by Sheila Hale
There is nothing this king does not do or does not suffer in his desire to avert war and consolidate peace; submitting, of his own accord, to conditions which might be deemed unfair, if he preferred to have regard to his own greatness and dignity rather than to the general advantage of the world; and exhibiting in this, as in everything else, a magnanimous and truly royal character.
He also praised the leaders of the other states that had formed the league of aggression against Venice nine years earlier, giving special mention to ‘Maximilian Caesar, whose old age, weary of so many wars, has determined to seek rest in the employments of peace, a resolution more becoming to his own years, while it is fortunate for the Christian world’. Erasmus did not in this letter mention Venice as one of the peacemakers. Nor did he foresee that one of the ‘pious princes’, Francis I, and the grandson of Maximilian Caesar would be once again at war within a few years and that their long fight for dominance in northern Italy would delay the harmonious international relations that he had so earnestly anticipated.
EIGHT
‘His Industrious Brush’: Pentimenti and Portraits
Confronted by a rival, whose name may be Pordenone or Michelangelo, Titian responds by engorging him. He appropriates his opponent’s style, or some part of it, which remains, for a brief moment, undigested within his own … The result is not, as with Hogarth or Renoir, disappointing: it is harrowing and short-lived. Titian works through the challenge, and his style reasserts itself.
RICHARD WOLLHEIM, PAINTING AS ART, 1987
When Titian was in his sixties he told a doctor that there were some days when he couldn’t paint at all and others when he could do and think of nothing else. Although his style changed radically in old age, his working habits were formed early in his career. When he was stimulated by competition or by the threat of losing a commission or by painting in fresco, he could work fast. But while the biographers of artists across different times and civilizations have told stories about wizardly speed of execution, as though the artists’ hands were directed by some supernatural force,1 Titian was known for his slowness and the procrastinations that stretched the patience of his patrons. He liked to work concurrently in different styles on paintings of different genres, stacking pictures that failed to satisfy him against a wall, leaving them unfinished or returning to them months, years or in some cases decades later. With growing success came the habit of taking on more tasks than he could realistically finish to a deadline. And he was capable of producing indifferent work on an off day or if the fee wasn’t high enough to merit his full attention: there are dull paintings – some come on the market or are stored in the basements of public galleries – that can be securely attributed to Titian, as well as some that are given to him without documentary evidence on the grounds of their high quality alone.
Painting conservators can detect the layers of dust that accumulated while he set his paintings aside until he had solved a problem or could no longer put off the demands of a patron. He made his alterations over dry paint, cancelling out previous attempts with white lead paint, which shows up on X-rays. Joshua Reynolds, who claimed to have taken a painting by Titian to pieces to discover the elusive ‘Venetian secret’, would have envied our up-to-date technologies, which allow us to watch Titian at work, rearranging, adding and cancelling, searching for the composition and the tonal relationships in his mind’s eye. Titian was an explorer in paint, trying out new ideas, striking out in new directions, assimilating lessons from other masters and quoting them before discarding their example to find his own way into an unmapped future. Although he frequently quoted motifs from paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael, the story goes that later in his life he once said to an imperial ambassador in Venice, ‘who saw him use a brush as big as a birch-broom’, that he wished to paint in a manner different from that of Raphael or Michelangelo, because he was not content to be a ‘mere imitator’.2 He was, as his contemporaries liked to say of him, an exemplar of the Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the effort that goes into great art.3 But the false starts and the pentimenti – changes of plan while he worked on a painting4 – that can be detected beneath the assured surfaces of his masterpieces give us an idea of just how great the effort was. Bellini and Giorgione had taken advantage of the slow-drying property of oil paint to make changes, but Titian’s more numerous changes were so characteristic of his working methods that they have become a hallmark for distinguishing autograph Titians from imitations or mainly studio works.
Although some of Titian’s compositions look as though he must have worked them out on paper before starting to paint, the majority of the preparatory sketches, if they existed, have long since disappeared, as have all but a few dozen of his other drawings, many of which are of debatable attribution. The whole question of Titian’s drawings, and what use he made of them, is one of the more vexed issues of Titian scholarship. The surviving sketches and drawings that are accepted, at least by some authorities, as autograph cover a wide variety of subjects – landscapes, animals, anatomical studies, sketches for portraits, studies for the benefit of assistants. But very few preliminary sketches for paintings have been identified, which, even allowing for the vulnerability of work on paper, is a tiny proportion of the 500 or so paintings he produced in the course of his long career. From the evidence we have, it seems that his painting technique from the beginning was to work and rework a compositional framework directly on to the primed support either in paint or black chalk and then more often than not ignore his own outlines. This does not mean, as his central Italian critics maintained, that Titian could not draw. Some of his sketches are masterpieces in their own right. One in particular, a Portrait of a Young Lady (Florence, Uffizi) of about 1511–12, in black chalk on blue paper covered with a yellowish wash, stands out from the other drawings not only because it is unique in his surviving oeuvre but because of its breathtaking beauty, the characterization of its moody introspective subject, and its vigorous and assured pictorial technique that looks strikingly modern when seen next to central Italian drawings of the same period. The rounded Slavic face of the model, whoever she was, evidently intrigued Titian at this time because it was a type he used also for the so-called Gypsy Madonna and the painting known as La Schiavona.
A nineteenth-century restoration of the Madonna of the Cherries (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) provided one of the first modern revelations of Titian’s way of working. When the painting was transferred from canvas to panel the conservators could see that the figure of the Madonna had been achieved only after trial and error while Titian tried different outlines with rough sketches, which he modified for the final design. Since he borrowed the motif of St John the Baptist grasping cherries from Dürer’s Madonna of the Siskin, which was painted in Venice in 1506, it is likely that he began his picture not long after he saw the Dürer. Then he seems to have lost interest or inspiration – or a patron – and abandoned the canvas. The two fathers, St Zacharias behind the Baptist and St Joseph behind the Christ child, were added, possibly at the request of a new patron, more than a decade later.
A restoration in the 1970s revealed that the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints5 is executed over two previous paintings.6 The first was a subject that included trees and water,7 which he never finished. He extended and reused the same panel for a new painting, which was commissioned for the high altar of the Oratory of San Nicolò ai Frari.8 This he set aside after sketching in rough outlines the figures of saints and filling in areas of colour before elaborating their poses or deciding how they would be arranged. He then abandoned the project for some years before in the 1530s completing on the same panel the painting we see today, with the help of an assistant, probably his brother Francesco. The thrifty habit of reusing the supports of discarded paintings continued throughout his career, even after he became well paid and famous.
In the Noli me tangere,9 the first and most delicate of his portrayals of the whore who was redeemed by her love for Chri
st, Titian evokes their close relationship during His lifetime, her yearning for Him and the drama of His miraculous reappearance to her after His Crucifixion with the balletic geometry of their poses, their limbs, Christ’s hoe and the tree planted in the centre of the painting which sways in counterpoint to Christ’s leaning torso. Here, as one writer put it, European painting has ‘become the richer by a new aerial quality due to nimbleness or expression in the touch itself’.10 Some scholars insist he must have worked out this highly complex composition on paper. There is no way of settling the question, but scientific examination has shown up the numerous changes that lie beneath the finished painting. A first attempt at a design evidently dissatisfied him because he cancelled part of it with a layer of white lead, apparently applied with a palette knife, and started again. He moved the ridge and buildings from lower down on the viewer’s left to their present position on the right, lopped off a branch of the tree, which was originally much smaller, and recast the agile figure of Christ, who originally wore a gardener’s hat and was shown upright and striding towards us away from the Magdalen rather than stepping towards her. The underdrawings sketched directly on the prepared canvas support are fine, free but very cursory scribbles describing some of the main elements, such as the curve of Christ’s back, hip and thigh but leaving details incomplete.11 The subject was so unusual in early sixteenth-century Venice and Titian treated it in such a wholly original manner that it is possible that he painted it for his own satisfaction without a commission as a way of exploring a depiction of the event that would emphasize the depth of feeling between the two protagonists.
The Three Ages of Man,12 the sexiest of all Venetian pastoral romances, was realized after unusually numerous revisions even by Titian’s standards. In a previous plan Cupid’s quiver was suspended from the top of the shattered tree; there was a tower in the central background; the old man holding two skulls was surrounded by four. The couple in the foreground – a naked young man and a girl who has not yet removed her white undershift, her pale bare arm resting on the brown flesh of his thigh while she points her flute at his groin – make love in the open air like the pagan shepherds and shepherdesses of the golden age described by Virgil and Ovid. But it was with one simple change – by twisting the girl’s head away from its original position facing the spectator towards her adoring lover so that, as Richard Wollheim put it, ‘their eyes copulate’13 – that he transformed a Giorgionesque mood painting into a Shakespearean poem about the most important and overwhelming of human emotions, for as long as youth and beauty last.
The Three Ages of Man (a seventeenth-century title) was commissioned by a goldsmith, Emiliano Targone,14 whom Benvenuto Cellini called ‘the finest jeweller in the world’. Vasari, who saw it in the late 1540s in the house in Faenza of Targone’s son-in-law Giovanni da Castel Bolognese, described it as ‘a naked shepherd and a country girl who is offering some pipes for him to play, with an extremely beautiful landscape’. A literary source has of course been endlessly discussed by modern scholars, but as with all Giorgionesque pastoral paintings it has never been possible to match the Three Ages of Man precisely to a particular text that would have been known at the time, and most of us are happy to accept it, with Titian’s nineteenth-century biographers,15 as a tale ‘merely half told … treated with such harmony of means as to create in its way the impression of absolute perfection’.16
It is in fact far from technically perfect. Titian, unable to fit in the girl’s legs, left the lower part of her body in an ungainly pose covered by the skirt of her red dress. The placing of the figures defies perspective: the old man is too small, the sleeping cupids too large. This is one of the first paintings in which Titian attempted the difficult challenge of grouping large figures seated directly on the ground within a landscape – a format that later became a hallmark of Venetian sixteenth-century painting but which continued to trouble Titian, who, even in his otherwise more assured pastoral paintings of the early 1530s,17 did not always quite bring off the anatomy of his seated figures. He had a similar problem with the Virgin’s pose in the Holy Family with a Shepherd of about the same date or a few years earlier,18 in which the disproportionately large head of St Joseph (apparently taken from the same model as St Mark in the St Mark Enthroned) looks as though it had been added on as an afterthought, perhaps for a patron or carpenters’ guild devoted to the popular cult of St Joseph. It was around the same time, or perhaps a few years earlier, that Titian painted the Baptism of Christ19 for Giovanni Ram, a Spanish collector resident in Venice who is portrayed in profile as the donor. The grandiose figures of Christ and the Baptist strike complicated, stagey poses, which look as though Titian was working from sketches or descriptions of classical and central Italian prototypes he had not seen in the original.20 The portrait of Ram is executed in a tight, explicit way that harks back to Giovanni Bellini.
If Titian in his twenties was still feeling his way in such paintings, he was already secure in the art of portraiture, which was a new genre in Venice – Vasari gave Giovanni Bellini the credit for starting what was evidently an unusual custom. It is our bad luck that the identities of most of Titian’s earliest sitters are lost, probably because portraits seem rarely to have been commissioned with written contracts. According to Vasari one of them was of Titian’s friend, a member of the noble Barbarigo family, who recommended Titian for the job of frescoing the Fondaco. Vasari wrote that he painted this portrait when he was no more than eighteen, ‘at the time he first began to paint like Giorgione’, and that it was held to be:
extremely fine, for the representation of the flesh-colouring was true and realistic and the hairs were so well distinguished one from the other that they might have been counted, as might the stitches in a doublet of silvered satin which also appeared in that work. In short the picture was thought to show great diligence and to be very successful.
It is possible that this is the painting now known as the Man with a Quilted Sleeve. Although the sleeve is actually blue it may be that Vasari was referring to silvery light playing on it before the surface of the painting was abraded over time. Nevertheless, it is remarkably assured for the date Vasari suggests, which would date it in or before 1508.
A doublet with voluminous sleeves was in any case the kind of luxurious garment that was frowned upon by the older, stricter seafaring generation. It went against the long-standing Venetian tradition of moderation intended to minimize jealousy within and without the ruling class. At a time when Venice was engaged in a crippling war, lavish clothes and foreign fashions were especially unpatriotic and indeed dangerous because offensive to God. Members of the patrician class, furthermore, were supposed to wear the toga or the robes that indicated higher office. In Titian’s portraits members of the nobility who had withdrawn from active trade and wished to be portrayed as gentlemen of refined taste are dressed instead in fashions that prevailed elsewhere in Italy and Europe. Some may indeed have been foreigners – Titian’s studio was already one of the many attractions of the much-visited city. But others were young Venetians emulating an ideal of how a gentleman should look and behave in a way that was gaining currency through drafts of Baldassare Castiglione’s popular and influential dialogue The Courtier. If some were, like Titian’s Barbarigo friend, members of the patrician class, their taste for avant-garde art would have been consistent with a subversive attitude to the dress code thought appropriate by their conservative elders. Perhaps some of them wished to be portrayed as they would like to be remembered before going off to war. The Man with a Red Cap (New York, Frick Collection) carries a sword and is dressed in furs, perhaps for campaigning in a northern winter.
When Titian was young most of the men he painted were also young. They generally posed for him in black, with touches of a white shirt showing at the neck. The Spanish fashion for wearing black was recommended by Castiglione as the most suitable attire for courtiers, and black, the most expensive cloth because the dye was difficult to fix, was an indication of th
e sitter’s wealth. Venetians who dressed like foreign aristocrats were making a statement about their status as gentlemen who had abandoned the sea for a more civilized and contemplative life. The expensive clothes, the rings that draw attention to their expressive hands, and their gloves, which would have been scented with musk, further signify their position as aristocrats or quasi-aristocrats. By limiting his palette to the variations of black, white and the flesh tones at which he excelled Titian brought a new drama and mystery to his portraits, which would later inspire painters as different from one another as Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Velázquez and Whistler. The earliest portraits seem to catch their subjects off-guard, ‘heads inclined like too heavy flowers’,21 lost in melancholy musing. The gaunt, handsome features of the Young Man with a Red Sleeve (Earl of Halifax on loan to the London National Gallery),22 tired eyes staring into the distance, are those of a man so intensely preoccupied by his own thoughts that we feel he would be startled by the slightest interruption. The initial ‘C’ on the scroll in the background to his right may give a teasing clue to his identity. One of the earliest extant portraits, the elderly man in Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst) wearing the habit of a lay brother – he could be a member of the confraternity of St Anthony whom Titian knew in Padua23 – averts his eyes like saints in religious paintings of the previous century. The Frick Man in a Red Hat gazes up and away from the viewer as though he too is absorbed in otherworldly thoughts. Sometimes Titian gives the impression that his gentlemen are about to emerge from their dark backgrounds to go out for the evening, or that they have just returned. The Young Man with a Red Sleeve has removed one of his kid gloves and his broad-brimmed hat. The Man with a Quilted Sleeve has his black outdoor cloak slung over his left shoulder.
