by Sheila Hale
Lavinia’s dowry was on his mind when, somewhat recovered from his illness on 8 September 1549 he sent a portrait of the emperor to Ferrante Gonzaga in Milan with a letter thanking him for the information, received through an intermediary, that the pension on Milan would be paid on presentation of the authentic documents: ‘… I am all the more thankful and obliged for this kindness as nothing could be more opportune than the receipt of these moneys, because, having a marriageable daughter, I ventured to betroth her on the faith of your Excellency’s performance.’ It was not strictly true that he had betrothed Lavinia, for whom he did not find a suitable husband for another six years. But he was already determined that she should marry into a family of good social standing, perhaps minor nobility, and was aware that entrée would require raising a dowry for her that was well beyond the means of other artists. Unfortunately, neither the portrait nor Titian’s hint that he needed the pension specifically for his daughter’s dowry succeeded in softening Ferrante’s heart. A few months later that ‘honoured and invincible hand’, which Titian had begged to kiss in his letter, sent Titian’s file to the Senate of Milan with a request that the statute of limitations should not apply to his claim for the pension.
Venice at this time was undergoing a threat to the religious tolerance, freedom of expression and traditional independence from Rome that the Most Serene Republic, alone among all other Italian states, had maintained throughout its history. The papal legate Giovanni della Casa – courtier, poet, pornographer and expert on etiquette – had introduced the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books to Venice, and was pressing the government to allow book burnings and the execution of heretics. As the shadows gathered over the home of liberty Aretino alerted Titian, his ‘dear fraternal friend’, to the plight of their confessor, a Franciscan friar who was in prison on bread and water charged with Lutheranism because, wanting to appear more learned than he was, he had gone around saying that the holy confession of sins was not divinely established; he had, furthermore, persuaded a girl, whom he knew ‘to be more inclined to the flesh than to the spirit’, to marry rather than enter a convent. Aretino, who also wrote on the friar’s behalf to the general of the Franciscan order, asked Titian to put in a good word for the friar with della Casa, whose portrait he was about to paint before the legate returned to Rome. Titian would have had time during the sittings to plead that the friar had made nothing more than an innocent blunder. It is also just possible that Titian, who rarely portrayed humble men unable to afford his fees, demonstrated his affection for his confessor by painting the Portrait of a Monk (Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria).9
The early spring of 1550 brought a personal loss and a professional slight. Titian’s sister Orsa died in March. We know nothing for certain about Orsa apart from two letters to Titian from Aretino, one of the previous year advising Titian that he had found a young servant girl for her and Lavinia. But Aretino’s heartfelt letter of condolence, which describes Orsa as ‘not just a sister, but a daughter, mother and companion … worthy of honour and reverence’, suggests that she had indeed occupied a valued place in Titian’s heart and household. The bereavement coincided with an insult. The first bound copies of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors since Cimabue appeared in March. Vasari devoted this first edition of his Lives to deceased artists, with the single exception among painters of the seventy-five-year-old Michelangelo, the most venerated Tuscan artist, whose work he knew very well, who was now approaching the end of his career and whom, as a Tuscan himself, he could hardly have ignored. Vasari was not, however, well acquainted with the work of Venetian artists, and although he could have gathered information about Titian when they met at Rome he had not yet thought of writing his Lives at that time.
Titian was nevertheless offended. Vasari’s Lives was the first book about the history of art since Pliny’s Natural History and the first to popularize the idea that art was reborn in central Italy shortly after 1300. The exclusion of Titian from that monumental and important work10 prompted Lodovico Dolce to write his own biography of Titian, which took the form of an imagined dialogue between a fictional Aretino and a Tuscan by the name of Giovanni Francesco Fabrini. Dolce has ‘Fabrini’ caricature Vasari’s unstinting praise of Michelangelo; ‘Aretino’, while admitting that Michelangelo is a magnificent painter, champions Raphael as a more universal artist and Titian as the master of colorito as well as very able in disegno and invenzione. It was several years, however, before Dolce began to plan his work, which was unlike anything he had ever written and was not finally published until 1557.
Titian’s own immediate riposte to Vasari’s encomium of Michelangelo as the master of disegno was to commission an advertisement of himself, a woodcut that could be printed and circulated in multiples, in the act of drawing. Some years earlier he had painted for his patron Gabriele Vendramin, a collector of drawings, self-portraits and antiquities, a tondo portrait of himself, with a statue of Venus behind him, drawing on a tablet.11 Until that time it had been considered indecorous to discuss, much less show, the act of artistic creation. This was the first time an Italian artist had portrayed himself using his hands, and it was this image that he asked Giovanni Britto, a woodcutter of German origin with whom he had collaborated since the 1530s, to reproduce in a square rather than the original round format and without the Venus. Britto hounded Aretino to publicize the woodcut with a sonnet. Aretino, who was evidently not impressed by Britto or his work, obliged in July with the sonnet, which was however preceded by an irritable letter berating the German for pestering him two or three times a day in a heatwave that would have undone the disciples of Caraffa (i chietini) let alone a poet. The first verse of the sonnet –
This is Titian, the wonder of the world,
Because he transforms nature into art,
Where we see in all his figures,
Disegno and colore in flesh and bone.
– was followed by a list, in reverse chronological order, of some of Titian’s most recent portraits: of Philip, Ferdinand and his daughters, and Paul III. Aretino did not mention that Britto had failed to reverse the image on his block, with the result that in the printed impressions Titian appears to be drawing with his left hand, a mistake that probably caused him to withdraw the prints from circulation and would explain why there are only four extant examples.
But Titian had more pressing concerns. On 3 July, as Charles V was calling another Diet at Augsburg, Prince Philip wrote from Ulm to Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, who had recently replaced his brother Diego as Spanish ambassador in Venice, asking him to invite Titian to Augsburg and to request him to bring with him a painting, the subject of which he did not specify. This painting might have referred to the unfinished portrait of Philip destined for his aunt Mary of Hungary that Titian had put aside during his illness. Alternatively, it might have been the Danaë (Madrid, Prado), a variant of Alessandro Farnese’s Danaë now in Naples. Although the date of Philip’s Danaë is highly controversial,12 it is possible that he began it shortly after his meeting with Philip at Milan. He may have discussed it with the prince, perhaps while talking about their mutual admiration for Correggio and about the different techniques of the tight Flemish and freehanded Venetian styles. It is equally possible that he painted it for the prince on his own initiative – just as he had the nude for Cardinal Farnese that became the first Danaë and the Venus he had brought to Charles V on his first visit to Augsburg – in order to demonstrate his versatility, introduce the prince to the Venetian painterly style and perhaps not least appeal to his well-known lust.
Philip’s Danaë, the most sensuous of all Titian’s female nudes, is a work intended for a young, sexually active man in his physical prime. It transmits a dark erotic charge that makes all previous reclining nudes – including the Venus of Urbino and the Farnese version that della Casa had said would put the devil on the back of the Vatican censor – look innocent by comparison. If the Venus of Urbino i
s about flirtation and the Farnese Danaë about the moment of penetration, the Danaë Titian painted for Philip is about the climax of passion. The girl’s delicate young body, painted in a very diluted oil floated on the surface of the canvas, is raised a little higher on her pillows as though straining towards her lover. The smooth sheets of the Farnese Danaë are now a mass of crumpled satin indicated by short, thick stabbings of impasto. The boy Cupid has been replaced by an ugly old hag, the keeper of the keys to Danaë’s prison, who sits with her back to us on the end of the blood-red bed-hanging that flows behind the girl’s body, straining forward to catch Jupiter’s golden sperm in her apron. Her pose and her dark wrinkled skin contrast with the pale, smooth young body of the girl who lies legs open on the bed enjoying the god’s lovemaking. Is the old woman – she is an add-on to the original myth – attempting to prevent insemination? Or is she trying to catch some of the gold, and some of the pleasure? Titian, or a member of his studio, seems to have traced Danaë’s body from a cartoon taken from a record in the studio of the Farnese version. The figural composition thus established, he allowed his brushes to work in the visible strokes that anticipate his work of a decade later.
Titian was supposed to leave Venice for Augsburg in August, but it was already September when Philip asked Juan Hurtado de Mendoza to make sure that he came as soon as possible. He finally arrived, late as usual, on 4 November, having brought with him some of the portraits commissioned on the previous visit. The celebratory mood that had followed the victory at Mühlberg had turned sour. Charles V was burdened with more problems than ever before in his reign. The victory at Mühlberg and the Augsburg Interim drawn up at the previous Diet had succeeded only in stiffening the Protestants’ resolve. Now the new French king Henry II, having signed a truce with Scotland and England, was trying to engineer a new Habsburg–Turkish war in order to distract the Habsburgs on the eastern front while he prepared to revive the Habsburg–Valois struggle in Europe. But Charles, his body racked with the pain of multiple illnesses, his mind focused on abdication if death did not come first, was obsessed by the matter that had always been a priority: that of the Habsburg dynastic succession. At the end of Philip’s extended tour of the seventeen provinces on 2 April, Charles had proclaimed his son heir to the Netherlands. The good burghers had not and never would warm to the haughty, ungainly, dourly pious Catholic prince who spoke neither French nor Dutch. But Philip in his father’s eyes could do no wrong.
Now, at Augsburg, Charles reached a far more controversial decision. He was minded to decide that Philip, rather than Ferdinand’s son Maximilian, would succeed Ferdinand as King of the Romans. The title would then pass to Maximilian, assuming that Philip predeceased him, but Philip, not Maximilian, would be first in line for the imperial succession. Ferdinand was outraged by what he rightly regarded as a betrayal of the original agreement that the imperial crown would descend through his branch of the family. Titian must have heard the shouting matches between the brothers that echoed through the Fugger palace. Charles summoned Mary of Hungary, who adored him and would always comply with his wishes. Ferdinand sent for Maximilian, who on arrival ostentatiously avoided the company of Philip. The shouting gave way to silence as the two sides resorted to communicating by letters carried by servants. It is possible that Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, the adviser with whom Charles had formed his closest rapport over twenty years, would have found an acceptable compromise, but Perrenot had fallen ill the previous year, and although he managed to attend the Diet at Charles’s bidding he was close to death. When it came in August, people close to the emperor said that with the loss of the elder Granvelle, the counsellor Charles had called his ‘bed of rest’, the emperor lost his own soul.
Although it was Philip who had issued the invitation to Augsburg, Titian spent more time there with Charles. The great theorist of Lutheranism, Philipp Melanchthon, writing from Wittenberg to a friend and fellow theologian, Joachim Camerarius, thought it worthy of note that Titian had frequent access to the emperor and was well informed about the state of his health, which was not good. Although Titian, who had his own aches and pains, may well have been interested in talk about illness, their conversations were by no means limited to the emperor’s health. Titian may have confided in Charles about his problems with his children because before the painter left Augsburg the emperor granted Pomponio naturalization as a citizen of Spain, which allowed him to hold benefices in Spain to the value of 500 scudi. As the freezing winter settled on Augsburg and the two men warmed their bones before blazing fires, Charles asked for two paintings, the only ones he had ever requested from Titian that were not portraits and the last that Titian would paint for him. One was a Grieving Madonna (Madrid, Prado; two versions) to be a pendant to the Ecce Homo that Titian had brought with him on his previous visit to Augsburg. The other commission at Augsburg, for which Charles gave precise instructions, was in anticipation of his abdication in favour of Philip, when he planned to take the painting with him to the Spanish monastery Philip had found for his retirement in Estramadura. Known as the Adoration of the Trinity or La Gloria (Madrid, Prado) – Charles on his death bed would call it a Last Judgement – it is an exceptionally complex painting with many figures including, on our right, portraits of the imperial family, from which Ferdinand and Maximilian are, however, notable for their absence. The imperial ambassador in Venice, Francisco de Vargas, as Titian wrote to Charles V when he delivered the painting to him three years later, had asked to be portrayed as the figure at the emperor’s feet, but ‘if it should please Your Majesty, any painter can, with a couple of strokes, convert it into any other person’. Titian took special pains with this painting, and by the time he sent it three years later along with the Grieving Madonna, Charles was in the process of finalizing arrangements for his long-awaited abdication.
The election on 7 February 1550 of Aretino’s compatriot Giovanmaria del Monte as Pope Julius III had revived his hopes that the cardinal’s hat he had been seeking for more than a decade would at last be his. Julius was not an impressive man intellectually or physically, and his pontificate was remarkable for nothing more than continuing the unstoppable momentum of the Reformation. He stank of the onions for which he had a passion and which were delivered to him in the Vatican by the cartload, and was so uncommonly ugly that an envoy of Cosimo de’ Medici wrote to his secretary that neither Giorgio Vasari nor anyone else could paint the pope’s portrait because his nose was so large and hooked, and he had thought of sending for Titian to do it. Even the Romans, who were not easily shocked, were appalled when he promoted his monkey keeper, a teenaged boy he had picked up on the streets, to the cardinalate. So why not Pietro Aretino? Julius was a native of Arezzo, and Aretino knew the del Monte family well enough to have stood godfather, together with Titian and Sansovino, to the child of one of his relatives. He bombarded the new pope with flattering sonnets and letters, and was rewarded with 1,000 crowns, a post as honourable chief magistrate of Arezzo and a knighthood of St Peter that carried an annual salary of eighty crowns. The fourth volume of his letters, which was ready for publication, was followed immediately by a fifth rushed through the press and dedicated to Julius’s brother Baldovino del Monte. He received encouraging letters from acquaintances in Rome, some of whom might not have had his best interests in mind. But Daniele Barbaro, writing from London in November, assured him that this time his cardinalate was as good as a certainty.
The timing of Titian’s second visit to Augsburg seemed to favour Aretino’s chances. Julius was planning to reconvene the Council of Trent and wanted the emperor’s support. Although Charles was concerned about the effect on the Protestants of a new sitting at Trent, he was, for the time being at least, the pope’s ally, having persuaded him to help to remove Ottavio Farnese from Parma. Titian agreed to carry his friend’s supplications to Charles and promised to present them to him as soon as the occasion arose, which it did within days of his arrival. On 11 November he wrote to Signor Pietro, Honoured
Gossip, describing Charles’s reaction.
After the usual courtesies and examination of the pictures I had brought, he asked for news of you and whether I had letters from you to deliver. To the last question I answered affirmatively, and then presented the letter you gave me. Having read it, the emperor repeated its contents so as to be heard by His Highness his son, the Duke of Alba, Don Luigi Davila, and the rest of the gentlemen of the chamber. But since I was mentioned in the letter he asked me what it was I required of him. To which I replied that at Venice, Rome, and in all Italy the public assumed that His Holiness was well minded to make you, etc. At this Caesar’s face showed signs of rejoicing, saying that this would greatly please him and could not fail to please you.
And so, dear brother, I have done for you the service we should all do for true friends such as yourself; and if I can assist you in any other way you need only command me.
He added that the Duke of Alba was continually expressing his love and support for the Divine Aretino, and that Granvelle would be writing to him shortly.
This letter, one of only two from Titian that Aretino included in his collections of letters written to him and very likely edited down to focus on the parts that concerned him, appeared in the second volume of Letters Written to Aretino, published in 1551 by Marcolini, who described the contents in his dedication as examples of the multitude Aretino received ‘day after day from Knights, Lords, from Counts, Marquises, Dukes, Princes and every kind of grand gentleman and lady’. The scandal that had prompted Aretino to cleanse his reputation with the earlier edition of letters written to him published in 1542 had by now been forgotten. This volume, in which the correspondents were evidently chosen as witnesses or guarantors of Aretino’s many virtues – political, religious, charitable – was more directly intended to proclaim him as an ideal candidate for a cardinalate. Nothing, however, came of it for the time being, although he did not altogether give up hope.