Titian

by Sheila Hale

  One of the signatories of the petition was Jacopo Palma, a disciple of Titian, who put himself forward as a candidate for the commission saying, however, that he wanted to have a competition with Titian un’opera per uno, in which each of them would produce a sketch and the better would win.3 (Formal artistic competitions were rare in Venice, and this is the only known example of one initiated by an artist rather than a patron.) In January 1526 the Council of Ten washed their hands of the dispute between the committee and the ordinary members of the Scuola, leaving it to the Scuola to arrange the matter among themselves. After long negotiations, during which Pordenone was a candidate, Titian was chosen and agreed to paint the altarpiece and construct the panel. The steward of the Scuola, whose name was Jacopo de Pergo, guaranteed a fee of a minimum of 100 ducats, which he would pay in person if the amount could not be raised by other contributions. Titian accepted the fee, although it was no more than he had agreed with the stingy Jacopo Pesaro for the Frari altarpiece, which was smaller and on canvas, and saw no reason to mistrust the word of Jacopo de Pergo. His failure to insist on a formal contract would lead to trouble later on, but he was so eager for the commission that his usual sound business sense deserted him. To be represented in both the great preaching churches of the city, in the Franciscan Frari by the Assunta and Pesaro Madonna and in the Dominican Santi Giovanni e Paolo, would raise his profile to a degree that could not be resisted. The subject, which was to be the assassination of St Peter Martyr, the Scuola’s patron saint, was preoccupying him even as he was finishing the Pesaro altarpiece in the Frari. In the next years he devoted much of the time he spent in his studio in Venice to working on the painting.

  Nevertheless, however absorbed Titian was by a work in progress the practicalities of life were never far from the other parts of his mind. In March 1528 he joined the Scuola di San Rocco, which was close to his house behind the Frari and next to the church of San Rocco, for which he had painted his miracle-working Christ Carrying the Cross two decades earlier.4 Membership of a Scuola, as he had perceived long ago as a boy working for Gentile Bellini, was an excellent way to make contact with the rich businessmen, merchants, lawyers, bureaucrats and industrialists who were potential patrons.

  A few weeks later he and Francesco invested in some land in the foothills of the Dolomites near Belluno. Ownership of agricultural land at that time carried with it aristocratic associations. It was also a secure hedge against inflation. In the years to come Titian would buy more property in the Veneto and welcome payments in land rather than cash until by the time of his death most of his estate was in property. This property, which was in an area to the east of Belluno still known as Calordo, consisted of two hectares with a meadow that produced twenty wagons of hay; a house with a fireplace and roofed stone shingles and tiles; stables covered with thatch; and a small yard.5 The brothers immediately let the property back to the vendor on a long lease and sold it four years later, presumably at a profit. But the configuration of the mountains above Belluno made an impression on him because they appear in the background of some of his paintings of the 1530s. The rounded peak in the distance behind the Madonna of the Rabbit (Paris, Louvre) looks like Monte Pizzocco, the presiding mountain of the Bellunesi; the twinned jagged mountains in the landscape background of the Presentation of the Virgin are the same shape as those of Monte Tre Pietre seen from the road between Belluno and Feltre.

  There is one spot in particular, just a few kilometres east of Belluno on the road to Bolzano, that so closely resembles the landscape of one of his paintings of around 1530 that the similarity cannot be accidental. In the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John and a Female Saint or Donor6 (London, National Gallery) a swathe of pasture flanked by trees leads the eye to an undulating line of blue hills and mountains lightly draped in the haze of early morning. The setting of the painting was discovered in the nineteenth century by Josiah Gilbert,7 who described the steep path leading downhill from the road to a narrow gorge where there were at that time ‘simply a cottage or two, a farm, and a water mill’. After comparing his own sketches to Titian’s sacred group he concluded that they agreed exactly, foreground and distance, and that it must therefore be ‘almost the only definite statement connecting the great master’s landscape studies with any one scene’. Happily, this part of the countryside has been spared the worst of the urban sprawl around Belluno. The fertile gorge has not changed since Titian painted it around 1530 and Josiah Gilbert described it in the 1860s. The mill is gone, but the place still feels haunted by the Madonna pressing wildflowers into the hand of a chubby young Baptist while the gorgeously dressed St Catherine of Alexandria leans forward to kiss her Child, and an angel emerges from a cloud above the blue mountains.

  In the summer of 1528 Titian lost a friendly rival when Palma Vecchio, who was not yet fifty, died leaving his last painting unfinished. Completing the unfinished work of dead artists was a Venetian tradition (Palma’s great-nephew Palma Giovane would finish Titian’s last work), but Titian’s additions to Palma’s Holy Family with Sts Catherine and John (Venice, Accademia), went further than most. Technical examinations have shown that in Palma’s original a donor knelt beside St Catherine, whose figure Titian repainted in a different pose, while also making substantial alterations to Palma’s St John. Although Titian used the same pigments as Palma, he built up the cheek and red dress of his St Catherine in many more layers. Where Palma had planned a landscape on the right behind the Holy Family, Titian replaced it with a quotation of his own invention from the Pesaro Madonna of a large column without a capital rising out of the picture and into the heavens.

  Titian must have enjoyed discussing his work on the St Peter Martyr with Sebastiano Luciani, who paid Venice another visit in the summer of 1528 and stayed long enough to arrange a dowry for his sister and to witness the marriage of Vincenzo Catena, before deciding to settle back in Rome the following March. In the years since he had sailed away to Rome with Agostino Chigi, Sebastiano had become Michelangelo’s chief disciple. Michelangelo himself was in Venice in the autumn of 1529. On his way to and from Florence, where he was supervising the strengthening of the Republic’s fortifications, he stopped in Ferrara to study that city’s famously impregnable walls. In Ferrara he saw Titian’s portrait of Alfonso d’Este, which, so Vasari tells us, he regarded with nothing less than stupefaction.8 It is tempting to imagine a meeting between Titian, the greatest representative of Venetian painting, and Michelangelo, the supreme artist of central Italy from whom Titian had borrowed ideas over many years. They may have been curious about one another, but they coincided in Venice for only a few days in early October, and there is no evidence that they met before Michelangelo returned to Florence in November.

  Titian’s progress with the St Peter Martyr had been interrupted in January 1529 by a summons from the Duke of Ferrara to make substantial alterations to Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods.9 Completed fifteen years earlier for Alfonso’s little alabaster chamber in the Via Coperta, Giovanni’s painting had been looking distinctly old fashioned for some time. Several years after his death a painter, probably Dosso Dossi, had reworked part of the landscape. Even so, Titian’s three Bacchanals, which now dominated the room, had succeeded, just as he had intended, in making Giovanni’s painting look tame and lacking in emotional energy. Titian, as we learn from a letter from Jacopo Tebaldi to the Duke of Ferrara, promised to embark for Ferrara on a Monday in late January with a certain Gugliemo, whom the duke had sent to Venice to advise him about the purchase of two leopards or cheetahs that were for sale. (Tebaldi reported that Gugliemo had told him that the animals were two years old, the male could not possibly be more beautiful, the female also beautiful but not quite as much so as the male.) Titian, he continued, was complaining that he needed money to support his family in his absence and to buy a dress suit for his appearance at court. He was surprised that he had received only 100 ducats for the three things he had done on his previous visit to Ferrara, although each was w
orth 100 on its own.10 He blamed the shortfall not on His Excellency the duke, but on his administrators. Two days after his arrival in Ferrara on 24 January Titian received the equivalent in lire of fifty ducats.

  This was to be Titian’s longest stay in Ferrara. (The wine records of the court cantina show that Titian and five assistants were there from 24 January to the end of February, and again for ten days between the end of April and 18 June.) During this time he entirely revised the left side of Giovanni Bellini’s landscape, cancelling out a frieze of trees that had once stretched across the canvas, and adding the escarpment that recalls the castle hill of Cadore. Although his landscape made Giovanni’s figures look more doll-like than ever, the changes made the Feast of the Gods harmonize better with his own three paintings in a way that emphasizes his rhyming of Giovanni’s demure little Lotis with his own large, sexually abandoned naked bacchants.11 What else he was doing during this prolonged visit to Alfonso’s court is unknown, although it is likely that he also made revisions or repairs to his own paintings in the room, and possible that it was then that he painted the lost portrait of Alfonso with his hand resting on a cannon, which Michelangelo admired later that year. All that can be said for certain is that when Alfonso wrote to his nephew Federico Gonzaga on 14 March he referred to ‘several kindnesses’ that Titian had done for him in the days he had been with him so far.

  The letter was in reply to a request from Federico for Titian’s presence in Mantua.12 Titian, he wrote,

  has asked leave to come to you in Mantua in order to attend to some necessary business, and I have decided to give it to him because I understand the importance of the matter that brings him to Your Excellency, and because I wish to gratify his wish, and for the esteem in which I hold his talent, I have thought it well to send him with these lines, with which I beg Your Most Illustrious Lordship to consider him recommended not only for the love I bear him, but for the sake of the goodwill which I know Your Lordship bears him also, and the favour it will be to him without further intercession; and the sooner Your Excellency shall deign to send him back, the greater will be the obligation under which you will place myself and him.

  We can imagine Titian’s heart lifting as he left the Duke of Ferrara’s gloomy castle to travel up the Po Valley and across the fertile Lombard plain to meet his younger patron in Mantua, the handsome city he remembered from his two previous short visits. Agriculture and stockbreeding being mainstays of the Gonzaga economy, the farmlands through which he passed gave off a healthy country reek of animal manure. The Mincio River runs through an impregnable maze of swampy lakes that surround the city on three sides, and which protected it from full-sale military attack until the seventeenth century. Approaching Mantua from the east Titian could see the enormous precinct of the Gonzaga court buildings and a multitude of church towers.

  In the fourteenth century, shortly after the Gonzagas became its rulers, Petrarch had famously described Mantua as foggy and frog-infested. But in the next century the Gonzagas had built a great many fine monasteries and churches, of which the most important was Alberti’s Vitruvian church of Sant’Andrea, one of the most influential buildings of the fifteenth century and part of an extensive programme of improvements to the town centre. As court painter to the Gonzagas, Andrea Mantegna had commemorated the family in their castle with his frescos in the Camera degli Sposi, the first illusionist ceiling paintings of the Renaissance (still one of the major artistic attractions of Italy). Mantegna had also glorified their military campaigns with the eight great canvases of the Triumphs of Caesar (now at Hampton Court).

  Federico’s mother, Isabella d’Este, was now fifty-five, her nose somewhat out of joint at having lost the power she had wielded during the frequent absences of her husband, Gianfrancesco, on military campaigns and after his death as regent during Federico’s minority. But she remained a dominating figure at the court. Cultivated and sharp witted if not learned (she had never succeeded in learning Latin), she played the clavichord, imported musicians from Ferrara and amassed a private treasure trove of gold, silver and bronze medals, vases of semi-precious stones, cameos, bronze and marble sculptures, antique relief carvings, busts of Roman emperors and copies of antiquities in the Vatican collection including two of the Laocoön. An avid and importunate collector of contemporary art, she relied on the advice of scholars, including her friend Bembo, to devise allegorical programmes for the paintings she commissioned for her studiolo, known as the Grotta, on the ground floor of the palace. But she was mean with her payments, and not all painters took kindly to her dictatorial control over subject matter. Although she obtained allegories from Perugino, Lorenzo Costa and Mantegna, Mantegna’s brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini evaded her frequent and insistent requests for a painting. Though far from beautiful, she was vain and had herself portrayed more than most of her contemporaries. Leonardo da Vinci drew her in chalk and pastel on a visit to Mantua in 1500, but never painted her portrait or anything else for her. When she was sixty, five years after Titian had got to know her in Mantua, he would paint her, at her request, as she might have looked as a young woman from a portrait by another artist that was itself based on an earlier portrait by Lorenzo Costa.

  In Titian’s day Federico’s court artist was the painter, architect and designer Giulio Romano, the only Renaissance artist mentioned by Shakespeare,13 with whom Titian would later collaborate on the decorations of a room in the ducal palace in Mantua. Giulio, as Vasari wrote:

  made for the whole of that city of Mantua … so many designs for chapels, houses gardens and façades and took such delight in embellishing and adorning it, that he transformed it in such a way that where it was formerly in the grip of mud and full of foul water at certain times and almost uninhabitable, it is today, through his industry, dry, healthy and altogether beautiful and pleasing.14

  Giulio’s most famous surviving project is the Palazzo Tè, which Sebastiano Serlio described as ‘truly an example of Architecture and painting for our times’, a judgement echoed in the late twentieth century by an architectural historian who saw it as ‘the embodiment of all the artistic qualities most admired in the middle decades of the Cinquecento: inventive, surprising, elegant, complex but basically unified, allusive, learned, novel but not actually subversive of accepted architectural norms’.15 It was the perfect building for splendid court entertainments, and was equipped with a tennis court and stable, as well as with private apartments for Federico and his mistress Isabella Boschetti.

  When Titian reached Mantua, Federico’s city, unlike the continually embattled Ferrara, had enjoyed nearly two centuries of security and growing prosperity. As a buffer state between the expanding frontiers of Venice and Milan, its rulers had bargaining power with both. Its location not far south of the Brenner Pass, furthermore, made it a convenient stopping place for German emperors on their way to and from Rome. The Gonzagas had from the earliest days of their reign deferred to the authority of the emperors, who had raised the family to the title of marquis in the early fifteenth century; and they had, unlike the Estes, usually managed to maintain good relations with the Church. Although they could not boast the ancient aristocratic lineage of the Estes, they had increased their prestige and their wealth by offering their services as military commanders to more powerful states and by marrying into more prominent dynasties, German and French as well as Italian.

  Titian was still in Mantua on 16 April 1529 when Federico wrote a short letter to his uncle Alfonso saying that although His Excellency must marvel that the master had not yet returned to Ferrara he was detained by finishing a portrait of himself, which he needed urgently. He did not say that he had other plans for Titian as well, but Alfonso understood very well why Titian’s portrait of his nephew was so crucially important. The time had come for the Marquis of Mantua, who had reached the age of twenty-nine, to contract one of the dynastic marriages by which the Gonzagas had traditionally enhanced their position. The question of who the bride should be, however, remained open
for the time being. Federico had long since lost interest in his first bride, Maria Paleologo. Maria was the daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat in Piedmont, but was unlikely to inherit the wealthy marquisate. Federico had neglected to consummate the marriage when she came of age, while he looked for a better match and continued to make no secret of his adulterous affair with Isabella Boschetti. An unsuccessful attempt to poison Isabella gave Federico just the excuse he needed to get rid of Maria. Although everyone suspected that Isabella’s outraged husband had ordered the poisoning, Federico pointed the finger at the Paleologhi and thus managed to persuade Clement VII to grant an annulment. He was now free to marry again, but while the struggle between Francis I and Charles V continued he could not decide which ruler it would be most politically opportune to consult about the match. Giacomo Malatesta, who had succeeded his brother Giambattista as Mantuan envoy, was dispatched to Paris and to Toledo to test the waters; he reported on his return that both rulers were well disposed towards the marquis, but advised him that since the emperor was planning to come to Italy shortly on a peacemaking mission the better strategy would be to bow to his wishes.