of Raphael’s Portrait of Leo X and his Cousins, which he would have seen in Federico Gonzaga’s collection. But while the Raphael and its all but identical copy are superb paintings it is Titian’s less resolved sketch of members of the Farnese family that draws us into a family drama so intense and complex that one can’t help wondering what Verdi would have made of it.
The large canvas delivered to Titian’s studio in the Belvedere was to hang in a public room in the Palazzo Farnese where ambassadors were received and where it would advertise the prestige of the family and convey a political message directed specifically at Charles V. The message was that Alessandro should succeed his grandfather as pope and Ottavio follow his father Pier Luigi as Duke of Parma and Piacenza, the latter requiring the permission of the emperor. The members of the family who do not appear in the painting are as significant as those who do. It would have been inappropriate to include Pier Luigi in a picture of state because the promotion of a son was one of the few restrictions on the practice of nepotism, and because the emperor was still refusing to recognize Pier Luigi as Duke of Parma and Piacenza. The presence of Orazio, who was s
ecretly destined to marry the granddaughter of Charles’s arch-enemy the King of France, was also out of the question. Alessandro, the most finished figure in the painting, stands on the pope’s right apparently detached from the drama while Ottavio hovers in profile on the left in an ungainly attitude that would end with the ritual abasement on all fours kissing the papal shoe that protrudes from Paul’s robe. So Ottavio, eventual heir to Parma and Piacenza, is – like his father-in-law the emperor, who is also required to kiss the papal foot when they meet – ultimately subject to the authority of the pope. Paul gives Ottavio, whom he knows to be deeply resentful at having been forced to sacrifice for the time being his right to Parma and Piacenza, a quick, irritable glance.
Titian received his first instructions for this painting early in December 1545, three months after Pier Luigi’s investiture as duke of a secularized Parma and Piacenza had enraged Charles V and sown in the disappointed Ottavio the seeds of rebellion against the pope. Titian continued to work on the painting until he returned to Venice at the end of May, and the many laborious pentimenti, which are particularly numerous beneath the seated pope, are evidence of how hard he tried to please his patrons and resolve the considerable spatial problems of portraying in one painting three figures: one three-quarter length, one seated, one standing at an angle while bowing. Alessandro, whose portrait was originally further to the left, close to the edge of the canvas, may have asked Titian to shift it forward and closer to the papal throne, which he grasps to indicate his forthcoming succession (the two heads side by side can be seen in an X-ray). This displacement made it necessary to move and repaint the table on which the pope’s unfinished right hand rests, and on which Titian erased an inkstand and added the hourglass that was presumably meant to remind imperial visitors that it was only a matter of time before Alessandro would be pope and Ottavio Duke of Parma and Piacenza. When it was decided to portray Ottavio in profile, he slightly softened the ugly curve of his nose, but if he had finished the painting he would surely have succeeded in making him look less oleaginous.
As it is, what we see is a work still in progress, and the unease that we may feel when standing before it could reflect circumstances that Titian sensed without being entirely aware of the tragedy that was unfolding as he laboured on the most challenging of his Roman commissions, and his first triple portrait since the Concert of more than three decades earlier. The pope at seventy-seven had aged noticeably. He was reputed to have said that the behaviour of his grandsons would be the death of him, and some of his cardinals were giving him three or four years to live. Titian, now well into his fifties, was old enough to empathize with Paul’s struggle for survival. He must also, as a father determined to dictate the future of his own ungrateful son, have understood the pope’s feelings about heirs who were dissatisfied with all the wealth and power he had lavished on them. But looking again at the painting in the light of Titian’s expectations for Pomponio’s benefice, which was still hanging in the air, one can’t help speculating that his own anxiety might be one of the elements in the dramatic tension that we feel, whether or not we know its background, when we look at this unfinished masterpiece.
Titian painted other pictures during his Roman stay, one of them a lost Ecce Homo mentioned by Vasari that was apparently not to the taste of the pope. Another was a copy of Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Julius II (the Raphael is in the London National Gallery, Titian’s copy in the Florence Galleria Palatina), which was on public display in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. But the only other surviving painting that has been attributed to Titian on circumstantial evidence13 is the damaged portrait of Pietro Bembo (Naples, Capodimonte), who was then seventy-six with less than a year to live. Although Bembo, who had rejoiced at Titian’s arrival, was in Rome throughout his visit, the portrait, even allowing for its poor condition, is so unworthy of Titian’s brush that we can guess that, in order to concentrate fully on the Farnese pictures, he may have left this task to Orazio.14 In one of the inventories of the Farnese collection the portrait is attributed to Titian or an assistant, and since the only assistant Titian brought with him to Rome was Orazio, it could have been Titian’s son who had the honour to paint the last portrait of the greatest Venetian writer of his time.
When the benefice of San Pietro in Colle was not forthcoming by 24 March 1546, the pope assigned to Pomponio the parish church of Sant’Andrea at Favaro Veneto in the diocese of Treviso, which made Pomponio a simple parish priest rather than the abbot of a great monastic foundation.15 The document mentions an annual income of twenty-four ducats, a pittance compared to the benefice of the abbey of San Pietro, although the living from Sant’Andrea di Favaro was later raised considerably. The Farnese assured Titian that this was only an interim reward while they continued to negotiate with Giulio Sertorio about San Pietro. Nevertheless, their interest in the triple portrait diminished as its political significance began to unravel after Alfonso d’Avalos, Charles V’s unpopular and disgraced governor of Milan, died from the complications of a battle wound on 31 March.
Paul, whose request that Ottavio and Margaret should govern Milan had come to nothing during his meeting with Charles at Busseto, now hoped that the emperor would be prepared to allow Milan, the imperial power base in Italy, to be governed by his Farnese son-in-law. Charles, however, was determined to take his revenge on the pope for his dynastic scheming. Even before the death of Alfonso d’Avalos he had installed his son Prince Philip as Duke of Milan and promised the post of governor to Ferrante Gonzaga, who shared the emperor’s loathing of the Farnese, and who was likely sooner or later to remove Pier Luigi from Piacenza and Parma. The old fox Paul III had fallen into a trap set by the Habsburg eagle. On 10 September 1547 Pier Luigi was assassinated by a gang of disaffected noblemen of Piacenza, including Agostino Landi, possibly the subject of Titian’s portrait known as The Young Englishman. The murder was incited by an agent of Ferrante Gonzaga, who immediately seized Piacenza before Ottavio could succeed his father there as planned. Ottavio, reluctantly at first, or so he made out, accepted Parma from the emperor, who feared that it might otherwise fall to the French.16
If Paul – after the loss of Piacenza, his failure to see Ottavio and Margaret governing Milan, and Ottavio’s betrayal – lost interest in Titian’s triple portrait, Titian had his own reason for leaving the painting unfinished. On 19 March he was made a citizen of Rome in a ceremony that took place on the Campidoglio, the hub of the ancient Roman Empire, which had been redesigned by Michelangelo, who had also designed the base for the gilded bronze equestrian statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Although the setting could hardly have been more magnificent, the conferral of citizenship was not really a special honour. The ceremonies took place every month, and foreigners had to pay for the privilege. On the day Titian took part twelve other people, including the pope’s singer but otherwise obscure, were also granted citizenship.17 The main purpose was to make money for the city, and since the only advantages of Roman citizenship were certain tax concessions and permission to buy property, Titian’s motive was probably to demonstrate to the Farnese that he might consider moving permanently to Rome in exchange for Pomponio’s benefice if invited back in order to finish the triple portrait.
On 24 May the Archbishop Giulio Sertorio wrote to Alessandro Farnese that, although he personally would be happy to accept compensation for the benefice of San Pietro in Colle, the Duke of Ferrara and Cardinal Salviati wanted it for some of their friends and he could not let go of it without their consent. The news did not entirely dampen Titian’s hopes as he and Orazio prepared for their return journey to Venice. On 25 May he was given a tax exemption for the export of some plaster casts and fragments of antique marbles presented to him by the Farnese. By mid-June he was in Florence. Ten years earlier he had turned down an invitation from Vasari to join him in the Medici city. Now he was hoping for a commission from Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, who received him at his villa Poggio a Caiano but, ever loyal to his favourite Bronzin
o, refused to sit for the Venetian painter. On his return to Venice Titian sent Guidobaldo della Rovere, a great-nephew of Julius II, the copy he had made of the Raphael portrait of Julius.
Although Vasari later claimed18 that the Farnese had been very satisfied with Titian’s triple portrait, the truth is that Alessandro, although he kept in touch with Titian, did not call upon him to finish it or even bother to have it framed. When Paul III died at the end of 1549 and was succeeded not by Alessandro but by the del Monte pope Julius III, the message the painting had been intended to convey was a dead letter. It was presumably somewhere in the Palazzo Farnese when Van Dyck sketched it during a visit to Rome in the winter of 1622–3; but no one else seems to have recognized its merit until 1653 when it was given a frame and a fringed silk cover of the kind made only for the most important paintings. The Portrait of Paul III and his Grandsons was eventually brought to Naples by Charles of Bourbon, who had inherited it from his mother Elizabeth Farnese. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who saw it there in the late nineteenth century, were the first in a long line of critics to praise it in writing. During the Second World War it was stolen by German troops and stored in a cave near Salzburg where it was discovered after the war and restored to the Italian government.
FIVE
A Matter of Religion
If we fail to intervene now all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith. I have decided to embark on a war against Hesse and Saxony as transgressors of the peace against the Duke of Brunswick and his territory, although this pretext will not long disguise the fact that it is a matter of religion.