Titian

by Sheila Hale

  The half-length penitent Mary Magdalen proved to be one of Titian’s most successful subjects, so much so that in later life he claimed that the saint had earned him no less than 2,000 scudi. He and his studio produced a number in the 1530s and again in the 1550s and 1560s, many of which survive3 – in the later versions her breasts are covered, she wears a striped shawl, her face is more lachrymose, and her attributes are a book, or a book resting on a skull, as well as the jar of unguent. All were small intimate cabinet paintings – the repentant but sensuous semi-nude Magdalen was not considered appropriate for large public altarpieces until much later in the Counter-Reformation. Vittoria Colonna’s Magdalen is lost. For the earliest extant version painted a few years later (Florence, Galleria Palatina), probably for Francesco della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, Titian may have used the same model – it has been plausibly suggested that she was a prostitute – but removed her clothes and wiped away some of her tears the better to titillate a male patron. The jar of unguent is the only sign we have that this pneumatic naked girl, her flowing red-gold hair encircling her large, firm breasts, is a saint. Titian gave her all the features of the Renaissance ideal of perfect beauty as well as the pose of a Venus Pudica coyly pretending to hide her sexuality.4 Ruskin, who was easily outraged by what he regarded as art betrayed by vulgarity, was disgusted by this ‘stout, red-faced woman, dull, and coarse of feature, with much of the animal in even her expression of repentance – her eyes strained, and inflamed with weeping … [It is] the only instance, so far as I can remember, of Titian’s painting a woman markedly and entirely belonging to the lowest class.’5

  On 1 September 1531, a week before Pomponio’s benefice came through, Titian signed the lease on the large house overlooking the lagoon in the parish of San Canciano where he would live and work for the rest of his life: painting, conducting his business affairs, raising his family and entertaining friends and visiting dignitaries.6 The area was known as the Biri after a canal called Biria that divided the district in two parts, Biri Grande, on the side nearest the church of the Gesuiti, and Biri Piccolo closer to Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Titian’s new house was on the northern edge of Biri Grande fronting the lagoon. It was a leafy but poor, unfashionable and crime-ridden suburb, but it was not the least of Titian’s considerations that its location on the lagoon would facilitate the export of paintings destined for the mainland and the import of materials, and that it was near the timber yards at San Francesco della Vigna, where the community of Pieve di Cadore had long-standing rights to land and store their timber. The house itself, furthermore, had many advantages that made it worth Titian’s while to shoulder the considerable rent of forty ducats a year, which rose to fifty after 1536 and sixty after 1549.7 Known as a casa grande or casa da statio, indicating that it was an upper-class residence, it had been built four years earlier by a patrician, Alvise Polani, who had originally intended it for his own use, but had died leaving it to his son-in-law Leonardo di Marcantonio Molin, with whom Titian signed the contract for the entire house apart for the time being from two mezzanine flats, and which allowed him to spend 100 ducats on improvements. It was a long, narrow, free-standing block similar to many villas built at that time on the mainland and in rural areas of the lagoon, consisting of a ground floor used for storage and Titian’s spacious apartment on the top floor. This had a large reception room for entertaining which was lit by four round-headed windows, and enough side rooms to accommodate his studio as well as the two growing boys, live-in assistants, visiting friends and members of his extended family from Cadore, and the necessary complement of servants.

  An external staircase led down to a garden that surrounded the house on all sides where finished paintings could be set out to dry away from the prying eyes and potential hazards of a calle or campo, and where a wood and masonry barn next to the house probably served as a store for materials. But not the least of the attractions of the new house was the view from it. Working in his north-facing studio or enjoying his garden on a clear day in winter when the north wind blew away the mist from the lagoon, Titian could see, beyond the smoking glass furnaces on Murano and the coastline towards Campalto, the mountains of the Vecellio homeland that he had painted so often from memory: the Civetta with two peaks that look like ears; the Pelmo, shaped like a doge’s hat; the jagged Marmarole that framed the view from his family house in Pieve di Cadore; the Antelao, just a few kilometres west of Pieve below which Titian’s father had fought in the victorious battle against Maximilian I; and on some days even as far as the snow-capped Marmolada, the highest peak in the Cadorine Dolomites.

  Titian was not the only Renaissance artist who cared about his domestic surroundings and could afford to live in style. Vasari had a fine house in Arezzo and Giulio Romano one in Mantua, as did Dürer in Nuremberg and the Cranach family in Wittenberg. But it was unusual for an artist to expend as much time, money and thought on a house as Titian did on his residence in Biri Grande. In the years to come he improved and extended the garden, buying an adjacent plot of land and planting it with trees; he enlarged the hut in the garden and raised its roof; he took a lease on the mezzanine flats whose tenants were annoying him and rented them out to lodgers of his own choosing. He used his connections with local artisans and the eye for decorative objects that he had put to the service of his wealthy patrons to purchase ceramics, glass and furnishings for his own enjoyment. He traded a portrait of a maker of musical instruments for a harpsichord. Less than three years before his death he asked a patron to pay him in lieu of cash with a set of wall hangings or spalliere, the attachments, often tapestry or leather, that were placed above pieces of furniture, and which were the most expensive decorative items in any Venetian household. The spalliere, he said, would give him more pleasure than a gift of 2,000 scudi.8

  We can guess from the endearing dogs that appear increasingly in his paintings that he filled the house with dogs. And at some time in the mid-1530s Titian married for a second time, and his third child, Lavinia, was born not long afterwards.9 Nothing is known about his second wife except that she was probably still alive in 1548 when Charles V wrote to Ferrante Gonzaga, then governor of Milan, asking that a pension of 100 scudi promised a decade earlier should be paid in order to maintain Titian’s wife and family while the artist was at court with the emperor. Even Aretino, who must have known about both his wives and was forever gossiping about his friends’ love lives and his own, did not so much as hint at their existence in his writings. We can assume that she was not a person of social consequence in Venice and that Titian, in the old-fashioned Byzantine tradition, kept her strictly at home. Perhaps, like Cecilia before her, she was a girl from Cadore come to Biri Grande as a housekeeper or live-in model.

  What little remains of Titian’s house can be found with some difficulty in a narrow courtyard called Campo del Tiziano, which is now some way inland from the lagoon. Even before Titian’s death the waters had begun to retreat from this part of the city, and by the end of the century the area to the north of his house had been filled in and developed with houses and the quays still known as the Fondamenta Nuove. His house was by no means the only one to be maimed in the nineteenth century by insensitive speculators under the Austrian occupation and left to decay in the sad years of desperate poverty that followed the unification of Italy.10 The piano nobile was partitioned, and repartitioned, into cheap flats. The external staircase had collapsed by the 1870s.11 Only two of the original round-headed windows remain on the outside and all but one are blocked on the inside.

  During the upheaval of moving house and studio to Biri Grande, Titian found time to finish a large votive portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti with the Virgin and Child and Four Saints, which was installed in the Collegio on 27 September. The painting was destroyed by a fire in 1574, but we have good idea of what it looked like from an anonymous woodcut (in which Gritti’s face is replaced by that of a later doge, Francesco Donà) and from a detailed description by Sanudo, who saw it on 6 October: ‘The new p
ainting shows the present Most Serene Prince kneeling in front of Our Lady, who holds the child. The doge is presented by San Marco, and behind Our Lady are three saints, Bernardino, Louis and Marina.’ Sanudo, who was as usual more interested in listening to gossip than looking at paintings, went on to record that people were joking that it looked as though an argument had broken out among the saints about which one had contributed most to the election of the Most Serene Prince. Nevertheless, everyone agreed that it was one of Titian’s most successful pictures.

  The loss of so many of the most admired paintings from the early 1530s – the Death of St Peter Martyr, the portrait of Cornelia, Vittoria Colonna’s Magdalen and most of the others commissioned by Federico Gonzaga; the St John the Baptist that Aretino sent to the military commander of Milan; the votive portrait of Doge Gritti – leave us with an unbalanced impression of the quality and range of Titian’s work at this time. But those that have survived suggest that in the years following the explosive St Peter Martyr he, and perhaps his patrons, were less interested in innovation, and that Titian, now into his forties and greatly in demand, was sometimes content to look back over his shoulder at past achievements, while relying more heavily on assistants than he had in his younger days.

  He seems to have called upon his brother Francesco to help him when he was under pressure to finish the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints,12 which was probably begun before an extended visit to Bologna in 1532–3 and finished by 1535. He reused the panel on which he had painted two unfinished pictures, one probably a bathing scene originally for Alfonso I d’Este who had cancelled the commission in 1518, the other an altarpiece for the Oratory of San Nicolò (the commission he had stolen from Paris Bordone). The upper section of the Virgin and angels floating on clouds is painted in a tightly explicit manner that looks more like Francesco’s work than his own. Titian did prepare the composition of the lower half, but the rather flaccid figure of St Sebastian (which he later radically revised for a woodcut by Niccolò Boldrini) looks remarkably weak, especially in contrast with the St John the Baptist (Venice, Accademia), probably of around the same date or a little earlier, in which the muscular body of the saint and the chiaroscuro tonality of the landscape are closer to the St Peter Martyr.

  The Baptist stands tall and triumphant in a mountain landscape so beautifully evoked that we can almost smell the crisp air. The mountain stream, which Titian indicated simply by combing a little white impasto on to the surface, is a tour de force that was noticed by Ridolfi: ‘we can see a gentle trellis of small trees which, as they bend their green branches, seem to be kissing the clear spring that provides a pleasing drink for him, and while it flows through small pebbles, it sprays silver drops of water …’. The painting was commissioned by a Polani relative of Titian’s landlord for his chapel on one side of the high altar of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The sculptural modelling of the Baptist’s body, intended as a pendant to a statue of St Francis in the chapel on the other side of the high altar, may have been inspired by a prototype by Sansovino or Michelangelo.13 But the painting is also so close to Aretino’s description of the Baptist in The Humanity of Christ that one wonders which inspired the other.

  Look at John the Baptist, there on a rock with his wild head of hair, horrid beard, and the face of penitence … His arms are naked, his legs undressed, his feet bare. He eats grass, drinks water, sleeps on tree trunks, and with the exclamations that issue from the depths of his soul the woods crash down, the rocks shake, and Echo, aghast, answers him trembling.

  Other paintings from these years are less powerful. The Assumption of the Virgin, still in the cathedral of Verona,14 is a simpler composition than the great Frari Assunta and its colouring is more subdued. But it is interesting to think that it may have been the first Titian seen by the great colourist Paolo Caliari, known after his birthplace as Veronese, who was only about four when Titian finished it around 1532; and to compare Titian’s two beautiful but relatively quiet versions of the Supper at Emmaus of around the same date with the more elaborate Suppers that Veronese would paint in the second half of the century, when he made the subject of lavish banquets his own. Titian painted two versions of the story from the gospel according to St Luke (24: 13–32) in which Christ after the Resurrection meets St Cleophas and another disciple who fail to recognize him and invite him to share their supper at an inn, where he reveals his divinity. One version (Paris, Louvre)15 was painted for Count Nicola Maffei, Federico Gonzaga’s chief minister who frequently acted as Federico’s representative in his dealings with Charles V and with Titian. The imperial eagle on the wall refers to Maffei’s loyalty to the emperor. Another, weaker version (Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery; formerly the Earl of Yarborough, Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire) was commissioned by a member of the Contarini family, who presented it to the Republic to hang in the Senate chapel in the doge’s palace.

  Although Titian was so famous by this time that the subjects and patrons of many of his paintings were recorded, nothing is known about the so-called Allegory of Marriage of about 1531–3 (Paris, Louvre), which continues to keep scholars guessing about who the three principal figures might be. One promising explanation is that it was painted in response to a letter from Alfonso d’Avalos to Aretino expressing the desire that before setting off on a campaign against the Turks Titian would paint a group portrait of d’Avalos himself in armour, his wife Maria d’Aragona and their baby son Ferrante as Cupid. The man in armour does not look like Titian’s known portraits of d’Avalos, but this could be because he hadn’t the time to pose for him before going off to war.16 He does, however, look remarkably like Titian’s later portrait of the mercenary soldier Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, whom Titian met in 1532. Since the woman holding a globe upon whose breast he lays his left hand bears no resemblance to Francesco Maria’s consort, it could be that she is Venus, he is Mars and the Cupid holding a bundle of arrows stands for marital love and fidelity.

  Sought after by foreign patrons though he was in the first years of the 1530s, Titian, as a prominent resident of Venice, could hardly have escaped local duties. In 1531, as well as completing the successful votive portrait of Doge Gritti for the Collegio, he was elected by the painters’ guild along with Lorenzo Lotto and Bonifazio de’ Pitati to the board of executors charged with distributing 200 ducats left in the will of Vincenzo Catena for charitable purposes. The grand chancellor, Andrea de’ Franceschi, who had been elected in 1529 to that most important of positions open to non-nobles, and whom Ridolfi described as ‘most beloved of the painter’, sat for him twice, in 1532 and a few years later, wearing the red robe and black stole of his office (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, and Detroit, Institute of Arts).17 And at about the same time he portrayed a member of the patrician Dolfin family (Los Angeles, County Museum of Art), also in red with a black stole.

  But these rather routine likenesses of high-ranking Venetians show none of the adventurous approach and intimacy with their subjects that we feel in the portraits Titian had painted in his youth when he was exploring what he could do with the genre of which he would prove himself the unrivalled European master at the end of the decade. Their inferior quality compared to the greatest aristocratic portraits of the 1520s – the Portrait of Tommaso de’ Mosti, the Man with a Glove, the Portrait of Federico Gonzaga in Blue – suggest that Titian in his middle age, loyal Venetian though he was, had made a conscious decision to reserve his best efforts for foreign aristocrats. At some time between 1530 and 1535 he changed the spelling of his signature from the partly Venetian ‘TICIANVS’ to the fully Latinized version ‘TITIANVS’, the first extant appearance of which can be seen on the Vatican Madonna in Glory, and which he or his advisers presumably deemed more appropriate to his international status.

  After the St Peter Martyr – for which he had to continue suing for his paltry fee – Titian gradually priced himself out of the home market. In the 1530s and early 1540s his fees for altarpieces quadrupled, he relied more
on his studio and he painted fewer time-consuming large-scale pictures than at any other time in his career; nor did he return to mythological narrative subjects until the 1550s. If his phenomenal artistic energy and courage were sometimes in abeyance, his genius for portraiture carried him up the social ladder and through the doors of the most powerful rulers in Europe, who would reward him with the cash, favours, land, pensions, flattery, honours and benefices for Pomponio that were beyond the means of chronically stingy Venetian patrons. From now on, with Aretino’s help, he manipulated the princes, the greatest of whom, so the legend went, bent to pick up his paintbrush, and managed his business affairs with a degree of flair and dedication unmatched by any other Renaissance artist.

  THREE

  The Most Powerful Ruler in the World

  As you cannot be everywhere at the same time, the best way of keeping your kingdoms together is to make use of your children.

  FROM CHARLES V’S POLITICAL TESTAMENT FOR HIS SON PHILIP, 1548

  In the autumn of 1532, nearly three years after his coronation by Clement VII at Bologna, the emperor Charles V returned to Italy from his possessions in Germany, the Low Countries and Austria. He had, at the last minute and with some difficulty, persuaded the pope to confer with him once again at Bologna about the issues that burned closest to his heart. Chief among them was the Protestant problem in Germany, which had grown from a movement for reform within the Catholic Church instigated by Martin Luther in 1517 to an outright rebellion against exploitation and abuses by the Old Church and the Habsburg imperialists. The formulation of Lutheran principles had been presented to Charles at Augsburg in the summer of 1530. They included the doctrine of justification to God by faith alone, and rejection of the Catholic rite of Holy Communion and of the celibacy of the clergy. Charles believed that the Protestant problem could be resolved at a General Council of the Church at which dogmatic differences would be discussed and much needed reforms of clerical abuses agreed. Although Clement was well aware of the need for Church reform, the emperor’s previous attempts to persuade him to summon a General Council had failed. Like every pontiff in the previous century he was haunted by the outcome of two such Councils held early in the fifteenth century, which had concluded that a General Council representing the whole Church was superior to the papacy. He had reason to believe that compromise with the Protestants and power sharing with the emperor would weaken papal authority whatever the conclusions of a General Council.