by Sheila Hale
Divine in charm was Raphael;
And Michelangelo, more divine than human,
In design stupendous; and Titian
Has the sense of things in his brush.
The Mantuan ambassador Benedetto Agnello described Trevisan as ‘better at reciting the rosary than governing states’. Agnello also claimed that Trevisan wore a hair shirt and spent much of his time in office trying to save nuns from prurient thoughts, which he believed would be aroused by paintings of naked flesh or even of copulating chickens, cats or dogs. He died of apoplexy a year after his election. Agnello welcomed the election in June 1554 of Trevisan’s successor, Francesco Venier, a younger, wiser and more sophisticated man, although also given to frugal personal habits, who proved to be an excellent administrator during the two years before illness overcame him.
The official portraits of Marcantonio Trevisan and Francesco Venier were destroyed in the fire in the Great Council Hall in 1577. Fortunately, however, Venier commissioned another portrait of himself (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza),7 whether for another government building or for his own residence we do not know. It is one of the most moving of the portraits Titian painted at this period and seems to bear out Benedetto Agnello’s judgement of the doge’s character. At sixty-six and within a year of his death, Venier looks old and frail beyond his years, his long, noble face flushed with red patches that suggest high fever, his emaciated body weighed down by the gold damascened robe of state, which Titian contrasts with a red satin curtain (painted in the same loose style as Aretino’s robe in the portrait of 1545) on his left. The gesture of his outstretched hand with palm facing down is that of a Roman emperor demonstrating authority and good conscience, perhaps derived from the statue of Marcus Aurelius, which both Titian and Venier, as ambassador to the Holy See in 1545, had had the opportunity to admire in Rome. The red curtain is balanced by an opening on Venier’s right through which Titian painted a fire, seen from across a lagoon. A little boat, its sail powered by a high wind, speeds towards Venice. Venice was at peace at the time, Venier was a pacific doge and there had been no recent major conflagration. What Titian meant to convey by this fire is therefore difficult to ascertain. It may have been inspired by the flames issuing from the glass foundries on Murano, which were a mainstay of the Venetian economy, and which Titian could see from his house. He may have used the view simply to give energy to the image of a doge who although old and ill was still actively in charge and capable of controlling any threats to the Republic.
The portrait of Francesco Venier was Titian’s last but one portrayal of a doge and one of the few portraits, apart from those of the Habsburgs and their courtiers, that he had painted since the late 1540s. Having been dismissed in his forties by some as a ‘mere’ portraitist, Titian had become a reluctant one, although he made exceptions. The Man with a Clock, or the Knight of Malta as it is sometimes known from the white cross stitched on to the gentleman’s elegant clothing (Madrid, Prado), is one his most striking portraits, for the immediacy of the man’s pose and expression and the superb evocation of black and white fabric. Nothing is known about the identity of the sitter, except that he was clearly of high social standing and that Titian took pains with his portrait, raising the left arm, which originally hung by the man’s side, and adding the clock the knight touches with his left hand. Another magnificent portrait of this period is of the papal legate in Venice, Luca Beccadelli (Florence, Uffizi), a Bolognese humanist and Bishop of Ravello, who had succeeded Giovanni della Casa as papal nuncio in 1550, and two years later sat for Titian seated in his black bishop’s cape. Titian identified him, signed the portrait ‘Titianus Vecelius faciebat Venetijs’ and dated it 1552 in the long inscription on the letter Beccadelli holds in his hands where he has made a wonderful still life of the contrasting textures of the paper and the pleated white silk of the bishop’s robe.8 But on the whole Titian seems to have been content to let Tintoretto take over as portraitist of the Venetian nobility. Tintoretto was fast, extremely ambitious and cheap: he charged only twenty ducats apiece for his portraits, many of which are very dull. He was also ready and willing to fulfil the big public commissions for which Titian’s commitments to the Habsburgs left him neither time nor energy.
King Edward VI of England died on 6 July 1553, and after the nine-day reign of the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor, the only surviving child of Henry VIII and Charles V’s Spanish aunt Catherine of Aragon, was proclaimed Queen of England. Mary, whose mission it was to restore the Catholic faith in England, offered her hand in marriage to Charles. Since the recent Diet at Augsburg he had suffered a series of humiliating political and military defeats. At the Council of Trent, which had been reconvened by Julius III in 1551, the pope and his legates had resisted his conciliarist position towards the Protestants, which would never again be revived. He was estranged from Ferdinand over the matter of the succession. Worst of all, the French king Henry II had revived the Habsburg–Valois conflict, invaded the Netherlands and occupied the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which were states of the Holy Roman Empire. A failed attempt to retake Metz on New Year’s Day 1553 had had disastrous consequences for the emperor’s treasury and for his physical and psychological health, which were described in alarming detail by a Netherlandish councillor: his arthritis had ‘spread to all the limbs, joints and nerves of his body’ and was worsened by cold weather; he was so severely affected by catarrh that ‘when he has it he cannot speak, and when he speaks he cannot be heard or scarcely understood by his attendants’; ‘his haemorrhoids have swollen and hurt him so much that they cannot be put back in without great pain and tears’; and instead of being gracious and affable ‘as he used to be’, he had become sad and pensive, ‘and often weeps for long periods and with such copious shedding of tears as if he were a child’. He refused to see ambassadors or even his own councillors or to sign papers, and spent his days and sleepless nights adjusting his large collection of clocks and reading the psalms of David.
Nevertheless, the prospect of a marriage that would unite England and the Spanish empire under a single Catholic monarchy against the French could not be ignored. Charles refused Mary’s offer of her hand in marriage, but proposed Philip in his stead; and Philip, although not personally enthusiastic, had no choice but to agree that it was his duty to obey his father’s command. Mary was eleven years his senior and no beauty, as can be seen from the portrait of her that he commissioned from Anthonis Mor (Madrid, Prado), which accords with descriptions of her appearance by members of the Spanish court when they reached England as unattractive, wrinkled, ‘very short-sighted’, her voice ‘rough and loud like a man’s’; ‘very white and fair-haired; she has no eyebrows; she is a saint; she dresses very badly’. But neither Mary nor Philip had any illusions that it would be a love match, although a son and heir to the English throne, which would perpetuate the Catholic alliance, was of course highly desirable.
Philip was committed but put off the wedding for as long as possible. He withdrew from his plan to marry Maria of Portugal, but continued a serious affair with one of his ladies in waiting throughout the negotiations for the marriage to Mary Tudor, which were conducted on Charles’s behalf by Granvelle and Simon Renard, his ambassador in England. Mary also hesitated. Many of her councillors were strongly opposed to the match on political or religious grounds, or because they did not want to see England embroiled in the perpetual continental wars. The English people hated foreigners, especially Spaniards. And she was troubled by rumours about Philip’s womanizing. Nevertheless, she was a determined woman with a mind of her own, and by the end of October 1553 she had made her decision. On the 29th she gave Renard her solemn assurance before the Sacrament that she would marry Philip.
She asked Granvelle to provide a portrait of her future husband; and on 13 November, the day after Charles had dispatched a party of councillors to draw up the marriage treaty, Granvelle wrote to Renard from Brussels that he hoped Mary of Hungary would soon send Mary Tud
or a portrait of Philip by Titian that was in her possession: it was already old and showed Philip in a less good colour than he had in reality, and the queen should bear it in mind that he was now more mature and his beard had thickened. Six days later Mary of Hungary herself wrote anxiously to Renard that the portrait had been done three years earlier when it was judged very lifelike. It was, however, somewhat damaged by the passage of time and the journey from Augsburg, and should be seen in the appropriate light and from a distance, ‘like all the paintings of the said Titian, which cannot be recognized from close by’. Mary of Hungary was doubtless concerned that Mary Tudor, who was not familiar with contemporary Italian painting, would judge Titian’s portrait by the standards of Holbein or Anthonis Mor or another of the northern artists who worked at the English and Habsburg courts. But we have a more precise and more favourable description of the portrait in a letter from Charles’s secretary Francisco de Eraso to the prince on 21 November.
It appears that the portrait of Your Highness painted by Titian, the one in the sayo lined with white wolf-skin, which is very good and like you, has been sent in secret to the Most Serene Queen of England. I am sure it would please her greatly if she had not already declared her wishes.9
Philip, however, continued to put off the journey to England, and when his Castilian entourage, sailing in seventy large vessels followed by an escort of thirty armed ships, finally reached the Isle of Wight he did not immediately disembark. The day before the wedding, which was celebrated at Winchester on 25 July 1554, Charles renounced Milan in Philip’s favour and created him King of Naples and Sicily.
On 10 September, less than two months after the marriage, Titian dispatched his first poesia, Venus and Adonis, to London with a letter to the new king, which was written by a secretary or literary friend with Titian’s approval. It refers to the paragone or comparison of the merits of painting with those of sculpture, which was still debated in literary circles.
My spirit now rejoices with Your Majesty because of the new kingdom which God has bestowed upon you and my congratulations are accompanied by the painting of Venus and Adonis, which you will view with those approving eyes that are already accustomed to look at the works of your servant Titian; and, because in the Danaë which I have already sent Your Majesty one sees everything from the front, I wanted in this other poesia to vary it and to show you the opposite side, so that the chamber where they have to hang will be more attractive. I will be sending you immediately the poesia of Perseus and Andromeda, which will have a different viewpoint, and likewise Medea and Jason, and besides these I hope with God’s help to send you a most devout work which I have had in hand these past ten years, wherein I hope that Your Serene Highness will see all the power of art that your servant Titian knows how to employ in painting.10
On 16 October Francisco de Vargas wrote to Granvelle that Titian’s Venus and Adonis was an estimable work but ‘excessively lascivious’. Philip, however, acknowledging receipt of the painting in a letter to Vargas dated 6 December, found only one flaw.
The picture of Adonis that Titian has completed has arrived here and truly it seems to me to be as perfect as you told me; but it is disfigured by a crease running across the middle in such a way that it now needs an extensive restoration. Concerning the other pictures that the painter is making for me, I desire that you take renewed care; and it would be most advisable if from now on you did not send them to me before informing me that they are finished and receiving my orders concerning their shipment.
The crease about which Philip complained is a join in the canvas, which may have been stretched when the rolled canvas was accidentally squeezed flat in transport. It is visible to this day in the Madrid painting.
In the story of Venus and Adonis, as told by Ovid in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses, Venus fell in love with Adonis when Cupid while kissing her accidentally grazed her with one of his arrows and she noticed a resemblance between the young and beautiful man and her son. She liked to go hunting with her lover, but warned him not to pursue the fiercer prey, such as wild boars. But one morning, when Venus had gone off in her sky-borne chariot, Adonis could not resist the lure of the hunt. Ignoring her advice he speared a wild boar, but the beast turned on him and gored his thigh. Venus heard his cries from her chariot, but by the time she reached his side he was dying. She scattered his blood to the wind and the flowers we call windflowers or wood anemones grew from the places where it fell to the ground.
Titian improved upon Ovid with the invention of a new episode in the story. In his painting the naked Venus clings desperately to her lover, who is dressed and ready for the hunt, the fateful spear held high in one hand while his baying dogs tug at the other. Cupid, who has unwittingly brought the lovers together, sleeps in the shade of a tree on which he has hung up his bow and quiver. Although there was a great deal of literary interest in the story at the time, no written account has been discovered that would entirely explain Titian’s departure from Ovid’s story, although his revision of it may have been prompted by Hurtado de Mendoza’s Fable of Adonis, Hippomenes and Atalanta,11 which was published in Venice in 1553, and in which Mendoza does describe a final embrace, but with the lovers both seated on the ground. The pose of Venus is instead modelled on a visual source, so obviously as to be closer to an outright quotation than any of Titian’s other large figures. It is a first-century BC Roman marble relief known at the time as the Bed of Polyclitus because the original was attributed to that ancient Greek sculptor. Titian would have seen Giulio Romano’s adoption of the same figure in his fresco of Bacchus and Ariadne in the Palazzo Tè in Mantua, as well as a version of the relief in Rome and the use made of it by Raphael’s workshop for the figure of Hebe in the fresco of the Banquet of the Gods in Agostino Chigi’s Roman villa (now the Villa Farnesina). Both Bembo and Granvelle owned copies, and it is possible that one or another of Titian’s learned friends suggested that it would be fitting for the modern Apelles to pay homage to the great ancient sculptor.
Although the telltale seam in the Prado version leaves little doubt that this was the painting sent to Philip, it was not Titian’s only version of the subject.12 There exist at least four other versions of the Madrid painting,13 all very similar to one another, as well as several copies, some later, all probably workshop replicas, as well as numerous engravings. There are also several versions of a slightly different composition, known as the ‘Farnese type’14 from the one Ridolfi claimed – mistakenly as all critics now agree – that Titian had painted for Ottavio Farnese as a pendant to Alessandro’s Danaë.
The erotic appeal of Titian’s Venus and Adonis and the poignancy of the scene he invented, as well as the theme of hunting, ensured that it became one of his most popular and immediately influential works, and the myth became the one that was most frequently painted by European artists. At a time when both Catholic and Protestant clerics were dedicated to repressing lust outside marriage, which was regarded as the second most terrible sin after avarice, crude engravings of erotic images in the guise of vulgarized classical myths were widely available on both sides of the Alps. Among the most popular with the educated and moneyed elite were the many copies and derivatives of Titian’s Venus and Adonis for Philip. Shakespeare, who may well have been alerted to the story by its international popularity with artists, also departs from Ovid by devoting a large part of his bestselling poem Venus and Adonis to the goddess’s futile attempt to detain her lover. But, although the possibility that he had seen an engraving of Titian’s painting cannot be discounted, his Adonis is repelled by Venus’ advances and leaves her not in the morning to go hunting but at night to join his friends at dawn.
Philip’s first poesia also benefited from a remarkable piece of publicity written by Lodovico Dolce, no doubt with Titian at his elbow, and published in 1555 in a collection of Dolce’s letters. It is a descriptive eulogy of the picture, which is longer and more detailed even than any praise ever heaped on Titian by Aretino. It was addressed to a p
atrician, Alessandro Contarini, as a return favour for Contarini’s verbal account of a painting by Raphael, the painter to whom Dolce would compare Titian in his L’Aretino, published two years later. First Dolce described the figure of Adonis as being:
of a height appropriate to a lad of sixteen or eighteen, well proportioned, handsome and graceful in every one of his parts, with a pleasing tint to his flesh in which extreme delicacy and the presence of royal blood are conveyed. And one sees that in the facial expression this unique master has aimed to convey a certain handsome beauty which would have its share of femininity, yet not be remote from virility … an amalgam which is hard to achieve and agreeable and was (if we are to believe Pliny) supremely prized by Apelles … He turns his face towards Venus with lively and smiling eyes … and one has the impression that with wanton and amorous endearments he is comforting Venus into not being afraid.
Moving on to Venus:
[She] has her back turned … to display art in double measure. For in the turn of her face towards Adonis, as she exerts herself with both arms to hold him back and is half-seated on a firm cloth of pavonazzo15 she everywhere evinces certain feelings which are sweet and vital and such that they are not seen except in her. With her, too, there is a marvellous piece of dexterity on the part of this divine spirit, in that one recognizes in the hindmost parts here the distension of the flesh caused by sitting … I swear to you, my Lord, that there is no man so sharp of sight and discernment that he does not believe when he sees her that she is alive; and no one so chilled by age or so hard in his makeup that he does not feel himself growing warm and tender, and the whole of his blood stirring in his veins. And no wonder; for if a marble statue could, with the shafts of its beauty, penetrate to the marrow of a young man so that he left his stain there, then what should this figure do which is made of flesh, which is beauty itself, which seems to breathe?