by Sheila Hale
The casket was a trivial matter compared to Titian’s ambitious plan to sell to the emperor Maximilian II, whom he had already provided with an Allegory of Religion, a group of studio paintings, which he intended to pass off as his own. We know what they were from a letter sent to the emperor by the imperial ambassador in Venice, Veit von Dornberg, written on 28 November 1568 in which he mentions that Titian could provide paintings of Diana and Endymion, Actaeon at the fountain, the death of Actaeon, the pregnancy of Callisto, Adonis killed by a boar, Andromeda freed by Perseus, and Europa on the bull. The ambassador said he was passing on information received directly from Titian and that the list was in the hand of Orazio, who sent an identical menu to Maximilian’s brother-in-law Albrecht V of Bavaria. Three of the subjects sound as though they were copies of Philip’s poesie, but the only surviving paintings that might have been on the list are the Death of Actaeon (London, National Gallery), possibly the painting he had promised Philip in 1559 but never finished or sent to Spain, and the simplified variant of Diana and Callisto (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), on the back of which an outline design of Philip’s Diana and Callisto can still be seen where it was traced from a studio record on to a new canvas. (Since the technique of that variant bears some resemblance to Girolamo Dente’s autonomous paintings, he has been proposed as the most likely painter.)
Dente, if it was he, made a number of changes to the original, which had the effect of taming as well as simplifying it. Callisto’s swollen belly is now lightly veiled, and the naked, triumphant nymph who betrayed her by ripping off her clothes is clothed and half kneeling. The nymph at Diana’s feet has disappeared, and the goddess’s hunting hounds have been replaced by a lapdog. In place of the pillar with fictive relief carvings of Actaeon’s punishment there is a meaningless fountain with a statue of the goddess. The modifications cancelled the sense of tension that is so remarkable in the original, but the most striking difference at first sight is the treatment of the girls’ flesh, which is rendered in a smooth pedantic manner that bears no resemblance to the broken brushwork and shadowy tonality of Titian’s original. The variant of Diana and Callisto had probably been in the studio for some years waiting for a suitable buyer. Titian kept the Death of Actaeon in his studio and continued to work on it for the rest of his life. There is no trace of the other pictures on the list, which may never have been executed after the emperor replied to Dornberg that he thought Titian was too old to paint.
Titian engaged Jacopo Strada, adviser to the imperial court and the most successful dealer of the day, to help him clinch the sale; and in lieu of a commission painted Strada’s portrait. He had all but given up portraiture by this time, and this is the last of his surviving portraits and one of the few that are even documented from his later years. But if there is a painting that confounds the rumours that Titian could no longer see or paint it is this vigorous, intensely observed Portrait of Jacopo Strada (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). Jacopo Strada was a painter, architect, goldsmith and numismatist, as well as a dealer. Born in Mantua around 1515, he had trained there as a goldsmith in Giulio Romano’s workshop. Later, in Rome, where he was employed by Pope Julius III, he bought up the entire contents of Perino del Vaga’s studio. His career as a dealer took off in Nuremberg where he became acquainted with Hans Jacob Fugger; and he went on to serve three successive Habsburg emperors, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II. By the late 1560s he was wealthy enough to build himself a magnificent palace/museum in Vienna, and was designing for Albrecht of Bavaria an antiquarium in Munich – the earliest part of the residence is still the most splendid palace north of the Alps – for which he acquired the Roman sculptures that are to be seen there today. When he sat for Titian in Venice in 1568 he was attempting, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to buy up the Vendramin collection for Albrecht of Bavaria.3
Niccolò Stoppio, beside himself with jealousy of Strada’s partnership with Titian, and apparently unaware of Strada’s close relationship with the Fuggers, directed venomous letters about the two of them to Max Fugger. In the letter of 29 February 1568 in which he had reported Titian’s failing eyesight and trembling hand, he described Strada and Titian as ‘like two gluttons at the same dish’:
Strada is having him paint his portrait, but Titian will take another year over it, and if in the meantime Strada does not do as he wants it will never be finished. Titian has already demanded a sable lining for a cloak, either as a gift or for cash, and in order to get it he wants to send something to the emperor. Strada encourages his hopes so that he can get the portrait out of him; but he is wasting his time. You will be amused to hear that the other day, when a gentleman who is a great friend of mine as well as an intimate of Titian asked him what he thought of Strada, Titian at once replied: ‘Strada is one of the most pompous idiots you will ever find. He doesn’t know anything beyond the fact that one needs to be lucky and to understand how to get on with people, as Strada has done in Germany, where he shoots them every line you can imagine, and they, being open by nature, don’t see the duplicity of this fine fellow.’ These were Titian’s own words.4
A restoration and scientific examination of the Portrait of Jacopo Strada in 19965 revealed, beneath layers of discoloured varnish, the full force of a composition that is one of the most dynamic and original of Titian’s works, and beneath it the many changes he made until he got it exactly as he wanted. Although one starting point was Lotto’s Portrait of Andrea Odoni, in which the sitter is also surrounded by objects from his collection, the wealthier and more powerful Jacopo Strada is lavishly dressed with a gold chain of honour wrapped not once but four times around his neck and from which a medallion portrait of Maximilian II in profile is suspended at the exact centre of the painting. The dealer looms into the light from the confined space of his den of treasures looking intently to his left as though anticipating a reaction to the precious objects Titian has painted as attributes of his many interests: the gold and silver coins on the table in front of him, the books on the shelf above, the antique torso and the statuette of Venus that he clutches in his right hand pressing against her naked figure with three fingers in a way that suggests erotic possessiveness. Strada’s leaning torso paralleled by the tilted statuette of Venus and the line of his fur cloak, are in opposition to the direction of his red satin sleeves and the glinting hilts of his sword and dagger, the unstable play of diagonals held in place by the vertical and horizontal lines of the stepped space behind him. The wonderfully painted fur cloak that seems to be slipping from his shoulders, which was one of Titian’s final additions, could be the one he had promised Titian as payment for the portrait. Another last-minute change was the letter addressed to the ‘Magnifico Titiano’ on the table, which was painted over a second arrangement of coins. The cartouche on the wall, which interrupts the geometry of the composition, is not by Titian but may have been added by Strada or on his orders shortly after the portrait was finished. The inscription on it identifies him as a Roman citizen, imperial antiquarian (he was using the title before he actually got it from Maximilian in 1574) and minister of war (this was mere wishful thinking). If Stoppio’s poisonous letter about Titian’s low opinion of Strada had any substance Titian would scarcely have revealed it to such a valuable client, and, although some may see Strada in Titian’s portrayal as sinister and malign there is no other evidence that the dealer and the painter were on anything but good terms.6
Strada bought nearly one hundred paintings in Venice, some described as modern, some as modernissimo. He sold some of them on to the Fuggers and Maximilian, but acquired many other works by Titian as well as by the Bassano, Francesco Salviati and Veronese7 for his own palace in Vienna. The dealer brought with him to Venice his eighteen-year-old son Ottavio, a numismatist, antiquarian and scholar like his father, and commissioned Tintoretto, if it was Tintoretto, to paint Ottavio’s portrait as a pendant to Titian’s of himself. Tintoretto, who four years earlier had begun work on the cycle of paintings in the Scuola di San R
occo, which were to be the major achievement of his career, had always been an uneven portraitist. But the Portrait of Ottavio Strada is such an eccentric mess that it deserves a place at the top of the list of the silliest paintings of the Italian Renaissance, although we might see it differently if there is any substance to a proposal of one of Tintoretto’s biographers8 that it was actually painted by his thirteen-year-old daughter Marietta.
Titian was making his final adjustments to the Portrait of Jacopo Strada at the end of 1568 when he sent the less impressive Tribute Money (London, National Gallery) to Philip of Spain. It was a rare subject, which he had painted once before, in 1516 for the door of the cabinet in which the Duke of Ferrara, his first foreign patron, had kept his collection of coins. The admiration that painting had attracted would explain the inscription, in Philip’s version, on the gold coin held out by the Pharisee which is identified as Ferrarese. In his letter to Philip of 26 October 1568 Titian claimed that he had just finished the picture of ‘Our Lord and the Pharisee showing the coin’. In fact, it looks more characteristic of his work in the early 1540s, and the variety of handling across the picture and numerous radical revisions, especially to Christ’s head and drapery, suggest that it may have been begun around the same time as Giovanni d’Anna’s Ecce Homo, to which it bears a stylistic resemblance. In the same letter he took the opportunity to beg the king to alleviate his great want by ordering the settlement of the concession to export corn duty free from Naples granted to him by Charles V as long ago as 1535. Philip, overwhelmed though he was by paperwork and a gathering cloud of problems, responded to Titian’s plea on 17 March of the following year with a letter to the viceroy of Naples, the Duke of Alcalá, asking him to make a single payment to Titian of 1,000 ducats in compensation for all his failed attempts to activate the grant.
Philip’s Tribute Money hung in the sacristy of the Escorial monastery until 1809 when Joseph Bonaparte, recently created King of Spain, presented it, along with five other paintings plundered from the Escorial, to the collector Marshal Nicolas-Jean de Dieu Soult, one of Napoleon’s most talented commanders. Opinions were less than enthusiastic, however, after the London National Gallery bought it from the Soult collection in 1852 for £2,604. Although the painting contains passages of great refinement it is less polished, intimate and adept than Alfonso d’Este’s original, and the explicit gestures of the two figures are not accurately resolved where Christ’s forearm protrudes over the arm of the Pharisee. Crowe and Cavalcaselle dismissed the painting as ‘a treatment far more crude and unsatisfactory than we can concede to even Palma Giovane in his bad days’. Berenson, in his Lists of 1957, was one of many who attributed it to Titian’s workshop. It is now accepted by the National Gallery as by Titian’s hand, if not up to his highest standards. But academic judgements do not necessarily affect the spark a painting can light in the imaginations of spectators who are not professional connoisseurs. During its time in Spain it was regarded as a marvel, even as a definitive likeness of the serenely powerful features of Christ. In the nineteenth century, not long after the National Gallery had acquired the picture, George Eliot, in her great novel Daniel Deronda, described Mordecai, the scholarly old Jew wandering ‘in the National Gallery in search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with grave and noble types of the human form’. She found it for him when she came to the meeting between Mordecai and her eponymous hero (whose features, ‘healthy grave sensitive’, she likened to those of Titian’s Man with a Glove in the Louvre). ‘I wish’, she wrote, ‘that I could perpetuate those two faces, as Titian’s “Tribute Money” has perpetuated two types presenting another sort of contrast.’
Fifteen-sixty-eight was a year that Philip would remember as one of the most difficult of his life. An uprising by the Moriscos of Andalusia in protest against laws that prohibited native customs and obliged them to convert to Christianity was all the more worrying at a time when the Muslims across the Straits of Gibraltar were on the offensive. It took longer than it should have to crush because the Duke of Alba’s crack troops were engaged in the Netherlands, and was put down only in 1570 under the command of Don John of Austria. Huguenot Breton seamen who were blocking Spanish shipping in the Gulf of Gascony managed to cut Spain’s maritime communications with Flanders. The king saw heresy wherever he looked and over-reacted when he learned that Huguenots, who were in fact harmless, were crossing the frontier with France to and from Catalonia. Even the transatlantic domains, which had previously been safe, were threatened. There were problems in Peru and Mexico, and English privateers, like Sir John Hawkins, were raiding the Spanish Caribbean.
One personal tragedy followed another. The behaviour of Don Carlos, Philip’s crippled and mentally unstable son by his first wife Maria of Portugal, had become ever more bizarre and unpredictable. The young man had developed an unhealthy attachment to his stepmother Elizabeth de Valois, whom he showered with jewels. He was monstrously and gratuitously cruel to animals and servants. Above all he harboured a deep hatred for his father and high ambitions for himself, which may have led him into making sympathetic overtures to the rebels in the Netherlands. When Alba was appointed to quell the rebellion there, Don Carlos protested that it was he who should lead the army. He threatened to kill both Alba and his father and pleaded for the support of the grandees and of Philip’s half-brother Don John of Austria, who informed Philip of the plot. In January 1568 the king felt obliged to imprison his only son and heir. Rumours more sinister than the truth flew about Europe (and continued to do so two centuries later when Schiller’s play Don Carlos transformed its eponymous hero into a republican martyr whose passion for Elizabeth de Valois was requited). After successive failed attempts at suicide, the prince died in prison on 24 July 1568 at the age of twenty-three. The court was in mourning for Don Carlos when Philip’s much-loved wife Elizabeth de Valois, who had never fully recovered from the birth of a daughter, Catherine, in the previous year and was pregnant again, fell ill. Philip was by her bedside when she died on 3 October after the stillbirth of another daughter. She was twenty-two.
Philip had never been popular outside Spain, and the coincidence of the two deaths with his cruel policies in the Netherlands suggested foul play even to respectable historians of the day. There was not a major European country that did not express disgust and outrage at Alba’s Council of Blood and the executions of Egmont and Hoorn. The disapproval was particularly strong in Germany, which had always had close links with the Netherlands, and where Protestants and Catholics alike were alienated. Philip, isolated even from his German relatives, began to consider a more merciful programme in the Netherlands, and in 1570 turned to the time-honoured Habsburg solution of a dynastic marriage. He settled on his niece, the emperor Maximilian II’s daughter Anna of Austria. It turned out that a marriage that had been calculated to pacify the Austrian branch of the family had the added benefit of bringing Philip unprecedented personal happiness. Anna, who was twenty-two years younger than her ageing husband, had been born in Spain during her father’s regency there and was the only one of his wives with whom he could converse in Spanish. Petite, blonde and blue-eyed, she was a completely different kind of person from Elizabeth de Valois. Philip fell immediately and lastingly in love with her, and in December of the following year she gave him a son and heir, whose birth was later to be commemorated by Titian in one of the last paintings he sent to the king.
FOUR
Wars
White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,