by Sheila Hale
Nevertheless, if Titian in his eighties used his assistants more than ever he would not put down his brushes until he was close to death. When the eyes of a painter begin to fail, the hand, guided by knowledge gained through long experience, may take over; and if the hand trembles it is still the hand of an artist, in Titian’s case an artist with one of the greatest and most original minds of all. The subjective, expressive paintings from the last five or six years of his life that were not intended for Philip of Spain – notably the Crowning with Thorns, the Death of Actaeon, Nymph and Shepherd, the Flaying of Marsyas and the Pietà – are often compared to the late works of Beethoven, Verdi, Shakespeare or Rembrandt (who was consciously following Titian and who refused to commit himself on the question whether a painting was ‘finished’ or not), or are admired anachronistically through the filter of twentieth-century Expressionism.30 They strike a particular chord with modern sensibilities, especially with working painters whose style may bear no resemblance to Titian’s but who see them as the apotheosis of his career. Younger contemporary artists like Tintoretto appreciated what he was doing. But patrons, on the whole, did not understand them, or put their ‘blotchy’ style down to old age. The rough, apparently unfinished style did not come into fashion with mainstream collectors until the next century, so it must have been Boschini writing in the late seventeenth century, rather than Palma Giovane a century earlier, who thought that Titian’s late paintings were unfinished and all the more sought after for that reason.31
We will never know whether Titian considered all of his most radical latest paintings to be ‘finished’ or not, or to what extent they were affected by his well-documented failing vision (perhaps cataracts or macular degeneration) and trembling hand. Nor, failing surviving documentary evidence about them – and because of Titian’s ability to work contemporaneously in different styles, and his habit of applying himself sporadically to paintings, as the mood took him, or to let one layer dry before applying the next – can they be put into chronological order. The most that can be said is that some of them must have been on his easels by the time he was painting Philip’s relatively conventional Rape of Lucretia, of which the technique and finish is similar to, if not as successful as, the poesie of the 1550s and early 1560s. And this raises the never to be resolved question of whether he hoped to work up the more roughly painted canvases to a similar degree of finish; or whether, despite or because of his physical limitations, he was searching for something so new, and so deeply private, that he would never have let them out of the studio where Ridolfi said he hid them away from view, and where they remained at the time of his death.
SIX
Another Way of Using Colour
The event is gloomy and this monotony seems to be appropriate. The hounds by which the transformed Actaeon is torn to death are expressive symbols; they are ghosts rather than creatures known in nature. One can say that Titian has here discovered yet another way of using colour.
JOHANNES WILDE ON THE DEATH OF ACTAEON, IN VENETIAN ART FROM BELLINI TO TITIAN, 1974
Even by Titian’s usual standards the Death of Actaeon had a remarkably prolonged gestation. He had mentioned a painting of ‘Actaeon torn to pieces by his own hounds’ in the letter to Philip II of 19 July 1559 in which he announced the completion of Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto and added that he had already begun the Rape of Europa.1 He kept Philip informed about his progress on the Rape of Europa, which was delivered to Spain in 1562, but the ‘Actaeon torn to pieces by his own hounds’ never appears again in his correspondence with the king, and the subject is not mentioned again until November 1568 when the imperial ambassador in Venice offered the emperor Maximilian II a selection of pictures by Titian which included a Death of Actaeon. That picture, like the others on the list, would have been a studio copy.2 The original, however, almost certainly remained in Titian’s studio until the end of his life, and by that time it looked nothing like any of the paintings he had ever sent to Philip. It may be, judging from the numerous changes he made even at the planning stage, that he had set himself a task that he could not at that time complete to his own satisfaction, or that the grim episode of Actaeon’s death may not, in the happier days of the 1550s, have suited his mood or what he knew would please the king.
At the end of Ovid’s story of Diana and Actaeon the virgin goddess of the moon, naked and unable to reach her bow and arrows, splashes water in the face of the unwitting intruder and challenges him to tell the world what he has seen – ‘if tell he can’. As Actaeon flees he senses a change in himself but does not realize the full horror of what has happened to him until he stops at a stream to drink and sees from his reflection in the water that he is being transformed into a stag. He tries to speak but cannot, whereupon he is set upon and killed by his hounds. In his Diana and Actaeon Titian had anticipated Actaeon’s gruesome punishment by placing the skeleton of a stag’s head on a rusticated pier and Diana’s quiver hanging from a tree high above her. It would be logical to assume that he intended his painting of Actaeon’s death, which in Ovid follows immediately after Diana’s curse, as a sequel to that painting. Titian had, however, decided to pair Diana and Actaeon with the unrelated story from the Metamorphoses of Diana and Callisto. And, apart from the stream that runs through all three pictures, the composition of the Death of Actaeon does not relate to his previous two Diana poems, in both of which the goddess is naked on our right with her nymphs striking different poses. In the Death of Actaeon she is alone on our left and clothed, in a rose-red tunic with one breast bared and her wrists adorned with matching bracelets, hunting down the stag that was Actaeon who is chased by his pack of hounds in the middle distance.
As the years passed the most protean of Renaissance painters seems to have discovered – like Actaeon, who found himself running faster than usual before he understood why – that something new was happening each time he confronted his easel, so that, as Francis Bacon remarked in 1972,3 the painting looks as though he was using ‘the light to work into the paint, so that the images are never absolutely definite and yet they are the suggestion of a tremendously tragic act’. The preparations4 are conventional: a thin gypsum ground, rough preliminary drawings made with a brush and lead white, and a dark translucent primer. But, although Titian had always tended to change his mind as he went along, this time he seems to have been even less satisfied than usual with his first ideas. The thinly painted figure of Diana, the dominant and most defined part of the painting, once had wind-blown hair and a flying scarf; her left arm was raised higher and her right arm hung by her side, slightly bent. The landscape also evolved over time: the tree in the foreground on our right was once in the distance; Actaeon was further to our left.
Last seen in Diana and Actaeon as a handsome young hunter, Actaeon’s metamorphosis is not yet complete: he already has the head of a stag, but as he rears back on his hind legs, his pose reversing that of Diana, his arms and torso are those of a man still human enough to understand his fate. The dog that slips between Diana’s legs could be the shadow of a dog. But the hounds that are already attacking their prey, as they ‘emerge from a flurry of energetic brushwork visible in X-ray’,5 are real hounds, executed with a broad brush and the help of the artist’s fingers. In the brief interval that follows Diana’s curse, the high summer of the previous Diana poems has turned to late autumn. The sky is a stormy grey tinged with the acid yellow he used for the foliage, which is painted with dry, broken stabs of the brush. Instead of adopting the traditional practice of applying translucent glazes over opaque colours, Titian let his yellow paint overlap in random order with a red-brown glaze. Perhaps his brush slipped once or twice and he decided he liked the effect? The mesmerizing bush in the foreground, however, is without a glaze, so that we can admire the extraordinarily vigorous and charismatic brushwork of a painter well into his eighties.
Titian had always taken liberties with Ovid’s stories, but never as radically as in the Death of Actaeon. In Ovid’s accou
nt Diana was not present at Actaeon’s death, nor was it necessary that she should be since she had already pronounced his doom only minutes before he left her in her grotto naked and unable to reach her quiver. This woman is clothed, with a quiver slung over a shoulder and holding up a bow from which she seems just to have fired an arrow, although the bow has no visible string and the arrow would have shot over Actaeon’s head – perhaps Titian was pleased by the pattern formed by the intersection of her arm holding the curved bow with the straight trunk of the tree across the river. Nor does she wear her attribute, the crescent moon, in her hair. So is she Diana? or might she be, as has been argued by one scholar,6 a personification of Diana’s vengeance?
The ongoing debate about whether or not Titian considered the painting to be finished will never be resolved, if only because it is difficult to distinguish the numerous abrasions and paint losses – especially along all the edges and the vertical seam of the centre of the canvas – from passages that were either unfinished or deliberately left vague. It was regarded as unfinished when first sold in the seventeenth century;7 and it may be that Titian, with no patron to consider, was so fascinated by the new way of using colour that was evolving as he worked that he was prevented only by death from making further changes.8
The subdued surface tone, the variation of painterly definition and the more open and apparently freer brushwork of the paintings from the 1570s have led to numerous theories about the aesthetic intentions of the octogenarian Titian and how much they were determined by his physical limitations. Some of them were contradicted, in the case of one exemplary late masterpiece, by a conservator who spent five years in the first decade of the twenty-first century examining and restoring his last secular poem Nymph and Shepherd (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).9 She found no signs of the haphazard, accidental or spontaneous work that might indicate a confused approach or an unfinished state; but saw that, on the contrary, Titian’s technique was even more elaborate and sophisticated than the procedures described by Palma Giovane, and was ‘developed to achieve a specific artistic effect’. The painting, which had previously been regarded as ruined beyond the possibility of recovery, was found to be in reasonably good condition apart from numerous small paint losses, filled in over time by dirt and discoloured varnish, ‘which visually spanned the painting like a black net’. The surface had been further darkened by excessive previous cleanings, which had rubbed away the paint surface down to the brown or grey-brown underpainting Titian had used beneath brighter colours. As with the Rape of Lucretia, but unlike so many of Titian’s earlier paintings, he followed the overall design established by his fluid preparatory sketches; even the scarcely detectable man sheering sheep in the distance was part of the original design.
The contours and position of the nymph, whose naked body reclines across the centre of the picture with her back to us, nestling into the pelt of a dead leopard – its head peers out at us from beneath her legs – were unchanged, although at a later stage he threw her into relief by modelling the outline of her body with dark glazes; nor was the figure of the shepherd altered apart from the shape of his head. Their lovemaking takes place in a blasted landscape, in which there seems to be a vaguely indicated castle in the distance and a shattered tree, as in the Three Ages of Man painted some sixty years earlier, but this time with a goat gnawing at one of its branches. The agitated mood of the background looks sketchy or unfinished, but must have been deliberate because it was retained throughout the successive painting campaigns, and the apparently spontaneous two strokes of red indicating the last rays of a setting sun that seem to set the sky on fire were made with thick multiple brushstrokes of lead white followed by the red, which was applied before the white had fully dried. One of the most surprising revelations of the investigation was the myriad of brilliant colours – emerald green, for example, for the foliage – that Titian had used before suppressing them with dark glazes. The underlying layers of the flesh of the nymph, a figure that is unique in Titian’s late works, are also composed of a variety of bright colours that would have given its original glazed surface a shimmering opalescent glow. Titian, who had always been especially famous for his depiction of living flesh, realized hers in a different technique from the rest of the painting, with no visible brushstrokes or use of his fingers.
There have been the usual attempts to find a subject for the painting – Diana and Endymion, Paris and Oenone, and Bacchus and Ariadne have all been proposed. But all that can be said with reasonable certainty is that Titian’s starting point for the nymph seems to have been an engraving by Giulio Campagnola of a lost painting perhaps by Giorgione. Since nothing is known about the patron, if there was one, of Nymph and Shepherd we can only imagine that Titian took such immense trouble to finish a depiction of sensuous experience because that subject, despite his more ambiguous feelings about it in his old age, had not lost its importance for him. The nymph and shepherd are young, as they were in the Three Ages of Man, but the old painter’s perspective on their youthful lovemaking has changed. In the earlier painting it was the shepherd who was naked and the clothed woman seducing him with her pipes. Their young flesh glowed in the fresh mountain air against an untroubled azure horizon while the broken tree and the old bearded man holding a skull in each hand served as warnings about the inevitable transience of such beauty and exquisite pleasure. Sixty years later Titian’s girl is naked and it is the clothed shepherd who calls the tune with his pipe. The prophetic old man, has disappeared from our view. But we can imagine him there in his studio standing, or perhaps sitting now, in front of his easel, painting his wintry poem about the pleasures of the flesh from the other end of life’s telescope.
When the London National Gallery acquired the Death of Actaeon in 197210 the director,11 who was less than enthusiastic about it, commented that Titian ‘had become pessimistic, perhaps rightly’. There were certainly more reasons to be pessimistic in the 1570s than there had been in the 1550s when he had delighted Philip with his erotic poems. No one living in the lagoon city was immune to what Titian in his letters to Spain called the calamitous times: the famine, the disease, the horrific flaying by the Turks of Marcantonio Bragadin, the loss of Cyprus despite the glorious victory at Lepanto. The great fire in the arsenal of 1569 was followed in 1571 by another, which consumed Titian’s Last Supper in the refectory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, caused by some drunken Germans who accidentally blew up a store of weapons beneath the monastery; and another in May 1574 when three rooms in the doge’s palace, the Sala delle Quattro Porte, the Anti-Collegio and the Collegio itself, were gutted,12 and another in 1575 in the communal palace of Brescia, which destroyed the three ceiling paintings that had been the cause of Titian’s prolonged dispute with the councillors.
Nevertheless, the dark and violent subject matter of Titian’s paintings from the 1570s reflects a change in outlook so profound that it surely transcended the calamities of the times. Most Venetians in any case – or those who could afford to indulge voluptuous appetites – continued to enjoy the finer things of life. Two years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent a catalogue of courtesans was freely circulated complete with prices and the names of pimps. Decrees by the Senate forbidding the wearing of pearls and excessive consumption at banquets were ignored, as they always had been. Veronese’s popular paintings of make-believe neo-Roman dinner parties13 continued to reflect the fantasy world of a self-important patriciate whose government was corrupted, whose fortunes were being eroded by inflation and the decline in maritime trade, but who did at least enjoy a degree of freedom, one that was unique in Catholic Europe, from the repressive dictates of the post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation.
The Inquisition operated with a light hand in Venice, where it was under the control of the state. The only occasion on which it challenged an artist concerned the feast Veronese had painted for the monks of Santi Giovanni e Paolo as a replacement of Titian’s Last Supper. Even then the Inquisitors seem to have been motivated more
by a grievance against the prior of the monastery than by a wish to impose Tridentine definitions of the purpose of art by illustrating the suffering of Christ and the saints as a means to salvation. Veronese named as his subject, probably picking it out of a hat, the banquet at which the Pharisee Simon entertained Christ in his house, where Mary Magdalen sought Him out and washed His feet with her tears and dried it with her hair. Unfortunately Veronese had absentmindedly neglected to include the Magdalen in his feast. The Inquisitors ordered the prior to demand that the painter replace the large dog in the foreground with a figure of the saint. Having failed to do so Veronese was summoned by the Inquisitors on 18 July 1573 when they informed him that they further objected to the presence of a clown holding a parrot, as well as ‘drunkards, German halberdiers, dwarfs, and other lewd things’. Veronese coolly admitted that ‘if in a painting there is space left over, I fill it with figures from my imagination … My commission was to make this picture beautiful according to my judgement, and it seemed to me that it was big and capable of holding many figures.’ He was ordered to correct the painting within three months at his own expense. But the painter, evidently undaunted by the demands of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, got round the problem by changing the title of his painting to the Feast in the House of Levi, which is described in the Gospel of St Luke as a great feast in which ‘there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down’ with Christ and the Apostles.14