by Sheila Hale
Titian would have noticed how much Charles’s health had deteriorated since he had last seen him at Busseto in 1543. Thinner and paler than ever, his red hair faded to a mousey brown streaked with grey, his frail figure was described as that of a ghost, a mummy, a man more dead than alive. Charles was comforted by the Ecce Homo Titian had brought with him: it is one of the paintings he would take to Spain to aid his meditations on his retirement. But Titian, seeing him so troubled and aged, may not have been altogether surprised when the emperor, who had never liked mythological paintings unless they had historical, religious or moral themes, later passed his reclining Venus on to an associate. The complex question of the succession, which Charles had been pondering for most of his reign, was now in the forefront of his thoughts as he prepared for his abdication in favour of Philip. He spent many hours at Augsburg composing, with the help of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, a political testament for his son’s guidance. Although he had frequently changed his mind about which members of the dynasty would rule the Netherlands, Milan and the German Empire, even in a moment of euphoria contemplating a dynastic alliance with the French Valois, he had never wavered on one point: his son Philip would rule Spain. He had made Philip his regent there in 1543, and in 1546 had invested him with the Duchy of Milan, the key to Spanish rule in Italy.
Titian’s programme at Augsburg was part of a recording process, prompted by the emperor’s intimations of mortality, that would continue two years later when Charles began dictating his memoirs to a secretary on a trip down the Rhine. His favourite painter was to produce, necessarily with considerable help from the assistants he had brought with him, a gallery of portraits in which the Habsburg dynasty would process, followed by their most senior counsellors, diplomats and commanders, to be trailed, eventually, by the Protestant prisoners as tokens of the victory at Mühlberg. Mary of Hungary, who was more knowledgeable about painting than either of her brothers, and who over the next decade would assemble the largest contemporary collection of paintings by Titian, may have been partly responsible for the idea. We can imagine her, from what we know of her forceful if charmless personality, organizing the sittings, lining up the relatives, some in twos or threes, Ferdinand and his two elder children one at a time, for their chance to enter the studio where the master would sketch their features, perhaps indicate their poses, and leave the costume and other details to his assistants. Alas, the originals of the portraits commissioned by Mary were lost to fires after being transferred to Spain, and we know about them only from some copies and an inventory of her collection that was compiled after her death in 1558. He portrayed Mary in ‘everyday dress’,3 Ferdinand in armour,4 Maurice of Saxony in armour, the Duke of Alba in cuirass and scarf (known from an engraving after a copy by Rubens). A portrait of the princely prisoner John Frederick of Saxony bulging out of his inelegant black armour with the wound on his cheek that he had suffered at Mühlberg survives (Madrid, Prado).5
Among the other rare survivals of Mary’s commissions are the Tityus and Sisyphus (Madrid, Prado), large, strenuously muscular male nudes which were, with two others (Tantalus and Ixion, which were lost to a fire in the Madrid Alcázar in 1734), intended as part of an allegorical programme to be displayed in the newly built Grande Salle of her château at Binche, which she was transforming at vast expense into one of the most magnificent Renaissance palaces in northern Europe. The stories of the Damned Men in Hades, as told by Ovid and Virgil,6 illustrate the eternal punishment that awaits those who anger the gods. Educated guests who saw them at Binche, hung high between the windows of the Grande Salle, would have interpreted them as antique morality tales intended to parallel the terrible punishments deserved by Protestants who dared to defy the sacred authority of their legitimate ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor, God’s imperial representative on earth. Like the ceiling paintings for Santo Spirito and San Giovanni Evangelista, their monumental conception was probably informed by Titian’s study in Rome of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and Last Judgement. The two survivals are hard to read through the damage by fire and the restorations they have suffered. But from their lack of emotional engagement we can guess that their execution was left mostly to the studio, probably after Titian’s return to Venice.
Some of the courtiers at Augsburg commissioned their own portraits from Titian. The surviving portrait of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle (Besançon, Musée du Temps) at sixty-eight with a long, forked grey beard seems to have been painted in haste and may be partly or entirely a studio copy of an original. It was destined, along with a now lost portrait of Granvelle’s wife, Nicole Bonvalot, for the family palace at Besançon where the Granvelles, who were connoisseurs of painting, assembled a large collection of works of art including several others by Titian. The portrait of Nicolas’s son Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) is more finished and more impressive. It is, however, a reminder that Titian was more than capable of ignoring the true character of subjects it was in his interest to flatter. The oval face, straight nose and courteously enquiring expression of the elegant young Bishop of Arras, his half-smile, lively eyes and raised eyebrows, give a misleading impression of the man – and of his girth: both he and his father were often described as stout. Far from descending from a long noble lineage, as one might imagine from the polished figure we see in the portrait, his father had risen from relatively humble origins. Antoine, who was to become the dominating imperial statesman of the second half of the century, was a gifted intellectual and patron of the arts who spoke seven languages. But he lacked the art of making himself popular, and would prove capable of great cruelty in his application of the Inquisition, and of ruthless manipulation of his superiors in the cause of imperial realpolitik. Nor was either Granvelle above taking ‘presents’ for services rendered. Antoine received 14,000 ducats in benefices; and the Granvelles père et fils were reputed to have accumulated property worth one million ducats.
Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle and Titian became great friends. They dined together when they found themselves in the same city at the same time, and Granvelle went out of his way to use his influence at court to help Titian retrieve the payments and pensions that were chronically delayed. In Titian’s portrait he holds a book with a Venetian leather binding: he had recently ordered a consignment of such books from Venice. The beautifully painted domed table clock, probably made in Augsburg or Nuremberg, is one of seven similar clocks to appear in Titian’s portraits of around this time.7 It may have been a gift from the emperor or reflect a fashion set by Charles’s mania for clocks: his courtiers frequently commented that he spent hours during his pain-filled days and sleepless nights checking, adjusting and setting his clocks. Clocks in sixteenth-century portraits served, not just as reminders of the passage of time and the inevitability of death, but as metaphorical attributes of the sitters. In the case of Granvelle the clock probably referred to his other profession as Bishop of Arras. Contemporary iconographers8 recommended that clocks should be included in likenesses of prelates to signify that men of the Church are the clocks that regulate the world, like the bell towers on church buildings. Some authorities believe that the Portrait of Antoine Perrenot was painted by an assistant. It is hard to judge because both Granvelle portraits were dispatched to Brussels in damp weather before the varnish had completely dried and needed extensive repainting. The portrait of Antoine, furthermore, was later cut down, then at a later date enlarged. Nevertheless, it is the finest and most memorable of the many portraits of him, and made an impact on Anthonis Mor who must have seen it in Brussels when, later in 1548, he painted his own Portrait of Antonio de Perrenot Granvelle wearing the same arrangement of rings.
It goes without saying that the emperor had first call on Titian’s time. Once again he ordered a Portrait of the Dead Isabella (Madrid, Prado), this time dressed as Charles remembered her in the fashion of the 1530s.9 She sits next to a window – ‘like a High Renaissance Madonna’, as one scholar has put it10 – no longer inte
rested in the book she holds in her left hand, but still young and delicately beautiful despite the ghostly pallor of her complexion and her abstracted gaze. It is easy to understand why the emperor was pleased with the portrait, of which Aretino wrote that Titian had revived Isabella ‘with the breath of his colours so that one of her is possessed by God and the other by Charles’. It was among Charles’s most cherished possessions. He kept it with him at all times, took it with him to Spain after his abdication in 1556 and asked to see it as he was dying.
Titian used the portrait of Isabella in black commissioned at Busseto as the basis of a double portrait of the emperor sitting by her side at a table. (The double portrait is known only from a copy by Rubens in the Madrid Collection of the Dukes of Alba.) In this case the clock displayed on the table would have been, as well as a reflection of the emperor’s interest in clocks, a metaphor for the ruler who sets and guides his subject people.11 That portrait of Charles, dressed entirely in mourning, his black coat adorned only by the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece, was the model for the Portrait of Charles V Seated (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), painted by an assistant probably for the Fuggers.12 Although the stick propped against his chair indicates the sad reality of his physical condition, Titian also painted Charles standing in armour holding the baton of command – this portrait was destroyed by the fire of 1734 but is known from a number of copies and variants, one of which is in the monastery of the Escorial – as well as another, now vanished without trace, for Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle.
The Council of Trent, where the Catholic majority had so far failed to find common ground with the Protestants, had recessed in June 1547, three months after Paul III had moved it to Bologna in order to escape what he regarded as the balefully conciliatory influence of the emperor. Charles, still innocent of any real understanding of the spiritual force of Lutheranism, of the political and social developments that had taken place in Germany while he was directing his attention to the struggle with Francis I, or of the stubborn resistance to conciliation on the part of the Catholic princes there, continued to believe that doctrinal compromise with the Protestants was possible. Guessing correctly that it would be some time before the Council of Trent resumed, he took advantage of the hiatus to preside at Augsburg over an Interim, at which a committee of Catholic and Protestant theologians tried to work out a compromise that would be his last attempt to achieve reconciliation. The Interim of Augsburg, as passed by the Catholic majority at the Diet in June 1548, did make some concessions to the Protestants: clerical marriage, justification by faith, the need for reform of Catholic abuses, and the right to the Lutheran Eucharist, in which the bread and wine are symbolic of Christ’s body and blood rather than as in the Catholic rite constituting substantial and real presence. But the compromises proved to be too little, too late. Although Paul III reluctantly accepted its provisions just before he died in 1549, the emperor’s prisoner John Frederick of Saxony coldly refused the pleas of both Granvelles for his agreement. Some Protestants were appeased, but the Augsburg Interim was largely ignored by both sides. While it was being formulated, however, the Habsburgs maintained high hopes for its success.
Under these circumstances a triumphalist image of the military victory at Mühlberg – such as the bronze sculpture of Fury in Chains at the Foot of the Emperor delivered by Leone Leoni in 1549 – would have been counter-productive. Aretino’s over-excited letter to Titian describing his vision of a portrait of Charles V at Mühlberg accompanied by the figures of Religion and Fame, riding a horse that tramples the defeated Protestants beneath its hooves, was no longer appropriate. Although the Portrait of Charles V on Horseback (Madrid, Prado), which Titian began in April, is routinely described as a commemoration of the Battle of Mühlberg, it is at least as much about the image of himself that the emperor wished to project at that time as about that single episode in his life. He wears the same armour, made for him in 1545 by Desiderius Colman of Augsburg, as he had worn at Mühlberg,13 and carries the same spear.14 He canters sublimely on his magnificent black charger across a landscape unscarred by battle, beneath a blazing sky that Titian might almost have recalled from Aretino’s description of the sun setting over the Grand Canal.
This masterpiece, which Titian executed entirely without assistance, is about the emperor Charles V as heir to Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who waged endless wars by day while composing Stoic meditations at night, upon whom Charles’s Spanish confessor Antonio de Guevara had advised him to model himself, and whose equestrian monument Titian had recently seen on the Capitol in Rome. It is Charles as Christian warrior, the miles christianus of the medieval tales of chivalric honour and of crusades against the Ottoman infidel that had enthralled him as a child. His sash, the plume of his helmet and his horse’s caparison are the colour of his birthplace, Burgundy, the duchy once ruled by his father Philip the Handsome, where as a young man Charles had expressed a desire to be buried, and to which he advised his son Philip never to give up his ancestral claim. While Titian was painting them he ran short of red lake and sent urgently to Aretino for a courier to bring him from Venice half a pound of the pigment, ‘the kind that so blazes and is so brilliant with the true colour of cochineal that even the crimson of velvet and silk would seem less than splendid in comparison with it’.15
But it is the emperor’s face, painted with a sympathy and tenderness that are rare even in Titian’s portraits, that haunts the mind’s eye: masterful, thoughtful, weary, earnest, certain of his purpose but unsure of his ability to achieve it in the time left to him. Seen side by side with Titian’s portrait painted five years earlier of the wily and cynical Paul III we see more at a glance about the characters of the two representatives of God on earth who, for better or worse and for different motives, shaped the destiny of Christendom, than from a hundred pages of written history.16 Titian’s Portrait of Charles V on Horseback was his only monumental state portrait and the first of all painted equestrian portraits on this scale. Its impact would reverberate in the mounted portraits painted by Rubens and Velázquez for Charles’s great-grandson Philip IV and on down the centuries until the last victorious general climbed down from the last warhorse. It has never been surpassed, and we can be grateful that having passed into the hands of Mary of Hungary and hung with the rest of her collection in the Madrid Alcázar it was rescued from the fire there in 1734 by being cut out of its frame.
The court had begun to disperse in March 1548, when Mary of Hungary departed, followed in April by Maximilian of Austria who returned to Madrid taking with him his portrait by Titian, which he described as ‘much cherished by the emperor and well received and appreciated by all the lords of this court’. The dynastic portraits were completed by June, when Titian also finished a portrait of Ferdinand as a gift intended to promote the Vecellio timber interests in Austria. The emperor had invited him to travel on with the royal party to Brussels when it left the city, but Titian, anxious to put his workshop at home in order and pleading that he had been away from Venice longer than he had expected, sent his excuses by way of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle. He continued to work on the equestrian portrait after the emperor’s departure on 13 August. As he wrote to Granvelle on 1 September, it had taken him longer than he had anticipated. Although technical investigation suggests that the horse was painted last and without changes, the numerous pentimenti that can be detected beneath the mounted figure of the emperor are evidence of the difficulties he had in getting the angle of his head and the position of the horse and rider on the canvas exactly as he wanted.
When it was completed to his satisfaction in early September, the picture was set out in a garden of the Fugger palace for the varnish to dry when an accident occurred. A gust of wind blew it over on to a stake, which gashed the image of the horse. Titian entrusted the repair to the German painter and printmaker Christoph Amberger. (It may be that his assistants were otherwise occupied with lucrative work for the Fuggers and that this is when one of them painted the Portrait
of Charles V Seated now in Munich.) Amberger, born in Nuremberg in 1505, was a favourite of the Fuggers, and among his many portraits was a fine but realistically unflattering portrait of Charles V. It is possible that as a young man he had worked in Titian’s studio as an apprentice, and in the 1560s his son Emanuel would become the most valued member of Titian’s inner circle of assistants. Nevertheless, as Amberger reported on 16 September, Titian had insisted that the repair should be executed in his presence.
Money was never far from Titian’s mind, and with the court gone and the city quiet, his thoughts turned to the pension on Milan promised him by the emperor in 1541. He had heard from home, probably from Francesco, that the pension, although doubled by the emperor in July, had not actually been paid. Charles had given explicit instructions that Titian should receive it in October 1547 when he was expecting to see him in Augsburg. In June 1548 he had written from Augsburg to Ferrante Gonzaga, his governor in Milan, that Titian must be paid what he was owed because he had travelled from Venice on the understanding that the money would be made available in Venice to support his wife and family.17 There is a marginal note on this letter in Ferrante’s hand that the money would be paid on his orders. It was not, however, forthcoming by 1 September when Titian wrote from Augsburg to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle that he had heard from home that the money had not arrived. The fault actually lay not with the emperor, who was evidently anxious that his favourite painter should be rewarded, nor with Ferrante Gonzaga, but with the overstretched treasury of Milan and a bureaucracy that required such privileges to be registered with the minister in charge of legal affairs and countersigned by officers many of whom were reluctant to waste their restricted funds on foreigners like Titian. Despite the efforts of Titian, Granvelle, Ferrante Gonzaga and the emperor himself, the pension did not begin to be paid retrospectively, and even then only in small amounts, until 1549, although it is interesting if not altogether surprising to note that the pension on Milan of the more dangerous Aretino was honoured.