Titian

by Sheila Hale

  From then on Andrea Gritti was continuously and successfully occupied by high political, diplomatic and military positions. Taken prisoner by the French during their horrific siege of Brescia in 1512, he was welcomed at Lyons by Louis XII as an honoured guest. When he returned, exhausted, to Venice, he reluctantly accepted a commission to take charge of the defence of Padua, having objected to the 500-ducat penalty for refusing the job, which, he said, would have made it difficult for him to refuse a position that it was his duty to fulfil without remuneration. In the spring of 1513 he played a leading role in negotiating the Franco-Venetian alliance at Blois and in the subsequent events that led to the end of the Cambrai war, as ambassador to Milan in 1515 after Francis I reoccupied the city following his victory at the Battle of Marignano, and as commissioner to the army in the reconquests of Brescia and Verona. At the end of the war he drew up a report on the strategic defence of the terraferma, which remained the basis for the Republic’s policy for the rest of the century.

  Two weeks after Andrea Gritti became doge Titian received a payment of twenty-five ducats for his portrait of his predecessor Antonio Grimani.5 Although Grimani had died on 7 May, Titian had evidently only just finished the portrait, which at the time of the payment was not yet hung. He was also working flat out to complete Giovanni Bellini’s Submission of Barbarossa for the Great Council Hall cycle, which he finished by 23 June. The loss of this canvas to the fire of 1577 is all the more frustrating because it included portraits, some by Giovanni Bellini, of distinguished contemporaries: Pietro Bembo, Jacopo Sannazaro, Andrea Navagero, Ludovico Ariosto, Bartolomeo d’Alviano and the Veronese architect and scholar Fra Giocondo being among the many famous Renaissance men gathered to witness the humiliation of the twelfth-century emperor Frederick Barbarossa in front of the basilica of San Marco. Now at last Titian received the sanseria, the broker’s patent worth 100 ducats a year, which he had requested ten years earlier.

  Soon after moving into the ducal palace, the new doge hired Titian to fresco his private chapel and apartments as part of an expensive programme of refurbishment. Whatever Titian may have thought of working again in fresco, he set to the task without delay. It would not have been in his interests to irritate the formidable new doge with his usual procrastinations and transparent excuses. His votive portrait of Gritti was lost in a fire. Of his frescos for the doge only a Madonna and Child with Angels and a St Christopher survive in another part of the palace. Although it is not possible to judge their quality from the few remaining fragments, Gritti, who recognized Titian as the only world-class artist in Venice, a city that he regarded as artistically provincial, remained his staunch supporter. Two years later he appointed Titian’s father Gregorio as inspector of mines in Cadore, and his brother-in-law Matteo Soldano to the position of chancellor of Feltre. It was thanks to Gritti, furthermore, that Titian was able to avoid completing the dreaded Battle of Spoleto while retaining his sanseria for another fourteen years.

  Meanwhile, Titian was left with the portrait of the late Girolamo Adorno on his hands. His old friend Andrea Navagero – always ready to be of service to the painter he had dissuaded from leaving Venice for Rome ten years earlier, and aware that Adorno had been a favourite at the Gonzaga court – persuaded Isabella d’Este to buy the portrait. She paid 100 ducats for it at the end of June. A few days later, however, she asked for her money back, pleading shortage of funds – her purchasing was often hampered by money problems. If Titian was aggrieved by her change of mind he nevertheless found time to go shopping in Venice for her son Federico. On 24 July Giambattista Malatesta, Federico’s ambassador in Venice, reported that Titian had managed to obtain for the marquis some fine Turkish felt of a quality which he himself had been unable to find and was now sending post-haste. In August Federico sent Titian a present of a doublet, for which the recipient expressed eternal gratitude, although he seems to have been reluctant to dispatch the portrait of Ferrante, which he had finished in Venice. It was finally delivered by 15 August when the marquis acknowledged that he had received it, but only at the end of a letter to Malatesta that was more enthusiastic and specific about two pairs of turtle doves and one of pigeons that had also arrived from Venice, as well as an order for a supply of zambelloto, a kind of fabric made from camels’ or goats’ hair that was imported to Venice from the Far East.

  The extant correspondence about Titian between Alfonso d’Este and Jacopo Tebaldi resumes in mid-March 1524 with Tebaldi informing the duke that Titian has been ill. Although the fever recurs every evening, he is nearly recovered, and has given his word to come to Ferrara after the Easter holidays. In order to justify his absence from Venice – presumably to the doge – Titian will, however, have to obtain a doctor’s certificate advising a change of air. He has also asked Tebaldi to tell the duke that the merchant who sold the blue pigment he had brought back from Ferrara didn’t want to take it back, and he will need another ounce.

  He reached Ferrara in mid-April and stayed there until the beginning of July.6 It was probably during this stay in Ferrara that he finished the Bacchanal of the Andrians. A celebration of the power of wine to release inhibitions and transport mortals into the realm of the gods, the Andrians gave Alfonso the godlike privilege of witnessing a scene that would ordinarily be invisible to such mortals as the two young courtiers, one wearing fashionable yellow trousers with his arm around a tree, who stand casually chatting as though unaware that an orgy is taking place around them. A river of wine has been created at Bacchus’ command by the old river god who lies in the middle distance on a couch of grapes watching the young revellers with his legs spread. A reveller pours wine into a dish held by one of two beautiful girls who have been playing their flutes from the sheet of music in the centre of the foreground. It is inscribed with the signature tune of the painting: one line of a four-part canon sung to the words ‘Qui boyt et ne reboyt, il ne scet que boyre soit’ (‘He who drinks and does not drink again, does not know what drinking is’), possibly a piece by Adrian Willaert. One of the bacchants holds up for our inspection a Venetian glass pitcher half full of the divine liquid. A little boy replenishes the river of wine by urinating into it.

  Although the scene is once again set by Philostratus, Titian integrated into the whirling choreography of visiting deities and Andrians a variety of quotations from classical and contemporary art, which proclaim that this painting transcends any previous masterpiece, ancient or modern. The reclining nude with the twisting torso refers to a figure from some fragments of Michelangelo’s cartoons for the Battle of Cascina, which Titian had seen in Mantua. The urinating baby Bacchus was familiar from ancient sarcophagi (technical examination by the Prado has revealed that he was not part of the original composition). An antique torso in the Grimani collection, which Titian would have seen in the ducal palace after it was displayed there in 1523, seems to have suggested the torso of the graceful dancing girl. The largest figure, the luscious naked girl abandoned in drunken slumber in the right foreground, is also the most original, as Titian emphasized by transforming – after much reworking – the cold marble of a well-known classical statue7 into the most shamelessly seductive flesh-and-blood girl so far seen in Renaissance art. Nor can it be an accident that he placed her in the same section of the painting as Giovanni Bellini’s primly sleeping Lotis in the Feast of the Gods, which was hung to the right of the Andrians.

  With this last, most energetic and spatially complex of his three Bacchanals for Alfonso’s little chamber in the Via Coperta Titian seems to be suggesting that he has outdone even himself. The two nymphs from the Worship of Venus reappear as the two reclining girls playing their flutes. He has given the one in the red dress and white bodice the face of his naked Venus Anadyomene, tucking a violet into her bodice and placing his signature, ‘Ticianus F’, on its border (the violet prompted Ridolfi to identify her as yet another portrait of Violetta). And he ‘signed’ it again in the far distance, across the sea where we see Bacchus’ boat sailing away, with th
e jagged blue peaks of his homeland in the Cadorine Dolomites.

  Returning to Venice in the heat of high summer, Titian continued what may have seemed the comparatively humdrum task of painting frescos in Gritti’s palace. He was also designing cartoons for mosaics in the sacristy of San Marco, a handsome addition to the basilica built in the 1490s by Giorgio Spavento. In these mosaics, realized by his boyhood friend Francesco Zuccato and two other mosaicists8 over the next six years, the art form most closely associated with the Byzantine patrimony of the Venetian Republic was brought up to date by the most progressive of Venetian artists. It can come as a surprise even today to recognize dynamic motifs from Titian’s past and future paintings incorporated in designs constructed, in the same way as the stiff iconic images in the vaults and domes of the basilica, with tiny squares of coloured Murano glass.9

  By autumn 1524 Alfonso d’Este was once again impatient to have Titian in Ferrara, and Tebaldi was warning the duke that he was doing his best to urge the master to come to him but could promise nothing. In a letter dated 29 November, he informed Alfonso rather wearily that ‘magistro Titiano’ had given a hundred promises to come and had broken them all.

  Even today he has given me another assurance, this time that he will depart tomorrow and that I should provide him with a barge. And so that he cannot excuse himself on the grounds that the barge isn’t there in the morning I have sent it this evening and it will stay outside his house for twenty-four hours … But I can’t guarantee that he will board it, and I won’t believe it until I have heard that he is actually on his way to you.

  Tebaldi continues by conveying Titian’s wish to return to Venice for the holidays, ‘so that he can finish certain things on which he is working’, adding that Titian has no lack of commitments there, ‘and all are of the highest importance because some are to do with making money and others with pleasure … and what greater pleasure than making money?’

  The only major oil painting on which Titian is known to have been working at this time was Jacopo Pesaro’s altarpiece for the Frari. After more than five years of trying out different ideas he had at last found his extraordinarily original solution and would have been understandably reluctant to tear himself away from it. The Pesaro altarpiece, however, was not about making money. The fee of 100-odd ducats he had accepted for a painting that included fourteen figures, six of them portraits, was no more than he was able to charge for a single portrait that could be finished in a matter of weeks. The lucrative commissions to which Tebaldi referred must have been some of the portraits of expensively dressed men that are now scattered throughout the picture galleries of the world. Some of them were doubtless, as Tebaldi said, men of the highest importance – rich Venetians, foreign aristocrats like Ferrante Gonzaga or ambassadors like Girolamo Adorno. For Titian, to whom portraiture had always come most easily, welcoming such men into his studio was indeed, as Tebaldi had suggested to the duke, a matter of mixing business with pleasure.

  With a guaranteed income from the sanseria of 100 ducats a year (for many years to come if he played his cards right) and with the government paying for the upkeep of his busy studio in the Ca’ del Duca, Titian was financially more secure than he had ever been. If he enjoyed making money he also enjoyed spending it – on furnishings, clothes, good food and wine, and entertaining his friends. Although Tebaldi never mentioned Cecilia, or anything else about Titian’s private life, we can imagine the delight he took in their baby, a boy to whom he gave the classical name Pomponio, and whom he had already destined for a career in the Church. That was an unusual decision at a time when the first sons of most artists became their fathers’ assistants and went on to inherit the business; and it was to have baleful consequences. At the time, however, Titian’s main concern was for Cecilia, whose health was frail and who was pregnant again with their second son, Orazio.10 Nevertheless Titian did board the barge provided by Tebaldi, and reached Ferrara by 3 December with three assistants. Judging from the records of wine supplied to the assistants, they, and presumably Titian too, stayed over Christmas after all and did not return to Venice until mid-February 1525. (He was certainly in Ferrara on 11 January when payment was made for an ounce of blue pigment, presumably ultramarine, to be sent to him for paintings for the duke.) But the only clue we have about what he painted there is a reference in a letter written by Tebaldi four years later to ‘three things’ Titian said he had done for the duke, each one in his estimation worth 100 ducats but for which he had received only 100 altogether. Two of the ‘three things’ may have been portraits of Alfonso and his son Ercole, both now lost. Another possibility is the Portrait of Laura Dianti, although that is more likely to have been done in late 1527 when Titian seems to have been briefly in Ferrara,11 possibly called there to commemorate Laura’s first pregnancy.

  Of the surviving portraits another candidate for one of the ‘three things’ is the marvellous Portrait of Tommaso de’ Mosti (Florence, Galleria Palatina), who was one of three brothers in the service of the Este court.12 In 1524 Alfonso appointed him rector of the church of San Leonardo; and at an unknown later date he took major holy orders and was made archpriest of Ferrara cathedral. It is one of Titian’s most sophisticated, beautiful and lucidly characterized portraits of the 1520s, and like the Man with a Glove suggests that Titian had been impressed by Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione. A later inscription on the back of the Portrait of Tommaso de’ Mosti stating that it was painted by ‘Thitiano de Cadore’ in 1526 when Tommaso was aged twenty-five13 suggests a possibility that Titian may have begun it on a quick visit to Ferrara in October 152514 and finished it in Venice the following year.

  Titian hurried back to Venice, where Cecilia had fallen critically ill. He was never a man to show his emotions, but the possibility of losing her, and of failing to legitimize their sons, shocked him at last into taking the decision to marry her. Twenty-five years later, while testifying on Titian’s behalf to the legitimacy of the boys,15 his brother Francesco remembered the occasion. Titian had come to him saying that he wanted to marry Cecilia, who was very ill, lying in bed, and that he wanted to legitimize Pomponio and Orazio. Francesco replied, ‘I am delighted and only wonder why you haven’t done it before. This is an excellent plan and I urge you to go ahead with it immediately.’ Titian then sent Francesco to invite the priest Paolo di Piero, a family friend originally from Ceneda, who was deacon of the church of San Giovanni Novo in the sestiere of Castello. The other guests were Paolo’s fifteen-year-old brother Girolamo Dente, who was Titian’s favourite apprentice; a goldsmith, Nicolò della Croce, whom Titian asked to bring a gold ring worth approximately four or five ducats; and Maestro Silvestro de Jacomo, a stonemason. After the ceremony, everyone stayed on for dinner. Since it was not at that time a requirement that priests should consecrate marriages, it may be that Paolo di Piero was called in also to administer the last rites. But Cecilia recovered and survived for another five years during which they had another child, a daughter to whom Francesco Zuccato stood as god-father, but who died in infancy. It was Titian’s first personal loss and he remembered it for the rest of his life.

  FOUR

  The Fall of a World

  I shall go into Italy and revenge myself on those who have injured me, especially on that poltroon the Pope. Some day, perhaps, Martin Luther will become a man of weight.

  CHARLES V, JANUARY 15251

  I will go to Venice maybe, and I will enrich my poverty with her liberty … Where is peace if not in Venice? … Here is the glorious, miraculous, and great Titian, whose colours breathe no differently than flesh which pulsates with life … Here, too, is the good Serlio … the worthy Sansovino, who has exchanged Rome for Venice, and wisely, because according to the great Adrian [Willaert], father of music, she is the Ark of Noah.

  PIETRO ARETINO, LA CORTIGIANA, 1534

  On 27 May 1526 Titian wrote a receipt acknowledging his final payment from Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, for the Frari altarpiece he had begun seve
n years earlier. The painting was in place over the Pesaro altar in the left nave of the church by 8 December, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, when Sanudo recorded that a service had taken place there. Although Pesaro’s altarpiece was if anything more startlingly original than Fra Germano’s Assunta, nobody seems to have objected this time. Some of the worshippers in the Frari, however, must have been bemused by Titian’s dramatic glorification of a relatively insignificant event in the history of the Republic that had been the highpoint in the life of Jacopo Pesaro, a patrician whose family were the most important patrons of the church but who was otherwise a person of no particular distinction, best known for his wealth, his stinginess and his meanness to his servants, who heartily disliked him.