by Sheila Hale
Paintings make no claims, Ma’am. They do not purport to be anything other than paintings. It is we, the beholders, who make claims for them, attribute a picture to this artist or that.
‘ANTHONY BLUNT’ TO ‘HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN’, ALAN BENNETT, A QUESTION OF ATTRIBUTION, 1991
The building opposite the Rialto markets and just upstream from the bridge is one of the largest and plainest of the palaces that line the Grand Canal. After centuries of neglect and radical restorations it is a mere shell of its former self, and most tourists passing it by water are unaware of its former significance.1 Under the Republic it housed an institution that was key to the city’s fabulous wealth: the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. The Venetian Fondaco – the word was an adaptation of the Arab fondouk, meaning exchange house or trading centre – was the residence, warehouse and trading post of the German and Germanic merchants. And of all the frescos that lit up the architecture of the painted city, those executed on its façades by Giorgione and Titian were the most spectacular for their unprecedented monumentality, colour, movement and fantasy.
A German exchange house had occupied the site since the thirteenth century. Trade with northern Europe, the complement to the overseas market, was an essential base of the Venetian economy, and the government exercised strict controls over the merchants to ensure that duties and tolls payable on imports and exports were not evaded. They were obliged by law to rent lodgings and warehouse space in the Fondaco, and Venetian merchants were prohibited on pain of criminal charges from crossing the Alps for the purpose of buying or selling direct. The inmates of the Fondaco were closely supervised by Venetian administrators and spies. Packers, weighers, auctioneers, brokers and the notaries, clerks and servants of residents of the Fondaco were all cleared and appointed by the Salt Office, the government agency responsible to the Council of Ten for its management. Each German merchant was assigned a Venetian broker, chosen by lot to prevent collusion, who acted as his minder. The brokers, known as sansali, negotiated and registered all sales, on which they received a commission, and accompanied their clients when they made purchases to make sure that they bought only from native-born Venetians. There were thirty such brokerages, or sanserie, some of which were sold or awarded as sinecures to people who employed agents to do the actual work. Some were used to pay artists working in the doge’s palace, who received 100 ducats a year tax free. Giovanni Bellini and Titian later in his career were beneficiaries of the system.
The task of frescoing the exterior of the Fondaco was Titian’s first public commission, and he came by it as the result of a fire. On 28 January 1505 the old Fondaco – the one you see on the de’ Barbari map – burned to the ground taking many German lives, consuming thousands of ducats’ worth of merchandise and upsetting the complex mechanism of government control over transalpine trade. Sanudo saw the disaster as one of the many bad omens in the uneasy times that preceded the Cambrai war. While temporary lodgings above the Rialto markets were found for the surviving merchants, the government decided within a week to build a new Fondaco at its own expense and as quickly as possible. Land adjacent to the old site was purchased, and in June Giorgio Spavento and Antonio Scarpagnino were appointed architects of an enlarged building, which was constructed with flat façades that were intended as surfaces for frescos. The foundations were laid and the first floor raised within a year at a cost of 300 ducats a month. The upper storeys, which took the best part of another year, cost 600 a month. The roof was constructed by 5 April 1507; in the following year a celebratory mass was sung in the courtyard, and Venetian shopkeepers signed leases granted by the government for shop spaces on the ground floor opening directly on to the street. Rooms in the newly appointed residential quarters, which were so luxuriously appointed that they were described as having walls like marble, were offered to the German merchants at between eight and twelve ducats a year, payable to the government of St Mark, the rent to exclude supplementary expenses such the usual duties, stewards’ fees and storage.2 In early August 1508 Sanudo reported that the building was now in use, but that the painters were still at work on the exterior frescos and rents for the ground-floor shops would not start being paid until 1 March 1509 (the first day of the year according to the Venetian calendar). He was evidently well informed because on 18 February of that year the German merchants celebrated the completion of the new Fondaco with a party at which the most important members of the government were entertained by a transvestite ballet, allegorical masques and the spectacle of a greased pig being chased around the courtyard by blindfolded men.
Although the German emperor Maximilian had joined the League of Cambrai the previous December, he was still theoretically at peace with Venice according to the truce he had been forced to sign after the rout of his troops at Cadore in March 1508. It was only after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello on 14 May, followed by Maximilian’s occupation of the key Venetian towns on the terraferma, that the German merchants departed, and the Fondaco was turned into a hostel for war refugees from the mainland. The merchants were not gone for long. Within weeks some of them had returned, having been granted safe conduct through the war zones by the emperor and the Republic. The spices on which Venice held a monopoly were essential commodities, used as preservatives and drugs as well as for flavouring. Northern Europe needed Venetian spices, and Venice, its economy severely threatened by an expensive war, needed the northern European markets more than ever.
Although Titian’s Fondaco frescos are the first of his works that can be securely dated within a few years, the question of when, exactly, he and Giorgione executed them is one of those tantalizing puzzles about his early career and his artistic relationship with Giorgione that will never be solved to the satisfaction of all scholars because most of the documentary clues about the frescos, although copious for the building itself, are missing. The only areas of agreement are that the painters could have started work in May 1507, soon after the roof was finished and while the scaffolding was still in place; that Giorgione finished before November 1508; that he painted the façade facing the Grand Canal and Titian the south-facing land entrance; and that Titian began working on his façade later than Giorgione did on his.
We know that on 4 August 1507 Giorgione was paid an advance of twenty ducats to supply a painting for an audience chamber in the doge’s palace, and that the picture, which does not survive, was finished a few months before January 1508, when he received a final payment of twenty-five ducats. He was therefore busy during this period. Vasari said that Titian was recommended for the job of frescoing the side façade by a friend of his, a member of the noble Barbarigo family whose portrait he painted. But, although nobody has ever doubted that Titian frescoed the land entrance to the Fondaco, he is not mentioned in any relevant document. Giorgione’s name appears in connection with the frescos only because of a dispute with the Salt Office about his payment. He had received a down payment of 100 ducats, but according to a document dated December 1508 a committee of four artists – Giovanni Bellini, Lazzaro Bastiani, Vittore Carpaccio and Vittore Belliniano – revalued them at 150 ducats. Giorgione settled for 130 including painting materials, possibly as a compromise between the minimum agreed payment and the revaluation.3 The document doesn’t say when he completed the frescos, but similar cases of disputed payment took a year or more to be processed, which suggests that he could have finished his façade by late autumn 1507. In that case the painters whom Sanudo mentioned as being still at work in August of the following year would have been Titian and his team of assistants working on the south-facing land entrance.
The only survivals of the frescos today are some ghostly detached ruins (the Titians in the Ca’ d’Oro, Franchetti Gallery; a standing nude by Giorgione in the Accademia Gallery).4 Titian’s land entrance being less exposed was better preserved than Giorgione’s on the Grand Canal, which has disappeared altogether apart from the standing nude woman, which is scarcely legible apart from the reddish tint of her flesh, which Antonio Zanetti, w
riting in the eighteenth century, described as ‘fiery’. Zanetti’s hand-coloured etchings and written descriptions, first published in 1760, are the most complete records we have of the appearance of the frescos. Although large sections were missing by then, it is evident from his and other prints, paintings and descriptions that their most remarkable feature was a series of life-size and lifelike figures. Some were male and female nudes in dynamic poses suggested by classical sculpture, which have been compared to Michelangelo’s nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They were the first realistic nudes to appear on a public building anywhere, and the first in the line of sensuous Venetian nudes by Giorgione, Titian and their followers. Other figures depicted by Titian represented familiar Venetian characters: a Levantine, a Swiss mercenary soldier; young Venetian aristocrats of about Titian’s own age wearing the striped hose and colourful short jackets of a compagnia della calza, representing nobility, peace and prosperity. There was a portrait of a certain Zuan Favro, a well-known and popular adventurer who several years later was convicted of smuggling spices. Sanudo described him as a most valiant man, a person of outstanding ability.
If there was a programme or any kind of predetermined scheme for the frescos, none has ever been suggested. Vasari, who first saw them on a visit to Venice in 1541 when they were already fading, thought that Giorgione had painted some of Titian’s figures and wrote that those in charge of the project had given Giorgione (and by implication Titian) an entirely free hand, ‘provided only that he did all in his power to create a first-rate result’:
So Giorgione started work. But he thought only of demonstrating his technique as a painter by representing various figures according to his own fancy. Indeed, there are no scenes to be found there with any order or representing the deeds of any distinguished person, of either the ancient or the modern world. And I for my part have never been able to understand his figures nor, for all my asking, have I ever found anyone who does. In these frescos one sees, in various attitudes, a man in one place, a woman standing in another, one figure accompanied by the head of a lion, another by an angel in the guise of a cupid; and heaven knows what it all means.
Titian painted his most prominent figure in full colour over the main land entrance (now marked by a lion of St Mark above the door) where she interrupted a frieze in grisaille of military trophies and fanciful scenes of combat, one between putti and animals, another between sea monsters. She was a seductive, elaborately dressed woman seated on a ledge, trampling a decapitated head with her bared left leg while she brandished a sword over the head of a soldier in armour who had an innocent expression but concealed a dagger behind his back.5 Vasari6 thought she was by Giorgione and that she represented Judith ‘speaking to a German standing below her’; but he confessed that he was unable to interpret the meaning ‘unless Giorgione meant her to stand for Germania’. Perhaps Vasari did not know or had forgotten that at the time Titian painted her Venice was on the verge of war with the German emperor Maximilian I, whose armies had been laying waste to Titian’s homeland. So, far from representing Germany, the story of Judith – the Jewish heroine who decapitated the invading general Holofernes – would have had a special significance for Titian and for the Venetian Republic, one that carried a double meaning as an allegory of Venice as Justice or Fortitude, intended as a warning to the German merchants as they entered their Fondaco.
Seen from Campo San Bartolomeo – as it could be throughout Titian’s lifetime before it was hemmed in by later buildings7 – Titian’s south-facing façade must have looked like a billboard proclaiming an overt sensuality, a sense of fun and a confident classicism that had not been seen before on this scale, let alone on the façade of a building. The frescos were the talking point of the city, and everyone without exception whose written comments survive considered Titian’s to be superior to Giorgione’s.8 The rumour went round9 that some wags congratulated Giorgione on Titian’s work, saying how much he had improved since he painted the Grand Canal façade. The older master, hurt to the quick, sulked in his house, refusing to go out and saying that he would never again have anything to do with that upstart.
The story, true or false, is interesting as being the first about rivalry between Venetian artists. Biographies of artists in other times and places are liberally spiced with anecdotes about artistic competition. Apelles and Protogenes competed to see who could draw the thinnest line. Wu Tao-tzu, the greatest Chinese painter of the Tang dynasty, murdered a rival, just as Andrea Castagno was supposed by Vasari to have assassinated his friend and collaborator Domenico Veneziano (who in fact outlived him by four years). Donatello strove to outdo Brunelleschi and made wittily disparaging comments about the work of Nanni di Banco and Paolo Uccello. Michelangelo, the arch-rival of Raphael, destroyed pictures by Dürer out of envy. And so on.10 But the rivalrous instinct, and the artist’s passionate identification with his work that it implies, seems to have been lacking in conservative, family-oriented Venetian studios until Titian’s independent and competitive spirit kick-started the rapid development of Venetian art.11
Giorgione’s posthumous reputation did not merely survive the setback; it mushroomed after his death, when he became increasingly famous as the most enigmatically romantic of Renaissance painters, in a way that is without parallel in the history of art. Apart from Vasari’s not entirely accurate ‘Life of Giorgione’, which was published four decades after the painter’s death, we know very little else about him, except that in the seventeenth century his family name was said to be Barbarella, that he was referred to in his lifetime as Giorgio rather than Giorgione, that the contents of his house suggest that he was by no means a rich man and lived in some disarray; and that he kept a separate studio.12
Although Vasari said Giorgione was born in Castelfranco in 1477 or 1478, he may in fact have been closer to Titian’s age because his first securely datable work is the Portrait of a Man of 1506, by which time, according to Vasari, he would have been nearly thirty. He died during a plague in 1511, not in 1510 as Vasari claimed. Vasari was, however, right in saying that, by giving his pictures more softness and greater relief, he was the first Venetian artist to create the ‘modern style’, far outstripping Giovanni Bellini and all other Venetian painters of the older generation, and that the finished pictures of Giorgione and Titian were for a while so similar as to be indistinguishable. In fact, although the mood of their pictures is similar, there were differences in the way they planned and painted them. The Three Philosophers, for example, which is one of the paintings that is confidently attributed to Giorgione at least in part – and one of the most closely studied by modern scientific investigations – reveals underdrawings, some in bold outlines using a large brush, some loosely drawn in stiffer lines. This careful planning is very different from the cursory drawings beneath Titian’s earliest paintings, which were conceived almost entirely in paint.
The problem of attribution to one or the other, or to Sebastiano Luciani, or to other artists some of whose names have not survived, continues even today to exercise scholars, critics, museum curators and dealers. They were all painted for young Venetians whose imaginations had been recently liberated by the classical stories and pastoral romances published by the Aldine Press, and who were ready for a new, unconventional way of painting. Ridolfi wrote that their portraits were also difficult to distinguish: ‘many portraits are identified with some confusion and no distinction, now as the work of one, now as the work of the other’. But since neither Vasari nor Ridolfi nor any other early writer was specific about the portraits in question, the only two that can be given to Giorgione on sound evidence are the Portrait of Laura, so called from the spray of laurel branches behind her head, and possibly the first of the Venetian portraits of anonymous seductive women, which is inscribed on the back of the panel, ‘On 1 June 1506 this was made by the hand of maestro Giorgio from Castelfranco the colleague of maestro Vincenzo Catena’; and the Portrait of a Man, which is also signed on the reverse, and seems to be
a portrait of the physician Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma, who was also the subject of a later portrait by Titian.
Apart from those two portraits, the public commissions for the Fondaco frescos and the lost painting for the doge’s palace, there are two other pictures that are so distinctive that they can be identified from the notes of a Venetian nobleman, Marcantonio Michiel, who wrote, mostly in the late 1520s, about the pictures he saw in eleven collections in Venice and Padua.13 One is the Tempesta, then in the collection of Gabriele Vendramin, which Michiel described as ‘The little landscape on canvas with a storm, with a gypsy and a soldier … By the hand of Giorgio of Castelfranco’. The other is the Three Philosophers, which he saw in the house of his friend Taddeo Contarini in 1525 and described as ‘The canvas in oil of Three Philosophers in a Landscape, two standing and another seated, who contemplates the rays of the sun, with a painted rock that is miraculously rendered. It was begun by Zorzo of Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano the Venetian.’ Both descriptions are so precise that they put the attributions beyond reasonable doubt, although modern scientific studies show no evidence that the Three Philosophers was finished by Sebastiano.
The Giorgione or Titian question14 remains so contentious that professional art historians use the phrase ‘according to my Giorgione’ in wry acknowledgement of the inevitable subjectivity of attributing any painting to a particular artist by connoisseurship alone. The problem is complicated by other possible contenders, some anonymous because Venetian painters seem rarely to have entered into notarized contracts for their work, as was the norm in the rest of Italy, or if they did the notarial records have survived less well than elsewhere. Giorgione, furthermore, worked mostly for high-born patrons, and the earliest accounts of his style were written by people, Vasari included, who did not have easy entrée to patrician collections and therefore didn’t know what his cabinet pictures looked like. The exception was Marcantonio Michiel, who, as a nobleman himself, had access to patrician collections, although his laconic notes were not always accurate. Michiel recorded fourteen Giorgiones. Vasari gave him about twelve. In the next century Ridolfi mentioned about sixty-five, already an impressive opus for an artist cut off in his prime by death.15
