by Sheila Hale
In October Titian arrived at long last in Ferrara with two assistants and his unfinished painting for the duke – the court expense account records that his journey from Venice cost four lire. He spent the better part of the next three months there, as the fog of winter settled on the city, completing the Worship of Venus in situ. Ferrara is only ninety kilometres south of Venice but in those days it seemed another world. With a population of no more than 30,000, some 2,000 of whom were employed by the court, it was much smaller but not much less cosmopolitan, prosperous or busy than Venice. Alfonso’s father, the spendthrift Duke Ercole I, had trebled the size of his city, adding to the old, cramped medieval centre a spacious garden suburb complete with orchards, religious establishments, palaces, villas, a hunting park, a racecourse and some twelve new churches, all enclosed in a massive circuit of defensive walls. A tributary of the Po curved around the gloomy fourteenth-century castle, in which two of the duke’s brothers, following a plot to assassinate him, were imprisoned for life in windowless dungeons. Over the coming years, Titian, arriving by barge towed upstream along the Po with his precious cargos of canvases, rolled and packed in specially built crates wrapped in waxed cloth, would become accustomed to the sight of the walls and towers of Ferrara looming across the fields from the port of Francolino. But coming as he did from a city with no court and no need of a castle or walls, his first visits to the best-defended court in Christendom must have been something of a culture shock.
The Francophile Este modelled their court on the royal courts of Burgundy and France. Although Ferrara might have seemed provincial by comparison, it was a lively and important centre of artistic activity, learning, literature, theatre, music and other courtly pleasures. Life there was a round of expensive and showy entertainments of the kind that were discouraged in Venice by sumptuary laws and by perpetual reminders to refrain from conspicuous consumption in the name of God and country. The courtiers of Ferrara, by contrast, were required to dress lavishly; clothes, indeed, were a courtier’s single biggest investment. They went jousting and hunting with cheetahs, leopards and panthers. They played real tennis, gambled on the horses and feasted at banquets where course after course of delicacies was served between dancing, concerts performed by Alfonso’s orchestra of thirty musicians and theatrical productions. Alfonso’s gluttonous cardinal brother Ippolito, who liked to be watched by an audience while he stuffed himself, died in 1520, aged only forty-one, of excessive consumption of roasted crayfish and vernaccia wine. After his death an inventory of his possessions itemized more than one hundred carnival disguises.11
Alfonso d’Este gave Titian his first opportunity to satisfy the courtly taste for large painted fables about the sexual exploits of the pagan gods and goddesses. It was a demand that did not exist in Republican Venice, where the preference of private patrons was for pretty girls whose classical disguises were really beside the point. And Titian, who had no previous experience of aristocratic courts, and whose imagination was uncluttered by the first-hand study of the Roman antiquities that was supposed to be an essential part of a Renaissance painter’s education, brought an unprecedented freshness and vitality to the inventions he devised for Alfonso’s pleasure, using colour and movement rather than narrative to shape his monumental figures. Without having seen or read the originals he unearthed the very spirit of the antique sculptures and stories in a way that established the interpretation of classical myths for subsequent artists, and especially for his most ardent follower, Rubens. The more experienced and conventionally educated Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael would doubtless have produced magnificent paintings for the duke. But they might have looked academic in comparison with Titian’s wholly original, dramatically exciting representations, which continue even today to remind us that those old myths spun by the writers of ancient Greece and Rome lasted as long as they did because they were cracking good stories.
Titian was not the only groundbreaking artist employed by Alfonso’s court in the 1520s. Another, the pioneering Netherlandish composer Adrian Willaert, the European master of the new polyphony, is today of interest only to specialists. But the Ferrarese poet and dramatist Ludovico Ariosto12 is still read, and his vast epic poem, Orlando Furioso (Mad Roland), first published in 1516 when the poet was in the service of Ippolito, remains the most romantic and entertaining of all the many versions told over the centuries of the tale of the Carolingian knight who was driven mad by his unrequited love for the princess Angelica. Ariosto, however, paid homage to his employers by making Ruggiero, the virtuous warrior and supposed founder of the Este dynasty, the true hero of his story. The poem is so close in spirit to Titian’s poetic paintings that Ridolfi invented a tradition according to which the painter-poet and the poet-painter enjoyed an intellectual partnership: ‘Thus, painting fulfils the function of mute poetry, and poetry acts as loquacious painting.’ He described an illustration of their companionable relationship, which he claimed would have decorated the catafalque to a plan (never realized) for Titian’s funeral, in which Alfonso, with attendant pages, sat listening to Ariosto read aloud while watching Titian paint at his easel.
The poet and painter must have met at least by 1522 or 1523 when Titian portrayed Ariosto as one of a group of prominent men in a canvas, now lost, for the doge’s palace.13 But, although Ariosto may well have advised Titian and the duke about subjects and sources, he did not mention Titian in writing until the third and final edition of Orlando Furioso, revised with Bembo’s help and published in 1532, in which ‘the honour of Cadore’ is listed – along with Mantegna, Leonardo, Giovanni Bellini, the Dossi brothers, Michelangelo and Sebastiano – as one of the greatest artists of the time.14 Titian made a woodcut portrait of the poet for the frontispiece of that edition, but none of his surviving portraits that have been hopefully identified as Ariosto – the Man with a Quilted Sleeve, and the portraits of men in Indianapolis (Herron Art Institute) and New York (Metropolitan Museum) – look anything like the woodcut portrait, or for that matter like each other.
They may not have known one another particularly well in the 1520s when both men came and went to and from the court where Ariosto was often employed as an extraordinary ambassador. They were, however, certainly aware of one another, and shared, as well as a vigorously modern spirit, similar tastes in feminine beauty. The golden hair, dark eyes and eyebrows of some of Titian’s models are the features that Ariosto most admired in women. For the last edition of Orlando Furioso he added a new story, in which the erotic charms of the heroine, Olimpia – her eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth, shoulders, hair, breasts, belly, hips, thighs and ‘Those other parts which to conceal she tries’15 – seem to echo the brazen sexuality of the women Titian painted for the Duke of Ferrara.
On 24 June 1519, in the summer before Titian came to Ferrara to finish his Worship of Venus, Lucrezia Borgia died in childbirth of puerperal fever. She was thirty-nine and had borne Alfonso eight children, four of whom would outlive him. Alfonso was beside her at her deathbed and was said to have fainted at her funeral. Nevertheless, at forty-three he knew himself well enough to see that without a consort he would return to his old whoring ways, which, according to his contemporary biographer,16 he realized ‘would not be good for his reputation nor would it be safe for him to stain the honoured families of citizens with seductions and adultery’. So he took ‘as his woman a person of decent habits and of dignified bearing who was, like himself, very fecund’. The woman was Laura Eustochia Dianti, known as la bella berettarina because she was the daughter of a hat maker. Nobody knew whether the duke ever made her his legitimate duchess. Vasari and Pietro Aretino thought they were married, but Alfonso described their two sons, born in 1527 and 1530 – and both confusingly named Alfonso – as the natural children of an unmarried woman. Titian’s splendid (but now very ruined) Portrait of Laura Dianti (Kreuzlingen, Klisters Collection) could have been painted late in her first pregnancy.17 At a time when childbirth was dangerous, Alfonso, who had lost both his wives to puerperal feve
r, must have feared for Laura’s life and requested from Titian a record of her beauty. Whether or not she was the legitimate Duchess of Ferrara, the bleached skin in Titian’s portrait, which he enjoyed contrasting with the black face of her charming little Ethiopian page, was a fashion that signified patrician purity, while her magnificent but provocatively dishevelled dress suggests a favoured mistress. Her piled-up hair is about to escape the pearl and gold headdress fashioned in the shape of a spray of laurel leaves. She has pushed up one sleeve of her jewel-studded blue dress, where Titian placed his signature on the armband.18
In the November after Titian’s arrival in Ferrara he and Dosso Dossi made a short study visit to nearby Mantua, where they admired the Gonzaga Mantegnas and the paintings in Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the ducal palace. Alfonso, who had fallen seriously ill earlier in the month, was somewhat recovered when the two painters returned to his court on 22 November, although his lack of appetite worried his doctors. In January 1520 his condition was still weak enough to prompt Leo X to sponsor an attack on Ferrara and even to try to bribe a corruptible guardian of one of the gates to the city. The plot was foiled by Alfonso’s nephew, Federico Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua, who had close papal connections and sent a warning through to Ferrara.
The Worship of Venus was finished by mid-January, when Titian returned to Venice. It is a close transcription of one of the pictures described in Demetrios Moschos’s Italian translation of Philostratus’ Imagines, which had been commissioned by Alfonso’s sister Isabella d’Este: a classical divertissement in which rollicking little cupids imitate the joys and mysteries of every kind of adult erotic experience for a Renaissance patron who imagined he could see and hear in it the very heartbeat of the antique world. To one side of the action two courtesans dressed as nymphs worship a shrine of their patron goddess, the unchaste Venus.19 The apples with which the cupids play their love games – plucking them from the tree tops, gathering them in bejewelled baskets, biting into them, playing catch with them – would have been interpreted by contemporaries as euphemisms for the female pudenda: in classical texts to catch an apple meant to be smitten with love. One of the cupids has captured a hare, symbol of fecundity, and seems to be riding it. Another bites the ear of his companion, an indication of rule-breaking or homoerotic love, in contrast with the cupids in the foreground happily throwing and catching their apples.
When Raphael died on 6 April without having made a start on the Triumph of Bacchus, the duke was so satisfied with Titian’s work that he was perhaps not as distressed as he might have been. Raphael’s pupils offered to take over his commission, but Alfonso refused the offer, demanded the return of his advance of fifty ducats, and transferred the order to Titian, from whom, however, he requested a different, more unusual episode from the Bacchanalian myth, the story of Bacchus and Ariadne. In Titian, however, the Duke of Ferrara had met his match. The painter’s sense of humour was subtler than the duke’s; he had better manners and more charm. He was every bit as wily and stubborn as his aristocratic patron, and he continued, just as he had started, to oblige him whenever he asked for small errands while working on the big commissions in his own good time. Now in his early thirties, his international reputation established by the Assunta, and the Worship of Venus admired by Alfonso d’Este’s circle of influential friends, Titian knew that the duke needed him as much as he needed the duke. And the duke, who would often be reduced to cajoling, threatening and trying to bribe Titian with favours – anything to get him to finish and deliver his paintings – never again referred to him as ‘the painter’.
TWO
Bacchus and Ariadne
… Mad for you, Ariadne, flushed with love …
And, all around, the maenads pranced in frenzy …
Tossing their heads; some of them brandishing
The sacred vine-wreathed rod, some bandying
Gobbets of mangled bullock, others twining
Their waists with belts of writhing snakes …
CATULLUS, CARMINA, FIRST CENTURY BC1
He who wraps the vision in lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, until form be half lost in pattern, may, as did Titian in his ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, create a talisman as powerfully charged with intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city seen on Patmos.
W. B. YEATS, CITED BY RONALD SCHUCHARD, ‘YEATS, TITIAN AND THE NEW FRENCH PAINTING’, 1989
As Alfonso d’Este’s ambassador in Venice, Jacopo Tebaldi was required to spend much of his time shadowing Titian. When Titian was away Tebaldi made it his business to discover where, why and for how long. When Titian was in Venice he haunted his studio. He brought messages from the duke, and sent back up-to-the-minute reports of Titian’s replies, questions, moods and current state of health. The more Titian procrastinated, the more obsessively the duke pursued the painter he now recognized as an unequalled master, and the more Tebaldi had to use his diplomatic skills to see through Titian’s excuses and think up ways of persuading him to deliver the paintings he had promised the duke. Tebaldi was no more interested in art than most ambassadors then or now, but he was a good detective. Not all of his correspondence with the duke survives, but enough remains to allow us, too, to follow Titian, sometimes week by week, over the next years; and to understand the forceful, self-assured, shrewd and charismatic personality of an artist born in a small house in the mountains who from then on would be pursued by the powerful rulers of his day.2 Although we know nothing for certain about his physical appearance before the self-portraits painted when he was in his middle and late years, we can deduce from his relationship with the Duke of Ferrara that this was a man who knew his worth as an artist perhaps even more than he genuinely respected his social superiors.
In January 1520, after eighty-six days in Ferrara finishing the Worship of Venus, Titian returned to Venice. No sooner was he home again than Alfonso began making further demands on his time through Tebaldi. Titian’s studio was crowded with works in progress. He was working concurrently on the altarpieces for Brescia, Ancona, the Frari and probably Treviso, as well as a number of portraits,3 and, so the duke hoped, his Bacchus and Ariadne. But when Alfonso requested him to put down his brushes and arrange for a set of glasses to be made in Murano for the ducal table, Titian ordered the glasses and fixed on a price. The duke wished to know if the furnaces on Murano were capable of producing as well as glass the brightly painted tin-glazed pottery known as majolica ware. By 28 January Titian had prepared the design of a trial vase, which was successfully fired and shown to Tebaldi. On 5 and 11 February Titian and Tebaldi went to Murano where they drew up a contract for twelve vases to be delivered within eight days along with the glasses. The production of majolica had ceased in Ferrara during the Cambrai war, and Alfonso, determined to revive a craft that was particularly dear to his heart, turned to Titian for help. Titian found a master potter and sent him to Ferrara. Then it seemed that there was no artisan in Ferrara who could be trusted with gilding the frame of the Worship of Venus. Titian persuaded an old, experienced master gilder he knew in Venice to go to Ferrara and gild the frame as well as the majolica jars in which the duke’s spices were to be stored. So far Titian had accepted such distractions with good humour. He did not, however, conceal his irritation when he heard that an incompetent person had applied to his Worship of Venus a coat of varnish that had obscured and in places damaged its surface. He agreed to come to Ferrara to restore the painting, but there is no evidence that he did so.
Meanwhile, it reached the ear of the duke that a curiosity and talking point in Venice was an exotic animal imported by Giovanni Cornaro who kept it in his beautiful palace on the Grand Canal at San Maurizio. Alfonso wrote to his ambassador on 29 May:
Messer Jacomo. Take care to speak immediately to Titian and tell him to do me a portrait as soon as possible and as though it were alive of an animal called gazelle, which is in the house of the most honourable Giovanni Cornaro. It should fill the entire canva
s. Attend to this matter diligently and then send it to us immediately advising us of the cost. And remember to send those spice jars, which were supposed to be sent to us some days ago.
Tebaldi and Titian hastened to Palazzo Cornaro only to learn that the gazelle was dead and its body had been thrown in the canal. They were however shown a painting by Giovanni Bellini in which he had incorporated a portrait of the gazelle, and on 1 June Titian offered to make a copy of it for the duke. If Alfonso accepted the suggestion Titian’s gazelle has disappeared, and the Bellini painting, of which there is no record, was presumably lost in the spectacular fire that destroyed the Cornaro palace in 1532.4
Although Titian was compliant enough to run such errands for the duke, the summer passed with no sign of the paintings he had agreed to provide before leaving Ferrara. Alfonso lost patience. On 17 November he wrote to Tebaldi:
Messer Jacomo. See to it that you speak to Titian, and tell him from us that when he left Ferrara he promised us many things, and up to now we have not seen that he has kept any of them, and among others he promised to do for us that canvas which we especially expect from him [the Bacchus and Ariadne]: and because it does not seem to us worthy of him that he should fail to keep his promises, urge him to behave in a way that will not give us cause to be saddened and angered with him, and to make sure above all that we have the above-mentioned canvas quickly.
