Philip may not have seen anything strange in Bosch’s works but, in general, he wanted his artists to display religious orthodoxy. When the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, whose sculpture, like Titian’s portraits, had played a key role in creating the image of the Habsburg monarchy, was suspected of being a Lutheran heretic, he was sentenced at an auto-da-fe and confined for a year to a monastery. Alarmed at these events, Antonio Mor, the brilliant Flemish portraitist who had accompanied Philip on his return to Spain, fled back to the Netherlands.
It is understandable why Titian should have been so reluctant to come to Spain despite Philip’s warm appreciation of the works he sent from Venice. These were, however, treated in very different ways. His portraits of the royal family were for public consumption, designed to show the majesty of the Habsburg monarchy, while his religious works were designed for the king’s spiritual meditation. The group of poesie was for Philip’s personal pleasure, and this accounts for the silence that descends on the paintings once they reached Spain. Italian commentators may have been united in their praise for the Rape of Europa, and the method Titian used, but the king had little doubt that the reaction would be very different in Spain. The Spanish ambassador to Venice had described Venus and Adonis in a letter to Philip II as ‘a thing of great esteem, in which Titian has put much effort, but it is excessively lascivious’.
The king was well aware that if one of his subjects owned such a painting, he or she was liable to prosecution by the powerful Inquisition, who would have labelled it as obscene, with the possibility of punishing the owner by excommunication, and a fine of 1,500 ducats. Philip may even have baulked at the sexuality of the poesie. Charles V had prized Correggio’s four erotic mythological paintings so highly that he had taken them to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura after his abdication, but his son had chosen to give two of the series away to his secretary Antonio Perez after his father’s death.
Owing to the dearth of documentary evidence there has been much dispute about where the poesie were originally hung. What is certain is that they were intended to be hung together as a set. This means that the Rape of Europa, as the last in the series, needs to be seen in context of the other five paintings which were already in the possession of the king.
Philip had settled in Spain permanently in 1559. Initially, the king travelled extensively between his various palaces, inspecting the work being carried out. The scale of the alterations to these palaces also meant that many of them were, at times, uninhabitable. Major alterations were made to the Alcázars of Madrid and Toledo, which Charles V had begun to modernize, and to the palaces of Aranjuez and El Pardo, while work commenced on the Escorial in 1564.
As the king had no fixed abode, it seems most likely that he simply took his key possessions with him, as he had probably done while travelling in the 1540s in Northern Europe. One of the few facts that we do know is that Philip first saw Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto in the Alcázar in Toledo in August 1560, and it may have been that the others in the series were also in the castle when the king received his new bride and third wife, the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth de Valois, there before their marriage in Toledo Cathedral on 3 January 1561.
Later in his reign, in an effort to escape from the gossip and intrigue of life at court, Philip was to make the palace-monastery of El Escorial his main residence, but he still visited his other palaces in and around Madrid. One of his courtiers made a humorous record of his peripatetic lifestyle in The Great and Notable Voyages of King Philip, describing how the king still liked to move ‘from Madrid to the Escorial, from the Escorial to the Pardo, from the Pardo to Aranjuez, from Aranjuez to Madrid, from Madrid to the Escorial …’
The two most likely destinations of Titian’s poesie during Philip’s reign were the Alcázar in Madrid, where they were to be located throughout the seventeenth century, and the royal palace of Aranjuez, where work finished in 1584. Unfortunately, they are not listed in the key inventory of Philip’s possessions, carried out after his death in 1598. When he could escape from his duties the king enjoyed masked balls, jousts and bull fights at the Alcázar in Madrid, but it was to his palaces in the country that he retired to for relief from life at court. On occasions Philip would rise before dawn, mount his horse and ride off to his palace at Aranjuez, leaving strict instructions that none of his courtiers or ministers was to follow him. El Pardo had the best hunting, whereas it was the garden at Aranjuez that gave Philip the most pleasure.
He liked to come here in the spring and autumn, when he could supervise the laying out of the gardens and waterworks. Philip loved to fish in the Tagus, and laid out new gardens by the river, designing a medicinal herb garden, supervising the planting of some 230,000 trees here during his reign, and digging new lakes which ‘would encourage birds to come and improve our hawking’. There was a small zoo with camels, used as beasts of burden in the gardens, and ostriches, one of which escaped and attacked a gardener on one occasion. In May 1564 Philip spent a second honeymoon here with his third wife Elisabeth, eating picnics together in the gardens. The royal family enjoyed sailing on the Tagus though even here Philip was not able to completely escape his duties, feeling obliged to sign some dispatches which his valet brought him while the ladies of the court danced on board, accompanied by music.
The semi-nomadic existence that Philip led in Spain during the early part of his reign, and the lack of certainty over the location of Titian’s poesie, has led to different theories on how they hung as a group. Titian left no written account of his intentions, but did offer an idea of how the paintings would look their best, as he outlined to the king in a letter of September 1554. He was particularly concerned with the pose of figures, offering a variety of interest, something that had preoccupied Leonardo at the beginning of the century:
And since the Danae which I have already sent to Your Majesty, was seen entirely from the front, I wanted to vary [the pose] in this other poesia [Venus and Adonis], and have the figure show the opposite side, so that the room in which they are to hang will be more charming to the sight.
Soon I will be sending you the poesia of Perseus and Andromeda which will offer still another view, different from these; and likewise with Jason and Medea.
The position of the Rape of Europa is the most confusing in the series. In a letter to Philip II dated 19 June 1559 Titian mentioned that he had just completed Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, and begun the final two paintings in the series, the Rape of Europa and the Death of Actaeon (the latter executed but never sent to Spain). Looking at the composition of the six paintings, it seems very possible that Titian decided to divide the six canvases into three pairs: Danae and the Rape of Europa (the first and the last to be painted), Perseus and Andromeda and Venus and Adonis, and Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. The Rape of Europa links with the Danae: both paintings show reclining female nudes enjoying the favour of Jupiter, they are almost portrayed as mirror images of each other and both are painted in the same warm tonalities, with Titian displaying a broad handling of paint.
If there is a unifying theme in the way that the spectator was intended to view all six paintings, it begins with Danae where the composition flows from right to left through the princess’ body, continues with Perseus and Andromeda, where it rises and falls, the movement continuing to the right in Venus and Adonis through the naked figure of the goddess, striving to prevent her lover from setting off for the hunt. Europa, reclining to the right, and balancing Danae, closes the four-fold composition. The two scenes with Diana stand apart, and appear to balance each other in perfect harmony, with Actaeon on the left, with the red curtain, balancing Diana’s nymphs on the right of Diana and Callisto, gathered around the goddess beneath a curtain of silver and gold. Renaissance humanists, of course, would have had a much deeper understanding of the connections between these myths.
3
The Myth of Europa
From the start of his reign Philip had been the champion of Catholic
orthodoxy and this increased as he retreated within the walls of the Escorial, administering his vast empire. Nevertheless, he had been educated in the culture of Renaissance humanism, based on a revival of interest in antiquity. The classical myths were central to all humanists, with Ovid’s Metamorphoses one of the most popular interpretations of the myths, its success greatly enhanced by the spread of printing and an increase in literacy.
The six paintings, Danae, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto and the Rape of Europa, represent some of the most famous myths of antiquity. Danae’s father King Acrisius had been told by an oracle that he would be killed by his daughter’s son so he shut her up in a tower. Jupiter, King of the Gods, desired the princess and Titian chose to depict the moment at which the God, descending in a shower of gold, is about to ravish her. Acrisius was unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods by killing his offspring, and cast Danae and her son Perseus to sea in a wooden chest. Much later Perseus was participating in the Greek Games at Larissa and accidentally struck Acrisius on the head and killed him, thus fulfilling the prophecy.
The second painting in the series relates to the myth of Venus and Adonis, the tragic story of the goddess of love who was smitten by Cupid’s dart and fell passionately in love with the handsome Adonis. In Titian’s painting Venus tries to prevent the young mortal from setting off for the hunt, fearful of the tragedy to come. Her fears are realized when Adonis is mortally wounded by a boar, his blood being turned into an anemone.
The subject of the third painting is closely related to Danae, the myth of Perseus freeing Andromeda. The princess’ mother Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia, had the temerity to boast that her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids (sea nymphs, daughters of the sea god Nereus), whereupon Neptune sent a sea monster to ravage the coast of Ethiopia. To appease the monster, King Cepheus consulted the oracle which advised him to sacrifice his daughter, who was left chained to a rock. Titian depicted Perseus, who had just slain the Gorgon, flying to the rescue of the princess, who is about to be devoured by the sea monster. Having slain the monster, the victorious hero married Andromeda. She was to gain immortal fame after her death when Minerva placed her among the constellations of the northern sky.
The next two paintings in the series are a pair of myths depicting the goddess Diana the huntress. The first tells the tragic story of Diana and Actaeon, the hunter who stumbled unwittingly upon the goddess and her nymphs bathing naked in a stream. This dramatic moment is captured unforgettably by Titian who shows a naked Diana punishing the unfortunate Actaeon by transforming him into a stag. The hunter fled in terror but was pursued by his own hounds, who caught him and tore him apart (the subject of Titian’s Death of Actaeon). Diana and Callisto is another dark myth featuring the goddess Diana. Jupiter seduced her nymph Callisto, disguised as Diana herself. Once again Titian chose the most dramatic point in the story, the moment when Callisto, bathing in a stream, is revealed to be pregnant and expelled by an enraged Diana from her presence. After Callisto had given birth to Arcas, Juno transformed her into a bear. Mother and child were later placed by Jupiter among the stars and named Ursa Major and Minor.
The origin of the Rape of Europa describes how Jupiter, King of the Gods, on Mount Olympus, spied the beautiful Princess Europa (whose brother Cadmus was Actaeon’s grandfather), daughter of Agenor, King of Tyre and Sidon, Phoenician cities on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and decided to seduce her. Transforming himself into a bull, Jupiter appeared on the seashore and captivated the princess, who garlanded him with flowers and caressed his flank. Eventually she felt bold enough to mount his back, whereupon the bull entered the sea and swam across to the island of Crete, the moment that Titian chose to depict in his painting. Once on the island Jupiter resumed his normal form and made love to the princess who became Queen of Crete and gave birth to three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, destined to be judges of the underworld. Jupiter later created the constellation Taurus in the shape of a bull (in modern times the smallest of the planet Jupiter’s Galilean moons was named after Europa). Europa’s brother Cadmus was also to play a major part in Greek mythology, bringing the alphabet to mainland Greece.
Interestingly, Philip II identified himself with the figure of Jupiter. As King of the Gods, the deity was associated with imperial propaganda surrounding the king, dispensing justice and punishing those who threatened his authority. Both Philip and his father had been immensely impressed when they visited the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, the creation of Giulio Romano for Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, a close ally of the Habsburgs (he commissioned Correggio’s Loves of Jupiter, now in the possession of Philip and a key influence on Titian’s poesie), where the Fall of the Giants was seen by contemporaries as an allegory of the emperor crushing his Protestant foes. When Charles and Philip toured the Netherlands in 1549, a series of triumphal arches were erected in their honour, showing them with the world on their shoulders and in the company of the Gods of Olympus.
The myth of Europa and the Bull was a very ancient one based on the island of Crete, where the bull was associated with strength and fertility. Far back in antiquity the islanders placed the youthful Bull God on a par with the Sun. The Cretans celebrated games involving bulls and bull fights, linked to fertility rites, and there are ancient images of youths playing dangerous games with bulls, grabbing their horns and vaulting on to their backs. The ancient Greeks acknowledged this obsession and had a saying that Cretan women preferred bulls to men. One of the most powerful Greek myths is that of the Minotaur.
The myth is known as the Rape of Europa, with its modern connotations of violence, but this is not how it is normally portrayed, either in literature or in art. There are two distinct parts of the story: the scene on the sea-shore, where Europa, often depicted as a regal bride, either garlands the gentle bull, or is seated on his back. In the second part of the myth she is taken away across the sea to Crete, often in a state of ecstasy, by a virile bull. For most writers and artists the first part of the myth has traditionally proved more popular, but Titian preferred the second part which allowed a more dynamic interpretation.
The earliest literary source of the myth is in the Iliad, dating back to at least the eighth century bc, where Europa is the daughter of Agenor’s son, the ‘sun-red’ Phoenix. The most famous account of the myth in antiquity, however, is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the Roman poet emphasizes the beauty and gentleness of the bull, and the way that he is garlanded with flowers by Europa and her maidens on the sea-shore before she mounts him and is taken across the sea to Crete. The bucolic poet Moschus and the rhetorician and satirist Lucian followed Ovid’s lead in portraying the bull as a likeable creature, who seduces a willing Europa. Lucian linked Europa to the moon-goddess Astarte, sacred to the Phoenicians:
But according to the story of one of the priests this temple is sacred to Europa, the sister of Cadmus. She was the daughter of Agenor, and on her disappearance from Earth the Phoenicians honoured her with a temple and told a sacred legend about her; how Zeus was enamoured of her for her beauty and changing his form into that of a bull carried her off into Crete. This legend I heard from other Phoenicians as well; and the coinage among the Sidonians bears upon it the effigy of Europa sitting upon a bull, none other than Zeus.
The Alexandrian Greek Achilles Tatius, author of The Adventure of Leucippe and Clitophon, also set the myth in Sidon, where his two characters saw a painting of Europa. What is interesting in his description of this painting is the number of details it contains which reappear in Titian’s painting: Europa’s drapery blowing in the wind, and the cupids that accompany her, flying through the air and swimming in the sea. We know that Titian’s friend Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to Venice, owned a copy of Achilles Tatius translated from the Greek by Lodovico Dolce and Francesco Angelo Coccio.
A few ancient writers took a different line on the myth. The Greek historian Herodotus, always keen to see such
stories as historical reality, saw the rape as a retaliatory attack by the Minoans, who seized Europa in revenge for the kidnapping of Io, princess of Argos. The Roman lyric poet Horace took a highly personal line, analysing the psychology of the victim; he considered Europa to be a tortured soul who feels deep shame and contemplates suicide at her action.
During the Renaissance, when these ancient myths were much studied, the fifteenth-century philosopher Angelo Poliziano, living at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, and a leading exponent of Neo-Platonism, which explored the union between man and the divine, followed Horace’s lead in describing the fearful side of the myth. His physical description of Europa, grasping the bull by the horn, bears some similarity to Titian’s depiction and it seems likely that the artist would have known of Poliziano’s text.
It was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, however, with its graphic and light-hearted description of the loves of the gods and mortals, that was to prove the most popular source for artists. The first illustrated copy of the Metamorphoses, published in Venice in 1497, showed to a wider audience what a rich source of visual imagery his myths possessed. A number of translations proved an instant hit when they were published in the sixteenth century.
The Rape of Europa Page 5