Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Jacopo Pesaro’s single moment of glory had been his role as commander of the papal fleet in the successful recapture of Santa Maura in 1502. He had fought under the banner of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, not of St Mark, and Santa Maura had in any case been returned to the Turks in the following year as part of the peace settlement. The pyrrhic victory – which he had celebrated once before when he commissioned the painting of Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St Peter by Pope Alexander VII2 from the young and then unknown Titian – was therefore of little interest to anyone except himself. Now in his early forties, Jacopo Pesaro was burning with indignation at the lack of respect he commanded in government and in the Church, where his several bids for a more powerful bishopric in or near Venice had all failed.

  By 1519, when Jacopo agreed to finance the decoration of the Frari altar in return for burial rights for his branch of the family, Pope Alexander was long dead and largely reviled. For those Venetians old enough to remember the capture of Santa Maura, the hero had been not Jacopo but his elder cousin Benedetto Pesaro, who had commanded the Venetian fleet. Although both Alexander and Benedetto had died in 1503, Jacopo remained steadfastly loyal to the despised Borgia pope – so much so that in a will of 1542 he left money to celebrate regular masses for his soul – while continuing to nurse a grudge against Benedetto for having been given the credit for the victory. Benedetto, whose funerary monument surrounds the entrance to the sacristy chapel (itself a Pesaro commission from the 1470s) had also been responsible for contributing to the sacristy chapel Giovanni Bellini’s heart-stoppingly beautiful triptych of the Madonna and Child with Sts Peter and Nicholas, and Benedict and Mark, signed and dated by the artist in 1488, around the time, that is, that Titian was born. Giovanni’s luminous masterpiece in its lavishly carved and gilded frame had remained the greatest work of art in the Frari until challenged by Titian’s revolutionary Assunta over the high altar.

  As Titian embarked on his second altarpiece for the Frari, he understood that the Bishop of Paphos expected a work that would exact a kind of revenge on Benedetto’s posthumous reputation by outshining the treasure he had commissioned from Giovanni Bellini all those years before. Titian, who had accepted the low fee of 102 ducats, payable in instalments, in return for the publicity value of showing again in one of the two most prominent Venetian preaching churches, was the only artist in Venice capable of outdoing his old master, and we have no reason to doubt that he welcomed yet another opportunity to show off his more progressive ideas. The problem in the first instance, however, was to find a way of accommodating the bishop’s specific requirements. The terms of the commission required a Madonna and Child with saints worshipped by life-size kneeling portraits of Jacopo Pesaro, his brothers and his young nephews. Thus the painting was to be a sacred conversation as well as a commemoration of the Battle of Santa Maura. Jacopo wanted in addition a depiction of the temporal and spiritual power of the crusading Christian Church; a funerary monument; and a votive picture, not with the usual portrait of one donor but of himself and five other members of his family.

  It is not surprising that it took Titian nearly seven years to work out how he could meet so many challenges. But it may well be, given his temperamental preference for working on different kinds of paintings at the same time, that the numerous interruptions – the altarpieces for Ancona, Treviso and Brescia, the Bacchanals for the Duke of Ferrara, the work in the doge’s palace, and the money-spinning portraits – stimulated his creative energies, allowing him to address the painting with a fresh perspective each time he resumed work on it. He began by assembling his figures under an open barrel-vault supported by square pillars in the manner of Giovanni Bellini.3 He then realized that he could achieve a more dynamic illusion by placing the arch on a diagonal with the Madonna and Child off-centre so that they would seem to be turned towards worshippers walking down the nave from the main entrance. Finally he settled on his boldest and subsequently most influential plan. He painted out the arch and a cloth of honour that hung diagonally above the angled Madonna and Child, and in defiance of tradition and of spatial logic replaced them with the two gigantic columns that rise above the clouds and into the heavens, a reference perhaps to the apocryphal text from Ecclesiasticus 24, associated with the Immaculate Virgin: ‘My dwelling place was in the high heavens; My throne was in a pillar of cloud.’

  If Titian’s architectural solution makes no spatial sense, those towering columns, which are all the more effective for serving no structural purpose, have reappeared in sacred and secular European art so often that we have come to take them for granted. But if we approach the Pesaro altar from the church entrance, as Titian intended, we can still share with his contemporaries the illusion that we have come upon an extraordinary but realistic civic ritual, in which Jacopo Pesaro, the crusading missionary, kneels at the foot of the Virgin’s throne facing his four surviving brothers and their favourite nephew, the orphaned ten-year-old Leonardo,4 who solemnly acknowledges our presence, staring out at us like the little satyr at the centre of Bacchus and Ariadne. Jacopo is presented to the Virgin by St Peter, the founder of the Christian Church, into which he will receive the two heathen captives led by a warrior saint wielding the banner of the triumphant Borgia pope. To the right of the throne Sts Francis and Anthony, the two principal saints of the Franciscan order, implore the Christ child to bless the other members of the Pesaro family.

  Although the Battle of Santa Maura was by now a mere footnote in the history of the Republic, the subject of a war against the Ottoman Empire was by no means without contemporary relevance. The brothers of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari were active in raising funds and lobbying the government for a crusade against the Turks. Such a campaign had been financially impossible in the aftermath of the ruinous Cambrai war, and unnecessary as long as the Turkish sultan Selim the Grim, who devoted his reign to consolidating his Islamic dominions, posed no threat to Venetian interests in the Levant. But Selim’s son Suleiman, who succeeded him in 1520, was an altogether more ambitious, arrogant and bellicose ruler, who soon adopted the titles Suleiman the Magnificent and Distributor of Crowns to the Monarchs of the World. A Venetian observer of his personality characterized him as proud, hasty, melancholy and addicted to women. Titian later portrayed him at least five times, taking his image from medals and book illustrations.5 Suleiman had captured Algiers in 1519–20, and the year after his father’s death besieged and occupied the Hungarian frontier fortress of Belgrade. In 1522 he launched an attack on Rhodes and expelled the Knights of St John from the island fortress they had occupied for centuries. The fall of Rhodes, although not in itself of more than emotional significance to the Republic, was a warning that further Turkish conquests could threaten Venetian colonies in the Dodecanese.

  Suleiman’s next onslaught, however, was more immediately alarming. In August 1526, three months after Titian had received final payment for his altarpiece commemorating the Pesaro victory over the Turks, a large Turkish army began advancing up the Danube. At Mohács it inflicted the most terrible defeat suffered in the history of Hungary. The waters of the Danube, according to a contemporary writer, were swollen for a day and a night afterwards by the bodies of men and horses. The archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg, the emperor Charles V’s brother and representative in Austria, managed to save some of Hungary’s territory, but two-thirds of it was lost to the Turks. Suleiman had chosen to invade at a time when he knew that the European powers were unable to retaliate. Although the defeat focused the emperor’s attention on the Turkish threat, he did not have the resources to defend his eastern empire while he was at war in Italy with Francis I. The Venetian treasury was still depleted after the Cambrai war; and the pope was bankrupt and unable to make up his mind whether to trim to the empire or to France.

  The indecisive Giulio de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici and nephew of Leo X, was forty-five when he was elected pope as Clement VII on 18 November 1523 after the most bitterly fought of all papal concla
ves. His uncle had made him a cardinal ten years previously – Raphael portrayed him looking rather smug in the background of his portrait of Leo. Although he took the name Clement to signify reconciliation with his enemies in the Church, he was never popular in Rome. Intellectually sophisticated, an able administrator and diplomat and dazzlingly handsome, Clement was also complacent and virtuous to a fault. A contemporary historian6 described him as not proud, not given to simony, not avaricious, not libidinous, frugal at the table, modestly attired, devoutly religious – everything, in other words, that his uncle Leo had not been. The Venetian ambassador in Rome reported that the new pope had not visited Leo’s hunting lodge more than twice, and that he did not care for music or buffoons. If the weight of so much unusual goodness sometimes clouded his judgement – it was Clement who set in motion the English Reformation by his refusal to grant the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon – he was also, like many intellectuals, able to see all sides of a problem and therefore given to changing his mind.

  By the autumn of 1524, however, both the pope and the Venetian Republic, alarmed by the successes of the imperial forces in Italy, gave covert military aid to the French, who had managed to reoccupy Milan. On 12 December, the Venetian government – still haunted by memories of Cambrai, with a Francophile doge and disinclined to a break with the head of the Christian Church at a time of renewed threat from the Turks – signed a secret treaty with France and Pope Clement against Habsburg Spain. The timing could hardly have been less judicious. When Charles V heard about the treaty he was not surprisingly enraged by the unforgivable treachery of a pope he had regarded as his protégé. In February 1525 an imperial relief army attacked French troops entrenched in a hunting park just outside Pavia under the personal command of Francis I, with disastrous consequences for the alliance. The French army was annihilated. The French king, who had continued to fight with great gallantry after his horse was shot from under him and his troops had retreated, was captured and taken to prison in Madrid. Andrea Gritti’s response was characteristically cagey: ‘Being a friend of both sovereigns, I can only say, with the Apostle, that I rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep.’

  From the makeshift tent provided for him by his captors, Francis had written, in a famous letter to his mother Louise of Savoy, ‘All is lost to me save honour and my body which is unhurt.’ Louise, as regent in Francis’s absence, then did something that would go a long way towards shattering the ideal of a Europe united by Christendom. She concluded, on behalf of her son, the Most Christian King of France – the country that had so far maintained a stronger hostility to Islam than any other European power – a military alliance with Suleiman, which called for parallel action against the imperial ambitions of Charles V. Lawyers had a field day debating the rights and wrongs of swearing oaths with infidels and whether such action was justified by the common humanity of Christians and Turks. Some French subjects, as a cynical Venetian ambassador put it, found the alliance as shameful as in fact it was, but ‘the defenders of the king justify it alleging that the natural rights and canons permit everyone to defend themselves at all costs’. Nevertheless, the Franco-Turkish alliance, which was maintained for another three decades, made nonsense of all the talk of Christendom and crusades, and, although that myth lingered, a new cynicism set in, adding yet another ingredient to the complex international politics of Renaissance Europe.

  Held captive in Madrid, Francis was forced to sign a humiliating treaty in January 1526 according to which he agreed to cede his claims to Milan, Flanders, part of the Netherlands, Genoa, Naples and the Duchy of Burgundy. In return he requested and was granted two favours: the hand in marriage of the emperor’s sister, Eleanor of Portugal; and release from prison before the treaty was implemented. He was however required to leave his two sons in captivity as hostages. Only four months later, with the full support of Pope Clement, Venice, the Duke of Milan and Florence, Francis repudiated the Treaty of Madrid on the grounds that he had made it under duress. The new alliance between Francis and the leading north Italian powers was formulated at Cognac, where the Venetians played the leading part in what might have been a momentous decision: they would expel the forces of Charles V from Italy, once and for all. At the demonstration organized in Venice to celebrate the promulgation of the League of Cognac in July 1526 Andrea Gritti, Sanudo tells us, was dressed in gold, ‘with a cloak of gold and white over all and his bareta of the type that symbolizes peace’.

  The so-called Italian League was widely seen as fighting for the liberty from foreign intervention of a fragmented Italy. It was the last attempt before the nineteenth-century Risorgimento to establish an independent and united Italy, and, just as all previous alliances of Italian states had fallen to pieces, the Italian League failed. Clement distrusted his allies and made the mistake of trying to placate Charles, for whom the perfidious behaviour of the French king and the pope was, however, the last straw. While Clement dithered, Charles’s reaction led to the most terrible disaster in the history of Renaissance Italy. The time had come to fulfil his threat to take revenge on ‘that poltroon the pope’. Charles placed his Spanish troops in Italy under the command of the turncoat Charles de Bourbon, formerly the hereditary constable of France. In January 1527 they were joined by a hoard of German landsknechts, led by the fanatical Lutheran George von Frundsberg.

  All eyes were now on the Duke of Ferrara, who was well placed to tip the balance of power between the emperor and the anti-imperial axis. Charles offered the hand in marriage of his natural daughter Margherita for Alfonso’s heir Ercole. Clement proposed Catherine de’ Medici for Ercole and Ippolito de’ Medici for Alfonso’s daughter Eleanora. Both League and emperor were eager to entrust the command of their armies to the warrior duke. Alfonso, preoccupied as always by his long-standing quarrel with the pope over possession of Reggio and Modena, opted for the emperor, a decision that was to have important consequences. He opened his gates to the swaggering, undisciplined landsknechts, armed with pikes and swords and all the more ferocious for want of food and wages. He saw to it that the soldiers were fed and provisioned, while Frundsberg was received as an honoured guest and supplied with weapons.

  As the emperor’s Spanish and German armies continued their descent on Rome,7 the Italian League, which had begun as an exhilarating promise of freedom from foreign intervention, was in disarray. The commander-general of the Venetian army, the Duke of Urbino, could not agree about tactics with the papal lieutenant general. Francis I made expansive but empty offers of help. The pope was deceived by a trumped-up truce with the imperialists. Frundsberg fell ill six weeks before his troops reached Rome on 6 May, and on that first day the Duke of Bourbon was shot dead on a scaling ladder. Unpaid, leaderless, starving, out of control and braying for blood and plunder, the Spanish and Lutheran invaders went on a killing and looting spree that quickly turned into the most barbaric invasion of the Holy City in the history of the papal monarchy. ‘Hell itself’, wrote Sanudo as the reports reached Venice, ‘was a more beautiful sight to behold.’ Clement managed to escape to the relative safety of Castel Sant’Angelo, where he watched the unspeakable carnage, and was kept prisoner until he managed to escape in December disguised as a gardener. The armies slaughtered every Roman they encountered, until they realized that it was more lucrative to take prisoners who could raise ransoms and provide information about the location of hidden treasures. Fidelity to the emperor counted for nothing, except for those who had friends or relatives in command of the imperial army. Isabella d’Este’s life was saved thanks only to the intervention of her son Ferrante Gonzaga, who was an imperial commander, but she still had to pay a ransom of 60,000 ducats.

  There was scarcely a church or palace or library that was not sacked and pillaged, and some were completely destroyed. In the Vatican, which was almost entirely gutted, the Sistine Chapel was used as a stable; a German soldier scratched ‘Martin Luther’ into Raphael’s Eucharistic fresco of the Triumph of the
Sacrament (the Disputa). The occupiers seized around a million ducats in hard cash and as much again in plunder and extortion. The loss of life was incalculable, and there were further deaths from the plague and typhus that inevitably followed the massacres. The Sack of Rome was a turning point in the history of Italy, ‘rather the fall of a world than of a city’, as Giorgio Vasari was to put it. No Italian state was unaffected. But for Venice there were gains as well as losses.

  May 1527 was the climax but not the end of the Habsburg–Valois conflict on Italian soil or of Venetian involvement in the wars of Italy. While they continued over the next years, the population of Venice was swollen with war refugees, as it had been during the horrific years of the Cambrai war. They brought plague, typhus and more cases of syphilis. It was a terrible time for the Venetian economy. The production of wool was collapsing, exchange rates were unfavourable, an acute shortage of grain was followed by a depression in the spice trade. There was famine in Venice and on the mainland as the price of commodities soared, the scarcity compounded by unusually severe floods. Provision was made for the poor and the sick; a law specifically requiring support for the poor was passed in 1528. But it was a bleak time for ordinary Venetians and a severe blow to the government, which, lacking the resources to make a significant military contribution to either side, gradually lost its power to influence the outcome.

  In the longer term, however, Venice was in many ways the beneficiary of the tragic destruction of Rome and the immeasurable damage inflicted on its cultural life. While Rome lay in ruins, with the pope in exile, the myth of Venice as the New Rome, which had been tarnished by the Cambrai war despite the best efforts of Venetian propagandists, took on a new significance. This time it was Rome that had been punished by God for its sins and excesses. Venice, at peace and with the most stable government in Italy, was now the obvious destination for talented artists and intellectuals. The enlightened doge, Andrea Gritti, welcomed and encouraged foreign arrivals who would realize his vision of Venice as heir to the cultural ascendancy of Rome.