Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Although the Counter-Reformation is literally defined as a response to the Lutheran apostasy, its roots went back further, to the early years of the century when the unprecedented upheavals of war, papal and clerical corruption and the flow of writings about religion churned out by the new printing presses fuelled a revival of interest in questions about the meaning and practice of Christian devotion. In the decades before Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the university cathedral door in Wittenberg, Catholics who had never given much thought to their faith had begun to question doctrines, dogmas and religious practices they had previously taken for granted. Although few Italians went so far as to embrace Protestantism, the heart of Italian Catholic Evangelism was a shared belief in justification in the eyes of God by faith alone and the Erasmian concern with individual moral reform achieved by following Christ’s example as revealed in the Scriptures, which as the source documents of the Christian religion must be read in the vernacular rather than understood second-hand through interpretations by priests or classical authors.

  The religious unrest lay deepest in cosmopolitan Venice, which had traditionally maintained a degree of independence from the papacy, where the economy had long depended on tolerance of the heretical faiths of Jews and Turkish traders, and where the printing houses were centres of humanist and religious discussion. And as the debate about Church reform intensified throughout Italy, Venice became its focus. In June 1527, a month after the Sack of Rome, the members of the strict reformist Theatine order had escaped from the devastated Holy City on a Venetian ship and they settled in the Republic for several years. Chief among them was Gianpietro Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti in the Abruzzi and a co-founder of the order which was named Theatine after the Latin version of his see. In the same year Aretino’s old enemy Gianmatteo Giberti took up an appointment as Bishop of Verona with the support of Andrea Gritti. The Catholic reformers were deeply divided among themselves. The Erasmian humanists, of whom Gasparo Contarini was the most respected Venetian leader, were at odds with the blinkered and intolerant Caraffa, a witch hunter who would lead the first Roman inquisition and later become the most detested pope of the sixteenth century.

  While few Venetians were tempted by Lutheranism or shared Luther’s doubts about the legitimacy of the pope, who is not mentioned in the Scriptures, the Veneto remained the gateway for Protestants from Germany into Italy, and the Venetian government could not immediately be moved from its tradition of religious tolerance. In 1524 Andrea Gritti had paid lip-service to the first of a flood of papal briefs instructing Italian bishops and prelates to take action against Lutheran heretics; but his government resisted papal demands for censorship of its presses and publishing houses and turned a blind eye as Protestantism spilled over the Alps into the Republic. In 1529, during Contarini’s negotiations at Bologna for a Venetian–imperial truce, Gritti refused Charles V’s request that he should expel the Lutherans and other heretics who had continued to worship freely in Venice and its dominions. There were sound economic reasons for this defiance. Venice could not afford to break its long-standing trading links with German merchants, an increasing number of whom were converting to Protestantism.

  After Bologna the wars in Italy gradually petered out, but only because the balance of power in the peninsula now rested with the emperor. Italian intellectuals recognized that the failure of Italy to unite in the face of foreign invasion had been its downfall, and now, as the patrician Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini put it, ‘The emperor’s greatness is our slavery.’ The Lombard-born physician, historian and churchman Paolo Giovio lamented ‘the sad change to almost everything’ not only in Italy but in the world. Aretino, who had always made a point of advertising his dislike of court life, called Charles V’s Italy a whore, a metaphor that was picked up by other Venetian-based critics writing about what they saw as the most vicious and evil of times for a miserable and unhappy Italy.

  Venice, unique among Italian city-states in maintaining its independence from the emperor, took up a position of guarded neutrality, a wise policy at a time when all wars ended in stalemate and bankruptcy. Venice prospered once again. The grain shortage eased, the spice trade recovered, refugees from the mainland established a thriving wool industry, demand abroad for Venetian luxury items soared. Publishing and printing expanded at such a rate that by mid-century Venetian presses were turning out more than three times the number of books published in Florence, Milan and Rome combined. For the independent Republic of Venice there would be no more conquests on the mainland in the name of St Mark, no more cannon fire blasting from across the lagoon. Venetians built holiday villas on the terraferma and along the banks of the Brenta, where Sanudo had seen the sun red as blood from the smoke of enemy fires. The landed gentry made more contacts with foreign princely courts. Venetian patricians began to behave more like aristocrats and to see distinctions never made before in the Republic of Venice between merchants and leisured noblemen. Halfway through his reign Andrea Gritti, the doge who had originally aimed to lessen the distinctions between rich and poor members of his government, became obsessed by money and the status it conferred. To be wealthy was to be a good citizen. To be able to finance the bankrupt monarchies – France, the empire and the Apostolic See – became for the Venetian state what one historian has called ‘the symbol of its own brand of statecraft, its special strength, the substitute for a military power which was lacking and which was considered neither possible nor profitable to have’.9

  It was, however, a psychologically uncomfortable time in a Venice that was pervaded by the sense of fatigue and disillusion that often follows the conclusion of long and testing wars. As inflation spiralled throughout Europe, the growing distance between the very wealthy and the desperately poor encouraged the criminal behaviour that had always been a problem in Venice. Although the peace was followed by one of the government’s occasional campaigns against corruption, the sale of offices was difficult to stamp out at a time when the poorest patricians were susceptible to exchanging their votes for bribes. Power was invested in a smaller number of patricians as quarantine periods were extended or abolished. Some literate members of the popolani expressed their discontent by scribbling graffiti on walls, such as ‘The people will rise and punish you.’10 But of course they never did.

  For Venice it was not yet the beginning of the end that historians have so often tried to pinpoint. Flexible as ever, the Venetian government bent with the winds of change and found peaceful ways of flexing its muscles as the rest of Italy remained directly or indirectly under imperial control. The Myth of Venice was given a new lease of life in the years to come by Gasparo Contarini’s ardent defence of the Venetian constitution, De magistratibus et republica Venetorum, which he revised in the year after representing Venice at Bologna. Meanwhile, the Myth was propped up by the brutal conclusion of the Florentine dream of maintaining its last republic.11 The republican government of Venice, under the guidance of Andrea Gritti, took the decision to preserve its wealth and independence by staying out of power politics while ‘supplying the teeth within the fixed smile of armed neutrality’.12 The arsenal was enlarged in 1535. Foreign dignitaries on guided tours of what was still the most impressive shipbuilding factory in the world were invited to admire a courtyard known as the giardino di ferro, the garden of iron weapons. Visitors arriving by sea after mid-century were greeted by the sight of the magnificent stone fortress of Sant’Andrea on the Lido, which was rebuilt by Michele Sanmicheli to withstand the latest developments in artillery power. ‘Far better’, as Andrea Gritti put it, ‘to fight with sword in sheath but with prestige than not to fight at all.’

  Venice more than any other city knew the value of putting on a show, and the most effective showmen of all were Andrea Gritti’s Triumvirate of Taste. With the return of peace and prosperity Sansovino was able to begin his transformation of the old Gothic city into a New Rome with buildings that translated the classicizing confidence of the Roman High Renaissance
into a uniquely Venetian architectural idiom. The bombastic propagandist Pietro Aretino proclaimed the superiority of the New Rome over all other states, beginning as he meant to go on with a letter to Andrea Gritti circulated in 1530 in which he deliberately echoed Petrarch’s encomium of two centuries earlier:

  Heaven has been so generous to her in its gifts that she shines in her nobility, magnificence, dominion, buildings, temples, holy houses, counsels, virtues, riches, fame and glory, more so than any other city that there ever was. She is Rome’s reproach because there are no minds that could or would tyrannize over her liberty, or make her a slave in the minds of her people …

  By then Titian’s public works – the Assunta, the Submission of Frederick Barbarossa, the mosaics in the sacristy of San Marco, the Pesaro Madonna, the St Peter Martyr – had made Venice an artistic centre to rival Rome. In the following years, however, he was most in demand for the portraits, which, so Aretino boasted, Titian could throw off ‘as quickly as another could scratch the ornament on a chest’.13 His portraits were routinely described as not paintings but mirrors of nature, ‘only that the mirror reflects while Titian creates’,14 not portraits but flesh itself, only frustrating the spectator by their refusal to speak. What we call psychological insight, contemporaries described as ‘something divine, and as heaven is the paradise of the soul, so God has transfused into Titian’s colours the paradise of our bodies’.15

  The aristocratic portraits of 1520s – the Man with a Glove, Laura Dianti and the portraits of Alfonso d’Este and Federico Gonzaga – had paved the way to a position almost as an honorary patrician in his own right. And when Titian’s high-born subjects were mean or dilatory with their payments he could make up the shortfall by setting substantial fees for lesser sitters – even Aretino had to pay for the portrait of himself in the Pitti galleries in Florence. Whereas in the early stages of his career he may have practised on Venetian friends of his own age whose names are lost to us, from the 1530s on Titian introduces us to more people we can identify. They range across many nationalities, ages and professions: merchants, lawyers, civil servants, soldiers, cardinals, diplomats; a toddler, an adolescent, an art dealer; as well as Venetian doges16 and many of the most powerful foreign princes of his day and their consorts (he was the only painter in Europe to portray both an emperor and a pope). Although the well-documented charm and social skills that endeared him to high-born patrons must have included the charismatic quality of being an intelligently attentive listener, some of his subjects were too busy to sit for him for long; and some of his most successful feats of portraiture were especially admired because they were taken from previous portraits, medals or verbal descriptions of subjects he had never or only briefly met. He painted a king, a sultan, the emperor’s dead wife and the mistress of the emperor’s chief minister, all sight unseen.

  Few other great Renaissance artists specialized in portraiture, a genre considered less important than religious, historical or mythological subjects, and which was disdained by Vasari and Michelangelo, who believed that the reproduction of nature was less exalted than the creation of ideal forms and features. Masters of the calibre of the Bellini brothers, Leonardo, Giorgione and Raphael developed Italian portraiture as a sideline. Titian, who was the first Venetian to take advantage of a new appetite for realistic likenesses of prominent people, was unique both for the sheer numbers of his portraits and for the techniques and insights with which he revolutionized the genre. Portraits constitute a greater proportion of Titian’s oeuvre than they do of any other artist of the period. Some seventy to a hundred paintings, about a third of his extant works, are portraits, now scattered throughout the picture galleries of the world; and dozens more are known from descriptions, engravings or copies. He used every format: profile, three-quarter profile or full face; eyes averted as though lost in thought or staring straight out at the beholder; bust length or three-quarters length, and in the early 1540s he began painting his most important subjects full length. Often he eschewed architectural or landscape backgrounds, focusing in close-up on the sitter, whose clothes and demeanour indicated their precise social status. He flattered them, correcting as far as possible the ‘mistakes of nature’, as a late sixteenth-century writer put it,17 but usually he captured what seems to us the essence of a real person. Usually, but not always. Given his enormous output and the speed at which he produced portraits it was inevitable that some of them, especially those of less socially exalted sitters, would be duller than others.18

  He became the portraitist of choice for a European elite familiar with Castiglione’s widely influential Courtier, which championed the ideal of an aristocracy that would bring order to a tired and confused Italy, and which emphasized the importance of clothes as essential indicators of social status. Although there was some discontent, particularly in Venice, with the increasing class-consciousness in an already rigidly hierarchical society, the majority of men and women accepted the status quo and were impressed by the spectacular shows of power and fabulous wealth when princes made their ceremonial appearances in public. Everyone in Renaissance Europe wanted to know what their rulers, good or bad, looked like; and, obvious though it may be, we sometimes have to remind ourselves of how precious likenesses were before the invention of photography when the insatiable public curiosity about the appearance of famous people gave added value to the painted and sculpted portraits only the very rich could afford. A diplomatic gift of a portrait acted as the surrogate presence of the donor. A portrait, especially one by Titian, who knew so well how to reflect the status of his sitters, conferred a kind of immortality on their subjects and, if the sitter was a ruler, on his state. ‘Death’, wrote Aretino in a letter to Veronica Gambara, ‘should hate the man who secures immortality for those he would kill.’

  It has often been said that Titian in his forties rested on his laurels; and it is true that there is nothing in his surviving work from the 1530s that is as groundbreaking as the Venetian altarpieces or the Bacchanals for Alfonso d’Este. It is, however, a misleading anachronism to charge him with what we call elitism for restricting his clientele to people who could afford his high prices and for flattering, rather than sitting in judgement on, tyrannical princes. The object of all Renaissance portraits of men was to record their social status, and Aretino was not the only writer to express the view that persons of the highest social and intellectual rank had the exclusive right to have their portraits painted, that members of the lower orders who wished to be portrayed as important men were merely comical. Italian artists, furthermore, earned their living by working for patrons who could afford to pay them.

  Titian had one of the greatest minds of the Renaissance. He expressed, as Bernard Berenson put it, ‘nearly all of the Renaissance that could find expression in painting’.19 But he thought and expressed himself in images that were intended to please or reflect the requirements of his patrons and leave us none the wiser about his political or religious affiliations. The word–image problem, the relationship between what writers and intellectuals think and what painters paint in any period, is particularly teasing for anyone trying to peer behind Titian’s paintings into the mind of the man who created them. Titian, unlike Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo and Michelangelo, was a silent artist. His surviving correspondence is mostly about business matters, and most of his letters were ghosted for him. He was praised in writing more often than any other artist apart from Michelangelo. But although he was in the course of his career acquainted with more than sixty writers, including Ariosto and Bembo as well as Aretino,20 he seems not to have been particularly interested in the company of wordsmiths, apart of course from Aretino.

  None of his literary acquaintances, not even his contemporary biographers Dolce and Vasari, ever mentioned his views about anything except painting. Some modern writers have seen heterodox messages in his late religious paintings, which suggest to them that Titian was in contact with heretics.21 It was impossible not to be in contact with heretics in Venice, but t
here is no evidence that he kept in touch with any who had confessed or been prosecuted. If he had any subversive tendencies, they would surely have been suspected by the sternly pious Gianmatteo Giberti, who offered to pay Titian 100 ducats for a small Nativity in 1531–2, and the papal legates with whom he frequently dined.

  So we are free to hazard a guess from the dignity his portraits confer on their powerful and well-dressed sitters that the younger Titian remained aloof from the religious unrest and the pessimism about human nature, clerical corruption and the state of the world expressed by the more cynical writers of his times. If Titian’s best portraits of the upper classes and aristocracy continue to hold our attention it is because they show us, in a way no painter would do again before Rembrandt, that we are standing face to face with a person who holds a particular profession or social rank, at a particular moment in that person’s life, whether it is the little daughter of a banker playing with her dog, a wily old pope who fathered at least four bastards while championing Church reform, an exhausted Holy Roman Emperor riding against a blazing sunset like a triumphant Roman emperor as he returned from a military victory against German Protestants that failed in its purpose, or any of the enormous cast of characters who, thanks to the most Shakespearean of painters, people our understanding of an age that was so different from our own.