Titian

by Sheila Hale

  NINE

  Sacred and Profane

  Titian appears, and art takes a step in advance, and we feel that there may be some further perfection of which as yet we do not dream.

  JOSEPH A. CROWE AND GIOVANNI BATTISTA CAVALCASELLE, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TITIAN, 1881

  The Assumption is a noble picture, because Titian believed in the Madonna. But he did not paint it to make any one else believe in her. He painted it, because he enjoyed rich masses of red and blue, and faces flushed with sunlight.

  RUSKIN, MODERN PAINTERS, VOL. 5, 1843–60

  A year or so after Titian had refused Pietro Bembo’s invitation to Rome and the Council of Ten had voted to accept his proposed battle scene for the Great Council Hall he received a private commission to paint a picture for Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Council of Ten. Aurelio was the civil servant who in 1507 had signed the payment order to Giorgione for the Fondaco frescos, and it is possible that he helped Titian with the phrasing of his petition and influenced the Council’s decision in his favour. He had risen through the ranks of the ducal chancery, starting his career as an advisory notary with a salary of twenty ducats a year to his present powerful position, which paid 200 plus bonuses. The son of a professor at the University of Padua, he was an educated man and evidently good at his job, which was one of the most important in the ducal chancery. He was a close friend of Pietro Bembo, who had written him a warm letter of congratulation on his appointment and who, some think, may have devised the Neoplatonic programme for one of Titian’s most visually compelling, endlessly fascinating and enduringly popular masterpieces, now known by the much later title Sacred and Profane Love (Rome, Galleria Borghese).

  Now in his early fifties, Niccolò Aurelio had fallen in love with Laura Bagarotto, a young and beautiful Paduan widow, who on the face of it could hardly have been a less suitable match. Laura’s late father, Dr Bertuccio Bagarotto, a Paduan nobleman, had been a lawyer and professor of canonical jurisprudence at the University of Padua, and a man of considerable means. But Dr Bagarotto, and some of her other blood relatives – including her maternal uncle, her cousin, her brother and her illegitimate half-brother – as well as her late husband, Francesco Borromeo, were among the members of the Paduan elite who had been singled out as traitors for supporting the short-lived imperialist occupation of their city in the summer of 1509. Within days of the recapture of Padua the family, including Laura, had been rounded up, sent under guard to Venice and thrown into prison. There was a debate in government about whether, given the status of the family, it would be more appropriate to strangle them privately in prison rather than hang them in public. Some escaped or were pardoned. But Laura’s uncle, father and husband were condemned to death, and on 1 December Dr Bagarotto was escorted from prison and hanged between the columns on the Piazzetta. He died protesting his innocence, while Laura and her mother were forced to watch his execution. Her brother, who had been spared, continued to work for the restoration of the family’s good name, and he seems eventually to have succeeded because his late father’s state pension was restored to him in 1519. Meanwhile, however, the family property, including their house in Padua near the Eremitani and Laura’s substantial dowry, was confiscated; and when in 1510 the Council of Ten decreed that the dowries of Paduan rebels be restored to their widows, Laura’s was not among them.

  On the day before their marriage on 17 May 1514 Aurelio arranged for the return of her dowry. Valued at 2,100 ducats, it consisted of a white satin gown (which she had probably worn for her first marriage), twenty-five pearls and some real estate near Padua. Any increase in the value of her estate would become the property of her husband, and Aurelio did later develop the land with walled stone buildings. Although the Collegio granted approval of the marriage (another indication that there were doubts about the guilt of the family), the marriage of Laura Bagarotto and Niccolò Aurelio was the scandal of the year. Everyone talked about it, as Sanudo indicated when recording the ‘noteworthy’ event. Had Aurelio married for money? Although his job was well paid, he had no independent means, and his salary was stretched to the limit by the need to provide dowries for two sisters. He had lived with his brother in a house rented for only two ducats a year. Like so many Venetian men he had remained a bachelor, although he had fathered an illegitimate son. Had Laura married him as a means of reclaiming her dowry? Was the young Laura, who had suffered so much tragedy, attracted by the security and respectability of a middle-aged husband with an important job in government? Or was it a marriage of passion? In the three wills he made in the 1520s Aurelio refers to Laura as his most dear, beloved and cherished consort, whom he cannot imagine wanting to remarry after his death. He also expresses tenderness for the entire family, especially their daughter Giulietta, as well as for his natural son Marco and for Francesco, the natural son of his deceased brother Antonio, both of whom Laura had helped to bring up.

  In August 1523, nearly a decade after their marriage, Aurelio was elected grand chancellor by the Great Council. It was the top job in the Venetian bureaucracy, carried a salary of 300 ducats per year plus bonuses, and made Aurelio the most powerful man in government after the doge and the procurators. He beat five other candidates – one of whom, Gasparo di la Vedoa, was the doge’s favourite. Sanudo described Vedoa’s black face when he heard he had failed to carry the election, and such was his distress that he died the next year. Aurelio’s victory enraged a cabal of the losers, and less than a year later his enemies trumped up charges that he had accepted bribes to allow some criminals to escape justice. On 15 June 1524, after attending a banquet with Laura, rumours reached him of a plot. In July he was arrested, tortured on the rack and banished to Treviso for life. But a year later, possibly thanks to an intervention by Bembo, he was permitted to go to Padua, where he was reunited with Laura, who soon bore him a son, Antonio. But Niccolò Aurelio was a broken man. He died on 17 June 1531. Sanudo tells us that Laura honoured his wish to be buried in San Giorgio Maggiore and that it poured with rain on the day of his funeral. She never remarried.1

  Titian immortalized the love story of Laura Bagarotto and Niccolò Aurelio with a painting that is one of the icons of Italian Renaissance art.2 The earliest references to it are relatively straightforward. In the years after its arrival in the Villa Borghese in the seventeenth century, it was called ‘Beauty Adorned and Unadorned’ and ‘Divine Love and Profane Love, with Cupid fishing in a basin’. Ridolfi described it as ‘two ladies near a spring in which a child is looking at itself’. The title Sacred and Profane was attached to the painting in the eighteenth century. But it was not until the end of nineteenth century that art historians educated in the classics began their attempts to possess by explanation this last and greatest of Titian’s Giorgionesque secular paintings with more and less arcane theories about its meaning and the classical or Renaissance stories it might illustrate.3 Although few have doubted that the naked woman in the painting is Venus, some have seen the two women as representing her double role as goddess of both chastity and carnal love. Some, taking their cue from the eighteenth-century title of the painting, have seen the naked Venus as ‘sacred’ in the sense that she is the celestial goddess of unadorned truth and the higher love, while her clothed counterpart is an earth-bound mortal and therefore ‘profane’.

  A more recent and more plausible interpretation4 inverts that theory. Venus may have been the most beautiful of goddesses, but she was notorious for sleeping around and was for that reason the goddess of whores as well as of brides. According to the Neoplatonic theory of love then being propagated by Bembo and Castiglione, carnal love, as encouraged by Venus and her son Cupid, leads step by step to the ideal love in which raging passion, harnessed by the human intellect and capacity for discipline, ascends to the perfect love of God and to Christian marriage in which the purpose of sexual relations is to produce children. It is the clothed bride in Titian’s painting who represents that ideal of what has been called a ‘baptized eros’.5 If this is
indeed the meaning of Titian’s painting it could have been suggested by Pietro Bembo’s famous and widely read Gli Asolani, in which a party of young friends discuss the nature of profane and sacred love. Bembo was, as it happened, in Venice at the time of the marriage, travelling on a diplomatic mission, and he would certainly have given a wedding present to his friend Niccolò Aurelio. Poems in praise of marriage were traditional wedding gifts. Bembo, who was also acquainted with Titian, and was not lacking in imagination or appreciation for the art of painting, might have decided instead on a painted poem. If so, we have the greatest Venetian poet of his day to thank for the most sublime Venetian painting about love and marriage.6

  The link with Niccolò Aurelio was not rediscovered until the early twentieth century when Sanudo’s diaries were first published7 and a scholar matched the escutcheon on the front of the fountain to an engraving of the Aurelio family coat of arms. More recently, thanks to the interest of academic historians in the material culture of the Renaissance, scholars have noticed what would have been immediately obvious to any sixteenth-century Venetian who saw the painting in the Aurelio household. Sacred and Profane Love is an epithalamium, a poem about a marriage, in the same tradition as Botticelli’s Primavera.8 Venetian brides did not necessarily wear white. Their wedding dresses could be any colour, the main requirement being that they were made of expensive materials and worn with ornate jewellery.9 Titian originally dressed his bride in the red that can still be detected beneath the white he painted over it. She wears the belt, or ceston, that refers to the girdle of Venus, which had the power to bestow sexual attraction on its wearer, but was also a sign of the bride’s chastity; it would have been sent by her betrothed as a tribute of love and a token of marital fidelity. The ceston, like the crown of myrtle in her hair, had been associated with sex and marriage since antiquity. Her hands are protected by gloves, which will be removed just before the ring is slipped on her naked finger. The pot she holds in her gloved left hand was a traditional wedding gift from the husband, associated with childbirth. The fluted silver bowl, the bride’s gift to the groom, would be inscribed with her coat of arms.10 It might be used for sweetmeats, for washing her hands after childbirth or for the baptism of the baby. The fictive relief carving on the sarcophagus of an unharnessed horse was a familiar symbol of unbridled passion – horse, cavallo, was a euphemism for phallus, fallo – which would be tamed by marriage just as the flames of the smoking torch held by Venus have been doused.

  Cupid stirs the water in the sarcophagus, which is transformed by the power of love into a life-giving fountain. The water falls through a brass spigot on to the rose bush, the rose being a flower sacred to Cupid’s mother because she pricked her foot on a rose thorn and her blood stained some of the white roses red.11 Rabbits, little symbols of fecundity, race across the beautiful landscape lit by the slanting rays of the evening sun, where a couple embracing in the far distance are pursued by huntsmen chasing after love. Even the lake calls to mind the lake in Venus’ garden at Paphos. The bride, however, seems to be unaware of where she is or of the presence of the goddess who gazes at her encouragingly but must remain invisible to a mortal.

  The two women are linked by the similarity of their features – a typical compliment to a bride who in the eyes of her husband is as beautiful as Venus; and by one of Titian’s simplest and most effective chromatic schemes: blood red, the colour of passion, for Venus’ cloak and the bride’s sleeves; the chaste white of her wedding dress echoed by the veil that covers the mons veneris of the goddess. We know from a cleaning and relining completed in 199512 that Titian did not decide on the final colours and composition without his usual trial and error and that he used a canvas on which he seems to have begun a painting of a different subject. He began with the sarcophagus and a naked standing figure in profile on the right. Originally he placed the two girls closer together. There was another large figure behind Cupid. The underdrawings revealed when the old lining was removed are thick and look as though they were rapidly executed with the help of his fingertips. It seems that he worked on the design at speed, propelled perhaps by a rush of inspiration or a deadline. If so, the freshness and originality of the finished masterpiece may owe something to the pressure to complete it on time.

  Giovanni Bellini died on the morning of 29 November 1516. He had chosen to be buried in a modest second-hand tomb near the graves of his wife’s family and his brother Gentile in a cemetery attached to the Dominican preaching church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo,13 where he had worshipped and where his funeral was held. ‘His fame is known throughout the world, and old as he was he continued to paint excellently,’ wrote Sanudo (who unfortunately left a blank space for Giovanni’s exact age). Titian, who had not yet delivered the battle scene for the Great Council Hall, may not have received the sanseria he had hoped to be awarded on Giovanni’s death.14 He was, however, immediately commissioned to complete the canvas for the Great Council Hall of the Humiliation of the Emperor Barbarossa, which Giovanni had left unfinished. But more compelling commissions were piling up.

  At the time of Giovanni Bellini’s death Titian was also at work across the city in the Franciscan Frari, the other great mendicant church of Venice, on a painting in which Christ’s Apostles express their astonishment, joy and thanksgiving as they witness the miraculous Assumption of His Mother into Heaven. Known as Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari to distinguish it from the many other Venetian churches dedicated to the Virgin, the Frari was and is the largest and most beautiful Gothic church in the city, with the second tallest bell tower after that of San Marco. The arch of its magnificent fifteenth-century monks’ choir, the only one that survives in Venice and one of the few in Italy still in situ, frames the view from the nave of the high altar. Titian had been invited by the energetic new guardian of the church, Brother Germano da Casale, to paint an Assumption of the Virgin for this prominent position, where it would be seen by congregations composed of every class from the poorest Venetians to visiting dignitaries and the richest and most powerful nobles. Titian must have played a part in the design of the frame, apparently completed in 1516, which determined the dimensions of his enormous painting: seven metres high and three and a half wide, making it the largest altarpiece ever attempted in Venice and the focal point of the Frari, where it dominates the view, framed a second time by the arch of the monks’ choir, from the far end of the nave. But size was only one of the challenges Titian would have to meet. His painting would have to be accessible to illiterate worshippers in the congregations of a preaching church. It would have to work against the counter-light streaming through the south-facing lancet windows of the apse. And it would require the ability to organize a team of carpenters to build the support and of assistants to help Titian execute his ideas as the painting progressed.

  He decided on panel as a more stable support than canvas, and with his inherited understanding of wood must have enjoyed supervising the carpentry. Twenty-one cedar panels, each three centimetres thick, are held together by sixty walnut pegs and larch struts supported by batons nailed to the back of the support. The nails penetrated the surface of the panel and were renailed backwards at Titian’s request.15 A studio in the convent was set up for him and his team of assistants, where a hundred or more curious friars observed their progress and plagued Titian with their comments before finally recognizing, so Ridolfi tells us, that ‘painting was not a profession for them and that knowing their breviaries was very much different from understanding the art of painting’.

  The germ of the composition seems to have been one or more of several chalk drawings by Fra Bartolommeo of flying, twisting virgins, which Titian could have seen on the Tuscan artist’s visit to Venice in 1508. The arrangement of the Apostles seems to have been suggested by Mantegna’s fresco of the Assumption in the Paduan church of the Eremitani. But Titian’s Assunta (as it is usually called) turned out to be entirely unlike any work of art ever seen in Venice or anywhere else, a masterpiece that would unsettle some
of his contemporaries and change the direction of European art in a way that was not repeated until Picasso reinvented the art of painting four centuries later. We see it through the veil of its powerful influence on Counter-Reformation and Rococo painting. But to appreciate the impact it made at the time one need only take a boat to the island of Murano, where Giovanni Bellini’s static and stately version of a similar subject, painted less than a decade earlier, can still be seen in the Franciscan church of San Pietro Martire. Bellini’s Virgin stands quietly praying on a cloud-shaped pedestal raised just above the landscape and behind the fathers of the Church, who stand in a semicircle meditating silently on the vision.

  Titian’s Virgin by contrast is propelled upward to heaven as though by her own spiralling momentum and is surrounded by a swarm of cavorting baby angels, while the miraculous ascent is witnessed by a crowd of amazed, larger-than-life-size Apostles, all in movement. Her robe and cloak billow about her supple body; her face and raised arms express terror and exaltation as she approaches God the Father, Who has burst through what appears to be the black unknown into the halo of celestial light that encircles her still youthful face. According to Franciscan tradition, which had been sanctified as doctrine by the Franciscan pope Sixtus V in 1496 – but was heatedly contested by Dominicans for centuries to come – the Virgin, like her Son, had been immaculately conceived. Uncorrupted by original sin, she was therefore not subject to decay and death but was physically assumed into heaven as a young and beautiful woman. Since the question of how she had been transported had never been settled, it was left to artists to depict her Assumption as they or their patrons envisaged it.16