by Sheila Hale
While Titian was attending to the details of business affairs in Cadore, orders for paintings were piling up in the studio in Biri Grande. Even before taking on the raft of commissions from Charles V’s entourage at Bologna, he had been working for two other aristocrats: the firebrand warrior Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, for whom he painted one of the sexiest nudes in sixteenth-century painting; and the peace-loving commander in chief of the Venetian army, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who was to become an important patron. There were also demanding commissions from Federico Gonzaga and from the Venetian Scuola della Carità. So when in March 1535 Lope de Soria issued another invitation on behalf of the emperor to meet him, this time in Italy where he was expected shortly to launch a conquest of Tunis, which had been occupied by Barbarossa,16 the ambassador reported to Charles V that he remained very doubtful about Titian’s departure, ‘since I see him so attached to this Venice of his, which he loves and whose praises he is always singing to me …’.
FOUR
The Venus of Urbino
As for Titian’s Venus – Sappho and Anactoria in one – four lazy fingers buried dans les fleurs de son jardin – how any creature can be decently virtuous within thirty square miles of it passes my comprehension. I think with her Tannhäuser need not have been bored – even till the end of the world: but who knows?
CHARLES ALGERNON SWINBURNE, FROM A LETTER TO LORD HOUGHTON, 31 MARCH 1864
Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, the bastard son of Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, was twenty-one when he posed for Titian in Venice in October 1532,1 ‘looking’, as a nineteenth-century writer put it, ‘through those he saw, till you turned away from his glance’.2 He dressed for his portrait (Florence, Galleria Palatina) as a Magyar: belted ruby velvet tunic and plumed cap, grasping a mace in one hand and in the other a scimitar given him by his Hungarian captains. Sanudo, who followed Ippolito closely while he was in Venice, described him wearing the same or a similar hat with a large feather as he went about the city ‘incognito’. The clasp on the cap bears the motto of the beautiful and pious widow Giulia Gonzaga, Countess of Fondi, who was the love of his life. Titian’s portrait is so vividly characterized, despite the lack of detail on the tunic, that one wishes that his other portrait of Ippolito, in armour, also painted during his Venetian sojourn, had survived.
A swaggering, spoiled, restless young hell-raiser, who refused to behave or dress like a priest, Ippolito had been installed at the age of eleven along with his cousin Alessandro de’ Medici, who was the same age and also illegitimate, as joint leader of Florence and caretaker of the Medici family interests after their cousin Giulio de’ Medici was called to Rome as Pope Clement VII in 1523. Clement had given Ippolito his red hat in 1529, two years before he sat to Titian, but the unwilling cardinal was bitterly disappointed when the pope and emperor passed him over in favour of Alessandro (who was said to be the pope’s illegitimate son, conceived before he had been made a cardinal) as Duke of Florence and the emperor secured Alessandro’s position by arranging his marriage to his natural daughter Margaret. Ippolito asked to be released from holy orders in order to become the martial leader of the Florentine exiles, but Clement deflected him by sending him as papal legate to the armies assembling under the command of Charles V to defend Vienna from Suleiman’s attack.
Ippolito arrived in Germany, ‘dressed’, according to one Venetian ambassador, ‘like Jupiter’, but, disappointed to find no action at Vienna after the retreat of the sultan, he broke ranks with the emperor’s forces. On the way home his Italian troops mutinied and went on a plundering spree that Ippolito did nothing to contain and with which he may indeed have connived. Charles V had him imprisoned but only briefly. It would have been impolitic to hold captive a prince of the Church who was also a relative of the pope with whom he was shortly to confer about important matters at Bologna. So Ippolito crossed the Alps into Italy, where he was invited by the Venetian government to spend some time, officially incognito, in Venice before proceeding to the papal–imperial conference at Bologna.
Ippolito de’ Medici was a good friend of Aretino, whom he had known in Rome and who may have suggested to Titian that he should meet the cardinal at Treviso when he arrived there on 16 October 1532 with a view to painting his portrait. Since the cardinal was in charge of a bureaucratic office in the Curia, he might also be persuaded to arrange a church living for Pomponio. Three days later Benedetto Agnello wrote to Gian Giacomo Calandra that Titian had spent a night in Treviso lodging in the same room with the servants of the imperial ambassador there. They had all caught the plague and Titian was terrified that he might have been infected. But the risk turned out to be worth taking. A hypochondriac at the best of times and often afflicted by minor illnesses, Titian had been exposed to plagues so often in his life that he must have been immunized by then.
Although his court was reputedly more like a seraglio, Ippolito could be discerning in his choice of women. The beauty of his greatest love, Giulia Gonzaga, was celebrated by Ariosto and Bernardo Tasso as well as in portraits by Sebastiano and Raphael and was so famous that Barbarossa tried to capture her as a gift for his sultan Suleiman. Ippolito’s list of more casual amorous adventures included an affair with Tullia d’Aragona, the reigning courtesan in Rome, to whom he dedicated a sonnet praising her golden hair, her sweetness and her attractive laugh. In Venice the obvious choice was Angela del Moro, known as Zaffetta, the most charming (and the second-highest-priced) courtesan in the city and a friend and dining companion of Titian and Aretino. Angela, who was no more than eighteen at the time of Ippolito’s visit, was the daughter of a policeman, a zaffo, hence her professional name. She later inspired a poem, The Thirty-One of Angela Zaffetta,3 in which the writer claimed that he had punished her for jilting him by taking her to Chioggia – he dated the event 6 April 1531 – where he invited a gang of fishermen to rape her. Aretino, who later wrote that Angela had retained her beauty even after she was thirty, gave her the palm in a letter praising her for ‘putting a mask of decency on the face of lust’ and for not resorting to feigned orgasms: ‘You embrace virtue and honour men of virtue, which is alien to the habits and nature of those who sell themselves for the pleasure of others.’4
Sanudo tells us that Ippolito spent the night of 20 October with this paragon among courtesans. The following morning he visited the arsenal. But in the afternoon after dinner, the main meal of the day taken in the early afternoon, he managed to shake off the obsessive diarist for a few hours and was late for an appointment in the palace with the doge. The inclement weather on that day provided him with an excuse.
We see the face of the irresistible, laughing, honourable courtesan in Titian’s painting known – the title is not strictly accurate – as the Venus of Urbino (Florence, Uffizi).5 At this stage of his career Titian did not often paint without a commission, but it is likely that he guessed (or that Aretino advised him) that a sexy nude that was also a souvenir of his night with Angela would appeal to the young and libidinous cardinal and might serve as a gift that would open the way to a benefice for Pomponio. He may have set the painting in her house; the most successful Venetian courtesans, known as cortegiane oneste, lived in a high style indistinguishable from rich patrician women, and it was said that Angela earned so much that she wanted to buy Palazzo Loredan, then as now one of the grandest in the city. But it is tempting to speculate that he posed her (or more probably a model that stood in for her body) in his own house in Biri Grande, which had biforate windows like the one in the background and among its furnishings a cloth,6 like the one that bisects the composition at precisely the point where the reclining woman fondles her pudenda with her ringed left hand. The little Papillon spaniel was a breed that was fashionable at the time and that appears again with slightly different markings in several of Titian’s other paintings.7 The lovely slender body of the girl is a more relaxed, realistic and womanly derivative of the Dresden Sleeping Venus of two decades earlier. But here she is wid
e awake as she stares out at the viewer, like the little satyr in the centre of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, inviting us to enjoy what we see or challenging us to be as shocked as Mark Twain famously was when after seeing her in the Uffizi in 1880 he described her as ‘the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses’.8
The so-called Venus of Urbino (it was only briefly in Urbino and whether or not it represents Venus is debatable) is the first of the nudes that Titian would paint in the course of his subsequent career for princely, ecclesiastical and aristocratic patrons. As we see it today it has been so dimmed and flattened by excessive restoration that it looks better in reproduction.9 Nevertheless, it remains one of Titian’s most popular, written about, copied and controversial paintings.10 Scholars are divided about whether or not it represents something more than a pretty naked girl lying on a bed. Some insist that she must be Venus, whose principal attribute is her nudity, and who is further identified by the red roses she clutches in her left hand and the pot of myrtle on the windowsill.11 Others say she is nothing more or less than a pin-up. Some see the two maids unpacking clothes from one of the two chests in the background as proof that it is a marriage painting because such chests and their contents were often part of a woman’s dowry, while others prefer to interpret that little scene as referring to the secular, domestic atmosphere of the house of a rich courtesan. Another interpretation would have it that she is not a goddess or a bride but a parody or ironic spoof, an intentional travesty of the by then anachronistic classical ancestry of the pudica gesture, the drawing attention while pretending to conceal.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle doubted that the lithe and slender woman ‘lying as nature shaped her, with her legs entwined’ represented anything more or less than youth and beauty ‘not transfigured into ineffable noblesse, but conscious and triumphant without loss of modesty’. Édouard Manet evidently had no illusions about her status as a poule de luxe when he paid homage to her with his Olympia painted in 1863. And there is a growing number of scholars today who would prefer us to take the Venus of Urbino for what it appears to be: a ruined painting of a seductive young woman whose nudity has lost the power to shock in an age when explicitly erotic images are a dime a dozen, but which continues to fascinate nevertheless because of the way it is painted and composed.
She was still in Titian’s studio on 20 December 1534 when he wrote – in his own hand but perhaps prompted by Aretino – to Ippolito de’ Medici’s chamberlain, a certain Messer Vendramo who, judging from the informal and gossipy letter, was one of his close acquaintances in the cardinal’s court. Titian asks Vendramo to apologize to the cardinal for his failure to keep a promise to visit him in Rome. He never tires of praising the greatness of Ippolito, nor does Aretino, ‘who speaks of His Most Illustrious Lord as he would speak of Christ’. He regrets that their mutual friend Benedetto (presumably another member of the court) will be sorry to learn that his Marcholina has been fucking around a bit (se fa un pocho foter) and got herself pregnant. He sends news of Pomponio and Orazio (this is the first mention in writing that we have of Orazio), who ‘are well and learning and grown big, and I hope that with the grace of God and of my patrons they will become proper gentlemen’.
The reason he hasn’t come to Rome is that he has been finishing a painting of a woman for Ippolito, which he is certain would have pleased him and will please him. But now he has received a visit from the Most Reverend Lorraine – Cardinal Jean de Lorraine was a powerful official in the court of Francis I – who asked him, in imitation of the Most Illustrious Medici, to paint his portrait.12
… [Cardinal Lorraine] has seen this painting of a woman and he liked it so much that he said he must have it at all costs. However, after I told him that it was for Cardinal Medici he calmed down. He said the Most Illustrious Medici loved him and begged me to do a similar one before I send the one for your Lord … And in any case I will serve both of you and as soon as I’ve made the copy I will send it to you …13
Neither Ippolito de’ Medici nor Jean de Lorraine ever returned to Venice to collect their paintings. Lorraine, who lived until 1550 and occupied a series of important and demanding positions under Francis I where he was in charge of immense revenues, may have been too busy. Ippolito was dead before Titian could send him his ‘woman’. In August 1534 news had reached him of Barbarossa’s plot to lay siege to Fondi in order to capture Giulia Gonzaga for Suleiman’s harem. Ippolito, commanding an army of 5,000 men, put the pirate king to flight while she took refuge in her castle. But he died the following August at Fondi, close to Giulia and with Vendramo by his bedside, poisoned so the rumour went by a former servant employed by his rival Alessandro. Historians say the rumour was probably untrue, even though Ippolito had taken command of the Florentines in exile and tried to persuade Charles V to expel the tyrannous Duke Alessandro and replace him with himself. He had also tried to blow his cousin up with an infernal machine placed beneath his bed. Alessandro was in fact murdered by a different jealous rival the following year.
Titian used Angela Zaffetta’s face for three more paintings of women with different bodies in different stages of dress and undress. Although he may well have been familiar with Pliny’s famous story about the naked and clothed Aphrodite sculpted by Praxiteles, it would hardly have required a classical reference for Titian, any more than for the editors of Playboy magazine, to appreciate the erotic stimulus of seeing the same woman clothed, half clothed and naked. And so he dressed her, perhaps in the clothes her maids are unpacking while she lies naked and freshly bathed on her couch flirting with her admirers. First he put her in a lavish, elegant and very proper blue court dress with a paternoster round her neck – rosaries of gemstones worn as necklaces, much in vogue at the time, were popular with noblewomen and with prostitutes competing with their social superiors.
Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, on a visit to Titian’s studio in January 1536 to make preliminary arrangements for portraits of himself and his consort Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, saw the painting of Angela in blue before it was finished. Judging from his subsequent correspondence with his Venetian agent Gian Giacomo Leonardi about the delivery of the painting now known as La Bella (Florence, Galleria Palatina) he was more interested in the dress, which is painted in precious lapis lazuli, and in possessing a painting by Titian than in the woman’s identity. If he noticed that his pretty girl in blue had the same face as the naked woman he must also have seen in Titian’s studio he seems not to have mentioned the resemblance. In a letter to Leonardi dated 2 May he says he wants Titian to finish ‘that picture of that woman in a blue dress’ and to do it beautifully and provide a protective cover so he can judge how the ‘other paintings’ – the portrait of himself and a Resurrection for Eleonora, which was never painted – will turn out. When Titian, dilatory as usual, had not dispatched his by then anonymous beauty by 10 July, the duke prompted him again to finish the painting of the woman. Before letting her go Titian made a replica of her, which X-rays have detected beneath the Woman in a Fur Cloak (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) in which he stripped off her proper dress, exposed one of her breasts and changed her facial expression and the position of her arms.14 The third, weaker and now half-ruined version, the Woman in a Feathered Hat (St Petersburg, Hermitage), seems to be a variant of the Vienna picture, possibly painted with studio assistance, to which he added the feathered hat as an afterthought.
We hear nothing more about the Venus of Urbino until late January 1538 when the Duke of Urbino’s son and heir, the twenty-four-year-old Guidobaldo II della Rovere, arrived in Venice for a month’s stay with his mother Eleonora. A soldier like his father, Guidobaldo had become a duke in his own right three years earlier on his marriage to the ten-year-old Giulia Varano, daughter of the late Duke of Camerino, who had left no male heir. The papacy had long since claimed lordship of Urbino, the imposing hill town that stands 160 kilometres south of Venice, and Camerino, a neighbouring duchy to the south-west on a spur of t
he Apennines, both of which were surrounded by the Papal States. The pope was therefore infuriated by a marriage that created an independent duchy large enough to threaten his own territory, which is why Guidobaldo had to travel to Venice through the Papal States secretly in defiance of an interdict. He saw the painting in Titian’s studio while sitting for his portrait in armour (lost), and like Cardinal Lorraine before him was struck by a passionate desire to possess her. On 9 March he wrote to Leonardi from Camerino that he was sending a servant to collect Titian’s portrait of himself and the painting of ‘the naked woman’ and requesting him to induce Titian to let the pictures go before being paid for them. Meanwhile Leonardi should pay for the frames he had already ordered for the pictures. His servant would stay in Venice until the pictures were ready. On 11 April Eleonora wrote from Venice to her son to say that she had come by some money and would pay Titian for the portrait and its frame, which were sent to Camerino three days later. But by 1 May Guidobaldo was fretting that Titian might sell the naked woman to another buyer: if necessary he would mortgage some of his possessions in order to meet Titian’s price. Leonardi replied that Titian had said he would gladly keep the picture for Guidobaldo, who did eventually acquire it.
Guidobaldo’s father Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino and lord of Pesaro, was a mercenary soldier best remembered by historians for his failure to prevent the Sack of Rome by repeatedly neglecting to take action against the imperial forces as they descended on the Holy City. He had inherited the Duchy of Urbino when he was eighteen in 1508 from his maternal uncle Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who had died childless, and with the support of his paternal uncle the della Rovere pope Julius II, for whom he had fought bravely against Venice in the Cambrai war. Driven out of his duchy by Leo X, who gave Pesaro and Urbino to his nephew Lorenzo II de’ Medici, he returned to his duchy only after Leo’s death in 1521, and moved the capital to Pesaro in 1536. Admirers of Titian know him from his magnificent portrait in polished armour. He holds the baton of his command of the Venetian land forces, a position to which Andrea Gritti had appointed him in 1523. The two batons propped on the wall behind him refer to his service to Julius II and to Florence. Between them is an oak (rovere) branch with a scroll bearing his motto ‘SE SIBI’ (By himself alone). There is no irony in the apparent contradiction between the duke’s hyper-cautious approach to engaging in combat – Sanudo called him pede plumbeo, lead foot – and Titian’s portrayal of him as a heroic career warrior. He was personally brave – and had a warrior’s violent temperament. But, unusually for his times, he was experienced and wise enough to know that armed combat was best avoided unless absolutely necessary because, as Sanudo reported him saying, ‘the outcome of battle is always uncertain’. It was an idiosyncratic philosophy for a soldier, but one that suited the Venetian government at a time when it was determined to maintain its position of neutrality and never again to risk losing the territories it had regained at the end of the Cambrai war by aggravating potential enemies. The Duke of Urbino was the most trusted Venetian commander of the century, his contract with the Republic was repeatedly renewed, and the government, which accepted that its commander would have to spend some of his time in his duchy, provided him with a fast cutter in which to travel back and forth, a house at Santa Fosca and a villa on Murano which was a magnet for Venetian intellectuals and writers, including of course Aretino.
