by Sheila Hale
Titian in the meantime had not neglected his unsolicited promise to devote the remaining years of his life to providing the King of Spain with paintings. Although the Rape of Europa marks the end of his brief Indian summer, he would send eight more paintings to Spain. Although they are almost the only works to leave his studio in the last years of his life that we can be certain he considered to be finished, these last paintings for Philip were largely ignored by art historians and by the public until the early twenty-first century when some were shown in public exhibitions.20 Before that Spain was by and large off the map for art historians, who were more drawn to Italy, the fountainhead of Renaissance art. Most of the late paintings for Philip were in any case locked away in the Escorial where they were difficult to access. Although some are in bad condition they look, on the whole, more finished or less apparently experimental than the pictures he did not send to Philip and for that reason are treated by some scholars as touchstones in the debate about Titian’s stylistic intentions in the last years of his life.
Titian’s correspondence with Philip and Philip’s about Titian to his ministers in Italy and Spain are well preserved. In the aftermath of Cateau-Cambrésis and the beginning of a steady flow of silver from the Americas, the king was in a position to pay Titian on a more regular basis than previously, and when payments were delayed it was not for lack of effort on Philip’s part to speed on his reluctant officials. Under those circumstances Titian’s continual demands for money, and his habit of withholding paintings Philip had never requested in the first place until the next payment arrived, his pleas of poverty and exaggerated old age may seem to us, as they did to some of his contemporaries, to be indications of encroaching senility. If so, Philip, the desk-bound bureaucrat who maintained that he ruled half the world with two inches of paper, never suggested that Titian was unreasonable. Overworked though he was, his passion for art never dimmed, and he would continue as he had begun to encourage Titian and to do everything in his power to support his claims.
TWO
The Spider King
God has turned into a Spaniard.
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN SAYING ABOUT PHILIP II OF SPAIN
After his return from Flanders in the summer of 1559 Philip II never again set foot outside Spain. From now on he spent his days at one or another of his desks in Castile, the centre of the Iberian peninsula – like a spider, so it was said, motionless at the centre of its web – toiling over mountains of documents: issuing or annotating hundreds of reports each day, studying maps, calculating numbers and troop movements, transferring bullion and bills of exchange. Le roi paperassier had been recalled to his kingdom by American silver, and as more bullion flowed faster from his mines in Mexico, Peru and the Caribbean the axis of financial and economic power in Europe shifted westward away from the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic with Spain at its hub. It was from Spain that the ‘Catholic King’ played the primary role in calling the last session of the Council of Trent. When it rose in December 1563 Philip’s Spain was established as the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation. Protestants who suffered from his brutal enforcement of orthodox Catholicism called him the demon of the south, but for his Spanish subjects he was their Solomon, their Prudent King – two views of this complex ruler that persist to this day.
He was a well-informed, dogged and in many ways a talented bureaucrat, who had been well trained to take over the enormous empire passed on to him by a father he revered and desperately tried to emulate. But Philip had a weaker character than Charles, and his health suffered under the stress of his responsibilities, as well as an unhealthy diet after his return to Spain: in 1563 he had his first attack of the gout that had plagued his father. His blinkered piety, obsession with detail, inability to speak foreign languages, indecisiveness and failure to travel to his foreign dominions left him too often unable to see the wood for the trees. He preferred soft slippery words in his ear to strong decisive advice, and thus fell victim to factionalism at his court, which had hardened during the revolt of the comuneros in the first years of Charles’s reign and would flare up again over his own policy of repressing heretics in the Netherlands.
Philip ascended the throne of Spain in a Europe that was fundamentally changed by the abdication of his father. Charles V had presided over an unwieldy, outmoded empire, which, after his abdication and decision to partition his inheritance between Philip and his brother Ferdinand I, served no purpose. Without the unifying force of one all-powerful personality European governments in the second half of the century focused inwards and exercised more control over their subjects, a cause for discontent and factionalism in the upper classes, as well as among the over-taxed poor, whose numbers increased disproportionately as populations swelled in the peace that followed Cateau-Cambrésis. Expanded government activity required the support of enlarged civil services, but since few could afford to pay their officers living wages, corrupt practices – from fees for favours to outright bribes and the sale of offices – were tacitly accepted. With domestic problems taking precedence over foreign relations, the age of ambassadors began drawing gradually to a close as high-ranking diplomats were replaced by lesser men employed to gather information or to spy rather than to negotiate. Inflation soared, fuelled by the inflow of American bullion and the Habsburg habit of living on credit; and as usual it was the unemployed poor who suffered most from the price revolution. The widespread appeal of militant Calvinism threatened all weak governments, but most disastrously from Philip’s point of view those of France, his monolithic and powerful neighbour, and of the Netherlands, an important market for Spanish commodities, which would come to rival Venice as a centre of diamond cutting and publishing, and whose port of Antwerp was beginning to replace Venice as the most active in Europe.
Philip’s struggle to control a scattered empire that was calculated by contemporaries to be twenty times the size of the ancient Roman Empire was compounded by the problem of distance. The Habsburgs had perfected a courier and postal system that was unprecedented for speed and efficiency, but it was never fast enough to keep up with events: messages between Castile and Brussels took at least three weeks, and eight months or more to and from Peru. Nor was it perfectly reliable, as Titian had learned when his first Entombment for Philip went astray. The peace settlement at Cateau-Cambrésis had an added benefit of allowing Philip’s envoys and troops to travel through France, a country that had been closed to Charles V during his perpetual wars with the Valois kings. But the French were still openly in alliance with the Turks, who continued to threaten Spanish Sicily and Spain itself from their satellite bases in North Africa. The behaviour of Philip’s mother-in-law the Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici, furthermore, was cause for grave concern. Catherine, determined to retain power until her son the future Charles IX was old enough to rule, oscillated in her support between Catholics and Huguenots, and refused Philip’s offer of troops to crack down on the Huguenot heretics. Explaining her conciliatory position in a letter to Rome, she wrote, ‘It is impossible to reduce either by arms or by law those who are separated from the Roman Church, so great is their number.’ In March 1562, three months after she had in fact issued an edict of toleration of the Huguenots, religious tension in France erupted into war when a Huguenot congregation at Vassy was massacred by Catholics. It was the first civil war France had known for a century, and the first of eight religious wars that would be fought there throughout the rest of Philip’s reign.
Philip was obsessed by the spread of Calvinism, which he saw as an international conspiracy, and as the financial position of the Crown improved he set his sights on the Netherlands, a hotbed of heresy and rebellion, which as far as he was concerned were one and the same. Although Charles had always wanted religious reform in the Netherlands he knew it would have to be incremental. He had also understood the value of stroking egos, and had a genuine bond with the Burgundian high aristocracy through his childhood in Ghent and the Order of the Golden Fleece. Philip had no such sym
pathies. He had always been suspicious of what was to him an alien culture and his feelings were returned in full measure. Margaret of Parma, illegitimate daughter of the late emperor and also born in the Netherlands, would have made a good governor in normal times. Described by contemporaries as of masculine appearance, she was a woman of considerable abilities although lacking the sensitive political antennae of her aunt Mary of Hungary, and she did what she could to persuade Philip that his repressive measures were doing more harm than good. But the appointment of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle as prime minister of her Council of State proved a disaster. The aristocracy, led by the Prince of Orange, richest of the Netherlands magnates and a favourite of the late emperor, were insulted by the power invested in a foreign commoner who seemed the personification of royal absolutism. They appealed to Philip for his removal, stirred up popular feeling against him, refused to attend meetings of the Council of State as long as he presided. In 1564 Philip reluctantly ‘authorized’ Cardinal Granvelle ‘to visit his mother in Burgundy’. But the king continued to seek his advice about the Netherlands and a year later sent him to Rome to look after Spanish interests there.
The situation in the Netherlands worsened after Granvelle’s removal when a financial crisis left Margaret in a difficult position. She was unable to pay her officials or troops, and her authority deteriorated, opening the way to Calvinist preachers who spread in increasing numbers into the northern provinces from their base in the south. They were particularly successful in areas where there was high unemployment but also made converts among members of the minor nobility, who deplored the Spanish persecution and burnings of their fellow citizens and sympathized with calls for independence from Spain. Philip instructed Margaret to enforce edicts against heretics and the Netherlands Inquisition. In April 1566 a league of minor noblemen, who called their movement the Compromise because many of them were Catholics, rode to Brussels to present a petition against the government’s religious policy. But they were a minority and for the time being succeeded only in earning themselves the nickname of ‘beggars’. The real revolution started with the lower classes in the towns where the wages of unskilled workers had not kept up with inflation. There was famine in Antwerp, where the cathedral was devastated by the rebels. The Calvinists were making thousands of converts. Rioting rebels broke into churches, smashing pictures, statues and altars. Margaret managed to calm the situation by promising to abolish the Inquisition. The Prince of Orange, who was compromised in the eyes of both Catholics and Calvinists by his attempts to pursue a moderate policy, fled to Germany and began raising an army. The majority of the high nobility, however, including Orange’s friends the Counts Egmont and Hoorn, took new oaths of loyalty to the king.
Granvelle, the Duke of Alba and the new pope Pius V advised Philip to persist with his hard line, but also urgently recommended that he visit Brussels in person. Philip dithered: he was suffering from severe headaches; his wife Elizabeth de Valois was pregnant and ill. He determined to go, he promised to go, but there was always a reason not to. In the summer of 1566 he decided to send his best general, the Duke of Alba, hero of Charles V’s victory at Mühlberg, to reassert Spanish authority in the Netherlands. Margaret objected, and there were serious doubts in Madrid about the wisdom of committing military resources so far from the main enemy, the Turk. But Philip, lulled into a sense of false security by the death in that year of Suleiman the Magnificent and the succession to the sultanate of Suleiman’s debauched son Selim II, persisted. ‘I neither intend nor desire to be the ruler of heretics,’ he wrote to his ambassador in Rome. ‘If things cannot be remedied as I wish without recourse to arms, I am determined to go to war.’ The Iron Duke arrived in Brussels on 22 August 1567 at the head of an army of Spanish soldiers and effectively took over from Margaret, who resigned in protest against his brutal measures. Alba set up a new court, the Council of Troubles, which over the next several years tried and condemned some 12,000 rebels. He was soon known as ‘the butcher of Flanders’ and his Council of Troubles as the Council of Blood. Egmont and Hoorn, guilty only by previous association with the Prince of Orange, who was sponsoring periodic raids from Germany, were arrested. Philip waived their privilege as Knights of the Golden Fleece to be tried by their peers; and in June 1568 they were executed in the Grand Place of Brussels. The executions of Philip’s brother knights, men who had, moreover, been instrumental in planning the victory of Saint-Quentin, sent shockwaves throughout Europe.
Philip meanwhile had returned to a kingdom that he recognized as a cultural backwater, and was determined to create a civilized royal court that would be a centre of humanist learning and compete with the great palaces and gardens he had seen in Italy, England, southern Germany and the Netherlands. Previous Castilian rulers had held an itinerant court that moved from one major city to another. Philip broke that tradition in 1561 when he moved to Madrid with Elizabeth de Valois and let it be known that Madrid would be his capital city and the permanent seat of his court. It was a surprising choice for the most powerful monarch in Europe. Charles V had recommended Toledo, the residence of the archbishop primate; Valladolid or Burgos, which were legal and commercial centres, would have been acceptable alternatives. Madrid, by contrast, was nothing more than a dusty, squalid village of some 12,000 residents huddled around its medieval fortress, the Alcázar, in the inhospitable climate of the dry Castilian tableland. The reasons for his choice of Madrid, which seemed puzzling at the time, remain obscure. It was geographically at the heart of the Iberian peninsula with his favourite royal palaces and hunting lodges within easy distance, but it was far from the ports that received American bullion. The main attraction may have been the very insignificance of Madrid, as well as its proximity to forests and granite quarries, which allowed him to indulge his addiction to building. Although he transformed the Alcázar into an imposing Italianate palace, which spelled the end of Mudéjar architecture in Spain, he never devised a proper town plan for his capital, which was developed haphazardly as and when needed to accommodate a rapidly expanding population.
Instead he indulged his passion for gardens, building and forest conservation at the ring of palaces around Madrid – Valsaín, Aranjuez, El Pardo, Toledo – which comprised an area of royal residences without equal in Europe. But Philip’s grandest project, and still the best place to understand his dour personality, love of splendour and ideals as defender in chief of the Counter-Reformation, is the great grim granite monastery and palace that he built from scratch on a slope of the windswept Sierra Guadarrama near the small town of Escorial forty-three kilometres north-west of Madrid. He dedicated the Escorial to the Spanish-born St Lawrence on whose feast day, 10 August, his armies at Saint-Quentin had won his only military victory; and he instructed his architect Joan Bautista de Toledo, who had been trained in Rome, to adopt a plan roughly in the shape of the gridiron upon which St Lawrence was roasted alive. Even before the foundation stone was laid in 1562 he defied his father’s explicit wishes that his remains and Titian’s Adoration of the Trinity should remain in perpetuity at Yuste by transporting them to the Escorial where he intended to found the mausoleum that would be the pantheon of the Spanish Habsburgs. In the decades before the complex was finished in 1595 Philip supervised every detail of its construction and interior arrangements, searching the world for rare books and original codices for a library that was intended to establish Spain as a centre of humanist learning, covering its walls with paintings and frescos. Titian was by no means the only foreign artist who received his favour. Philip was an enthusiastic collector of Bosch; the Fleming Anthonis Mor became his court painter around 1560 and was succeeded in that role by his Spanish pupil Alonso Sánchez Coello. A host of lesser-known Flemish and Italian painters were summoned to Spain. Philip’s Spanish subjects called the Escorial the eighth wonder of the world.
This then was Philip’s situation when Titian sent his next paintings to Spain. One was a Last Supper (Madrid, Escorial), which Titian, writing on 28 July 15
63, announced would be ready for delivery in a few days. It was a painting, he wrote, upon which he had been working for six years and was ‘perhaps one of the most laborious and important that I ever did for Your Majesty’; and might he beg His Majesty most humbly to console him about the Neapolitan corn ‘which was granted to me so long ago by the glorious memory of Caesar’, likewise for the promised pension from Pomponio’s naturalization in Spain, and would His Majesty deign to write to the Duke of Sessa about the pension due from the chamber of Milan, ‘of which I have not had a quatrino for more than four years’? On 6 December, having heard nothing from the king, he wrote again begging for ‘a sign if not a letter’ from His Majesty, which ‘would add ten years to my life and be an incitement to send with a more joyful heart the Last Supper of which I wrote on previous occasions’.
Three months later, on 8 March 1564, Philip acknowledged receipt of Titian’s letters in a packet addressed to García Hernández, to whom he wrote that he would be glad to receive the Last Supper (Madrid, Escorial) now that it was finished. He also enclosed a letter to Titian with copies of his orders made that day to the governor of Milan and to the viceroy of Naples to settle his claims over the pension and the grant to export corn from Naples. In the same post came a letter to Titian from Antonio Pérez, the illegitimate son of Gonzalo who was bedridden with gout. The younger Pérez at twenty-four was dapper, vain, greedy, ambitious and, as it would transpire, a corrupt courtier, who had studied at Padua and Venice and was already beginning to take charge of Italian affairs. Philip distrusted him at first, and split Gonzalo’s job between Antonio and another courtier. Although the king’s instinct would prove correct years later when it was discovered that Antonio was selling state secrets, after his father’s death in 1566 he became Philip’s most powerful secretary, wielding considerable and in the end baleful influence on the king while making himself a rich man.1 Pérez assured Titian that when the Supper arrived he would see to it that the king sent a suitable acknowledgement. But when Hernández replied to Philip on 16 April 1564 he had to report that the Last Supper was not finished after all, and that Titian was prepared to drop his claim on the Naples corn because he was an old man and could not find or remember the relevant documents. Titian promised that the Supper would be ready in May. May came and went, and on 11 June it transpired that it would not be completed for another three months.