by Sheila Hale
The truth was that Titian was standing undecided at a crossroads. If the Farnese had been able to be more positive about the benefice, if they had not finally lost patience and given the office of the piombo to the sculptor Giovanni della Porta, he might have been tempted to take the path to Rome. But it had become increasingly obvious to everyone that the emperor, at forty-seven, was strong, while his enemy Paul III, now seventy-nine and showing it, was weak. Charles was in control of Milan, and Milan, the main prize in his wars with Francis I, meant control of northern Italy. (A few years later Charles wrote to his son Philip that Milan had ‘tormented him more than all the rest put together’.) Charles’s status, furthermore, was immeasurably enhanced by two coincidental deaths – Henry VIII died in January 1547, followed by Francis I on 31 March – which left him as the only one of the three powerful monarchs who had been shaking the world.
Titian’s future was to be indirectly affected by another decisive death, that of Martin Luther, one of the great defining figures of the age, who departed this world on 18 February 1546 while the Council of Trent was sitting. Luther almost to the end of his life had maintained that peace was more important to him than justice and kept a restraining hand on his protector John Frederick of Saxony, the most respected of the Lutheran princes and one of the founders, with his cousin Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, of the militant Protestant Schmalkaldic League. Charles, distracted for too long by his struggles against Francis I, had failed to appreciate the strength of the new religion in his German Empire. He had never mastered the German language (‘one speaks German to one’s stable boys’) and had not set foot in the empire during the nine years between 1532 and the fruitless Diet of Ratisbon in 1541. But in April 1546, after the death of Luther and in the light of the growing aggression of his followers, he was persuaded by Paul III to sign a treaty of alliance against the Protestants at another Diet at Ratisbon, this one equally inconclusive because the Protestants refused to attend in person. There he took advantage of his unaccustomed leisure to have an affair with a girl called Barbara Blomberg. Their son, the future Don John of Austria, who would command the Christian fleet at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, was born on 24 February 1547.
With the League now on the attack, Charles had the financial and military backing of the pope with an immediate advance against the pope’s promise of 500,000 ducats from the Fuggers of Augsburg. He also had, thanks to a diplomatic coup secured by his chancellor Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, an all-important alliance with the nominally Protestant Maurice, Duke of Saxony, who, although married to the daughter of Philip of Hesse, had long been suspicious of John Frederick. Maurice agreed to help defeat the League by invading Saxony in return for a promise that he would replace John Frederick as elector in the event of an imperial victory. Paul III withdrew his troops from the imperial army in January 1547 in protest against the emperor’s attack on Parma. But the Protestant League, weakened by divided command and shortage of funds, was losing the initiative. Charles took the advice of the Duke of Alba, a distinguished Spanish diplomat, brilliant military strategist and commander of his Spanish divisions, to postpone war until the enemy’s problems had taken their toll.
By April 1547 the time had come to march against John Frederick. Always the least yielding of the Lutheran princes, he had been outlawed by the emperor for his continuing occupation of Brunswick, and he was now rattling his sword at Ferdinand’s Kingdom of Bohemia. After a long journey during which Charles was so ill that he had to be carried in a litter, the imperial army reached the Elbe River in the small hours of Sunday 24 April, a misty morning that was, as it happened, the feast day of St George, patron saint of Christian soldiers. The elector’s army was sighted on the far side of the river in the village of Mühlberg where John Frederick believed himself to be safe because as far as he knew the river at that point could not be forded. Charles, mounted on a black charger, pain and exhaustion forgotten, urged his troops forward. Some waded across the river carrying their guns above their heads; some of Alba’s Spaniards stripped naked and swam with knives between their teeth. Then Alba discovered that there was in fact a ford. John Frederick was at church still unaware of the danger when the imperial troops charged across the ford. While the elector and his troops fled in confusion the imperialists, Charles now riding in the vanguard accompanied by Maurice, with Ferdinand and his son, the Archduke Maximilian, in the second line, gave chase. By midday the mist had been burned off by a blazing sun, and the figure of John Frederick was easily sighted. He was immensely fat, encased in black armour and riding the stallion he favoured because it was strong enough to bear his great weight. After a short battle in a wood near Mühlberg, he was taken prisoner, bleeding from a wound on his cheek, and handed over to Alba. ‘Do you now acknowledge me as Roman Emperor?’ Charles demanded. To which the elector replied, ‘I am today but an unfortunate prisoner, and I beg Your Imperial Majesty to treat me as a born prince.’ ‘That’, Charles insisted, ‘I cannot do.’ John Frederick, however, remained popular with the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, who, according to a report sent to Venice by the two Venetian ambassadors, had greeted him with nothing less than reverence on his arrival in the city after his defeat, dragged along on a cart with a guard of 150 Spanish soldiers.
A Spanish historian who witnessed the battle and its aftermath12 found a parallel between the crossing of the Elbe and Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and recounted that Charles ‘attributed this great victory to God, as something granted by His hand; and thus he spoke Caesar’s three words, changing the third as befitting a Christian prince: “I came, I saw, and God conquered”’. Charles regarded the routing of the Protestants as the most glorious day of his life. He was never more himself than when in the thick of battle, and by defeating the League he believed he had subdued every subversive element in Europe, even down to the Venetian philo-Protestants who resented Habsburg domination in the rest of northern Italy. Mühlberg was followed by the even more significant capture of Wittenberg – the stronghold of Protestant opposition where Martin Luther had launched the Reformation – as well as by the capture and imprisonment of Philip of Hesse. On 14 May the leader of the Venetian clique that had supported the League was executed in the Piazza, while others were exiled.
On 1 August the emperor convened an Imperial Diet at Augsburg where he hoped to fulfil his lifelong goal and God-given duty of reconstructing a universal Catholic monarchy by floating a programme of reform that would be acceptable to both Catholic and Protestant princes. His first idea, a league of all the imperial states with its own parliamentary, administrative and judicial institutions, was quickly defeated by the Catholics, who perceived it as an attempt to dilute their powers. And after the flush of adrenaline that had carried him to victory on the battlefield, Charles paid the price in ill health. He developed a fever, and his gout, asthma and haemorrhoids returned with a vengeance. His chronic depression was aggravated by insomnia – he had not slept for more than four consecutive hours at a time since 1540 – and now by enforced immobility and the restricted diet recommended by his doctors. He withdrew from company, taking his meals alone. Each morning he communicated in secret about official business with Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, who was acting as president of his Council, by means of letters carried by a valet who could not read or write.
It was in this dark and pensive mood that Charles instructed Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in a short letter written on 21 October, to invite Titian to come to Augsburg to repair the nose of his portrait of Isabella with an offer to pay his travel expenses. On 29 October Mendoza replied that Titian would leave soon for Augsburg and that he would be given 100 scudi for his expenses. Titian hesitated, unable to make up his mind, and disinclined to make the arduous journey across the Alps just as winter was closing in. Another possible explanation, one that must remain in the realm of speculation because Titian’s private life at this time is a mystery, is that he was delayed by the death of his second wife or the imminent birth of hi
s fourth child Emilia, the result of an affair, possibly with a housekeeper. Aretino urged him to make an early start for Augsburg, and, at last, on 24 December Titian wrote as tactfully as possible to Cardinal Farnese that he had decided to accept the emperor’s summons but hoped that he would not withdraw his favour in respect of the benefice of Colle. He sent this letter by way of Guidobaldo della Rovere, who after the death of Julia Varano had married Cardinal Farnese’s sister Vittoria (with what some thought indecent haste). Guidobaldo forwarded Titian’s message to Farnese with a note begging him ‘to be convinced that the matter in question is quite as much desired by me as it is by him’.
The emperor had not, of course, asked the ageing Titian to make the journey across the Alps only to repair the damaged nose of his portrait of Isabella. He would be required to portray the members of the Habsburg dynasty present at the Diet, as well as their principal courtiers and prisoners. Since no one painter could have fulfilled so many commissions in a relatively short time he brought with him seven assistants, described by Ridolfi as ‘a party of gallant youths’. We can be sure that Orazio was one of them and fairly sure that Cesare Vecellio, his first cousin once removed,13 was another. The others cannot be identified because the documents relating to Titian’s visit to Augsburg were destroyed during the Second World War.
Two canvases for Charles were packed with extra care for loading on and off the mules that would carry them across the Alps. One was the Venus that he had painted on his own initiative in Venice in 1545 – Mendoza had described it as his finest work – and which he had promised Charles in his letter from Rome. Since the original for Charles is lost we can only speculate that Titian kept a drawing or painting of it in his studio as the prototype for at least six derivatives painted for different clients over the next fifteen years or so. Titian’s other gift for Charles survives. It is an Ecce Homo (Madrid, Prado), his only painting on slate,14 in which the beautiful, youthful figure of Christ accepting his humiliation and pain is divorced from the episode in the story of Christ’s Passion that Titian had narrated so dramatically for Giovanni d’Anna. This Ecce Homo, an exemplary Counter-Reformation image, was intended to promote private devotion, and its gravity and restraint suggest that Titian, whatever his own religious leanings, understood the profound and personal relationship with his God that motivated the emperor’s commitment to Catholic reform.
On the Christmas morning before his departure Titian sent Aretino a copy of the Ecce Homo he had painted for Charles (possibly the one in the Chantilly Musée Condé, which differs from the original in that Christ holds in his right hand the reed with which he has been beaten), for which he received effusive thanks. And on 6 January 1548 Titian was at Ceneda, perhaps sleeping in his newly built villa, where he met Count Girolamo della Torre. Della Torre took the opportunity to write a letter of recommendation to Cardinal Madruzzo, who had arrived at Augsburg from Rome on the previous day, in which he described Titian ‘as the first man in Christendom … who is coming at the emperor’s bidding to work for His Majesty’, and begging Madruzzo to help Titian in any way he can ‘because in so doing you will be doing a favour to me’. What was this favour? Madruzzo, whom Titian had portrayed in Venice years earlier, was one of the most powerful prelates of his day and therefore an ideal person to approach about Pomponio’s benefice of Colle.
The rest of the journey seems to have been uneventful, although it must have been hard. As the convoy of horses, mules and carriages struggled through the snowy passes towards Germany Titian, who had by no means given up hope that the Farnese would sooner or later honour their promise to give Pomponio the greatly desired papal benefice, could not have guessed that by accepting the emperor’s invitation he had severed his relationship with the Farnese and that by the end of his life he and his studio would have produced no fewer than 150 paintings for the Habsburgs, seventy of them in the next six years.
SIX
Augsburg
And it is told of Titian that while he was painting the portrait [of Charles V on Horseback], he dropped a brush, which the emperor picked up, and bowing low, Titian declared: ‘Sire, one of your servants does not deserve such an honour.’ To this Charles replied: ‘Titian deserves to be served by Caesar.’
CARLO RIDOLFI, LE MARAVIGLIE DELL’ARTE, 1648
Augsburg, founded by the Roman emperor Octavian Augustus and situated at the junction of two tributaries of the Danube on the trade route between Venice and Antwerp, was sixteenth-century Germany’s largest city and headquarters of its most important banker merchants, of whom the Fugger family were the wealthiest. The Fuggers had made a fortune from lending to the Habsburgs since the reign of Charles V’s grandfather Maximilian I. It was from the Fuggers that Charles had borrowed more than half of the bribes that won him his election as Holy Roman Emperor, but which also set him on the road to the bankruptcy and financial mismanagement that would last until the end of the Habsburg era. The Fuggers had originally secured their loans against anticipated revenues from the copper and silver mines in Castile and the Tyrol. But in the 1540s, as the extravagant Habsburg borrowings increased – not only Charles’s, but also those of his brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, and their sister Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands – the bankers themselves had to resort to borrowing in order to lend on the required scale, while the Habsburgs, who never succeeded in balancing income with expenditure, delayed repayment of principal sums indefinitely. The Fuggers continued to profit from the Habsburg business by charging enormous interest rates, levying penalties for late payments, imposing brokerage fees, manipulating exchange rates and accepting such favours as imperial land sold to them at special prices. But they were seeing their profit margins reduced, and Anton Fugger, who had inherited the bank from his uncle Jacob, ‘the Rich’,1 was beginning to tire of his close relationship with the imperial family. The Fuggers, who were keen patrons of Venetian art – Paris Bordone and Gian Paolo Pace had come to Augsburg to paint their portraits – also kept a palace in Venice where they traditionally sent their sons to complete their education and their experience of the business world. Aretino, needless to say, made a point of getting to know Anton Fugger’s two sons and of trying to extract money from them.
Titian must have been struck by the clean, broad streets lined with steeply gabled houses, by the enormous size of the churches, and by the cold: Augsburg is one of the chilliest cities in southern Germany. It was an orderly city, certainly by comparison to Venice, but perhaps too orderly. Did he, coming from a Venice that styled itself the home of liberty, notice that the Protestant guilds had been suppressed, and the privileges formerly due in an imperial free city revoked? In any case he received a warm welcome in the Fugger palace, a complex of houses and courtyards that was home to the Habsburgs when the court was in Augsburg. The assistants were housed separately, while the emperor saw to it that Titian was given rooms overlooking the wine market that were close to his own so that they could meet and talk without being seen and where he could work on paintings that did not require assistance. Ridolfi’s story about Charles V bowing to pick up Titian’s paintbrush may have been an invention, but the documented comments of Titian’s contemporaries leave no doubt about the warm friendship and mutual respect that developed at Augsburg between the painter and the most powerful ruler in the world. Gian Giacomo Leonardi, Guidobaldo della Rovere’s agent in Venice, wrote that he had heard from a man who had just come from Augsburg – but wished to remain anonymous – that the emperor distracted himself from his illness with his collection of clocks and paintings by Titian; and that Titian, so they said, was entirely at ease with His Majesty and much favoured by him and by the whole of the court. Leonardi would leave it to Guidobaldo to judge for himself whether such a thing could be true or not.2 It was indeed the official truth, as testified by the Venetian ambassadors at Augsburg, Alvise Mocenigo and Francesco Badoer, who confirmed that Titian was ‘greatly cherished by the emperor and highly regarded and appreciated by all the lords of this c
ourt’.
Titian described the emperor’s affectionate greeting in a letter to Aretino, but was too absorbed by work to write again immediately. By April 1548 when the Scourge had heard nothing further from his ‘no less brother than friend’, he penned an indignant letter saying that it seemed, although it surely could not be true, that the favours of His Majesty had so inflated Titian’s ego that he no longer deigned to notice his friends. ‘You know’, he wrote threateningly, ‘that I could make even the emperor a laughing stock if he should make a jest of me.’ This fit of jealous pique was quickly forgotten, however, when he heard news that the emperor had promised when the time came to pay the dowry of his little daughter Austria, to which he responded by telling Titian exactly how he should paint a portrait of the emperor on horseback trampling on the Protestants in commemoration of the victory at Mühlberg.
The court, in festive mood after the great battle, was crowded with members of the Habsburg family, their ministers, diplomats and military commanders. Ferdinand came with the eldest of his nine children, Anna, and his eleven-year-old son and heir Maximilian of Austria. Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, the emperor’s chancellor and most trusted adviser since the death of Mercurio de Gattinara, was present with his wife Nicole Bonvalot and their brilliant son Antoine, Bishop of Arras. At thirty-one Antoine was a highly accomplished young politician destined to become a cardinal and Charles’s chief minister after the death of his father. Prominent among the Spanish contingent were Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, third Duke of Alba, the hero of Mühlberg; and Francisco de Vargas y Mexia, an ecclesiastical writer who was Charles’s attorney general, one of his representatives at the first sitting of the Council of Trent and a future imperial ambassador to Venice. Titian spent time with Bernardo Tasso, father of the later more famous poet Torquato; and with Tasso’s patron, the imperial commander Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, who was sufficiently impressed by the painter to promise him a pension – a gesture that he quickly forgot although Titian did not. The men brought their ladies, and the gregarious Ferdinand was only too happy to host the numerous balls and dinners, at which the emperor rarely made an appearance, or, when he did, defied his doctors’ orders by eating enormously before retiring to a corner where he listened attentively to his courtiers without commenting on what he heard.