by Sheila Hale
He created the Wisdom, his only autograph ceiling painting, as a gesture of his long-standing friendship with Jacopo Sansovino, the architect of the library, but also because he wanted his work to be compared favourably with those of the most renowned of the younger Venetian painters whom he and Sansovino had chosen several years earlier to decorate the ceiling of the library. But Titian had reserved the vestibule ceiling for himself, and we need not doubt that he intended to demonstrate that even at his advanced age he could make something that was beyond the reach of Veronese, much though he admired and had learned from his use of colour. And so he did, with a painterly tenderness and fluency of design that makes Veronese’s virtuoso Allegory of Music in the library look effortful and contrived by comparison.
The Wisdom had been installed in the Rosa brothers’ frame on the ceiling of the vestibule by 26 April 1562 when Titian wrote to Philip that he had, at last and with the help of divine providence, brought to completion the Agony in the Garden and the Rape of Europa, which, he confessed, had been long since ordered by His Catholic Majesty. He sent another Agony in the Garden to Philip about a year later, and scholars are divided about which is which. Both are night scenes depicting the imminent capture of Christ, but taken from different Gospel accounts. In one version (Madrid, Prado), one of the soldiers carries a lantern as mentioned in John 18: 3. In the other (Madrid, Escorial) an angel appears before the praying Christ as in Luke 22: 43. Whichever he sent to Philip in April 1562 it was the first night Titian painted for the king, who eventually sent both versions to the Escorial where they were allowed to moulder over the centuries, and are by now so ruined by neglect and destructive restoration that it is difficult to judge the qualities that Titian thought made them the equal of the Rape of Europa, the last, and now best preserved, of the poesie he painted for Philip.
Europa was the daughter of Agenor, king of the Levantine city of Tyre. One day Jupiter, who had been lusting after her from Olympus, could resist her charms no longer. He took the form of a handsome white bull and swam ashore while she was playing on the beach with her handmaidens. Jupiter joined their games, persuaded her to mount him, then gradually edged away from the shore. Europa was attracted to the bull but not quite ready when he plunged into the sea and carried her with the speed of wind across the water from Asia to Crete. There he assumed the form of a man and impregnated her, and their descendants become known as the Europeans.
The story could hardly have been more suitable for a king who, with his family, ruled most of continental Europe. It had been told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, and often retold and represented by artists,7 although none, not even Rembrandt in the next century, ever gave the story the dynamism of Titian’s version. Veronese’s charming but static later versions, one in the Anti-Collegio of the doge’s palace, depict the scene on the shore with the bull lying down and licking one of Europa’s feet. Dürer, in a sketch of around 1495, shows Europa astride the bull as he gallops through reeds towards the open sea. But what painter but Titian would have risked the more challenging image of the bull breasting the sparkling waves, with the surprised Europa on his back, legs open, under one of those Venetian sun-streaked evening skies that Aretino had described all those years before in homage to Titian’s unique ability to translate the effects of nature into paint. Everything is in motion. Two flying cupids are buffeted by the wind as they try to keep up with the couple; a third, riding on a dolphin behind the bull, directs his gaze between Europa’s legs. The handmaidens left behind wave from the shore as the glowing clouds race towards the darkness of night.
Titian took his interpretation of the fable less from Ovid’s account than from a description of a classical painting at the beginning of the romance of Leucippe and Clitophon by the Alexandrian writer Achilles Tatius. His friend the scholarly Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, during his term as Spanish ambassador in Venice in the 1540s, had acquired the manuscript, which would have been accessible to Titian in a translation by Lodovico Dolce. The story was popular in Spain, but Titian never mentioned his source in his correspondence with Philip, who may or may not have read it. Tatius described Europa balancing precariously on the bull’s back, clad in a veil of lawn ‘from her breast to her privy parts’, her scarf swelling against the force of the wind like a sail. But it was Titian who turned her face so that her ecstatic expression is half concealed by the shadow of her raised right arm. It was Titian who painted the beguiling head of the bull whose horn she clutches with her other hand as he looks out at us with an eye that is about to wink an invitation to give in to our passions wherever they may lead us. And it is Titian who varied the textures, so that figures in the foreground rendered in impasto appear solidly three dimensional against the landscape background so thinly painted that you can see the weave of the canvas; and the mountains, just as Shelley would see them when he gazed at the Euganean Hills, are made transparent by the vaporous sun.
The apparently effortless fluency of design and the springtime palette of the Rape of Europa, and of the Marciana Wisdom, are enough to reassure us that, old, frail and needy though Titian may have claimed to be when dealing with matters of business, his heart lifted when he went into his studio and took up his brushes to reveal an inner life that was still bursting with painterly creativity and fresh ideas. With the Rape of Europa and the Agony in the Garden he had fulfilled the terms of the agreement he had concluded with Philip at Augsburg in 1551. Nevertheless, he promised to proceed with a Madonna and Child (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) which Philip had apparently requested, and which he hoped would please the king no less than his other paintings. We don’t know when he sent it but Philip must indeed have been pleased by this ravishing piece. The elongated figure of the seated Madonna, reminiscent of Mannerist sculptures by Sansovino and Michelangelo, glances down with amused tenderness at her restless baby boy as He struggles to slip off her lap. Dressed in pink and smoky blue, she is set against one of those dark backdrops with which Titian still liked to bisect his pictures and which opens up on our right to a fiery sunset over a distant city.
Meanwhile, on 26 April 1562, in a letter to Philip that accompanied the Agony in the Garden and the Rape of Europa to Spain, Titian wrote that these pictures ‘put the seal on all that Your Majesty was pleased to order, and that I was bound to deliver’:
Though nothing now remains of what Your Catholic Majesty required, and I had determined to take a rest for those years of my old age which it may please the Majesty of God to grant me; still, having dedicated such knowledge as I possess to Your Majesty’s service, when I hear – as I hope to do – that my pains have met with the approval of Your Majesty’s judgment, I shall devote all that is left of my life to doing reverence to your Catholic Majesty with new pictures, taking care that my pencil shall bring them to that satisfactory state which I desire and the grandeur of so exalted a King demands.8
PART V
1562–1576
The difference between the old Titian … and the young Titian, painter of the ‘Assumption’ and of the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, is the difference between the Shakespeare of the Midsummer-Night’s Dream and the Shakespeare of the Tempest. Titian and Shakespeare begin and end so much in the same way by no mere accident. They were both products of the Renaissance, they underwent similar changes, and each was the highest and completest expression of his own age.
BERNARD BERENSON, ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE, 1938
ONE
A Factory of Images
Although many have been with Titian to learn, the number of those whom one could truly call his disciples is not large; so that he has not taught much, but has imparted more or less to each one according to what they have known how to take from his own paintings.
GIORGIO VASARI, ‘LIFE OF TITIAN’, 1568
When Titian painted his self-portrait (Madrid, Prado) in 15621 he was the most famous person in the proudest and most admired city in Europe and was universally recognized as the greatest artist of his time apart fro
m the octogenarian Michelangelo, who had only two years more to live. Titian emerges, like his earliest sitters, from a shadowy background, his features strongly lit. He looks less distinguished in Veronese’s portrait of him dressed in red playing the viol da gamba in the huge Marriage at Cana (Paris, Louvre), painted in the same year for Palladio’s new dining hall in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. But if Titian flattered himself up to a point, he did not disguise his years. Mottled skin sags from the bones of his long face, the nose more prominent than ever against sunken cheeks, downturned mouth collapsed as though no longer supported by teeth. He wears discreetly expensive blacks, which no painter could imitate as convincingly as Titian and which define his status as a wealthy gentleman. The textured blacks of his doublet and fur pelisse are relieved by a white linen collar and gold chain of honour around his neck. The paintbrush in his unfinished right hand seems to be there as an emblem rather than a tool of the profession that has brought him fame and fortune. The near-profile view of his face is unusual in painted portraits of the period, and to paint a self-portrait from that angle would have involved taking the trouble to set up an arrangement of mirrors. Titian may have chosen it because the profile portrait was a standard format on classical coins and was for that reason associated with nobility and immortality.
Since there seems to have been no commission for this self-portrait we can guess that Titian painted it for his own satisfaction, perhaps as an epilogue to a career that might be terminated by death at any minute. Although he may not have known exactly how old he was, he had begun referring to himself as old and frail as early as 1548 when he was approaching sixty. Now into his seventies he had been spared the many illnesses for which doctors had no cure: malaria, typhus, dysentery, plague, severe influenza, gout, the septicaemia that was the inevitable consequence of a burst appendix or the gangrene that infested open wounds. He had outlived many of his patrons, relatives and friends, Aretino, Charles V and his siblings Orsa and Francesco among them. So what we see in this last of his self-portraits is a survivor, at a time when old age was regarded as an achievement, in a Venice ruled by old men. Stiffened by his years, but with more work ahead, he is as determined as ever to maintain himself, his children and the headquarters in Biri Grande where he received distinguished guests, notaries and lawyers in the style suitable to his quasi-aristocratic status. Ridolfi recounts that Titian:
kept in his home an honourable retinue of servants and dressed ostentatiously as a great knight; in his travels to the courts of princes, he always acted generously, and it is said that when he unexpectedly invited Granvelle and Pacecco [another cardinal] … to dine with him, he threw a purse at his servants and said: ‘Prepare dinner, for I have the entire world in my house,’ and he kept them with him long enough to retouch their portraits.
As a younger man Titian had been known, unusually for an artist of rare genius, as pleasant and easy to deal with (although those who knew him well were aware of his stubborn nature).2 Now he was more often described as sly, grasping, unreasonable and dishonest. Ridolfi, who was writing in the next century partly from hearsay, maintained3 that Titian hid his autograph paintings from his assistants, but when he discovered that they had made copies of them without his authorization he worked them up for sale. But Ridolfi also records his ‘resplendent greatness of spirit’. Titian’s surviving letters, which are almost exclusively about money, may well give us a distorted idea of his character, but it does seem from the comments made about him by others that, with fame and old age, the sense of entitlement and canny head for the details of business that had characterized his dealings with patrons from early on were turning into a degree of avariciousness that was unusual among Renaissance artists. In 1561 Philip’s ambassador in Venice had referred to Titian merely as ‘somewhat covetous’. Three years later, when Titian and Orazio were supplying his long-standing and friendly patron Guidobaldo II, Duke of Urbino, with timber, the duke’s agent in Venice, Giovanni Francesco Agatone, began complaining about Titian’s cupidity. ‘He does nothing other than demand money,’ he wrote in 1564. And two years later, ‘as I have written before, when it comes to money, [Titian] is the most obstinate man’. And in 1567, ‘there is no more obstinate man in Venice than Tiziano Vecellio. And his son, certainly in terms of avarice, is in no way inferior to his father.’
Fifteen-sixty-two, the year of the last self-portrait we have of him, also saw the first publication of Titian’s impresa, one of the devices printed in the period to honour great men with a motto, short poem and metaphorical illustration. Titian’s impresa appeared in an engraved anthology of such devices with verses by Lodovico Dolce.4 It bears the motto ‘NATVRA POTENTIOR ARS’ (Art is more powerful than nature), and a doggerel verse by Dolce, which concludes with the lines ‘But TITIAN, thanks to great fortune,/has defeated art, genius and nature’. The theme of Titian as godlike creator of a new nature was by then a commonplace, a stale trope for a quality of his paintings that is difficult to define even with today’s more sophisticated critical vocabulary. We would probably settle for Truth, the complex, ambiguous truth that we recognize only in the work of the greatest artists. The text is illustrated by the apparently incongruous image of a she-bear and cub, which would have made sense to educated contemporaries as a metaphor for artistic creativity inspired by ancient biographies of Virgil in which the poet was routinely described as gradually licking his works into shape just as a mother bear gives shape to her formless offspring. Dolce may also have chosen it to emphasize Titian’s sprezzatura, the contemporary word for the time and labour that goes into apparently effortless achievements.
Another event of 1562 that concerned Titian was the commissioning of the last remaining pictures of the Alexandrine cycle in the Great Council Hall, which were given to Veronese, Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio, each of whom was to be paid 100 ducats.5 Titian, out of respect for his standing and his age, had been relieved of official duties in the ducal palace but was permitted to continue drawing his sanseria, the brokerage on the Salt Office worth 100 ducats per annum, for life. Since Orazio, whose subject was the Battle of the Forces of the Emperor Barbarossa and the Roman Barons near Castel Sant’Angelo, was not in the same league as Veronese and Tintoretto it is likely that Titian had used his influence to obtain for him the highly prestigious job and stood over his shoulder while he executed it. Vasari reported that ‘some people said’ that Orazio had help from Titian. But from Titian’s stunning drawing of a Horse and Rider (Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung),6 made for Orazio’s guidance in black chalk on squared blue paper, it looks more as though the old master was not just helping but trying to pump something of his own genius and vitality into the son who would one day take his place at the head of the studio.
Relations with Pomponio were for the time being on an even keel after years of effort on the part of the Church authorities to settle the differences between father and son over the benefices of Medole and Sant’Andrea di Favaro, which Titian had acquired for Pomponio but tried to appropriate. In August 1563 an agreement was drawn up and signed by the papal legate in Venice according to which Pomponio’s ownership of the benefices was acknowledged but which gave Titian power of attorney to manage, use and profit from them in return for the very handsome monthly payment to his son of twenty-five ducats. Soon afterwards, on 18 October, Pomponio took major orders, which entailed a sacred vow never to renounce the priesthood and the obligation to officiate at mass and care for souls. Four decades earlier Titian, rejoicing at the arrival of a healthy firstborn boy, may have allowed himself to dream that the baby in his mother’s arms would one day wear the red hat. By now, however, it was enough that Pomponio had at least committed himself to the priesthood. What Titian may not have noticed was that Pomponio, well rewarded though he was by their agreement, continued to resent his father’s condescension, and perhaps all the more now that he was a fully qualified priest.
Overbearing, shortsighted and selfish though he could be as a father, Titian was
unfailingly loyal to his friends. He had done everything he could to help Jacopo Sansovino when the vault of his library of St Mark had collapsed in 1546 and to promote Aretino’s embarrassing bids for a cardinal’s hat. In 1563 Titian’s close friends the mosaicists Francesco and Valerio Zuccato found themselves in trouble. A rival mosaicist, one Vincenzo Bianchini, with whom the Zuccati brothers had been engaged in a long-standing feud, denounced them for using paper and paint to cover a mistake in the representation of some towers in a mosaic of the Vision of St John the Evangelist at Patmos. The Byzantine art of mosaic was still taken very seriously in High Renaissance Venice, and the work in question occupied a prominent position in the great vault of the loggia where the four gilded Roman horses were displayed. The mosaic was completely remade in the late nineteenth century, but the minutes of the investigation of the Zuccati’s original survive intact, giving us one of the rare opportunities to hear Titian’s voice reported verbatim.
On 22 May a procurator, who was unwell and unable to climb up to the loggia to see the mosaic for himself, came to the basilica accompanied by a group of artists including Titian, Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea Schiavone, Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. Titian, on account of his seniority, was the chief witness: ‘I say to you that as regards the art of mosaic I see nothing better, by which I mean all the works in the church which were made in past times and which are exposed to view, nor do I recognize any defects in them. But because I do not have much experience in the art of mosaic, I do not want to involve myself in talking about what I do not know …’ This was disingenuous. Titian’s studio had been designing mosaics for the Zuccati for more than three decades. Asked if he had any vested interest in their work he made no attempt to conceal his friendship with the brothers: ‘I have been friendly with the Zuccati for very many years and Master Francesco stood as godfather when I had my little girl [a daughter by his first wife Cecilia] baptized, who died … It is true that they said to me, “Look what calumny this is!” and so I said to them that justice would not be wanting, as they had done no wrong, and I eat and drink with Master Valerio for the sake of good company.’ When the procurator put it to him, ‘Are the mosaics well or badly executed?’, he replied, ‘About that I leave the decision to these young painters.’ The painters were unanimous in their opinion that the papering was a trivial matter that did not compromise the beauty of the mosaic. Nevertheless, the Zuccati were found guilty. Francesco was given the opportunity to restore his reputation. Valerio, who, Titian admitted, had spent his days at his boutique at Santi Filippo e Giacomo cutting the gold tiles over which the paper and paint would be applied, was forbidden by the procurator in charge of the investigation to continue practising as a mosaicist.