Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Although there is little doubt that Titian believed he could meet the challenge, his promise to complete the battle scene speedily was perhaps disingenuous. He was probably aware that the brokerage he was requesting was usually paid for as long as an artist could convince the Council of Ten that he was working on canvases for the palace. This forgiving approach encouraged procrastination and if cleverly negotiated could amount to a sinecure for life. The government had shown no sign that it was in any great hurry to complete the redecoration programme of the Great Council Hall, which was intended more for propaganda purposes than for the pleasure of the noisy throng of mostly philistine patricians who assembled there on Sunday afternoons. The Hall, which had been built in 1340, was cold and draughty in winter, and a heat trap in summer. The higher elected officials and their secretaries spent most of their time in the more comfortable surroundings of their offices and smaller council chambers. Thus the campaign to replace with canvases the ruined medieval frescos of episodes from the Alexandrine legend had been progressing slowly despite the occasional efforts of the Council of Ten to move things along. In the early 1490s Sanudo had boasted that the ceiling of the Great Council Hall was ‘all done in gold, which cost more than 10,000 ducats’.7 By 1494, however, the programme of replacing the medieval frescos with canvases by modern artists was so far behind schedule that the Umbrian painter Perugino, who was then most famous for his frescos in the Sistine Chapel, was offered 400 ducats to paint the Battle of Spoleto. He had refused, and that was the scene that Titian now proposed to provide in return for a studio of his own, two assistants, colours and the first available brokerage.

  The Council of Ten voted, by ten to six, to accept Titian’s proposal. Eight days later a further resolution ordered the Salt Office to pay his two assistants four ducats a month but not until they had started work on the battle scene. On 1 September 1513 Titian employed Luca Antonio Buxei and Lodovico de Zuane, who had previously worked on paintings for the Council Hall, and moved his practice into a set of spacious warehouses on the premises of the unfinished Ca’ del Duca – the palace so called because it had once belonged to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan – where the government gave working spaces to artists employed by the state.8 (It is the building with the heavily rusticated base at the bend of the Grand Canal opposite the Accademia Gallery.) But then, just as he was settling into the new studio, the Republic suffered the most catastrophic reversal of the entire war. On 6 June a French army that was supposed to come to its aid was defeated at Novara by Swiss mercenaries in the service of Massimiliano Sforza, who governed Milan under Swiss protection provided by the emperor. Sforza allowed free passage to Spanish and imperial troops, who laid siege to Treviso and Padua, penning in the inadequate Venetian army. With Louis XII suffering from what seems to have been premature senility the French alliance was all but useless. Venice was alone. In July the normally reticent Doge Loredan addressed the Great Council, beginning his speech with the familiar threnody about the arrogance and sinful habits of the patricians as the cause of disasters and defeats. He threatened to dismiss from office those patricians who were delinquent in the payment of their taxes, and appealed to them to join the army in defence of Padua and Treviso.

  By September a Spanish army had reached the edge of the lagoon and aimed their cannon at the Virgin City, which was saved from bombardment only by the four kilometres of shallow water that put it beyond the reach of contemporary firepower. Once again, as in 1509, Venetians saw their mainland towns, villages and farms in flames. On 26 September Sanudo climbed to the top of the bell tower of San Marco to survey the devastation.

  I saw the terrible destruction wrought by the enemies, who, if they had been Turks, could not have done worse … and everywhere one saw enormous fires that were billowing smoke, so that at the twenty-third hour the sun was as red as blood from the smoke of so many fires … It has been heard around town that the enemy front has crossed the Brenta, burning everything as they go, and that tonight they will burn Mestre and the villages and dwellings and whatever they find …

  Yet another sign that God had withdrawn His protection from His once chosen city came on a freezing night in January when an oil lamp overturned in a canvas depot at the Rialto. The flames were spread across the Rialto by a high wind, and by the time the firefighters had arrived shops, warehouses, banks, merchants’ lodgings and thousands of ducats’ worth of merchandise had been destroyed. Sanudo devoted ten double-columned pages of the printed edition of his diary to a vivid eyewitness account of the catastrophe, which he compared to the Fall of Troy and the recent sack of Padua. The work of putting out the fire was impeded by the throngs of Venetians trying to rescue what they could and by looters, some but not all of them foreigners. The wind did not die down until morning, when the doge sent his senior officials to bring order. Among the crowds who assembled to watch the spectacle Sanudo saw many foreigners, including ‘our rebel Paduans … and in my heart I believe that it gave them great joy to see our ruination’. It was, however, a good omen that the little church of San Giacomo al Rialto, the oldest Christian foundation in Venice, was miraculously saved despite its proximity to the source of the fire.

  On 20 March 1514 the Council of Ten took the decision to revoke the terms of Titian’s petition. He would have to wait his turn for a vacant sanseria like everyone else, and to save the state money they cancelled the salaries of his two assistants. Titian wisely bided his time. It might have seemed small-minded and unpatriotic to contest the decision when the state finances were overstretched by rebuilding the Rialto as well as by the soaring expense of the war. He waited until 28 November that year to present a revised petition to the Council of Ten in which he accepted that he would have to wait for his sanseria until the death of Giovanni Bellini unless one became available earlier. Meanwhile, he hoped that the Salt Office would resume paying for his assistants’ salaries and for his colours. He claimed that he had begun work on the battle scene, which would have been well in hand had it not been for the ‘skill and cunning of some who do not want to see me as their rival’. He added that without the promised expenses he would die of hunger. Although he did not name his enemies he must have been referring to Carpaccio,9 who was now in his fifties and out of fashion although ahead of Titian in the queue for the next vacant brokerage. (Carpaccio lived into the 1520s but never worked in the palace again.) The next day the Council of Ten agreed to the revised terms, this time by the narrow margin of seven to six votes, and ordered the Salt Office to pay the assistants, to provide Titian with pigments as required and to repair his workshop in the Ca’ del Duca, which was letting in the rain and might damage his preparatory sketches for the battle scene, thus delaying its completion.

  Another year passed. The government, desperate to economize wherever possible, filled loopholes in the taxation system, tightened the supervision of accounting methods and appointed special committees to eliminate all unnecessary expenditure. At the end of December 1515 an official from the Salt Office was given the task of auditing the accounts relating to the canvases for the Great Council Hall. He reported that as much money had been spent on them as would have completed the redecoration of the entire palace. Two canvases, for which there were only preliminary sketches, had cost more than 700 ducats, while there were masters willing to paint one canvas for 250 ducats. All the artists working in the Hall were immediately dismissed so that the terms of their employment could be renegotiated.

  The new conditions suited Titian very well. Although he may or may not have been one of the artists who had offered to paint a canvas for 250 ducats, his nose for business told him that he could do better. On 8 January 1516 a new proposal from Titian, this one addressed directly to the doge, was read out at a meeting of the Collegio. He had been working on the battle scene for two years. It was the most difficult situation in the entire room, but he would finish it for 400 ducats, half the amount, so he claimed, that Perugino had refused. The Collegio, whose members were presumably aware that
Perugino had been offered 400 ducats, not 800, voted to give Titian 300 on completion of the painting, as well as his colours and the monthly four-ducat salary for one assistant while he worked on it.

  He was allowed to keep the government studio in the Ca’ del Duca, and it was here that he painted the succession of masterpieces that would make him rich enough by 1531 to buy a studio and house of his own. In the absence of detailed contemporary descriptions or inventories of Titian’s working environment we can only deduce from such scraps of information as we have, and from descriptions of other artists’ workshops, what his studio might have been like. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo,10 a Milanese painter who turned to writing after losing his sight, said that Titian kept models of wood, plaster, terracotta and wax, as well as sketches of contemporary and antique works. Among them, we can be sure, were sketches and perhaps small models of the Laocoön. And then there were the luscious girls, naked or en négligée, whom, according to a report written in the early 1520s by the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice, ‘he often paints in different poses and who arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits; but he denies it’.11

  The meticulous account books kept by Titian’s contemporary Lorenzo Lotto from 1538 are the most informative source we have for the contents and atmosphere of a Venetian painter’s studio. Lotto, like Titian and indeed all sixteenth-century painters, worked from wooden lay figures, plaster and wax models of relief carvings, cameos and engravings, as well as from live models. He paid his models, usually poor people (he provided a bath for at least one girl), eight soldi for religious subjects, sometimes less to prostitutes who posed in the nude, although on one occasion he paid twelve soldi ‘for undressing a woman only to look’. His studio was equipped with powdered lapis lazuli (which he distilled himself), other colours, varnishes, oils, wax, glues, lacquers, mastic, turpentine, pitch and a stone mortar and pestle for grinding pigments.

  The atmosphere in Titian’s studio must have been something like the back-stage of a theatre, full of props and costumes and models in various states of undress practising their poses. Unfortunately for us, however, sixteenth-century writers on art thought it inappropriate to describe the physical act of painting. Leonardo, in his campaign to promote painting as a more gentlemanly art than sculpture, described the painter who sits ‘in great comfort before his work, well dressed, and wields his light brush loaded with lovely colours. He can be dressed as well as he pleases, and his house can be clean and filled with beautiful paintings. He often works to the accompaniment of music, or listening to the reading of many fine works.’ Sculpture, by contrast, was an exhausting labour during which the artist is covered with dust and sweat, ‘so that he looks more like a baker’. Even Titian’s best friend Pietro Aretino, who knew very well how Titian worked, refrained from mentioning his messy habit of using his fingers. It was not until the seventeenth century that Marco Boschini12 recognized Titian’s intensely physical way of painting as evidence of his creativity when he attributed to him the observation that a timid artist who is afraid to experiment with mixing his colours in case he makes a mess will end up soiling his clothes, with nothing to show for his efforts. But even in the nineteenth century, when Christina Rossetti dreamed up a Pre-Raphaelite atelier for Titian in her short story ‘Titian’s Studio’,13 the reality of the messy work involved in producing a painted work of art – the noise of assistants grinding pigments, the smell of oils, the paint-spattered clothes – was considered unacceptable.

  Titian ran his workshop in the Venetian tradition, as a business. He was not as patient or generous a teacher as Giovanni Bellini, and kept his shop relatively small. The only early assistants for whom we have names are Luca Antonio Buxei and Lodovico de Zuane. But it is likely that Domenico Campagnola, who had worked alongside Titian in Padua, also joined the studio for a while, until Titian discovered that Campagnola was forging what he passed off as preliminary drawings for Titian’s woodcuts by drawing on lightly printed counterproofs.14 Like all painters of the time, Titian used his assistants to do the preliminary preparations of his supports. It was not long, however, before he required them to collaborate with him on making copies, variants or paraphrases of what he considered to be his most marketable paintings destined for clients whom he knew would not object to the participation of his workshop, especially if a patron of high rank had commissioned the original. The earliest examples of this practice, which would later, with increasing fame, become an essential way of meeting the demand for his work, are the multiple versions of the Young Woman with a Mirror (two painted around 1513–15 are in the Munich Alte Pinakothek and the Paris Louvre).15

  The most reassuring and trusted presence was that of his brother Francesco, the better part of himself and the only rival he feared, or so he apparently liked to say.16 Towards the end of the Cambrai war Francesco was wounded fighting bravely in hand-to-hand combat near Vicenza, but he recovered and returned to Venice in 1517. In the coming years he would divide his time between Venice, where we can assume he shared the studio with Titian and helped with its management, and the family home in Cadore, where he occupied increasingly important offices in the communal government while working in partnership with Titian on the expansion of the timber business and on investments in landed property. Of all the Vecellio clan of minor painters he was the most prolific, and continued painting at least until 1550, occasionally with what looks like some improving help from Titian, as an independent artist specializing in altarpieces which were extremely popular on the provincial mainland. Examples of his work can be seen in churches around Cadore, Belluno and Vittorio Veneto, as well as in the Venetian church of San Salvatore, the Berlin Staatliche Museen and the Texas Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. His style, at least compared to that of his brother, seems clumsy, retardataire and wholly lacking in originality or dynamism, which did not prevent Titian from calling on him for assistance from time to time.

  Girolamo Dente, who entered the studio as an apprentice in the early 1520s, was to be the most faithful and the longest-lasting of Titian’s garzoni, so much so that he became almost one of the family and was often known as Girolamo da Tiziano. Like Francesco, he fulfilled commissions on the mainland as an autonomous painter, helped by his close association with the master. A story (for which there is no evidence) has it that the more ambitious and talented young Paris Bordone also worked for Titian. Not only did Titian refuse to teach him, he snatched from the hapless Bordone the commission for a Madonna and Saints from the monks of the Frari for the high altar of their Oratory of San Nicolò ai Frari. Bordone stalked out of the studio but remained, according to Vasari, ‘the one who more than all the others imitated Titian’. The Madonna and Saints remained in Titian’s studio until the early 1530s when, probably in collaboration with Francesco, Titian overpainted it with the different version, the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints (Vatican City, Pinacoteca Vaticana).17

  It seems that The Battle of Spoleto, the canvas he was supposed to be painting in return for his government studio, had gone stale on him. It was to be in a difficult position, as he had occasion to point out more than once, and medieval history paintings were not his forte. The more he thought about it the more his imagination was fired by a different battle, the Old Testament battle in which the Israelites are saved by God from Pharaoh’s army. Titian had already proved himself a master designer of woodcuts with the Triumph of Christ, and the Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, to which he now turned his attention, is arguably the greatest and most dramatic woodcut ever made18 and is certainly one of the greatest of all depictions of war. It measures 1,225 mm by 2,215 made from twelve blocks, a scale never before or after attempted for a Venetian figurative woodcut. Although there is no proof that Titian intended this heroic image as an allegory of the war that was threatening the Republic of Venice with extinction, the relevance at that time of the story of the salvation of God’s chosen people and the destruction of their enemies might have seemed especially movi
ng. Titian chose the episode from Exodus chapter 14 when Moses, having parted the waters to allow the retreating Israelites to escape from the Egyptian army, is instructed by the Lord to stretch out his hand over the sea, ‘that the waters may come again upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen … And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.’

  It may have been a coincidence but was nonetheless appropriate that the Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea was completed by February 1515.19 On 1 January the Venetian alliance with France had been given new life when the vigorous twenty-one-year-old Francis I succeeded Louis XII on the French throne. Francis declared himself duke of Milan, and in August crossed the Alps with the largest army ever assembled up to that time. In September, at Marignano (now Melegnano), sixteen kilometres south-east of Milan, the French army with some assistance from Venetians won a resounding victory against the combined forces of the pope, imperial Spain and the Swiss mercenaries who occupied Milan on behalf of the emperor. It was the final battle of the war of Cambrai. With all the remaining enemies who had determined ‘to extinguish, like a great fire, the insatiable rapacity of the Venetians and their thirst for power’ routed, it was left to diplomats to settle the terms of a peace, which two years later restored the greater part of the Venetian terraferma to the protection of the lion of St Mark.

  While Venice celebrated what it saw as its victory, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in a letter written in 1517, rejoiced in the peace from a loftier international perspective. He foretold ‘the approach of a new golden age, so clearly do we see the minds of princes, as if changed by inspiration, devoting all their energies to the pursuit of peace’. He gave most of the credit to Francis, King of France: