by Sheila Hale
Titian left Padua shortly after 19 July 1511, the day on which he received his last-recorded payment there. It was not until 2 December, a year after he had accepted the commission, that Antonio da Cesuna, the steward of the confraternity, brought the final instalment of four ducats to Titian’s house12 in Venice. Titian’s receipt to the confraternity survives only in a nineteenth-century facsimile, which is however consistent with genuine examples of his handwriting. He signed it ‘Tician depentor’, Tician being the Venetian spelling of his name.13 Depentor signified merely that he was qualified to paint by membership of the painters’ guild. It wasn’t until much later that he signed himself pittore, painter.
Titian was back in Venice in time to say goodbye to the convivial Sebastiano Luciani, who sailed away to Rome in August with Agostino Chigi, who had made an enormous fortune for himself and was collecting artists to work on the decorations of his Villa Farnesina. Banker to the pope and reputedly the richest man in the world – he once told Pope Leo X that he didn’t know how much he was worth – Chigi had been in Venice negotiating a loan to the cash-strapped government, which was struggling to raise the funds and armies it was expected to contribute to Pope Julius’ Holy League against the French. Also on board were the Venetian state jewels, which the banker took as security, and his young Venetian mistress, Francesca Ordeschi, whom he would marry eight years later. Sebastiano did not reappear in Venice, and then only temporarily, for seventeen years. His departure, which was followed in September by the death of Giorgione, left Titian in a lonely position, without the stimulus of a competitor close to his own age, cut off by the war from his family in Cadore, and from Francesco who in the spring of 1512 joined a squadron commanded by two condottieri14 as a footsoldier fighting in Vicenza and Verona. Titian had managed to send money home from Padua to a nephew.15 But communications became more difficult in October when Maximilian’s army took control of the Alpine passes, sacked those villages that had been spared by previous campaigns and forced the surrender of the castle of Pieve. In a message to the doge the citizens of Cadore wrote that they hoped to resist and rebuild the castle but were living meanwhile in huts and caves without even the basic necessities.16
Venice was crowded with peasants whose farmsteads on the mainland had been destroyed by the warring armies and who flocked into the city in ever greater numbers, wandering around half starved with their animals. The refugees were housed in monasteries deserted by monks who had escaped the hardships of the city in wartime, but the presence of so many needy mouths put a strain on the already severely limited supplies of food. The Aldine Press was closed. Horses capable of pulling artillery had been conscripted. The city was uncannily quiet. The plague, which claimed Giorgione as one of its victims, intensified in the summer and autumn after Titian’s return when it coincided with an even more lethal epidemic of fever. Nor, unusually, was it checked by winter. It persisted throughout 1511–12 and then, in a milder form, for two more summers. Titian’s first altarpiece, St Mark Enthroned, was commissioned during the plague by the monks of the church of Santo Spirito in Isola. St Mark’s head and left shoulder are in shadow. He is accompanied by Sts Cosmas and Damian, the physicians, and Sts Sebastian and Roch, protectors against plague. St Roch, an aristocrat who survived a plague, was most famous for his miraculous ability to cure other victims. St Sebastian, a Roman soldier, a captain of the praetorian guard who converted many others to Christianity, was associated with the plague because the wounds of the arrows that pierced his body resembled the lumps that were the first symptoms of bubonic plague. He is always shown young and naked, and Titian’s marvellous figure is his first male nude. Once again he looked to the example of Sebastiano, this time for the pose of St Mark on his high throne, which is very close to the figure of Solomon in Sebastiano’s unfinished Judgement of Solomon.
But war and plague were not the only disasters sent by God to punish Venice. Halfway through the previous Lent, when Titian was preparing to leave for Padua,Venice had been shaken by a tremendous earthquake, the first in living memory. Sanudo described the disaster, which hit the city on 26 March 1511, the day after the feast of the Annunciation, which marked the Venetian new year.
It seemed as though the houses were collapsing, the chimneys swaying, the walls bursting open, the bell-towers bending, objects in high places falling, water boiling, even in the Grand Canal, as though it had been put on fire. They say that, although it was high tide, when the earthquake came some canals dried up as though there had been a tremendous drought. The bells in their towers rang by themselves in many places, especially at St Mark’s, a terrifying thing to happen.17
The statues that toppled from the façades of San Marco and the doge’s palace were read as omens. That Prudence was among those that fell was a warning that the rulers of Venice must learn to be wiser than in recent years. It augured well, however, that some stone lilies fell from the roof of the ducal palace, just above the balcony of the Great Council Hall, and smashed in the courtyard: the lily being the heraldic emblem of the French king, the destruction of the lilies was a sign of God’s will that the French ‘barbarians’ would be driven out of Italy by the pope’s Holy League. The statue of St Mark stayed intact, a prediction that Venice would continue to be the preserver of the Catholic faith and defender of the Church. Some fanatical preachers put the blame for hard times on the Jewish war refugees from the terraferma, but what might have developed into a wave of anti-Semitism was immediately stemmed by order of the Council of Ten. Nevertheless, although given some protection, Jews were ordered to leave Venice within a month and meanwhile to stay indoors except for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
On the day after the earthquake, the patriarch, addressing the steering committee of the Senate, proclaimed that the catastrophe was God’s punishment for the sins of Venice, and the worst of them (as usual) was sodomy. Sodomy had become so rampant that the female whores had sent to him to say they could no longer make a living. He had heard in confessions that fathers were interfering with their daughters, brothers with sisters. He ordered three days of fasting on bread and water with penitential processions morning and evening. The government strengthened the already punitive legislation against homosexuality and blasphemy, passed more stringent laws against sexual relations with nuns and promised to ensure that justice was dispensed more quickly than had become the custom. Crowds processed through the city chanting litanies and imploring God’s forgiveness. The churches were full, and many more people than usual went to confession.
Although for most Venetians the outbreak of religious observance was a temporary reaction, the disastrous times had a more profound effect on the thinking of a small group of intellectuals from distinguished patrician families. Their spiritual guide and mentor was Tommaso Giustiniani, who after a mysterious visit to the Holy Land had been seized by an urgent need to atone for his hedonistic youth. His most prominent disciples were Vincenzo Querini who, as Venetian ambassador to Germany before the war, had become aware of the illwill against Venice and warned the doge of its possible consequences; and Gasparo Contarini, the son of a wealthy merchant who had studied with some of the greatest scholars of his day and was the youngest and later the most famous of these three. They retreated to an austere monastery on Murano for discussion, prayer, meditation and readings of the Bible and classical texts, and became convinced, at a time when Martin Luther was still an obscure theology professor at the University of Wittenberg, of such proto-Lutheran beliefs as the value of preaching and reading the Bible in the vernacular and of the necessity of ridding the Roman Church of worldly abuses. Giustiniani and Querini, who had come to the conclusion that the war was a sign of the futility of life on this earth, rechristened themselves Peter and Paul, and became hermit monks in the monastery of Camaldoli in the wilderness of the Apennines, from which, in 1513, they presented Pope Leo X with proposals for radical reform of the Church.
Contarini wavered. Although deeply troubled by the spiri
tual condition of the Christian world – ‘our age sins badly’ he wrote later – he had agonizing doubts about his religious vocation and about the value of retreat and penance. They culminated on the Easter Saturday after the earthquake when he confessed to a sympathetic monk an insight that anticipated Martin Luther’s vision in the tower of two years later. Contarini had reached the conclusion that no amount of self-punishment would compensate for his past sins. Justification in the eyes of God was not to be achieved by penance but by deep, abiding love of Christ and gratitude for His suffering and self-sacrifice on behalf of mankind. Having decided to pursue a worldly career, he went on to serve the Venetian government in a number of important posts, notably as ambassador to Charles V during the diplomatically sensitive period in the 1520s when Venice switched its allegiance from France to the emperor. When in 1535 he was unexpectedly made a cardinal by Pope Paul III, the appointment was taken as a sign that the Church intended to institute reforms, and he did play a crucial role as a reforming humanist at the papal court. His famous idealized description of the republican government, De magistratibus et republica venetorum, was published posthumously in 1543.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1511, only a few months after the resolution of his spiritual crisis, we find Contarini taking part in a jousting tournament at Mestre as one of eight nobles dressed in magnificent armour and silken doublets – the prize was a horse worth forty ducats. Venetians, after all, needed to cheer themselves up in those grim times. While modest merchants watered their wine and struggled to put food on their tables, wealthy members of the government suffered far less from the war. Inside information about troop movements on the mainland made it possible to import agricultural produce from their country estates into the city at inflated prices. Venetian estates overseas were undisturbed while the Turks concentrated on consolidating their Islamic dominions in the Levant. Venice had been at peace with the Ottoman Empire since 1503 and in 1513 obtained the renewal of its commercial privileges in the Ottoman territories. So overseas trade continued, albeit at a slower pace. Although most merchants dealt in quantities too small to justify the risk of re-export, the trading galleys of the richest sailed into the harbour of San Marco with cargoes of essential spices large enough to obtain guarantees of safe conduct through the war zones and into the transalpine markets. The rich and privileged, as Sanudo repeatedly informs us, continued to enjoy the luxurious habits that the rest of the population believed were offensive to God.
In the first winter after the defeat at Agnadello all classes had enjoyed an unusually entertaining and riotous carnival. But in 1511 the season was altogether more muted after the Council of Ten, fearing violence or even insurrection from a discontented population, issued a decree in early February that forbade the wearing of masks and other disguises. It was unanimously signed by the Collegio and was followed a few days later by an official warning to all Venetians who continued to offend God by indulging in ostentatious displays of wealth:
Although we are in great danger, as everyone knows, there are many who in disregard of God and of the obligations to Him and in disregard of the honour and the needs of our republic … continue to spend high, unnecessary sums of money. By this they do damage to themselves and cause general resentment; they show little love for their fatherland since many spend this money without having paid their taxes, which are imposed to preserve this state and to secure the existence of us all.18
The enforcement of sumptuary laws, already the strictest in Europe, was tightened. Dress should be simple; the wearing of pearls and expensive fabrics was prohibited. There were specific instructions about the kinds of foods and numbers of courses to be served at dinners. And yet it was only days after the restrictions on carnival and the recent warning against unnecessary expenditure that the high-ranking and immensely wealthy nobleman Antonio Grimani, who had made his fortune in commodity dealing, hosted a lavish dinner in honour of Agostino Chigi. Just twelve years earlier Grimani, who had been elected naval commander in the Turkish war in return for a loan to the state of 16,000 ducats, had been arrested for failing to engage a Turkish fleet off the southern coast of Greece and for not disciplining his subordinate officers. The case was so sensitive that it took twenty sessions of the Great Council to reach a verdict of treasonable incompetence. Sentenced to exile, Grimani went to live in Rome with his son Domenico, for whom he had shrewdly purchased a cardinal’s hat for 25,000 ducats some years earlier. In 1509, thanks to his vast wealth and useful papal connections, his reputation was restored by an overwhelming vote in the Great Council. He returned to Venice where he was made a procurator of San Marco, and in 1521 at the age of eighty-seven the former incompetent traitor Antonio Grimani was elected seventeenth doge of Venice. Domenico, who had amassed one of the most important collections of ancient Greek and Hellenic sculptures, gave part of it to Venice on Antonio’s death, possibly as a gesture of gratitude for his father’s return to power. The pieces were housed in the doge’s palace where they could be studied by Venetian artists, not least Titian. Some are still in the Venice Archaeological Museum.
Antonio Grimani’s dinner for Agostino Chigi was attended by fashionably dressed ladies dripping in jewels and by some of the highest-ranking members of the Republican government, several of them bankers, who were served numerous lavish courses of the finest forbidden delicacies. We can imagine how the younger male guests might have dressed from Titian’s early portraits of fashionable young men. Not only is the shirt worn by the Man with a Quilted Sleeve (London, National Gallery) gathered in what was thought of as the French way, his sleeves defy an order by the Senate issued in 1512 which explicitly forbade the wearing of ziponi made of expensive quilted materials.19
In another time and place the Grimani dinner might have been enough to spark a revolution. The majority of ordinary Venetians certainly agreed with the official government line that the behaviour of a minority who ignored the proscriptions against feasting and fine clothes had brought disaster upon their city. There was widespread resentment that some of the wealthiest and most influential members of the ruling class avoided military service and the payment of taxes and forced loans, and that some used their money to buy offices for themselves and their sons. But if the government feared insurrection, it never happened. When in August 1511 Maximilian broadcast a message from Innsbruck to the Venetian popolani, inviting them to rise up against the ‘insatiable cupidity and avarice of the so-called gentlemen and rulers’ and to bear in mind that, ‘should you not be liberated, their pride and conceit will be such that you and your fortunes will soon be utterly destroyed and ruined by them’,20 his appeal was ignored.
Although we know very little about Titian’s private commissions at this time, it is a safe assumption that his Venetian patrons were among the small elite who were in a position to indulge themselves during a war that impoverished the majority of Venetians, threatened the very existence of the Republic as an imperial power and saw some of the bloodiest military encounters that had so far been fought. The development of artillery after Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494 meant unprecedented casualties in battles, and some were on a scale no less shocking at the time than the slaughters in the world war of 1914–18 still seem to us. In February 1512 a five-day siege of Brescia, the Venetian gun-manufacturing town, by French and German armies left 15,000 corpses. In a battle fought at Ravenna a few months later on Easter Day between Spain and the pope on one side and France allied with Ferrara on the other, so many were killed that the following day the corpses lay thick on the ground so that for miles it was said to be impossible to walk without treading on them. Closer to home Venetian soldiers whose pay was delayed were forced to live off the land, where they looted the smallholdings of peasants. ‘All the soldiers’, wrote Sanudo, ‘act in their habitual way, dressing up in cloth of gold, and if they are not paid in time by the government, they do so much harm among the villages that they come out very well from it and rejoice, wanting the war to drag on as it does.’
Titian’s religious paintings are realized in the same pastoral setting, the sacred figures sometimes taken from the same models, as the secular subjects. The Noli me tangere (London, National Gallery) and the Baptism of Christ (Rome, Pinacoteca Capitolina), both painted just before or after the Padua frescos, are too small to have been intended for church altars, where the pastoral landscapes, which could suggest pagan revelries, would not have been acceptable. For the highly erotic Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland), which is about the same scale and date, he used the same model for the shepherd as for the Baptist in the Baptism of Christ and the same model for the blonde girl who is in the act of initiating passionate sex with her naked shepherd for the St Catherine in the Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor (Mamiano, Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca). This is one of the most gorgeous sacred conversations ever painted, the reds, blues, mauves and whites worn by the lovely dark-haired Virgin and glamorous St Catherine glow against their dark-curtained enclosure while the black and white robes of St Dominic and the donor to whom he introduces the splendid vision are silhouetted against the peacefully receding landscape. If we didn’t know the Christian story we might imagine that the men had come upon a harem. Such paintings would have been commissioned by private patrons who were steeped in the pastoral stories of Jacopo Sannazaro and his imitators and who were perhaps sophisticated enough to enjoy the teasing play of an Arcadian landscape as it could have been in the golden age of pagan revelry with the golden age in which Christ was born.21
