Titian

by Sheila Hale

  The magnificent portrait of Federico Gonzaga (Madrid, Prado) in a blue doublet embroidered with gold that Titian painted in Mantua in the spring of 152916 was exactly the reassuring image the marquis wished to project on the eve of a marriage. He wears a gold and lapis-lazuli paternoster around his neck. His concealed left hand rests on the pommel of a sword, the pale skin of the other, highlighted by two jewelled rings, rests on the bright white fur of an adoring Maltese terrier. Federico was certainly more interested in playing with his dogs than in using his sword, but Titian’s portrayal of his tender relationship with this little terrier suggests a capacity for domestication, affection and fidelity. The expression of his face is ingenuous, open, almost sheepish.

  Soon after Titian arrived at his court in March, Federico had set in motion a plan to help him purchase some farmland in the Veneto. Although the laws of mortmain were vague, the majority of fields and farms throughout Catholic Europe were owned by monasteries. Federico had in mind for his ‘friend’ – as he referred to Titian anonymously in the early stages of the correspondence – thirty-three contiguous fields near Treviso, including a walled house roofed with thatch, a well and an oven, that belonged to the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria del Pero, which was under the jurisdiction of the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore and ultimately, as an ecclesiastic property in Venetian territory, under the control of the Council of Ten. Although the preliminary negotiations had stalled by the end of March, Titian wrote to the marquis from Ferrara on 12 June expressing his extreme gratitude, saying that he had no greater wish than to serve the marquis and that ‘every hour seemed like a year’ while he waited to return to Venice in order to satisfy him by fulfilling his ‘obligations’ – by which he meant the paintings he had promised to deliver in return for Federico’s efforts to obtain the farmland for a bargain price. There is a note of friendly enthusiasm in this letter that we rarely find in his dealings with the prickly and demanding Alfonso d’Este.

  Titian returned to Venice from Ferrara on 18 June bearing an effusive letter from Alfonso to Andrea Gritti thanking the doge for having allowed him to remain in Ferrara for so long. There was news, good and bad, of friends. Sebastiano Luciani had returned to Rome in March. Andrea Navagero, the patrician humanist and diplomat who had persuaded Titian to refuse Bembo’s invitation to Rome sixteen years earlier, had recently been in Spain as Venetian ambassador to the court of Charles V. When his negotiations with the emperor stalled he had been transferred to the French court at Blois where he died almost immediately after his arrival.

  On 7 April Jacopo Sansovino had been appointed protomagister – chief architect and supervisor of buildings – to the procurators of St Mark. It was a position that carried a starting salary of eighty ducats a year and a house rent-free near the Piazza. But the job, as he was to discover, would not be plain sailing, even with the support of the doge. He had already begun, with Andrea Gritti’s blessings, the difficult job of demolishing and relocating the shops, taverns, hostelries and moneychangers that had littered the Piazza and Piazzetta for centuries. The rents were a source of considerable revenue for the procurators, and the tenants had long-standing rights to their premises, which in many cases had been passed down through generations.

  Before Titian could resume work on the St Peter Martyr he was faced with two less demanding tasks. One was a commission from Andrea Gritti for a votive painting of himself as doge being presented to the Virgin (later destroyed by fire). The other was for an altarpiece of the Pentecost for the church of Santo Spirito in Isola (for which he had painted his St Mark Enthroned nearly twenty years earlier). Gritti’s painting was installed in the doge’s palace in September 1531. There was no contract for the Santo Spirito picture, but the patrons decided to supply Titian with wine and flour in order to reduce the final fee, which would be decided when the picture was completed. But after making a sketch he abandoned it for a year or two, made another sketch and then lost interest until the 1540s when he finally painted a different version. He did not refuse a small job for Alfonso d’Este, who had asked him to have made in Venice a gold goblet with silver feet decorated with low reliefs, which was shipped to Ferrara in September.

  That summer of 1529 Federico Gonzaga and Alfonso d’Este, like all the princes up and down the peninsula, were preoccupied by a momentous happening. Peace, at a price, was about to descend on Italy in the person of the emperor Charles V. Charles had never before set foot on the soil of the country he was determined to dominate. Now, after eight years of waging war in Italy against Francis and the papacy, he finally had the upper hand. Francis had never recovered from his defeat at Pavia and the enormous cost of redeeming his sons, who were still held prisoner in Spain as sureties for the Treaty of Madrid. On 15 June Charles concluded an armistice with Henry VIII at Hampton Court. Two weeks later, at Barcelona, he signed a treaty with Clement VII, who, almost as worried by the republican revolution that had expelled his Medici family from Florence in 1527 as by the Sack of Rome in the same year, realized that his only hope lay in alliance with Charles. The pope agreed to support the emperor and receive him in Italy in return for the restoration to the Papal States of Cervia, Ravenna and the Venetian seaports in Apulia, as well as Alfonso d’Este’s Duchy of Ferrara and the contested cities of Modena and Reggio. Then, at Cambrai17 on 3–5 August a peace settlement between Charles and Francis was negotiated in private by two politically gifted women: Louise of Savoy, Francis’s mother and regent in his absence; and the Habsburg princess Margaret of Austria, Charles’s aunt and regent of the Netherlands. Francis agreed to withdraw his troops from Italy and to renounce previous claims to Genoa, Milan, Flanders, Asti and Naples; to marry Charles’s sister Eleonora; and to pay two million écus, the equivalent of 2.6 tons of solid gold, as ransom for his two sons. He undertook furthermore to help persuade the Venetians to give over their territories in the Kingdom of Naples, and the Florentines to come to terms with the papal–imperial intention to restore the Medici. Charles gave up his cherished dynastic claim to Burgundy but gained far more than he lost. Where so many previous treaties had failed, the Paix des Dames – the ‘Ladies’ Peace’ – succeeded, largely because both sides were short of money after the expense of their wars. For the same reason it lasted for the next seven years.

  Charles sent word to Clement that he intended to come to Italy where he wished to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor at the papal city of Bologna. Rome, where the coronation would normally have taken place, was still suffering from the aftermath of the Sack by his troops, and his presence there could look like an apology. He set sail from Spain at the end of July, and on 12 August made a grand maritime entry into Genoa. Sanudo noted in his diary that the salutes of artillery from the fortresses and ships in the harbour sounded ‘as though all of Genoa were falling into ruin’. The emperor spent seventeen days in Genoa (where the people were surprised and dismayed by his stinginess) before progressing slowly on towards Bologna, where he planned to take the measure of the pontiff he had never met while conferring with the principal Italian rulers who would be affected by the terms of the Ladies’ Peace. Federico Gonzaga, who was unusual among Italian princes in having nothing to fear and much to gain from the imperial visit, rushed to Genoa to pay his feudal respects and present the emperor with two Turkish horses and one Barbary, which he followed with a gift of ostriches for the entertainment of the court when it reached Piacenza on 5 September. A month after their first meeting at Genoa Charles appointed Federico to the position of captain general of the imperial army in Italy, an honour that the marquis did not altogether welcome. He had no intention of exhausting his fragile health, the contents of his treasury or his neutrality by leading military campaigns against Milan, let alone against Venice, with which he remained secretly on friendly terms. But he looked forward to discussing his marital prospects and asking some other favours at a second meeting with the emperor.

  The marquis and the emperor were the same age, both born in 1500. Federico had the im
pression they had got along well, and was buoyed up by a faction that was trying to persuade Charles, who was tired of dealing with the difficult and ineffectual Francesco Sforza, to assign to him the Duchy of Milan. And so, when the emperor communicated an intention to stop over at Mantua, Federico had what seemed to him an inspired idea. He would present Titian to the emperor, who would be pleased, perhaps, to sit for the artist who had done such a superb portrait of himself, the Marquis of Mantua. On 10 October Federico wrote to Malatesta asking him to make arrangements for Titian’s immediate embarkation. The imperial visit to Mantua was, however, postponed.

  The next opportunity to introduce Titian to the emperor arose at the end of the month when Charles invited Federico to spend three days with him at Parma discussing his military responsibilities and his marriage. Titian needed no persuading to accompany Federico to Parma,18 where he admired Correggio’s much-criticized frescos in the cupola of the cathedral, which one of the canons had described as ‘a hash of frogs’ legs’. Titian, to the surprise of the friend who was with him, exclaimed, ‘At last I have found a painter!’, and went on to proclaim in a loud voice that if he weren’t Titian he would want to be Correggio.19 But Federico’s hopes that Charles would be eager sit to Titian were dashed. Not only did the emperor reject the offer, he added insult to injury by dismissing the painter with a tip of one ducat, the amount usually given by princely guests to their hosts’ cooks, waiters at table, musicians and buffoons. (The other story about his meanness was that he slept with a different woman every night but never paid more than two ducats.) Five months later, when the emperor had not offered Federico a wife or the Duchy of Milan, and had paid him only 4,000 ducats for his services as captain of the imperial army, the Duke of Urbino’s ambassador in Venice wrote a letter to his master describing the episode of the tip, implicitly an example of the emperor’s by now notorious parsimony. The story certainly did the imperial reputation no good in a Venice that was in any case resentful of the losses it was bound to sustain at the Bologna summit.

  Charles, to do him justice, could hardly have been expected at that stage in his life to share Federico’s enthusiasm for Titian. He had been regularly portrayed since childhood, but his taste in art, such as it was, had been formed in Flanders; and he had spent the previous seven years in Spain. Knowing and caring nothing about Italian painting or the prices it fetched, he may have considered his measly tip as a dismissive joke. And he had a great deal else on his mind. He was preoccupied above all by the news, which had reached him soon after he disembarked at Genoa, that a Turkish army, commanded once again by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman, had recaptured Buda, had slaughtered its defenders and was marching towards Vienna with 100,000 troops. Charles’s first instinct was to abandon the Bologna summit and to go instead to Hungary as fast as possible ‘to help the king my brother [the Archduke Ferdinand], because his need is so great and the peril so extreme that it does not merely threaten him but places all Christendom at risk. I cannot and must not abandon him.’20 As it turned out, the Austrian capital was saved by one of the wettest autumns of the century. The 1,500-kilometre march from Istanbul to Hungary took four months instead of the usual six weeks. The delay gave Ferdinand time to strengthen the fortifications of Vienna before the sultan’s army reached the city at the end of September. The Turks laid siege to the city for three weeks before Suleiman finally ordered a retreat on 14 October. By the time Charles met Federico and Titian at Parma two weeks later, the pressure to go to the aid of his brother had diminished, but with Vienna not altogether out of danger he was determined to expedite the execution of the Ladies’ Peace at Bologna. (The Venetian ambassador to the papal court observed that Suleiman’s withdrawal was of course ‘good for Christendom’ but came at ‘a bad time for our present negotiations’.)

  Soon after the embarrassing incident of the one-ducat tip in Parma, Federico rounded it up out of his own pocket to 150 ducats, and Titian persuaded him to resume negotiations for the farmland in the Trevigiana that he had tried and failed to purchase at a bargain price in the spring. Federico had within his domain another important Benedictine abbey, San Benedetto in Polirone, through which he could put pressure on the monks of San Giorgio Maggiore. In a letter to Malatesta written on 13 November he informed the ambassador that he wished to give some thirty fields to the excellent ‘maestro Tuciano pictore’ whom he sought to repay for the many favours he had done him and would do in the future. Malatesta and the celerario (the monk responsible for carrying out St Benedict’s orders to care for the sick and the poor) of San Benedetto were to offer the monks of San Giorgio Maggiore a down payment of 300 scudi, to be followed by another payment after one year. The marquis concluded by saying that he needn’t remind his ambassador to use all his dexterity and good judgement to expedite the purchase. Malatesta did his best, but negotiations dragged on. The gift of land, like the emperor’s portrait, failed for the time being.

  From Parma the emperor and his court progressed on into the territory of the Este. Alfonso d’Este had played a major part in the Sack of Rome by allowing the imperial armies free passage and supplementing them with his own crack artillerymen. But in the lull that followed that disaster he had bolstered his relationship with Francis I by agreeing to the marriage of his son and heir Ercole to Renée, the daughter of Louis XII. At Barcelona, Charles had agreed to give Ferrara, Reggio and Modena to Pope Clement, who insisted on them as a punishment for the part Alfonso had played in the Sack. But the forceful Alfonso now made it clear to Charles that without his participation at Bologna there would be no lasting peace in Italy. Emperor and duke travelled together through Modena and Reggio where there was an opportunity to discuss the fate of the contested cities and Charles promised to negotiate with the pope on Alfonso’s behalf before the duke joined the imperial procession towards Bologna.

  The pontiff and his retinue of cardinals and civic officials were already there. Clement’s solemn entry into the city had taken place on 24 October when he was borne through triumphal arches painted with biblical scenes and the papal and imperial arms, blessing the crowds along the way, to the cathedral for the Te Deum and then to the civic basilica of San Petronio, which was hung with green garlands and the Medici coat of arms. The pope, at fifty-one, was a decrepit figure. Sebastiano Luciani’s unfinished portrait painted a year or two later shows the effects the Sack and its aftermath had had on his health. His skin is yellowed by a liver complaint. There are bags under his right eye, which was almost blind. His penitential beard and the fringe of hair around his otherwise bald head are grizzled. Only the finely cut lips and nose remind us that he had once been the most handsome of all Renaissance popes. He was as indecisive and secretive as ever but if anything more embittered against the Duke of Ferrara, the emperor and the Duke of Urbino, who had let him down on the eve of the Sack. Charles, however, was too shrewd to make the mistake of underestimating Clement’s intellect.

  The emperor’s ceremonial entry into Bologna21 on 5 November had been carefully stage-managed by his advisers and was a more magnificent and more worldly affair than the pope’s. He passed through a gate inscribed ‘Ave Caesar, Imperator invicte!’ with a procession of important officials and noblemen from Spain, Germany, Flanders and Italy whose participation demonstrated the international extent of his dominions, while his military might was proclaimed by a large body of troops and cannon carried on carts. The emperor himself, erect, auburn haired and blue eyed, cut a fine figure in contrast with the sickly pope. With his protruding lower lip and prominent Habsburg jaw he would never be handsome, but his bearing was every inch that of a king as he nodded courteously to the crowds, paying special attention to the ladies. Dressed in armour, his helmet topped with a golden imperial eagle, he rode a Spanish jennet covered with cloth of gold, his richly woven canopy supported by four knights on foot. An official rode alongside him throwing out gold and silver coins to the crowds from his saddlebags.

  Some of the temporary triumphal arches through which he pa
ssed, always de rigueur on such occasions, bore medallion portraits of ancient emperors; one was inscribed with a message from the pope promising greater glory to the emperor when he had overcome the impious Turks and Protestants. In front of the basilica of San Petronio a temporary open-air structure representing the consistory hall of the Vatican palace had been constructed on the orders of the pope, who waited to receive his arch-enemy on a wooden platform covered with crimson cloth. As the emperor knelt at the feet of the Vicar of Christ whose Holy City his troops had destroyed, Clement turned pale and tears streamed down his cheeks as he knelt to kiss Charles in forgiveness.

  In the next four months the emperor pressed for Clement’s agreement to a General Council of the Church to discuss much-needed reform of Church abuses and, so he hoped, to find common ground with the German Protestants. They discussed the need to contain the militant Ottoman Empire, now allied to France, as well as bargaining with delegates from the Italian states over the new political arrangements in Italy outlined by the Ladies’ Peace. But the pope managed to evade the emperor’s request for a General Council of the Church, which would weaken his papal authority. They made plans for the imperial coronation, which was to be the climax of this summit of summits. And Charles took time out from the gruelling meetings to create several hundred knights. Bologna during this time was a festival city, the destination for visitors from all over Europe, including many prominent Italian intellectuals. Isabella d’Este and the learned poet Veronica Gambara, sister of the governor of Bologna, entertained writers and humanists. Bembo came from Padua. The historians Francesco Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio joined the pope’s entourage. Gasparo Contarini, the Venetian philosopher, statesman and religious reformer, contributed his considerable gravitas to the conversations.