Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Shortly after his arrival in the lagoon city, Aretino threw himself into managing the career of his ‘other self’. In June Titian took up his new friend’s suggestion that the two of them should jointly revive their connection with the Marquis of Mantua by presenting him with a gift of two paintings by Titian. Titian, who had been out of touch with the marquis for four years, was easily persuaded that the portrait he had just done of Aretino should be sent to Mantua along with the one of the late Girolamo Adorno, which had been in Titian’s studio since Isabella d’Este had decided against the asking fee of 100 ducats. Aretino guessed correctly that it would appeal to her son, who had been impressed by Adorno’s diplomatic achievements, intellectual qualities and close relationship with the emperor.

  A letter dated 22 June, signed by Titian but surely composed by Aretino, accompanied the portraits. The letter compares Aretino to St Paul, an Apostle and therefore infallible, but even so a lesser being than Federico, from whom he begs praise. He hopes the portrait of Aretino will please him ‘because I know how much you love your servant for his many virtues’. This was the first of many portraits of himself that Aretino would send or have sent to princes who were supporting him or from whom he sought support, and the first important letter he ghosted for his less articulate friend. Turning to the portrait of Adorno in the same letter Titian/Aretino continues the flattery by stating, not that the marquis had admired Adorno, but that Adorno had ‘adored the marquis’. He also penned under his own name an effusive sonnet professing to ‘adore’ the Marquis of Mantua whom he compared to Caesar and Homer. Such elaborately gushing sycophancy, ridiculous though it may sound to our ears, was consistent with the etiquette of the time, although Aretino, it must be said, did lay it on thicker than most of his contemporaries.

  On 8 July Federico acknowledged the gifts with separate letters to Titian and Aretino expressing his delight in possessing portraits of two such learned and distinguished men. He praised Titian with the usual cliché about the paintings being so natural and lifelike that they could not possibly be bettered. Federico rewarded Aretino with a ‘tip’ of fifty scudi and a gold doublet, for which Aretino thanked him, suggestively signing the letter ‘Titian and I kiss your hand.’ Nevertheless, although Aretino nagged the marquis over the coming months about the matter of compensating Titian, it was not until the following March that the painter had reason to thank the Most Illustrious and Excellent Signor for a ‘noble and honourable’ but unspecified gift. Meanwhile Aretino proposed to Federico two more works by friends in Venice: a sculpture of Venus by Sansovino, ‘which will fill you with lust’, and a painting by Sebastiano commissioned by Federico three years earlier on the advice of Castiglione, but which Aretino recommended the painter should now execute in a more straightforward way, ‘without excessive religiosity [hipocrisie] nor stigmata, nor nails’.11

  Aretino, who had made a number of useful Venetian acquaintances over the years, was staying at that time with the wealthy patrician Cornaro family in their beautiful palace at San Maurizio. It was two or three years before he found a place of his own. It was an apartment in the parish of Santi Apostoli on the lower of two main floors in a small palace on the Grand Canal that belonged to Domenico and Jacopo Bollani.12 The accommodation, which consisted of a long portego, or central hall, and three other rooms, was accessible from a long, dark alley off the little campo on the landward side by what Aretino called a ‘bestial staircase’. The best thing about it, apart from its situation on the Grand Canal, was that it was rent-free. How he managed to get away with not paying a penny to the Bollani in all the twenty-two years he lived there is something of a mystery, although it is possible that the mother of the Bollani boys thought that Aretino might be useful in advancing their careers.

  Some years after settling in to his apartment Aretino addressed to Domenico Bollani one of the most vivid of his descriptive letters.13 The ‘heavenly situation’, he began, gave him the ‘greatest pleasure he had ever known in his life’. He professed to be almost as afraid to start his eulogy of it as he would be if writing to the emperor himself.

  Whenever I look out of my windows at that time when the merchants forgather I see a thousand persons in as many gondolas. To my right are the butchers’ and fishmongers’ markets; to my left the busy Bridge and the German warehouse. There are grapes in the barges below, game of every kind in the shops, and vegetables laid out on the pavements … All is tumult and bustle, except where a cluster of sailing boats are moored together, making a sort of island where the crowds count, sniff and weigh, so as to test the quality of the goods. Of the ladies, gleaming in gold and silk and jewels, though they are only housewives, I will not speak, lest I grow tedious …14

  The house is still there, where the Rio San Giovanni Crisostomo runs into the Grand Canal at the point where it bends above the Rialto Bridge, although one storey has been added to the original building. Aretino would no longer recognize the interior of his apartment, which had a marble bust of himself at the door, and a glass dome over the main reception room where there was an ebony filing cabinet in which he kept letters received from great rulers, military commanders, artists, bankers and so on. As years went by he improved the apartment with a new fireplace and new floors and furnished it with works of art, many sent as gifts: paintings by Parmigianino, Giulio Romano, Vasari, Sebastiano, Francesco Salviati; and sculptures by Sansovino, Leone Leoni and Alessandro Vittoria. Tintoretto painted a ceiling with the stories of the Flaying of Marsyas, Mercury and Argos, and Salome.

  The house is today known as Casa Bollani. But for as long as Aretino resided there it was famous, so a friend once wrote to him, as the Casa Aretino, in the Calle Aretino, on the Rio Aretino. He was eventually in a position, so he boasted, to feed as many as fifty servants and to dress them in livery, and was so renowned for his hospitality that the story went round that some foreigners passing by the house saw so many people coming and going that they thought it was a tavern, entered with the flow and were given a delicious meal by a handsome servant, who was insulted when they asked for the bill. Titian, who ran an orderly household and was by nature and upbringing thrifty almost to a fault, and Sansovino, who also had a good head for managing money, scolded their friend over the years for his prodigious generosity, and for allowing his servants to rob and cheat him and generally do as they pleased. Aretino replied that it made him happy to have his staff take advantage of him: ‘I, who am feared rather than loved by the great ones of the earth, am glad that my grooms and kitchen maids do not respect me. For that situation prevents me from getting a swollen head.’

  Some of his servants, male and female, were rough trade, hired mainly for sexual purposes. But however carelessly he managed his domestic affairs, he forbade gambling in his house, and watered his wine, and his guest lists were carefully calculated. He made himself a two-way source of information by cultivating Venetian patricians who had held positions in foreign courts and, on separate occasions, foreign ambassadors in Venice, whose social life was otherwise severely restricted by law. His stairway, he wrote to a friend eight years after he had settled in Casa Aretino, was as worn by the tramping of foreigners as the pavement of the Capitol by the wheels of triumphal cars. ‘Nor do I believe that Rome itself ever heard such a conglomeration of languages as resounds in my house. Turks and Jews, Indians and Frenchmen, Germans and Spaniards come to me. So you can imagine how many Italian visitors I have as well.’

  Among the Italians were other writers – some jobbing hacks, but some better educated than their host – who had been attracted to Venice by Aretino’s example and by the unique freedom of expression allowed in the city. Some acted for a time as his secretary, a role that became increasingly necessary as with age his maimed right hand rendered it more difficult to use a pen. He also made a point of inviting young Venetian noblemen with literary and artistic tastes, who were of course also intrigued by the succès de scandale of his reputation. In this way he used the close blood ties within patrician familie
s to forge connections with the older relatives who occupied senior government positions.

  Although Titian met many ambassadors and young patricians through Aretino, he did not attend the literary salons, or if he did Aretino never mentioned his presence at them in his correspondence. But if knowing everybody who was anybody in the political and literary world was a professional necessity for a powerbroking journalist, it was his intense and sensuous response, not only to Titian’s painting but to all the visual arts, that gave him the most pleasure. All his life he kept eagerly in touch with artists in other parts of Italy. He annoyed Michelangelo by sharing with him his own vision of the Last Judgement, then rebuking him for exhibiting naked saints and angels in the finished painting, as well as begging him for examples of other works. In Venice he surrounded himself with resident artists and artisans: great masters like Tintoretto whom he dared to criticize and whose violent reaction terrified him, but also lesser artists and artisans working in gold or glass, advising them, acting as their dealer, commissioning or extracting works from them.

  But it was Titian and Sansovino who remained his closest friends. Andrea Gritti’s Triumvirate of Taste – the Aretine writer, the Florentine architect and the painter from Cadore – spent evening after evening over the nearly thirty years that passed before Aretino’s death, gossiping about patrons and mutual friends, making up minor quarrels, laughing, discussing one another’s work and how much they were paid for it, and flirting with the pretty girls of whom there was never a shortage in Casa Aretino. Wives, in the oriental tradition, stayed at home, and it was taken for granted that men had a sexual life outside marriage. Although Aretino showed genuine concern for Titian’s children, he never mentioned Cecilia in his correspondence, nor Titian’s second wife, a shadowy figure who was probably the mother of his daughter Lavinia.15 The Triumvirate were good conversationalists, Aretino famous for his wit, Titian for his elegant manners, sense of irony and quiet charm, Sansovino, so Vasari reported, for his excellent memory and ability to embellish his stories and anecdotes with examples. The three of them, busy and famous though they became, were not above relishing the small pleasures of a good life: the cosiness of a winter’s evening talking around a roaring fire; the delicious meals prepared from ingredients brought to Aretino, or extracted by him, as gifts.

  Titian, who has dropped in before dinner on a winter’s evening, sees some thrushes roasting on a spit and, sniffing them, gives one look at the snow and decides to disappoint some gentlemen who are giving a dinner for him. The thrushes are prepared with a bit of beef, two bay leaves and a pinch of pepper. On another occasion the Mantuan ambassador, Pietro Bembo’s son Torquato, Sansovino and Titian help to entertain a ‘divine young lady’ while enjoying a handsome and delectable turkey stuffed with three kinds of meat. But Aretino disapproves of gluttony, and makes fun of a party of ‘heirs apparent to every kind of drunken excess’ who have filled the bellies of their gross bodies with ortolans, figpeckers, pheasants, peacocks and lampreys.16 Aretino takes an innocent delight in gifts of flowers, fruit and vegetables, which seem to give him nearly as much pleasure as gold chains and silken doublets. He rejoices in orange blossom and pansies, cherries, artichokes, baby squash (fried), pears, apricots, melons, plums and peaches. He thanks Vittoria Colonna for the lemons, truffles and carp from Lake Garda. He composes a little prose poem in honour of the olives sent by the mother-in-law of one of his girlfriends; gobbles down the snails provided by a physician friend; makes a meal of Sansovino’s gifts of suckling pig, tasty jellies and excellent fish from Slavonia. He eats mushrooms from Treviso, but prefers salads, which ‘in Nero’s opinion were the antipasto of the gods’. The ‘unique Titian, to the glory of Cadore’, often sends his friend a grouse for his lunch or supper. Two of his women leap for joy when they see ripe cucumbers, which have only just blossomed.

  Aretino, if we are to believe him, entertained every class of women from prostitutes to the wives of gondoliers, merchants and tradesmen; his conquests, so they said, included the wife of the architect Sebastiano Serlio; even some members of the aristocracy failed to resist the allure of the man’s priapic energy and wicked reputation. (He was less open about the homosexual affairs he carried on at the same time.) The girls, of whom there were sometimes as many as a dozen at a time living in his house and gracing his parties, were proud to be ‘Aretines’, as Aretino called them in a letter to his publisher. He made sure they did him credit, dressing them in the latest fashions, providing them with jewels, even supervising their makeup and hair. One was ash blonde, another had black hair and eyes and a terrible temper; one had a comically prudish manner, another a voice like a nightingale; one was so like a boy that Alessandro de’ Medici slept with her to find out whether she was a man or a woman. Sansovino, who shared Aretino’s voracious sexual appetite, took advantage of his host’s generosity with his girls, although once, when they were all getting older, he received a slightly malicious letter from his friend saying that he had dined alone with a beauty called Virginia and kept it a secret from Sansovino and Titian ‘out of reverence to the, alas, somewhat advanced age of the pair of you’.

  Aretino continued into his old age to boast about his sexual prowess, even to his closest friends, even after he had fallen seriously and in one case painfully in love and fathered two daughters. ‘To those who maintain that in following sensual appetite we hasten death,’ the Scourge, of pedants and prudes as well as of princes, wrote to the pedantic writer Sperone Speroni in the late 1530s, ‘I say that a man prolongs his life precisely in proportion to the extent that he satisfies his desires. And it is I who say this, not Plato!’ And to another correspondent he said that if he didn’t have forty lovers a month he would start worrying about his health.

  As for Titian’s sexuality, if anyone would have known all about it that person was his closest friend and most honoured gossip, who when Titian was about sixty wrote in a letter to Vasari that ‘Titian, the eminent painter, affirms that he has never seen a lass who does not reveal some lasciviousness in her face.’ But Aretino also tells us that although Titian enjoyed flirting with the girls at his parties, caressing them and taking them on his knee, he never went any further with them. It seems that Titian – who had denied sleeping with his models when Alfonso d’Este’s ambassador found him looking exhausted in his studio – preferred to keep his personal life to himself. From what we know about the mothers of his children he seems to have preferred domesticated women who kept a lower profile than Aretino’s brazen girls. It could even be that he was satisfied by monogamous relationships. The most we can say is that, although Titian’s portrayals of women inviting or – in the case of his two versions of the Danaë17 – actually engaging in the sexual act were painted for rich men to enjoy in private, they are the work of an artist who loved women and understood them with a tenderness and understanding that may have eluded his erotomaniacal best friend, who wore his sexuality like a badge of honour while Titian revealed his in a way that speaks to us across the centuries more persuasively than words.

  SIX

  Caesar in Italy

  What a wonderful thing it is that the king of France, from a desire to have his sons back, did not refuse anything; that the king of England, from a wish to disencumber himself of a wife, promised everything; and that Charles, anxious to place the imperial crown on his head, conceded more than anyone asked of him.

  BENEDETTO VARCHI, STORIA FIORENTINA1

  When in 1525 the Scuola of St Peter Martyr decided to commission a painting for their altar in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo there was a division of opinion about who the artist should be.2 On 30 November of that year the executive committee of the Scuola submitted a petition to the Council of Ten in which they stated that some ordinary members wished to commission the altarpiece from ‘people who were not up to the task’. The people in question were probably Venetian-born artists of the older generation like Marco Basaiti, Vincenzo Catena or Giovanni Mansueti, who had never shaken off the in
fluence of Giovanni Bellini, charged less than Titian and probably appealed to more unsophisticated tastes. The committee feared that the result would not be of a quality appropriate either to the Scuola or to the church, and asked permission to bypass the chapter by commissioning, at their own expense, one of the outstanding painters working in Venice. The Council of Ten accepted the petition, but only on condition that the individual committee members should pay for a painting that the majority apparently did not want.