by Sheila Hale
Over successive centuries the volume of Giorgiones expanded, the inflationary optimism of connoisseurs fuelled by a burgeoning art market whose interests were served by exploiting the fascinating qualities of early sixteenth-century Venetian painting that are difficult to define – except as ‘Giorgionesque’, meaning a style characterized by informal grouping of figures, gentle transitions of colour, dreamy landscapes and idiosyncratic or enigmatic subject matter that seem to reflect the mood of the pastoral poetry of the period. Giorgione, as a connoisseur of Venetian painting observed in 1877,16 had become ‘a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it crystallising about the memory of this wonderful young man’. By the early nineteenth century it is said that some 2,000 ‘Giorgiones’ passed through the London salerooms. They included paintings now more securely attributed to other artists including Titian. It was only from the second half of the nineteenth century, when more informed connoisseurship was facilitated by the invention of photography, the spread of railways, the growth of public museums and the opening of the Italian state archives, that the Giorgione bubble began to deflate.17 By the early twentieth century some ‘Giorgiones’ had been restored to the artists who painted them, and the numbers have continued to decline with colour photography, loan exhibitions and the expansion of art history as an academic subject. But there are still a number of paintings that art historians have continued to shift back and forth between Giorgione and the young Titian, and sometimes Sebastiano, or to a collaboration of two of them or all three.
Depending on the Giorgione of which modern scholar you consult, there could be anything up to about forty surviving works. They include a number that some scholars prefer to give to Titian, including the Christ Carrying the Cross (Venice, Scuola di San Rocco), the Allendale Nativity (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art); and the Sleeping Nude in a Landscape (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), which is the first extant reclining nude in Western art and one of the most famous of early sixteenth-century paintings. It has traditionally been assumed that the beautiful nude was painted by Giorgione and the landscape in which she lies finished after his death by Titian. However, after long and complicated detective work by scholars and restorers it now seems more likely that the entire painting is by Titian.
The most interesting problem of attribution, for historians of the vagaries of taste, and perhaps the most contentious in the whole of Italian Renaissance art18 concerns a painting recently described as ‘the greatest erotic masterpiece in the history of Western painting’19 but which was dismissed by some of the leading connoisseurs of the late nineteenth century as too feeble to be by either Giorgione or Titian. Despite the negative academic judgements of the Concert Champêtre, its quality was defended by the independent-minded Walter Pater,20 and it inspired painters on both sides of the Channel, from Watteau to Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, although in different ways. Manet took it as the model for his slice-of-life Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1863. It was the subject of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet ‘For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione’ (1849) about the sadness of a moment of perfect bliss that must pass with time. Two naked women and two fully clothed men make music in an Arcadian landscape on a late summer’s day. The naked women may be nymphs, personifications of the landscape and therefore invisible to the men,21 who do not look at them. Whoever painted it, this mysterious, erotic, beautiful picture is an epitome of what we think of as ‘Giorgionesque’. Nevertheless, since 1976 the Concert Champêtre has been given to Titian by a majority of scholars,22 partly on the grounds that technical investigation has revealed a large number of the changes of plan that were characteristic of Titian’s working method.
There is in fact no undocumented Venetian painting that looks like Giorgione or Titian or both – or in some cases not very much like either – that has not been the subject of prolonged scrutiny and sometimes bitter debate. But any amateur art lover who tries to follow the ins and outs of all the arguments is at risk of drowning in oceans of spilled ink. There are even some art historians who say that there is really no point in speculating about the dates or attributions of the disputed early paintings, and particularly the Concert Champêtre, without comparing them to the first of Titian’s works about which we know for certain exactly when, where and for whom they were executed. They are the frescos still in the Scuola di Sant’Antonio in Padua, where Titian worked in the spring and early summer of 1511.
SIX
Miracles and Disasters
Often the high and broad trees produced by nature in the fearful mountains tend to please spectators more than the cultivated plants, pruned by learned hands in ornamented gardens … And who doubts that a fountain that naturally comes out of living rocks, surrounded by a little greenery, is more pleasant to human minds than all the others made with art from the whitest marble, resplendent with a lot of gold?
JACOPO SANNAZARO, ARCADIA, 15041
On 1 December 1510 Titian received a visit from a certain Nicola da Stra, the guardiano, or chief executive, of the Confraternity of St Anthony in Padua, who had come with a proposal that no young artist in those lean times could afford to refuse. A programme of frescos depicting miracles performed by St Anthony, patron saint of Padua, was under way in the recently built chapter room on the upper storey of the confraternity. Titian, for a fee of twelve ducats, including an advance of twenty-four lire, the rest to be paid in instalments, agreed to contribute a fresco depicting the miracle of St Anthony’s jawbone (a fragment of which was preserved in a jewelled reliquary in the basilica of St Anthony). Stra would reserve for it the first large space to the right of the entrance to the new hall. The relevant entries in the confraternity account book for the next months are the earliest surviving records in which Titian’s name appears.2
Padua was the left bank of Venice and cultural jewel of the Venetian land empire. The Venetian intellectual elite were educated at its university, which was financed by the central government and was one of the oldest in Italy. The city’s Roman remains – including the first-century AD amphitheatre that is now the site of the Arena Chapel – bore witness to the ancient civilization that had flourished there at a time when Venice was a wilderness of mud banks inhabited by fishermen. The miracle-working St Anthony, a disciple of St Francis, was, and is, one of the most popular of all Christian saints. His shrine, the basilica of St Anthony, known simply as Il Santo, had been begun the year after his death in Padua in 1231, and has been visited ever since by pilgrims from the far corners of Christendom. The confraternity, which is adjacent to the Santo, was well endowed, with a distinguished membership. So the commission to contribute a fresco carried considerable prestige.
Although Titian had recently demonstrated his prodigious talent for creating dynamic figures in fresco on the façade of the Fondaco, the confraternity must have taken advice before employing an artist still in his early twenties. Jacopo Pesaro, his former and future patron and a prominent devotee of St Francis, would have given him a warm reference. Pietro Bembo, who had known Titian from the days in Giovanni Bellini’s studio, kept a house in Padua with his father Bernardo where they made their collection of coins, medals, antiquities and plaster casts of antiquities available for study by artists. The confraternity must also have consulted that fascinating Renaissance man and distinguished Paduan Alvise Cornaro. Cornaro, after enjoying a dissipated youth, regretted his wasteful life, wrote a treatise advocating moderation and sobriety and made a fortune as a technologist and agricultural reformer – ‘holy agriculture’, as he called it. (Tintoretto portrayed him in robust old age.) A man of wide-ranging interests and abilities – his passion for classical architecture would later encourage the young Palladio – he kept open house to gentlemen farmers, scientists, architects, writers, sculptors and painters. Titian, during his stay in Padua, frescoed the exterior of his house near the Santo.3
The choice of an up-and-coming Venetian artist was also an expedient political gesture
of loyalty to the Venetian government at a time when Padua was under a cloud of justified suspicion. Since taking control of the town in 1405 Venice had ruled there with a relatively light hand. But Padua had betrayed that trust. Members of the old governing aristocracy continued to harbour imperialist sympathies and some had advocated joining the League of Cambrai against Venice. Their chance had come on 6 June 1509, only a few weeks after the catastrophic Venetian defeat at Agnadello, when the remains of the League were welcomed into Padua, which declared itself an independent republic under the protection of the emperor Maximilian. The occupation lasted for forty-two days before the city was recaptured on 17 July by Venetian forces under the command of the brilliant soldier (and future doge) Andrea Gritti, with the help of Venetian loyalists in the city. The siege of Padua was one of the most violent actions of the Cambrai war, not least because of the use of a terrifying novelty known as ‘Greek fire’ which stuck to the bodies of its victims and could not be extinguished by water. The recovery of the city was celebrated in Venice with a magnificent procession led by the doge, which remained a regular event in the Venetian calendar for centuries to come. And when on 15 September a League army once again reached the walls of Padua the city was so well defended that after two weeks of bombarding the walls with heavy artillery Maximilian abandoned the siege and retreated towards the Alps.
When Titian started work in the confraternity in April 1511, Padua and Treviso and the swathe of territory between them were the only mainland possessions still in Venetian hands. Some leading imperialist partisans had been singled out by the Venetian government as examples and had been executed by hanging, their families fined or imprisoned and their property confiscated. Padua was a garrison city and headquarters for the duration of the war of the Venetian light cavalry, the stradiotti. The gates were guarded and the streets patrolled by able-bodied Venetian conscripts of all classes and occupations – patricians and their servants, peasants, guild members, even the entire crews of merchant galleys were given incentives by the government to occupy and defend the city. The surrounding suburbs and farms had been destroyed to provide a clear line of fire, and property within the city pulled down to speed up communication between threatened points. The population was swollen by refugees from the enemy-occupied territories around Vicenza and Verona. The university was closed.
Titian, his formidable energy undiminished by the depressing mood of the city and bursting with ideas, studied the outstanding examples of central Italian art that Paduan patrons, more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than their Venetian contemporaries, had commissioned since the early fourteenth century when Giotto frescoed the Arena Chapel with scenes from the lives of St Joachim, St Anne and the Virgin, and from the life and passion of Christ. Donatello’s monument to the mercenary commander Erasmo Gattamelata, the first of the great Renaissance equestrian statues, occupied a place of honour in front of the Santo, where his bronze sculptures for the high altar included four relief carvings of the miracles of St Anthony. Mantegna’s frescos in the Ovetari Chapel, strongly influenced by Donatello, were the first paintings in the Veneto to adopt the idiom of the fifteenth-century Tuscan Renaissance.
The members of the confraternity were lay brothers – and indeed sisters since women were admitted, although not into the chapter room. As family men required to conduct exemplary Christian lives, they understood the need to resist and to disclaim the passions, misunderstandings and temptations that can destroy the best of marriages – of the seventeen frescos in the chapter room, eight are about family matters. And it may have been for that reason that it was decided at some time during their early discussions with Titian that he would paint, instead of the miracle of the saint’s jawbone, the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, a story of domestic discord which doubtless appealed more to his sense of drama. A woman in thirteenth-century Ferrara is wrongly accused of adultery by her husband, a distinguished aristocrat who is convinced that another man has fathered their child. The supposed lover is identified by his striped hose as one of the young compagnie delle calze who organized theatrical events and were notorious womanizers. The woman protests her innocence, but a judge is unable to reach a decision. St Anthony gives the baby the gift of speech, allowing it to reveal its legitimate paternity to its father and assembled witnesses. The accused young man rushes forward in relief.
Titian based his composition on one of Giotto’s frescos in the Arena Chapel. The frieze-like arrangement of the figures seems also to have been inspired by Donatello’s miracles and by Antonio Lombardo’s relief carving of the same subject, which had been installed in the Santo only a few years before Titian painted his fresco. The group of three women on the right is a direct quotation from Sebastiano’s altarpiece, finished only a month or so earlier, in the Venetian church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. But it is the lighting and the striking composition of the fresco that account for its dramatic tension. Titian realized the sky, the landscape and the upper part of the church in a single working session or giornata – the time, that is, that it takes the fresh wet plaster on which true fresco is painted to dry. The fresco is divided vertically in half by the edge of the dark church, identified as such by a red cross in a blind arch. The device of splitting his compositions in this way was one he would use again over the next decades, and with stunning effect only a few years later for the impeccably polished Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor (Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca).4
On the church Titian propped a fictive statue of the Roman emperor Trajan,5 copied from a plaster cast or wax model of a Roman relief, which had recently been discovered in Ravenna.6 Although he would later occasionally incorporate all’antica inventions to give added meaning to his subjects, as he already had in the Jacopo Pesaro before St Peter, the figure of Trajan is the first instance in his career of his portraying a real antique model. It referred to a story told by Dante and in The Golden Legend 7 that was often used at the time to decorate wedding chests as a symbol of marital concord. Trajan, although hastening to battle, was persuaded by a grieving widow whose child had been slain to stop and administer justice. Centuries later Pope Gregory the Great saw a sculpted frieze depicting the Justice of Trajan and was so moved by the story that he prayed for the pagan Trajan to be baptized as a Christian by his tears and thus, unlike other pagans, who were automatically sent to hell, placed in Purgatory. Titian probably used it here to reinforce the visual message that Venice, like St Anthony, was dedicated to the administration of justice.
Titian finished the Miracle of the Speaking Babe in early May 1511. Later in the month he was commissioned to paint two smaller frescos for eighteen ducats, with a down payment of ten ducats.8 On 22 May we have the first record of Titian’s brother Francesco, who was in Padua where he witnessed a document in the office of the confraternity, signing himself as a master painter resident in Venice at the Rialto, and where he may have acted as Titian’s assistant. The Miracle of the Repentant Son – in which a bad-tempered boy who has kicked his mother cuts off his foot in remorse, and St Anthony restores the foot when the boy’s mother begs that he be forgiven – was executed in eight giornate. The miracle is witnessed by the first of the portraits of real people – probably members of the confraternity – to whom Titian liked to give roles in his theatrical productions. The only figures who seem to be unaware of the miracle are two soldiers, one in armour looking away from the performance of the miracle, the other seated in the distance.
The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, painted in six giornate, is the most turbulent of Titian’s trilogy of love stories. Possibly the first depiction in Renaissance art of an emotionally driven assault on a real, ordinary woman, the wind-blown landscape that echoes the violent act contradicts the written version of the story which takes place in a domestic setting. It is also one of Titian’s most theatrical early paintings.9 An insanely jealous husband, convinced of his wife’s infidelity, knifes her to death. The murder takes place in the foreground of the fresco, in the shadow o
f a rocky outcropping, while St Anthony, having resurrected the wife, is seen only in the distance forgiving the husband. In an age when extreme violence was commonplace, although rarely represented in Italian art, and women were regarded as the property of their fathers and husbands, Titian’s empathy with a woman violated by male intemperance is remarkable. As the model for the innocent wife sprawled in agony on the ground Titian quoted, in reverse, the pose of Michelangelo’s dramatically foreshortened figure of Eve from the Fall of Man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling10 or of the Virgin in his earlier Doni Tondo. Thus this most Venetian of painters made use of the two outstanding painters of the Florentine Renaissance, Giotto its founding father and Michelangelo the supreme genius of its maturity. Nor was this the last time Titian would quote Michelangelo, although that greatest of central Italian artists had probably not yet heard of the Venetian painter who would become his artistic opposite and principal rival. Titian executed the three Paduan frescos at top speed and apparently with no cartoons and only sketchy sinopie or underdrawings.11 The lay brothers’ request for domestic subjects gave him the opportunity to express for the first time his precocious understanding of the human heart, but he did so without a trace of rhetoric or religiosity, while his Shakespearean capacity to absorb, synthesize and enliven ideas borrowed from other artists transformed Venetian narrative painting, introducing a sense of naturalistic excitement that rendered obsolete the charming but static processions of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio.
