by Sheila Hale
One of Titian’s most original decisions was to eschew the traditional landscape background. His Assumption takes place, not in the countryside or in a fictive architectural space, but as though in the church itself. His awestruck, gesticulating Apostles, cast in shadow by the silhouette of the ascending Virgin, could have been members of a real congregation. They react to the supernatural event in a two-dimensional space ‘as natural as nature’17 and as solid as a building that seems to extend the apse beyond its windows. The sharp reds of the robes that mark the base angles and apex of the pyramidal composition flash against the warmer brick and terracotta of the choir and floor of the church. The swag of stormy clouds and rejoicing angels repeats in reverse the arch of the choir screen, thus completing a second full circle around the circle of golden light that out-dazzles the daylight that streams through the apse windows. There cannot be many other works of art that combine such architectonic solidity with such dynamism, or which are in such perfect harmony with the buildings for which they were created.
Dolce, writing nearly forty years after the unveiling of the Assunta, was the first to praise it in print:
It seems that she really ascends, with a face full of humility, and her draperies fly lightly. On the ground are the Apostles, who by their diverse attitudes demonstrate joy and amazement, and they are for the most part larger than life. In the panel are combined the sublime grandeur of Michelangelo, the charm and grace of Raphael, and the true colours of Nature.
But in his eagerness to promote and doubtless to please Titian, Dolce gilded the lily, asserting that Titian had painted the Assunta before Giorgione had produced any oil paintings, which would put it a decade earlier than the date that was clearly visible on the frame. He was doubtless right, however, that ‘clumsy painters and the ignorant crowd, accustomed to the cold, dead works of the Bellini brothers and Alvise Vivarini, which were without movement and relief, spoke very ill of the finished work’. Ridolfi repeated an old story, that the friars including even the enlightened Fra Germano objected to the excessively large figures of the Apostles, ‘thereby causing the artist to endure making no small effort to correct their lack of understanding and to help them comprehend why the figures had to be in proportion to the extremely large location in which they were to be seen, as well as to discuss whether it would be advantageous to make them smaller’. (Ridolfi also claimed that the friars came to value the painting only after the emperor’s ambassador tried to buy it for an enormous sum. But about this he must have been mistaken, because the emperor’s ambassador was not in Venice at the time.)
By the time Vasari saw the Assunta it was so obscured by an accumulation of dust and candle grease that he guessed it was on canvas and merely reported that it had not been looked after very well and was too dark to make out. When Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the Frari in 1752, he found it ‘most terribly dark but nobly painted’. It remained shrouded in grime and difficult to see against the light of the lancet windows until in 1817, during the Austrian occupation of Venice, the Assunta was removed from its frame and taken to the newly opened Accademia Gallery where it remained until after the First World War. It was displayed, along with other sixteenth-century paintings brought in from religious foundations and palaces in Venice and the Veneto, in the chapter room of the former Scuola della Carità (the first room at the top of the stairs, now hung with Venetian Primitives), where the ceiling was raised above it to accommodate its height.18 The sculptor Antonio Canova, who formally opened the room to the public in 1822, described Titian’s Assunta as the greatest painting in the world. The gallery was thronged. Artists queued up to copy it, writers to describe it. Some imagined they could hear its music.19
Now cleaned and well lit, Titian’s Assunta is no longer a pilgrimage piece. As happens to all successfully original works of art, its impact has to some extent been diluted by its influence. Titian would be dismayed to know that the more popular painting in the Frari is Giovanni Bellini’s neo-Byzantine Sacred Conversation in the sacristy. But if you stand for a while, perhaps on a winter’s afternoon when you might have the church all to yourself, and watch Titian’s Virgin flying up to heaven beyond the apse, you will notice a detail that sometimes escapes attention: one of the angels flanking God the Father holds a crown. It is with this that He will crown the Virgin, the protector of Venice, as Queen of Heaven, just as He had made Venice, at the end of the long wars of Cambrai, once again queen of cities. It was a time for Allelujas. And if you listen to the painting you may hear a chorus singing in the monks’ choir, accompanied perhaps by both church organs.
The unveiling took place on 19 May 1518. It was San Bernardino’s day, a public holiday, chosen to allow members of the government to attend. We know the date from Sanudo, whose maddeningly laconic diary entry however tells us nothing more than what we can see from Titian’s signature, ‘Ticianus’, and the inscription on the frame that records Brother Germano’s inspired patronage: ‘In 1516 Fra Germano arranged for the building of his altar to the Virgin Mother of the Eternal Creator assumed into Heaven.’ But Sanudo’s presence at the ceremony indicates that it was an important social event, attended by foreign dignitaries and members of government in their black togas or the brightly coloured robes and stoles worn by those who held high office. The papal legate to Venice, Altobello Averoldi, was evidently impressed: five months later he ordered an altarpiece from Titian for a church in his native city, Brescia. The following year Titian’s first private patron Jacopo Pesaro, to whom Fra Germano had recently conceded patronage rights to an altar in the left nave of the Frari, commissioned Titian to paint the altarpiece for it. Even before the formal unveiling, enthusiastic descriptions of the Assunta in progress may have reached the ears of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, a keen patron of contemporary artists who had, however, so far failed to recognize Titian as a painter of the first order.
Titian had worked for the duke in 1516, when he lodged with two assistants in the ducal castle from 22 February until the end of March. (The ducal account book of expenditure for that period records that the party was provided with salad, salted meat, oil, chestnuts, oranges, tallow candles, cheese and five measures of wine.) The visit may have had a diplomatic purpose. As the war of Cambrai drew to a close, the Duchy of Ferrara had been linked to its former enemy Venice by the Franco-Venetian treaty negotiated at Blois in the spring of 1513. After the decisive battle at Marignano in 1515, the pope, Leo X, had no choice but to side with the victorious Francis I, who had taken Alfonso under his wing and was conducting exploratory negotiations about the possibility of restoring Reggio and Modena to Ferrara.
Alfonso, who owed allegiance to both pope and emperor but who had more reason to fear the territorial ambitions of the pope, had minted gold coins the reverses of which were inscribed in Latin with the concluding words of the episode told in the three Synoptic Gospels about a Pharisee who, trying to trick Christ, asked: ‘Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?’ And Christ replied: ‘Show me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered, and said Caesar’s. And He said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.’20 This was the story the duke chose for Titian to paint on the door of a cabinet in which he kept his minted coins and collection of antique Roman coins and medals. It was a very rare subject. Titian’s Tribute Money (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), indeed, was the earliest Italian rendering of it, and he pulled out all the stops to produce a picture that would allude to the antiquarian interests of the Este dynasty and give an added dimension to the precious contents of the cabinet.
The Tribute Money is Titian’s sleekest, most polished early work. Ridolfi claimed that when the emperor Charles V’s envoy to Ferrara saw it several years later he expressed his surprise that anyone could compete so successfully with Dürer. Vasari – who may have been recording Titian’s opinion rather than his own – described the head of Christ as ‘stupendous and miraculous’, and wrote t
hat all artists who saw it considered it the most perfect painting Titian had ever produced. Although court painters did not normally sign pictures, this was the first of several works for the Duke of Ferrara that Titian, perhaps to emphasize that he was not a court painter, signed ‘TICIANUS F’. He placed his signature on the collar of the Pharisee; and if, as has been suggested,21 this malign figure is a self-portrait, the joke seems remarkably intimate coming from a young painter working for his first foreign prince.
In 1517 Titian received another diplomatic commission from the Venetian government. It was a painting, now lost, of St George, St Michael and St Theodore, which was sent as an official gift to Odet de Foix, the Seigneur de Lautrec, who had commanded the French army at Marignano and was now governor of Milan. Titian was also doing small jobs for Alfonso d’Este, who in August of that year paid him forty-eight lire for a sketch of a bronze horse. Early in the following winter Alfonso, who was planning to rebuild part of his castle, asked Titian to send him a sketch of a Venetian balcony and to supply him with a painting for the ducal bathroom of nymphs bathing. Titian responded to these requests with a letter – it is not in his own handwriting – saying that if his sketches of the balcony were not satisfactory he would do others because he was dedicated, breath, body and soul, to serving His Excellency, and he was honoured to obey him whenever and in whatever way he commanded. As for the Bathing Scene, he had not forgotten it, indeed he was working on it daily and the duke need only let him know when he would like it sent.
But a few weeks later Alfonso was persuaded by reports of the Assunta to cancel the Bathing Scene and to offer Titian a much more ambitious commission. On 1 April 1518, in a letter addressed to ‘the Most Illustrious and Excellent Lord, my Lord Duke of Ferrara’ and written by the same hand as the earlier letter about the balcony, Titian acknowledged receipt of a canvas, stretcher and instructions for a painting. Titian’s intellectually sophisticated ghost wrote that he found the subject so beautiful and ingenious that the more he thought about it the more he became convinced that the grandeur of the art of the antique painters was due to the generosity of great princes, who had allowed painters to take the credit for works of art which merely gave shape to the ingenuity and spirit of those who had commissioned them. To say that the soul of a work of art resided in its patron while the artist was merely the physical agent was an extraordinary conceit and certainly not one that would have occurred to any painter, let alone one as proud of his powers of invention as Titian. (Giovanni Bellini had refused outright to paint a subject according to a programme described to him by Isabella d’Este.) So whoever composed that letter must have been a friend whose judgement Titian trusted absolutely. Although there is no way of proving the identity of the author of the letter, the most likely candidate is Andrea Navagero, the poet and classical scholar who had persuaded Titian to refuse Bembo’s invitation to Rome in 1513 and who had himself recently returned from Rome to Venice.22
On 22 April Jacopo Tebaldi, the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice, reported to the duke that he had paid a visit to Titian. He had given him the ‘the sketch of that little figure’ and Titian had taken note of the duke’s further instructions for his painting. Titian wanted to know exactly where the duke proposed to hang it in relation to the other pictures in the room,23 and he promised to begin work on it that very morning. There is no record of Alfonso’s reply. Perhaps he took the opportunity to answer Titian’s question about where the picture would hang, and to see the Assunta with his own eyes when he paid a visit to Venice in early June. We can be sure that the duke nagged the painter in person – the sight of Titian’s astonishing painting of the Virgin flying up to heaven surrounded by angels can only have inflamed his natural impatience – and that Titian disarmed him with his usual courteous but disingenuous assurances that he would make the painting a priority.
If Titian hoped that the government would continue to excuse his failure to make progress with the battle scene while he satisfied the demands of the Duke of Ferrara, he was mistaken. On 3 July 1518 he received a stern warning from the Salt Office. Unless he began immediately on the canvas for the Great Council Hall, which had been neglected for so many years, and unless he continued to work on it until it was finished, their magnificences would have it painted by another artist at Titian’s expense. Titian, who had reason to be confident that there was no other artist capable of or even willing to attempt a painting for the difficult site between the windows facing on to the Grand Canal, seems to have deflected the threat by agreeing to complete Giovanni Bellini’s unfinished Submission of Barbarossa,24 which he did not actually get around to for another four years. His private practice was busier than ever before. His mind was racing with fresher and more compelling ideas. Titian would not be rushed, either by his own government or by the Duke of Ferrara.
He did not complete Alfonso d’Este’s painting until January 1520, twenty months after he had promised to begin it ‘that very morning’. It would be the first of three canvases for the duke with which the artist who had transformed Christian art with his Ascending Virgin surrounded by angels breathed new life into painted fables about the orgiastic revels of pagan gods and goddesses and their freedom to behave in ways that mortal men could only relive in their classically inspired imaginations. For the Worship of Venus (Madrid, Prado) he borrowed his own baby angels from the Assunta and let them loose in an apple orchard where he turned them into a swarm of unruly little pagan cupids tumbling and flying about, gathering and throwing apples, shooting arrows, wrestling, hugging, kissing and dancing before a statue of Venus, the goddess of uninhibited sexual love.25
Titian’s life was about to take a new turn, one that would lead him to international fame and place Venice on the map as an artistic centre to rival the glory days of Florence and Rome. He had never lacked confidence, but now, as he entered his thirties, he knew this about himself: he was more than ready to work for the greatest princely collectors, but he would do so at his own pace; and if he was required to spend time at their glittering courts, he would never stay long enough to be anyone’s court painter, always returning as soon as possible to Republican Venice.
PART II
1518–1530
Look at the ‘Bacchanals’ in Madrid, or at the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery. How brim-full they are of exuberant joy! You see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer conditions, but life so free so strong, so glowing, that it almost intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs – the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate the sun.
BERNARD BERENSON, ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE, 1938
ONE
Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara
You see, the Cupids are gathering apples, and you might be surprised at their numbers, but that they are the offspring of the nymphs and govern all that is mortal, and their multitude is proportioned to the varied desires of mankind … They hang their golden arrows and quivers on the boughs, and rove in swarms about the place … Blue, gold, or coloured are their wings, the hum of which is like music. The baskets in which they throw the apples are of cornelian, emerald, or pearl … Ladders they need not, for they fly into the very heart of the fruit; they dance and run, or rest, or sleep or sate themselves with apples. Here are four of the loveliest of them. One throws an apple to the other; a third shoots his arrow; but there is no wickedness in him … The riddle which the painter gives us here to solve doubtless expresses love and longing …
PHILOSTRATUS, IMAGINES, THIRD CENTURY AD1
He who rests must take action and he who acts should take rest.
INSCRIPTION ON A CARVING BY ANTONIO LOMBARDO FOR ALFONSO D’ESTE’S STUDY
Alfonso I d’Este, third Duke of Ferrara and the first in the chain of Titian’s aristocratic foreign patrons, was a rough diamond. He traced his ancestry back to the knights of King Arthur’s round table, but he dressed carelessly, and his manner was gruff. He enjoyed playing outrageous practical jo
kes and working with his hands. When he was a young man it was reported in the Venetian Senate that the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara had the habit of strolling about Ferrara stark naked – ‘nudo, nudo’; it was also said that he had fathered several illegitimate children, and contracted syphilis. Even after he had inherited his title and with it the weighty responsibilities of ruling and defending a large and much-contested state, he continued in his spare time to enjoy carpentry, painting pottery, casting in bronze, constructing and playing musical instruments, maintaining a menagerie of exotic hunting animals, fishing for sturgeon in the lagoons at the mouth of the Po, and commissioning works of art.
His special passion and expertise lay in weapons of war, which he collected, designed and helped to construct. His personal device was a smouldering grenade, and he had his court painter Dosso Dossi paint him on a battlefield surrounded by heavy artillery. He nicknamed one of his favourite cannon Il Diavolo, the Devil. It may be the weapon with which he posed, his hand resting on its muzzle as though it were a pet dog, for Titian’s first portrait of a foreign ruler.2 Alfonso pioneered some of the new powerful models of guns and cannon that changed the nature of warfare in the Renaissance. The Battle of Ravenna fought on Easter Day 1512, in which he served on the French side as a soldier and technical adviser against a Spanish and papal army, was the most alarming demonstration yet seen of the killing power of gunpowder. The power and deployment of his artillery routed the enemy forces, but killed nearly as many French, with the unintended result that the French were for a time driven out of Italy.
Alfonso was twenty-nine in 1505 when he inherited the Duchy of Ferrara from his father Ercole. For all his eccentric ways he proved to be a reforming ruler of a government that had become corrupt, as well as a brave and resourceful soldier and a shrewd political strategist with an innate sense of timing that told him when it would be opportune to switch into or out of alliances with the larger powers that continually threatened the independence of his duchy. The city of Ferrara had been a self-governing papal fief for centuries before it fell under the control of the Este lords early in the thirteenth century. By the time of Alfonso’s rule the state comprised a vast hinterland, stretching 160 kilometres from the mineral-rich Apennines, where gold and silver were mined, through the productive farmlands of the Po Valley and on down to the Adriatic coast, the Po delta and the valuable salt marshes of Comacchio. It embraced the problematic towns of Reggio and Modena, which were historically imperial possessions. For most of Alfonso’s reign Reggio and Modena were used as political currency in the quarrels between successive popes and emperors.
