Titian
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Contarini, who was in Bologna as Venetian ambassador, struggled hard to retain the seaports of Ravenna and Cervia for Venice, on the grounds that it had occupied them for a century. But Clement could not be moved, and the emperor had no reason to cross him in this matter. Contarini did, however, persuade the emperor to restore the Duchy of Milan to Francesco Sforza, a diplomatic success for Venice that crushed Federico Gonzaga’s hopes but enhanced the Republic’s reputation as upholder of such little Italian independence as was left – until it became clear only a few months later that Sforza was nothing more than an imperial puppet. A general peace was signed on Christmas Eve by Charles, Venice, Francesco Sforza, the pope, the Archduke Ferdinand’s representative, Mantua, Savoy, Montferrat, Urbino, Siena and Lucca. ‘Now, indeed,’ declared one of the cardinals, ‘we can sing the Gloria with the angels, since peace and goodwill are restored to men.’22 Italy, which had been the political football pitch of Europe since Charles VIII of France had marched across the Alps in 1494, was at peace.
No European country was unaffected by the peace. But in the long term it was England that experienced the most profound consequence of the alliance between pope and emperor. Henry VIII, unaware that Spanish and German troops were laying waste to Rome in May 1527, had chosen that very month to petition Clement VII for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his wife of eighteen years and Charles V’s aunt. Clement, who had so easily granted Federico Gonzaga a divorce from Maria Paleologo, was puzzled by a request that he thought could just as easily be expedited by Henry’s chief minister Cardinal Wolsey. Charles, however, saw the request as an insult to his family and was deeply opposed. There was nothing Clement could have done while he was Charles’s prisoner, and, appalled by the limitless ambition of Cardinal Wolsey, who had proposed that he should assume papal powers from Avignon during the pope’s captivity, he refused to co-operate with the King’s Great Matter even after his release. After Bologna Henry’s case was hopeless, and he began the long process of separating England from the Catholic Church.
On 1 January 1530 the peace was made public with celebrations in Bologna and in Venice. Sanudo described the events of the day in Venice in his usual detail. The weather was freezing. The French ambassador took part but with evident displeasure. The patriarch said mass in the basilica, and there was one of those glittering processions around the Piazza for which Venice was renowned, with richly dressed officials of the Scuole bearing their gold and silver vessels and floats carrying allegorical and sacred images. On one of the floats actors posed as Justice and as the five allies – the pope, the emperor, the doge, the Archduke Ferdinand and the Duke of Milan – all seated and accompanied by a standing St Mark. There was not, perhaps, the same sense of relief that Venetians remembered from the celebrations that had marked the end of the Cambrai war. The more recent wars, which had begun before the economy had time to recover from Cambrai, had cost the treasury between four and five million ducats.23 Although Venice was bankrupt, Sanudo noted that the government had ordered that the proclamation of the Peace of Bologna should be especially spectacular in order to demonstrate to Venetians and to the world that the Most Serene Republic was still wealthy. Florence had failed to send a delegate; and the Venetians, so Sanudo wrote, felt sorry for ‘that republic remaining alone to defend itself’. And when later that year Florence finally accepted the seigniorial rule of Alessandro de’ Medici, and exiles from its republican government fled to Rome or Venice, the reputation of Venice as the last surviving Italian republic was inevitably enhanced.
The crowds in Bologna who witnessed the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor and King of Italy on 24 February 1530, or who read about it in the many descriptions issued in all European languages, could have been forgiven for imagining that the problems of Christendom and Italy were now settled. The most spectacular state occasion of the century – and as it turned out the last coronation of an emperor by a pope – had been scheduled to take place on the emperor’s thirtieth birthday and the fifth anniversary of the imperial victory at Pavia. In accordance with previous rituals, which had been carefully researched by the imperial master of ceremonies, it was preceded two days earlier by a complicated private ceremony in the small chapel of the palace at the end of which the pope placed the Iron Crown, which had been brought specially from Monza, the ancient imperial capital in Lombardy, on the head of the emperor. The second, public coronation was staged in the basilica of San Petronio, which could hold thousands of spectators and had been rearranged to stand in for St Peter’s, the mother church in Rome. It was connected to the communal palace, which represented the Vatican, by a raised walkway that allowed the crowds in the Piazza to observe the passage of the pontiff, his cardinals and other officials followed by the emperor wearing the Iron Crown and his attendants. Shortly after the procession reached the safety of the church the walkway collapsed, killing several people. But it was seen as a divine omen that the emperor’s life had been spared.
After the ceremony, which was as long, as splendid and as heavy with symbolism as the medieval coronations it was intended to recall,24 trumpets and salvoes of artillery informed the crowds outside that the crowning had been done. Pope and emperor emerged from the church and rode on richly caparisoned horses to the church of San Domenico, which stood for San Giovanni Laterano, the cathedral of Rome. This was the most spectacular of the coronation parades. The young Holy Roman Emperor and the ailing pope rode side by side under the same golden canopy, which was carried by three Bolognese and three Venetian ambassadors, signifying the agreement of pope and emperor with the Most Serene Republic. As they passed along the streets of Bologna banners of the crusades, the Church, the pope, the empire, the city of Rome, Germany, Spain, the New World, Naples and Bologna fluttered above them. The representatives of Charles’s dominions rode with the ambassadors of all the major European powers, including France and England. An imperial herald flung newly minted gold and silver coins bearing the emperor’s image to the crowds, shouting ‘Larghezza! Larghezza!’ Later, while the imperial and papal guests banqueted in the palace, a whole ox stuffed with fowls was roasted in the piazza outside and fountains dispensed unlimited quantities of red and white wine.
On 21 March Charles took charge of the long-standing quarrel between Alfonso d’Este and the papacy. In Italy as elsewhere in his vast and geographically scattered empire he preferred where possible to work with existing rulers. And so he confirmed the Este as dukes of Ferrara in perpetuity, and bought the disputed cities of Reggio and Modena from Clement for 100,000 scudi. Clement and Alfonso were to refer any further disputes about those cities to adjudication by the emperor. There being no further reason for prolonging his stay in Bologna, Charles left the following day. Although he had urgent business in Germany he was exhausted by four months of negotiations, which had been interrupted only in December by one of the agonizing attacks of gout that would plague him all his life, and he looked forward eagerly to breaking his journey for a holiday hosted by Federico Gonzaga at Mantua, where he intended to rest, enjoy himself and indulge his passion for hunting in the well-stocked forests maintained by the marquis.
Federico had made elaborate preparations for a magnificent welcome. On 25 March the emperor with his huge apparatus of attendants crossed the Po on a bridge of boats into the city, which had been specially decorated by Giulio Romano with triumphal arches and columns. In the next three weeks there was much hunting (one of the hunts employed 3,000 beaters for a party of 10,000 riders), roastings of boars, banquets, balls and theatrical entertainments. For Federico, however, the imperial visit brought bad news as well as good. The two men had discussed his marital prospects at Bologna, and now Charles had reached a decision. Federico’s bride was to be Giulia d’Aragona. She was thirty-eight and apparently sterile; and in addition to being an old woman who would produce no heirs, she was the daughter of the deposed King of Naples and therefore without a dowry. The blow was softened on 8 April, four days after the drawing up of the unappet
izing marriage contract, when the emperor raised the Marquis of Mantua to the title of duke.
In the course of the imperial holiday Federico, who had introduced Charles to his art-loving mother, Isabella d’Este, on the day of his arrival, took the emperor on tours of his palaces closely watching his reaction to the Gonzaga collections. Assessing and perhaps gently tutoring the unformed imperial taste in art would help him in future to choose the most effective diplomatic gifts. He knew that Charles would be especially interested in the portraits he had commissioned from Titian, if only because they were all of people well known to him. Federico’s younger brother Ferrante (the possible subject of the Man with a Glove),25 who was now twenty-three, was a great favourite of the emperor, who had invested him with the title of duke two years previously. The late Girolamo Adorno had been Charles’s ambassador to Venice when the government was wavering between a French and an imperial alliance. Aretino was an all too familiar thorn in his side. And then, of course, there were Titian’s portraits of Federico Gonzaga himself. If Federico was shrewd enough to resist pressing again for an imperial portrait by Titian at this stage, he guessed correctly that the portraits Charles saw in Mantua, particularly the one in armour, would stick in the emperor’s mind.
Charles left Mantua on 19 April. When two days later he entered Venetian territory at Peschiera, Sanudo was one of four envoys sent to greet him, bringing with them more than a hundred wagons of provisions. Sanudo, who described the meeting at his usual length, noted with pride that ‘… His majesty truly made a fine smile and spoke some words to me, but I understood few of them because of his speaking in a low voice and because I didn’t understand his language, although I saw great evidence of good will …’ By 1 May the emperor was in Germany attending a diet in Augsburg. He stayed in his northern possessions – trying to deal with the growing Protestant rebellion, raising an army against the Turks who attempted a second siege of Vienna – for more than two years before returning to Italy. This time he would not only see the point of Titian: he would embrace him as a friend.
SEVEN
The Most Beautiful Thing in Italy
Of all the pictures painted so far by Titian this is the most finished, the most celebrated, the greatest and the best conceived and executed.
GIORGIO VASARI, ‘LIFE OF TITIAN’, 1568, ON THE DEATH OF ST PETER MARTYR
In the middle of the thirteenth century a Dominican grand inquisitor famous for his preaching and conversions and his intolerance of heretics was riding home from Como with a companion through a dark forest to his monastery in Milan when he was ambushed and stabbed to death by assassins hired by two heretical Venetian noblemen whose property he had confiscated. As he died he wrote the Apostles’ Creed on the ground with his blood while his terrified friend fled. He was canonized the following year, and became a frequent subject of paintings commissioned by the Dominican order. Giovanni Bellini, at around the time Titian left his studio, had set the scene of the murder in front of a frieze of trees not unlike the one Titian later abolished from Giovanni’s Feast of the Gods.1
Titian’s enormous Death of St Peter Martyr for the confraternity of the saint owed nothing whatsoever to any previous painted version of the story. It was installed over the confraternity’s altar in Santi Giovanni e Paolo at the end of April 1530 and, before it was destroyed by one of the most tragic of all Venetian fires on 16 August 1867, it was the most admired, most copied, most described single masterpiece in Europe, a pilgrimage painting that attracted visitors whose education was not considered complete until they had stood before it. Generations of amateur, student and minor artists, as well as a succession of the greatest artists of their day – Benvenuto Cellini, Lodovico Carracci, Domenichino, Rubens, Gainsborough, Constable, Reynolds, Géricault, G. F. Watts – devoted hours to studying or copying it.
There is a lot to see in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which was the pantheon of Venetian doges; and most visitors today walk straight past the full-scale seventeenth-century copy by Cardi da Cigoli that hangs in place of Titian’s masterpiece. Other visual records of the original are engravings made later in the century,2 and copies including Géricault’s of about 1812. We also have numerous verbal descriptions, which echo across centuries with praise for the same qualities: energy, drama, poignancy, realism, colouring, the pallor of the martyr’s cheek, the frenzied, twisting figures worthy of Michelangelo, the vibrant colours, the trees swaying in sympathy with the tragedy, and the vastness of the landscape leading the eye to Titian’s beloved Dolomites as they could be seen from Venice on a clear winter’s day.
All Titian’s biographers shared Vasari’s opinion that it was Titian’s greatest painting. Ridolfi, who insisted that the Death of St Peter Martyr proved that Vasari had been wrong to claim that Titian had suffered from not studying original antique models, concluded his description by informing his readers that ‘this highly esteemed panel’ was already ‘deemed by every intelligent man to be among his finest efforts, and it is thought that Titian reached the most sublime heights of art in this place’. And not long after Ridolfi’s biography was published, the poet Marco Boschini3 claimed that the Venetian government had threatened with the death penalty anyone who dared to move it.
By the nineteenth century this most highly regarded of Renaissance masterpieces had been maimed by many restorations and by ‘sponging’ by student copyists. Napoleon had taken it to Paris, where it was transferred from panel to canvas4 before being returned to Venice in 1816. Even so there was enough left to inspire enthusiastic literary responses. William Hazlitt,5 writing in the year it was brought back to Venice, saw a landscape background ‘where every circumstance adds to the effect of the scene – the bold trunks of the tall forest trees, the trailing ground plants, with that cold convent spire rising in the distance, amidst the blue sapphire mountains and the golden sky’. Burckhardt6 thought he could hear ‘the last call of the Martyr and the shriek of his companion’ rising through the vastness of the landscape to the distant peaks of the mountains. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who were among the last people to see it before the fire, described ‘the startling display of momentary action and muscular strength’ Titian had taken from Michelangelo.
Aretino was the first to describe it, and as so often it is the elaborately rhetorical voice of Titian’s closest friend that best evokes the emotional impact the painting made on all who saw it from then on:
If you were to direct the eyes of your sight and the light of your intellect towards this work you would comprehend all the living terror of death and all the true agonies of life in the face and the flesh of the man on the ground, and you would marvel at the chill and the flush which appear in the tip of his nose and in the extremity of his body; and being unable to restrain your voice you would let yourself exclaim, when you contemplated the companion in flight, that you could perceive in his appearance the pallor of vileness and the whiteness of fear. Truly you would give a just verdict on the merits of the great panel if you told me that there was nothing more beautiful in Italy.7
When Titian delivered the St Peter Martyr on 28 April 1530 the members refused to contribute. Although the subsequent universal admiration for the painting makes the wrangling about a relatively small sum of money seem especially bathetic, the negative reaction of the less sophisticated members of the Scuola to the finished painting is understandable. The Scuola had chosen the subject of the assassination by heretics of the patron saint of inquisitors as signifying that they rejected the Protestant heresies that were seeping unchallenged into Venice. Titian had painted the death of their patron saint in a way that was, if not exactly heretical, in their view indecorous, inappropriate, as shocking to the pious Dominicans as his Assunta had been to the Franciscan friars twelve years earlier. The complexity of the composition and the forceful dynamism of Titian’s interpretation of a sacred subject for a church altarpiece were at that time unprecedented in Venice and unusual in Italy.8 The figures were as muscular as Michelangelo’s, but their actions were
more violent than anything he ever painted.
When Jacopo de Pergo prevaricated about his commitment to pay 100 ducats Titian petitioned for payment through the court. After a series of delays requested by Jacopo, he submitted a revised petition on 16 May 1531 saying that he had now received a total of thirteen ducats, partly in cheese and partly in cash. He may have sympathized with Jacopo’s plight because he asked that Jacopo should be required to pay only sixty ducats with an obligation to pay the rest at some future date. The judges accepted Titian’s request in full, saying that if the balance of eighty-seven ducats was not forthcoming within a week Jacopo would have to pay at least the sixty ducats on account. But the matter dragged on, and on. By October 1533 Jacopo had appealed successfully against a court decision to make him pay Titian fourteen ducats. It seems that Titian did eventually receive some payment and that Jacopo provided some of it. But even after Jacopo’s death in 1540 the executors of his estate tried to assemble enough evidence to recover the money from the members of the board.
The Death of St Peter Martyr was the last of the three great altarpieces Titian painted for Venetian churches and the climax of everything he had discovered so far in the course of a period in Italian art that had seen Raphael’s Stanze, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, Correggio’s frescos in the duomo of Parma, and the catastrophic Sack of Rome. As he was finishing it, the summit meeting at Bologna ushered in a new chapter in the history of Italy. The papal–imperial discussions about the need for a General Council of the Church and the launching of a counter-offensive against the Protestant challenge introduced the most intense period of the age historians define as the Counter-Reformation or the Catholic Reformation. Religion from now on was the dominant concern in the minds of all thinking men, a preoccupation that may explain the relative delay of scientific and technological progress. After 1529 the word Protestant was applied for the first time to dissenting German principalities and free cities that had previously been regarded as deviant Catholics. The unity of western European Christendom, already shaken by the alliance of the Most Christian King of France with the infidel Turkish sultan, broke down as the Catholic Church split into new orders and the Protestants into new sects, while Charles V set himself up as the temporal leader of a reformed universal Catholicism, an impossible goal that would inevitably be unacceptable both to the papacy and to the German Protestants.