by Sheila Hale
Ridolfi tells us that Titian painted two portraits of Francesco Zuccato, one with a self-portrait. A painting formerly at Cobham Hall in Kent, in which a heavily bearded man looks with keen interest over the shoulder of a version of the Berlin self-portrait, is sometimes said to be a studio or posthumous copy of the painting mentioned by Ridolfi but has never been taken seriously by scholars. In the other, according to Ridolfi, Titian portrayed Francesco as Simon of Cyrene helping Christ to carry the cross to Golgotha. There are two versions of Titian’s late Christ Carrying the Cross (St Petersburg, Hermitage and Madrid, Prado), both usually dated 1565–70, both painted over abandoned compositions, as was Titian’s wont in these years. In these paintings Titian applied his mature sense of tragedy to the subject he had painted for the church of San Rocco at the start of his career. Now, more than five decades later, he brought the face of the exhausted Christ to the front of the picture where He gazes at us with tearful bloodshot eyes while shouldering the burden of the cross painted at a steep diagonal. Although we can’t be certain that the figure of Simon of Cyrene is the portrait of Francesco Zuccato mentioned by Ridolfi, his noble, well-characterized head and the ring he wears on his thumb do indicate that it is a portrait of someone.
Titian took Valerio Zuccato under his wing and may have employed him as an apprentice painter. (At any rate Valerio witnessed various documents for him in Venice or Pieve di Cadore.) The workshop in Biri Grande was now run as a highly efficient business turning out the copies, variants and paraphrases of Titian’s originals that had become status objects in their own right, especially if Titian added the few convincing strokes of his own that were known in Venice, according to Marco Boschini, as ‘the icing on the cake’. The quality of the surviving studio works varies greatly depending on how much work Titian put into them. Sometimes he would make a brush drawing to be finished by an assistant; or he would paint or repaint certain passages, which shine out from otherwise dull studio replicas. The master had gathered round him a stable team of assistants, of whom the most important in the coming years would be Emanuel Amberger, the son of Christoph Amberger who had repaired the Portrait of Charles V on Horseback in Augsburg. Although Emanuel is first documented as being in the workshop in 1565 he may have arrived several years earlier, perhaps after the death of his father in 1562 when he was in his early thirties and therefore a mature painter. In the coming years he would stay on as the most valued member of the studio, living in Biri Grande as part of the family. Titian’s young cousin Marco Vecellio, the son of Toma Tito, may have come for a while as an apprentice in the late 1550s. After joining the core team in 1565 at the age of twenty he was given the unenviable task of collecting payments, and his career as an independent painter did not take off until after Titian’s death. Girolamo Dente, having combined four decades of service to Titian with a career as an autonomous painter on the mainland, seems to have been in the process of freeing himself from the master’s shadow while still relying on the valuable connection for commissions.
It had become common practice in the workshop to keep ricordi – sketches on squared paper, small oil versions, perhaps cartoons – of original works that could be copied, with variations and perhaps a few finishing strokes of his own, to meet the demands of the market.7 Titian or one of his assistants would copy or trace the main outlines of the template on to a new canvas in chalk or charcoal, and these could then be developed into multiple versions with some alterations added at the final stage. Titian signed some of them, or his assistants signed themselves as his alumni, or forged his signature. Works largely or partly executed by the studio come on to the market even today, and fetch good prices, although not of course as high as originals.
The clearest example of how the system worked is provided by the Reclining Venus series, which was derived from the original Titian had taken on his first visit to Augsburg as a gift for Charles V and executed over the following fifteen years or so.8 All the Venuses lie on a couch in a villa in the Veneto in front of a window overlooking a formal garden or mountain landscape. Opinion is divided about whether the lost original looked more like the Venus and Cupid with a Partridge in the Florence Uffizi9 or like the Venus and Organist in the Madrid Prado.10 The Uffizi version is the only one of the group that does not include a musician. In all the others an organist or lutanist serenades the naked woman, no doubt with one of the sexually explicit madrigals of the time, while gazing back at her with evident lust. Cupid is present in all but the Madrid Venus and Organist, which was painted, possibly as a marriage picture, for a Paduan lawyer, who would have been familiar with the Venetian tradition of pretty girls portrayed without the classical alibi of a Cupid.11 The three organists, who from the direction of their gazes appear to be in the early stages of seduction, have different faces. The identical young lutanists, in what are probably the last two paintings in the series, apparently celebrate the aftermath of love as they look up at Venus being crowned by Cupid. Titian’s favourite breed of spaniel, familiar from the Venus of Urbino and other pictures, reappears in some. All of the girls wear identical gold bracelets, one on each wrist, a fashion that persists today with well-born women from the Veneto and Friuli.
From the 1560s on the paintings that emerged from Biri Grande are – with the notable exceptions of those sent to Philip II of Spain – difficult to date, and their quality varies, usually depending on the degree of Titian’s involvement. There are fewer large, complex narratives, more replicas and variants, and more variants and paraphrases of earlier subjects. The master was slowing down. Although there had always been days when he simply did not feel up to painting, they came more often now. In the 1550s a Florentine physician, Filippo Capponi,12 who was curious about the temperaments and working habits of artists, had interviewed the musician Adriano Willaert, Michelangelo the sculptor and Titian the painter. Titian had confessed that on some days he enjoyed painting but on others he did not. He could not explain the cause of these variations in the will to work but he wished he could be freed of the difficulty, which on bad days was beyond his control.13 Capponi was ahead of his times in advocating the idea that health is influenced by behaviour and diet rather than by the stars. Other contemporaries would have diagnosed Titian’s problem days as symptoms of the conjunction of certain planets. Nevertheless, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that by the 1560s Titian was simply getting old. In 1564 he had to retreat temporarily from his long-standing and doggedly repeated claim on the Neapolitan corn granted to him by Charles V, because he had absentmindedly lost the receipt. More often now he combed through his store of paintings begun and discarded over the years, finished them or gave them to his studio to finish, or reused the canvases as supports for new paintings.
There is a division of opinion about the degree of Titian’s participation in the Annunciation (Venice, Church of San Salvatore), the last of his several treatments of the subject and still in situ in Jacopo Sansovino’s stone frame over the altar for which it was commissioned in May 1559 by Antonio Cornovi della Vecchia, who ordered a painting by Titian of ‘the Incarnation of our Lord’. Some connoisseurs admire the San Salvatore Annunciation as a magnificent example of the late style; others cite what they see as inept drawing and murky colours as evidence that it must be largely a studio work.14 Vasari, who interviewed Titian in 1566 soon after it was finished, reported that Titian himself did not much care for it or for the Transfiguration of Christ, which was probably ordered separately by the Augustinian canons of the church as a weekday cover for a medieval silver-gilt reredos and is still over the high altar although in very bad condition. Both, in Vasari’s opinion, ‘have some good aspects’, but ‘in fact fall short of the perfection of his other pictures’.
A third painting for San Salvatore, a Crucifixion, was ordered from Titian at the same time by the Flemish merchant Giovanni d’Anna for his family altar directly across the nave from that of the Cornovi. Both the d’Annas and the Cornovi had made large fortunes in the textile trade, and Titian h
ad a personal connection with them both through the Scuola di San Rocco of which all three were members. In 1558 he had delivered his superb Ancona Crucifixion to Antonio’s first cousin Pietro Cornovi della Vecchia. He was godfather to Giovanni d’Anna’s son, and had painted the Ecce Homo and other pictures for the family palace. Titian was thus the obvious choice for both, and the interior of San Salvatore, which, after a major reconstruction completed by Jacopo Sansovino in the 1530s, was (and is) one of the most impressive in the city, was the ideal place for two wealthy cittadini merchants, who would have spent a lot of time at the nearby German warehouse and were aware that showing off their piety and patronage was a way of confirming their status in the city and perhaps even gaining admittance to the patriciate. Sadly the d’Anna family fell on hard times after Giovanni’s death; construction of the altar was suspended, and Titian’s Crucifixion, which may or may not have been finished,15 disappeared.16
Given the prestige of the church and Titian’s personal connection with Cornovi it seems unlikely that he would have given this Annunciation entirely to assistants. It could be that its muddy tonality and some clumsy passages such as the angel flying on his stomach at the top of the picture, are due to an intrusive restoration mentioned by Ridolfi. It may have been that same restorer who overpainted Titian’s original signature ‘FACIEBAT’, a trope that he had used many years earlier for the Averoldi polyptych in Brescia, with the words ‘FECIT FECIT’. Ridolfi attributed the repetition to Titian’s intention to force the patron, who, so he said, failed to appreciate the altarpiece, to acknowledge his scarce understanding of the art of painting. For the next three and a half centuries it was interpreted as an assertion of the master’s awareness of his miraculous creativity even in his old age – ‘I made it. I made it’ – and was the single most famous aspect of the painting, until a technical examination in the late twentieth century revealed Titian’s more conventional original signature, ‘I was making it’.
The unusual iconography of the San Salvatore Annunciation may have been inspired by Aretino’s Life of the Virgin Mary in which Mary ‘drank with her mouth of the desire and grace of all the splendour that burned in her womb without burning’. The inscription in the bottom-right corner of the picture, ‘IGNIS ARDENS NON COMBVRENS’ (The fire that burns but does not consume), refers to the burning bush that was not consumed by its flames from which God called out to Moses, an episode that prefigures the Incarnation of Christ and which is illustrated on the step above the inscription by the burning leaves in the crystal vase that signifies the ancient Christian dogma that Mary’s virginity remained intact during and after the birth of Christ. A burly angel Gabriel, his profile slightly turned away from the viewer, stomps towards Mary arms crossed and without proffering the usual lily. The crossed arms are normally given to the Virgin, and X-rays show that the angel annunciate was originally painted with arms outstretched and palms down. But Gabriel’s crossed arms, far from indicating humility, have the reverse effect of making him look all the more aggressive, while Mary, her face borrowed from one of Jacopo Bassano’s peasant Madonnas, opens her arms in an attitude that seems more like apprehension or even self-defence than joyful amazement at what this hulking messenger is about to do to her. It is, as one art historian17 has put it, as though Titian ‘is showing us that we do not fully grasp the message of the announcing angel until we recognise, as Mary manifestly does, that it involves, amongst other things, a fierce assault on a woman’s body’. The aggressive masculinity of Gabriel and the feminine receptivity of Mary are further emphasized by the angels that swarm around the dove of the Holy Spirit, little naked boys above the angel annunciate and older clothed girls above Mary.
It has been proposed that the painting carries a hidden message about heterodox religious opinions supposedly harboured by Titian and other heretical Venetians who doubted the central Catholic dogma of the Virgin Birth.18 The hypothesis seems unlikely given that the San Salvatore Annunciation was one of a small selection of his paintings that Titian later chose to have engraved for mass circulation and that he was on excellent terms with high-ranking prelates of the Church with whom he often dined. It is true that one of his tenants, a writer from Brescia by the name of Andrea di Ugoni, had had problems with the Inquisition from the mid-1540s. But when in 1565 he was summoned again he confessed to heretical beliefs but recanted, and was permitted to return to Titian’s house, which would not have been allowed if there had been the slightest doubt about Titian’s own orthodox faith.
Although the question of studio participation in the San Salvatore Annunciation may never be resolved, it should be borne in mind that Titian’s contemporaries did not always make the same distinction between studio and autograph paintings that began to concern collectors in the seventeenth century. One case in point is the little St Nicholas of Bari (Venice, Church of San Sebastiano) in which the saint accompanied by a figure holding his bishop’s crown appears to be addressing an imaginary audience in the stall of a cathedral choir. It was delivered to the patron, a lawyer Niccolò Crasso – for whom Titian had painted a portrait and a version of his Venus with a Mirror (St Petersburg, Hermitage) – by 1563 when Crasso dedicated the altar to his name saint. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, writing as early as 1877, recognized it as an admirable studio work probably largely by Orazio and other assistants, and it is possible that Crasso also accepted that his altarpiece was not entirely autograph. Titian could be cavalier even with commissions from potentially useful men. Later in the 1560s Cardinal Michele Bonelli, an influential member of the Curia, ordered a painting of St Catherine of Alexandria. Although Cardinal Bonelli was well placed to help him exchange Pomponio’s living at Sant’Andrea di Favaro for the richer living of San Pietro in Colle, it seems that Titian or an assistant merely adapted the figure of the Virgin in an abandoned Annunciation that had been in the studio for some time. Nevertheless, when the cardinal received his St Catherine of Alexandria (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) in 1568 he professed himself delighted with the clumsy result.
Not all clients were as easily satisfied. When in 1564 the town councillors of Brescia ordered three ceiling paintings for the council hall of the communal palace, Titian went to Brescia where he signed a contract according to which he was paid an advance of 150 ducats, the final price to be determined by a commission after the completion of the work. The canvases were to represent an Allegory of Brescia, Ceres and Bacchus, and the Forge of Vulcan, the latter a reference to Brescia as a centre of the manufacture of arms and weapons, and it was stipulated that they should be entirely by Titian’s own hand. Titian failed, however, to anticipate that a committee of provincial town councillors might be less forgiving than individual patrons like Crasso and Bonelli. When Orazio delivered the paintings in the winter of 1568 the councillors, certain they were the work of assistants, refused to pay more than 1,000 ducats for them. Orazio refused the payment, and Titian continued to insist that he had fulfilled the terms of the contract. He appealed to the Bishop of Brescia, to his friend Cristoforo Rosa, the Brescian painter of illusionist frames; he sent Orazio and his young relative Marco Vecellio to negotiate with the councillors. In the end he backed down from a threat to take the matter to arbitration, which suggests that the councillors may have been correct in their suspicions. There is no way of telling because the paintings went up in flames in 1575; and the only evidence we have of their appearance is an engraving by Cornelis Cort of The Forge of Vulcan and a sheet of drawings by Rubens after preparatory drawings for the Allegory of Brescia.
Titian certainly did not regard the Brescia paintings as a priority. At the time of the commission he was at work on two paintings for Philip; and in the autumn of 1565, shortly after he had acknowledged his final instructions from the town councillors of Brescia, he travelled home to Pieve di Cadore to discuss a commission there. Leaving Orazio behind to mind the studio and explain the delays to the Brescia paintings – it was too hot, it was too cold, the varnish wouldn’t dry – he took with him Emanuel Amberg
er and Valerio Zuccato, who were joined by Marco Vecellio. Titian and the assistants were in his house in Pieve on 1 October to witness his creation, by right of his power as knight palatine, of Fausto Vecellio as a notary. The purpose of the visit was to inspect and measure the chancel of the parish church of Santa Maria Nascente which was to be entirely decorated with frescos on a Marian theme executed by the assistants to designs that would be made by Titian after he returned to Venice with the measurements. The project was completed in 1567 after Titian agreed to drop his price from 500 to 200 ducats, which was financed by public subscription, the first instalment being paid in lieu of cash with fifty cartloads of timber.19