by Sheila Hale
Five years after the death in childbirth of his first wife, Anna Sforza, daughter of the Duke of Milan, Alfonso bowed to the political necessity of marrying Pope Alexander VI’s adored twenty-one-year-old daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, in the interests of warding off a threat by the pope to install his son Cesare as ruler of Ferrara. On the eve of their marriage in 1502 Lucrezia’s dowry of 100,000 ducats in cash plus 75,000 in jewels and other valuables was carried into the city on seventy-two mules covered with the Borgia colours of black and yellow. Historians differ about how well founded Lucrezia’s infamous reputation was – she was supposed to have murdered one or both of her previous husbands and to have had incestuous relations with her father and her brother Cesare. Whatever the truth of the dark rumours, as Duchess of Ferrara she contributed gaiety, fun and style to the court, surrounding herself with artists, musicians and writers – not least Pietro Bembo, who was one of her lovers, whether platonic or not we do not know. Her kindness and generosity won the hearts of the people and eventually, it seems, of her husband.
In 1508 Alfonso joined the League of Cambrai on a promise from Pope Julius II to rid the city of occupying Venetian troops and to restore Rovigo and the Polesine, which had been surrendered to Venice in 1484. In the early stages of the war he fought in person with the French against Venice at the Battle of Agnadello. His brother, Ippolito d’Este, who had been made a cardinal at the age of fourteen and was, like several of Julius’ cardinals, a soldier and military strategist as well as a prince of the Church, assisted the emperor Maximilian with the initially successful siege of Padua. In December 1509 the two brothers commanded a spectacularly successful naval battle at Poleselle on the Po near Rovigo in which a Venetian fleet was routed and all but destroyed. Celebrated by the poet Ludovico Ariosto, who was in the service of Ippolito at the time, it was a turning point in the Cambrai war. But when, less than two years after the resounding Venetian defeat at Agnadello, Venice accepted Julius II’s invitation to join a Holy League against France, which the pope now perceived as the greater threat to the stability of Italy, Alfonso refused to join Julius and stuck by his French alliance.
Julius, the ‘papa terribile’, was easily enraged by opposition. Machiavelli described him in The Prince as ‘impetuous in everything’, a man who ‘found the time and circumstances so favourable to his way of proceeding that he always met with success’. Vasari said of Raphael’s wonderful portrait of him painted when he was an old man that it made all who saw it tremble. This was the pope who had fathered three daughters while a cardinal, and who, dressed in silver papal armour, had led his troops in mostly successful conquests of cities which resisted his authority. Not a man to cross, he excommunicated Alfonso, imposed an interdict on Ferrara and, in February 1511 – the coldest winter in living memory – ordered two of his cardinal commanders to lay siege to the city. ‘I want Ferrara,’ he declared to the assembled troops. ‘I would rather die like a dog than ever give it up … And if by any chance I am beaten, then I will raise another army and so wear out [the French] that I’ll chase them out of Italy.’3 The interdict hurt, but the siege failed. Alfonso outmanoeuvred the papal troops, inflicted heavy losses on them while the lives of his own men were largely spared, and seized the enemy banners and guns. Julius retreated. Ferrara, in any case, was so well fortified in 1511 that a French commander described it as the greatest fortress in Christianity.4 Alfonso had further grounds for satisfaction in May when an occupying papal army was driven out of Bologna by French troops with the support of the people. In December the citizens of Bologna celebrated by toppling Michelangelo’s enormous bronze statue of Pope Julius from its pedestal on the façade of the church of San Petronio. Some of the metal was taken to Ferrara, where, so the story went, Alfonso kept the head for his collection and had the rest melted down and reforged as a cannon, which he named La Giulia.
Nevertheless, the disastrous Pyrrhic victory on Easter Day 1512 at Ravenna, in which Alfonso played such a crucial role, put him in an exposed position and left him in economic difficulties. With his only allies, the French, temporarily driven out of Italy it would not be long before the papal armies attacked. The cost of refortifying Ferrara had to be met by selling off some of the ducal treasures, including some of Lucrezia Borgia’s jewels. When the table silver went too, the court was reduced to dining on ceramic plates and vessels painted by the ducal hand. By June Alfonso recognized the need to make his peace with the pope. Julius provided safe conduct as he travelled to Rome, accompanied by Ludovico Ariosto, to attempt reconciliation with the irate pope. While in the Holy City he took time off to inspect the Sistine Chapel ceiling, climbing the scaffolding with Michelangelo, whom he begged, unsuccessfully, to paint something for him. But he refused to listen to the pope’s demands, and the pope refused to be pacified. Alfonso and Ariosto were obliged to flee. Fearing for their lives and living rough, disguised sometimes as priests, sometimes as peasants, they made their way home through Umbria and Tuscany. Julius died in 1513, shortly after Alfonso had returned to Ferrara. But any hopes that the apparently more peaceable Medici pope Leo X would prove less of a threat to Ferrara were soon dashed. Leo, as it turned out, was as obsessed with regaining Ferrara for the papacy as his more openly bellicose predecessor.
While Ferrara remained on a war footing, the warrior duke found time to indulge his keen appetite for acquiring and commissioning works of art. It was a passion he shared with his elder sister Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua and one of the most astute and formidable Renaissance politicians and patrons of art and learning. Their ancestors had collected antiquities and Flemish paintings and nurtured a school of Ferrarese painting that included Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti. Immediately after the death of his father, Alfonso began to rearrange and decorate the rooms he had chosen to be his private quarters in the long elevated building known as the Via Coperta, which links the castle to the ducal palace.5 A year or two later he brought to Ferrara the sculptor Antonio Lombardo,6 who spent two or three years carving beautiful relief sculptures for rooms described in later inventories as camerini d’alabastro, little alabaster chambers. One of them, a study next to the duke’s bedroom that was entirely lined with Antonio’s marble carvings, was unique in Italy.7 Some of the larger panels depict mythological scenes in high relief. Some, of birds and animals, are in low relief. Inscriptions note that the duke’s study was a space for rest, relaxation and quiet contemplation – the necessary complements to action for Renaissance man.
Alfonso’s court painter Dosso Dossi and Dosso’s brother Battista – the sons of a land agent to the court – decorated the rooms in the Via Coperta with painted ceilings and friezes. But it was not until Ferrara was at peace with Venice after the spring of 1513 that the duke was in a position to begin to realize his most ambitious project. It was for a small, intimate room that would be a private showcase for the best representatives of the three principal schools of Italian painting: Giovanni Bellini for Venice, Raphael for Rome, Fra Bartolommeo for Florence, all painters whose works he had admired on his travels. The prototype for such a room was Isabella’s studiolo in the ducal castle at Mantua, for which she had commissioned two paintings by Mantegna, one by Perugino and two by Lorenzo Costa, all illustrating subjects from classical antiquity. (She had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Leonardo to contribute a painting. Giovanni Bellini also refused because the terms of her commission did not provide him with enough freedom.) Although Alfonso’s taste was by no means untutored – he had travelled widely and had an even more perceptive and independent eye than his glamorous and domineering bluestocking sister – he was without intellectual pretensions. Nevertheless, like his nephew, Isabella’s son Federico Gonzaga, and his political ally Francis I – and, for that matter, many twenty-first-century tycoon collectors – he was interested in employing top names.
He overlooked Titian in the first instance in favour of the more famous Giovanni Bellini, who agreed to paint the Feast of the Gods. Giovanni took as his s
ource a free translation of a story from Ovid’s poetic calendar, the Fasti, about a feast given by Cybele, goddess of the harvest and fertility, at which Priapus’ attempted rape of the sleeping nymph Lotis is foiled when Silenus’ ass brays and wakes her. (Priapus has the ass killed for interfering with his right to satisfy his sexual appetite.) He conflated two separate episodes of the story (which may be the explanation for a subsequent attempt by another painter to bring the figures more in line with one of Ovid’s originals). The frieze-like arrangement of his feasting Olympian deities may have been intended to conform with Antonio Lombardo’s sculptures. Giovanni set them against a forest with tree trunks extending across the width of the picture, which was later cancelled by repaintings by Dosso Dossi and finally by Titian. But the painting, even after Giovanni had been requested, presumably by Alfonso, to eroticize the goddesses by revising their postures and lowering their necklines, lacks sex appeal.
Giovanni had finished and signed the Feast of the Gods by 4 November 1514 when he received a payment of eighty-five ducats. Three years later Alfonso began to plan a radical rebuilding of the Via Coperta. He was impatient to see, on either side of the Feast of the Gods, a Worship of Venus, which he had commissioned from Fra Bartolommeo, and a Triumph of Bacchus promised by Raphael. An exciting source of subjects was available to him in the first ever translation into Italian of the Imagines (the Eikones in Greek) written in the third century AD by the Greek writer Philostratus.8 The translation by the scholar Demetrios Moschus had been commissioned by Isabella, who had given it to her brother on loan.9 Philostratus described in detail sixty-four paintings he purported to have seen in a house outside Naples. No one in the Renaissance had ever seen antique paintings, and since few if any painters could read Philostratus in the original Greek, Isabella’s translation was a treasure trove of ideas.
Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael sent sketches of their respective subjects. But Fra Bartolommeo died on 31 October 1517 before he could make a start on his painting. Raphael was given an advance payment early in 1518, but then prevaricated. Alfonso hounded him through his agents in Rome, who found it increasingly difficult to make contact with that prince of painters. Alfonso flew into rages. Raphael tried to assuage his anger with gifts of preliminary cartoons for some of his other paintings. But in September 1518 Alfonso instructed one of his agents to find Raphael and advise him that his evasive behaviour was not the proper way to treat a person such as himself and if he didn’t do his duty, and soon, he would regret it. The correspondence continued in January and March of 1520. And then, on 6 April of that year, in the night of Good Friday, Raphael died, probably from overwork, at the untimely age of thirty-seven.
Titian had agreed in the previous year to take over Fra Bartolommeo’s subject and to base his painting on that painter’s sketch and on the description by Philostratus of cupids playing love games in front of a statue of Venus. But, although outwardly more accommodating than the more famous Raphael, he also prevaricated. The success of the Frari Assunta had attracted other commissions, and his studio was crowded with works in progress. When in late September 1519 he had still not delivered the painting he had promised a year and half earlier to begin that very morning the enraged Alfonso instructed his ambassador in Venice, Jacopo Tebaldi, to warn ‘the painter’ that it was high time he finished ‘that picture of ours’. The ambassador had to find Titian as soon as possible and tell him in no uncertain terms that he, the Duke of Ferrara, didn’t like to be disappointed. Tebaldi replied on 3 October that he had been looking for Titian but had been told by his neighbours that he had gone to Padua, promising that on his return he would finish the duke’s picture. A week later Tebaldi informed the duke that Titian had given his word that he would come to Ferrara with the picture, which he would finish in situ once he had seen where it was to hang and in what light. But, he added, he had heard by word of mouth that the reason for the delay was that Titian was working on a painting for the Very Reverend —— and that Titian did not deny the rumour.
The name of the Very Reverend is missing from Tebaldi’s letter, which was later damaged by fire. But we know that it was Altobello Averoldi, the papal legate to Venice and a member of the nobility of Brescia, the gun-manufacturing town on the westernmost edge of the Venetian terraferma. As papal legate Averoldi had made it his business to smooth relations between Venice and Rome after the Cambrai war. Titian had gone to Padua, probably encouraged by the Venetian government, to discuss with him a painting for the high altar of the Brescian church of Santi Nazaro e Celso, of which Averoldi was provost. While Titian was in Padua discussing the Brescian commission Averoldi’s arch-rival, Broccardo Malchiostro, the canon of the cathedral of Treviso, was celebrating the completion of a new chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Annunciate. We don’t know exactly when Malchiostro began the decorations of the chapel, but his choice of Titian to paint an Annunciation for its altar (still in situ) may have been motivated by his intense jealousy of Averoldi – the mutual detestation of the two prelates was such that they had once come to blows during a church service. Malchiostro was in fact generally disliked. His extreme vanity is evident from the frequency with which the Malchiostro coat of arms and initials appeared in the chapel and on Titian’s painting. It was also considered inappropriate that he had Titian paint him as the donor facing worshippers at the altar, rather than in the usual position kneeling in profile. But the awkward and apparently malign figure of Malchiostro lurking outside the columns is evidence not of Titian’s judgement of the canon’s character but of a repainting by another hand after the picture had been attacked by vandals not long after it was finished.
Although Titian, who presumably worked alternately on the Averoldi and Malchiostro commissions, gave less of his attention to Malchiostro’s Annunciation than to the altarpiece for the papal legate, the Treviso altarpiece was his first treatment of its subject and is full of original ideas. The fictive architecture extends the real space of the chapel; the asymmetrical composition anticipates the Pesaro Madonna in the Frari; and the child angel skidding down the elongated perspective of the floor approaches the Virgin from behind, an unusual relationship that was later adopted by Lorenzo Lotto. But the painting doesn’t really work, and looks as though Titian tossed it off in a hurry, probably with assistance.
He was far more inspired by a commission from another foreigner, one that carried a political message that would not have been lost on those who saw it after Titian had completed it in 1520. This was the Madonna in Glory with Sts Francis and Blaise and the Donor Alvise Gozzi (Ancona, Museo Civico) over the high altar of the church of San Francesco in Ancona. Alvise Gozzi was a nobleman and merchant originally from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) who had settled in Ancona and made frequent business trips to Venice, where he must have seen Titian’s Frari Assunta. Ancona and Ragusa, which face the Adriatic from opposite sides, had long been required to pay Venice for the privilege of trading in Venetian waters, until in 1510 Pope Julius II, in gratitude for Ancona’s loyalty during the Cambrai war, granted that city the right to trade without paying tribute to Venice. By the time Titian painted Gozzi’s altarpiece, the war was over and Venice was once again queen of the Adriatic. The painting is thus a celebration of the renewed hegemony of Venice, of which Titian painted the skyline in the background. St Blaise, patron saint of Ragusa, places one arm around the shoulder of the donor while pointing upwards at the Madonna in Glory, protector of the Republic of Venice, who gazes down from a golden sky on St Francis, patron of the church but also of the city of Ancona. Although Titian modelled the composition on Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (c. 1512), his version, with its dynamic figures and spellbinding view of Venice, one of the most hauntingly beautiful passages he ever painted, has an emotional depth and a unity of space and colour that are in an altogether different key from Raphael’s more contemplative prototype.
When he was in Venice Titian worked from time to time on the San Nicolò ai Frari altarpiece, which he had grabbed from Paris Bordone, and for
which he thriftily reused the panel on which he had begun the Bathing Scene for Alfonso d’Este. The informal grouping of the saints recalls those in the more successful Gozzi altarpiece, but he didn’t actually finish the upper part of the painting, and then with the help of an assistant, until the early 1530s when he transformed it into the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints (Vatican City, Pinacoteca Vaticana).10 He did, however, make a start on a more compelling commission, the second from his old patron Jacopo Pesaro, who wanted another celebration of his victory over the Turks in 1502 – the highpoint in his otherwise unmemorable career – this one for the altar, which had recently been granted to the Pesaro family, in the left nave of the Frari. It was a demanding and unusual order, and not well paid – the instalments Titian received over the seven years it took him to complete the painting amounted to only 102 ducats. But it gave him a second opportunity to show in the prominent church dominated from the high altar by his Assunta. Judging by the outcome, which was in its different way as innovative and subsequently influential as the Assunta, the Pesaro Madonna was often on his mind in the next seven years, during which he made three radical changes to its composition. In April and June 1519 he acknowledged his first two payments of ten ducats each from ‘Monsignor the Bishop of Baffo [Baffo was short for Paphos] of the House of Pesaro’. Since it was his usual practice to begin work on a painting after he had received a down payment, we can assume that he made a start on the altarpiece that summer, or at least by 22 September 1519 when he issued a receipt for six ducats to cover the costs of the canvas and stretcher.
