by Sheila Hale
Francesco Maria could hardly have failed to be something of a connoisseur of the arts. He had been brought up in Senigallia and at the court of Urbino, a centre of learning and the arts since the fifteenth century, and the setting of Castiglione’s Courtier in which the author described the town as ‘the fairest in all Italy’, decked out with ‘a wondrous number of ancient images, of marble and metal, very excellent paintings and instruments of music of all sorts’. His formidable mother, Giovanna da Montefeltro, had seen to it that his education was broadened at the court of the French king Louis XII. And he became the son-in-law of Isabella d’Este and brother-in-law of Federico Gonzaga, two of the most avid and sophisticated collectors of the Italian Renaissance. Nevertheless, it took him some years to appreciate Titian’s talent to the full. At first he had commissioned only small religious works and portraits from him, and he was a more dictatorial and less original patron than Federico.
After he was introduced to Titian by the architect Sebastiano Serlio at Federico’s court in the summer of 1532 he had ordered a Nativity (possibly the ruined painting in the Florence Galleria Palatina),15 the Bust of Christ also in the Palatina, and a Hannibal that is now lost. Titian was required to base the Bust of Christ16 on a Flemish or Italian prototype, which was sent specially to Venice by the hand of the architect Sebastiano Serlio. The Nativity was to be a gift to Eleonora, for whom the subject had a special meaning because she was expecting a child, but by October 1533, six months after the birth of her son Giulio (the future Cardinal della Rovere), the duke was complaining that while Federico had a lot of paintings by Titian he still didn’t have a single one. The Nativity finally reached Urbino a month later, and the Bust of Christ and Hannibal the following March.
The portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino were the only masterpieces Titian painted for the duke. Francesco Maria cared enough about his portrait (Florence, Uffizi) to postpone a tour of inspection of fortresses on the mainland in order to do Titian the honour of sitting for him in person before leaving Venice on 2 May 1536, an opportunity that may account for the strongly characterized face and head. The armour, which Titian painted at his leisure later in the summer, was taken from the duke’s best cuirass, a very valuable object, which he left on loan in Titian’s studio for as long as the artist required it but made a fuss through Leonardi that it must not under any circumstances be damaged and should be carefully packed when the artist was ready to return it.17
Francesco Maria’s marriage to the beautiful and accomplished Eleonora Gonzaga in 1509 was one of those arranged matches that turned out to be fortunate in every way. Castiglione, who helped negotiate the contract, praised Eleonora’s ‘wisdom, grace, beauty, genius, courtesy, gentleness and refined manners’ as ‘a chain adorning her every movement’. The duke certainly had good reason to be fond and proud of her. She administered his estates so wisely and successfully during his long absences that she was mourned by her subjects as ‘the good duchess’ when she died in 1550. Eleonora initiated the idea of her portrait in January 1536 when she asked Titian to paint her if he passed through Pesaro. The portrait (Florence, Uffizi), painted as a pendant to the duke’s when she was in her mid-forties – Titian gives her flawless skin but an incipient double chin – looks like a testament to her husband’s lifelong affection for her. Although there was a precedent for paired portraits of husband and wife in Piero della Francesca’s diptych of a previous Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro and his consort Battista Sforza, they were a rarity in Renaissance Italy. Titian took advantage of the unusual opportunity to contrast their roles and characters. While the duke, the choleric man of action, stands, his duchess sits18 calmly in charge of the well-ordered landscape we see through the aperture behind her. He is stocky, tanned and bearded. She, pale, slender, wearing an elaborate dress that we can still recognize as the height of fashion, is given attributes that seem to echo Castiglione’s praise of her virtues: a clock representing temperance, the obelisk in the landscape the wisdom of her governance, the little white and tan spaniel fidelity.
The portraits of the duke and duchess arrived at Pesaro in the spring of 1538. Unfortunately, the duke had only months to enjoy them before he succumbed to an illness – he may have been poisoned like so many of his contemporaries by a jealous rival – and died in agony on 22 October. Aretino, who had dedicated the first volume of his letters to the Duke of Urbino, wrote his obituary in the form of a long poem in terza rima, beginning:
Oh Caesar, he is dead, the faithful duke
Of whom the esteem and the honour
Will live for ever in the common outcry.
Shortly before Francesco Maria’s death Titian had begun work on three portraits for his private gallery of contemporary rulers: a copy or variant of the portrait of Charles V in armour originally painted at Bologna, a portrait of Francis I and one of his portraits of Suleiman the Magnificent (he had seen neither of the last two in the flesh).19 The only one of these that has survived is the Portrait of Francis I, which is probably the one now in the Louvre,20 although there is a nearly identical one in a private collection in Lausanne that could be the original or a copy.21 There is a striking although certainly unintentional contrast between this portrait of the dashing, extrovert, unscrupulous, smiling French king whom Titian never met and those he painted of Francis’s arch-enemy, the shy, earnest, ugly Charles V. The portrait of Francis was still in Titian’s possession in November 1539 – Guidobaldo seems to have had difficulty in finding the money to pay for it – but reached Pesaro some time afterwards. We know from a letter from Benedetto Agnello to Federico Gonzaga written on 23 August 1538 that Titian had nearly completed a portrait of Suleiman based on a medal and a previous portrait. The copy for Francesco Maria was delivered to Guidobaldo the following year.
After his father’s death Guidobaldo continued to entertain a mix of literati and patricians in his house in Venice where Aretino, who had become a close friend, was a regular guest. The new Duke of Urbino was given an increased personal command but was not offered a higher rank until 1546 when he was appointed governor general (not captain let alone commander) of the land forces with a very restrictive contract. The portrait of his wife, Giulia Varano (Florence, Pitti Appartamenti), which is sometimes attributed to Titian’s studio, is more likely to have been painted in Urbino or Pesaro by another hand on the basis of Titian’s Portrait of Eleonara Gonzaga whose pose it repeats exactly. But Guidobaldo remained an affectionate friend and patron of Titian until his death in 1574.
Vasari (who was vague about the della Rovere pictures) probably did not have the opportunity to meet the ageing Guidobaldo or see his paintings when he was in Pesaro in 1563. Later in his ‘Life of Titian’, however, he described the painting we now know as the Venus of Urbino as portraying ‘a young reclining Venus’.22 But in all other descriptions and inventories of the collection she is described merely as a naked woman. In one account made in 1631 when the painting was briefly in Urbino before being moved to Florence,23 the author refers to it as ‘a big picture with a reclining naked woman’ and further down the document mentions La Bella as ‘a portrait of the previously mentioned naked woman, but dressed and more than half length by the hand of Titian’. Nevertheless, by the end of the century a less observant compiler of an inventory described La Bella as a young princess. Perhaps it was around the same time that the nudity of Ippolito de’ Medici’s painting of a Venetian courtesan whose identity had been long forgotten was excused by turning her into the goddess Venus, but whose depiction, whether courtesan or goddess, remains one of the most charming and arousing of all Titian’s nudes.
FIVE
The Roman Emperors
Titian is loved by the world for the life his brush gives to images of people, and hated by nature because he shames living senses with artifice.
PIETRO ARETINO IN THE DEDICATION TO THE EMPRESS ISABELLA OF HIS POEMS IN HONOUR OF ANGELA SIRENA, 1537
Pope Clement VII died on 15 September 1534, and a
month later his chosen successor, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, was raised to the papal throne as Paul III at the age of sixty-seven. In the remaining fifteen years of his life Paul would prove himself to be the ablest and most effective of Renaissance popes. Shortly after his election the physician, historian and patron of the arts Paolo Giovio, who had been the doctor of Julius II and Clement VII but had not yet met his new patient and was unsure what to expect, declared that with each passing day he found the pope ‘more humane, more courteous, more learned, more lofty of concept, more Christian, and more just’.1 The portraits Titian would paint of him in the 1540s probe deeper into the complex character of a subtle, learned, decisive politician, who used his extended family – he had fathered at least four bastard children by the time he ascended the papal throne – to further worldly ambitions that were extraordinary even by the standards of the day and whose sincere advocacy of Church reform led to the General Council of the Church that finally sat for the first time at Trent in 1545 four years before his death.
Titian’s involvement with the Farnese pope and his family was still in the future, however, when an important chapter in his career closed a fortnight after Paul’s election. On 31 October 1534 Alfonso d’Este died suddenly from indigestion caused, so his doctors said, by excessive consumption of crayfish. Alfonso’s son Ercole II, who was twenty-six when he inherited the Dukedom of Ferrara, was perhaps inevitably a very different character from his rough-mannered and bellicose father. Alfonso had compensated for the deficits in his own formal education by ensuring that the boy received the best possible tuition in the humanities and music. But although Ferrara under Ercole’s rule remained a centre of fashion, culture and the arts, he was not a gifted governor. He inherited a treasury exhausted by Alfonso’s wars and, to avoid conflict, ruled Ferrara as a feudatory vassal of the pope, and Modena and Reggio at the pleasure of the emperor. He was marginalized at court by the more powerful personality of his wife Renée, daughter of the late French king Louis XII, whose first allegiance was to her native country and who surrounded herself with Protestant heretics whose presence offended Ercole’s orthodox Catholic beliefs and endangered his relations with the pope.
Soon after inheriting the duchy Ercole commissioned Titian to finish the copy of the portrait of his father that had been taken away to Spain by Francisco de los Cobos. The French Order of St Michael, which Alfonso had had erased from the original so as not to offend the emperor with any indication of his Francophilia, was sent to Tebaldi with instructions, no doubt originating with Renée, that Titian should reproduce it in the copy. Titian received a down payment of fifty ducats on 20 July 1536, but although Tebaldi reported in December that the portrait was finished, as like its subject ‘as water to water’, and so beautiful that he wondered that His Excellency hadn’t sent for it, Ercole waited to see it until he happened to be in Venice in January 1537, when he expressed his admiration and paid Titian a further 200 ducats.2 According to Aretino, Ercole also presented Titian with a silver vase, which must have been valuable because Titian told him he had never been so well paid for a portrait. Nevertheless, although he honoured a last wish of his father, Ercole preferred Pordenone, who was known to be more reliable than Titian and was briefly in vogue in Venice when Ercole requested Tebaldi to invite him to Ferrara in December 1538. Although Pordenone died within a month of his arrival there, Ercole never again asked Titian to paint for him.
In 1534, the year that had marked the accession of Paul III and the death of Alfonso d’Este, Federico Gonzaga3 did not request a painting for himself from Titian and when in September Titian tried to capture his attention with the offer of a pleasing kitten lynx he turned it down with thanks for the thought. Federico was preoccupied by challenges to his right by marriage to the Marquisate of Montferrat, which was contested by neighbouring rulers, and by the citizens of Casale who staged a rebellion against the presumptive foreign duke. But Titian was never entirely absent from Federico’s schemes. In February of that year – when Titian’s attempts to purchase the farmland near Treviso were still in play – the duke asked his favourite painter on behalf of his brother Ferrante, then a captain of the imperial army, for a Rape of Proserpine and another picture to be sent as gifts to a Spanish official, presumably as a bribe for support with the investiture.4
Titian was also working at the time on an independent order from Federico’s mother Isabella, who turned sixty that year and had requested a portrait of herself as she had looked – or would have liked to have looked – as a young woman. Isabella had never been a beauty, although Aretino was doubtless exaggerating when he described her at sixty, in a pronostico that was circulated in manuscript but never published, as ‘indecently ugly’, her heavy makeup as ‘positively indecent’, her teeth made of ebony and her eyelashes of ivory. The Scourge of Princes was out of favour in Mantua and probably also aware that Federico was not on the best of terms with his mother. But judging from Rubens’s copy of Titian’s earlier portrait of her in red – and allowing for Rubens’s preference for fleshy women – she had grown positively obese in her old age. Isabella nevertheless had always been extremely concerned with her personal appearance. She devised the formulae for her personal face creams and perfumes, and designed her own clothes and jewelled headdresses. If she didn’t like what she saw in the mirror as she grew older, she sustained an image of herself as a beautiful fashion queen by commissioning nearly as many portraits of herself as did the most powerful rulers of her day.
Isabella had instructed Titian to work from a portrait by the Bolognese painter Francesco Francia painted more than twenty years before and based on a still earlier portrait by her court painter Lorenzo Costa. She borrowed the Francia back from a Ferrarese nobleman to whom she had originally given it in exchange for a precious manuscript. When the owner died a month later his brother and heir asked to have it back immediately. Isabella passed the request on to Titian, who retained it for two more years with no explanation for the delay. He delivered his own portrait of Isabella at the end of May, but did not for some reason return the Francia with it. Although Isabella refused to pay him until he did, she admitted to Benedetto Agnello that she found Titian’s portrait ‘so pleasing that we doubt that we were ever, at the age that he represents, of such beauty that is contained in it’ (she had said the same to Francia). Since Titian’s Portrait of Isabella d’Este as a Young Woman (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) does not look like other portraits for which she posed in person, we can take her at her word. The jewelled cap and the cut of her dress hark back to the 1490s when her creations had set fashions for the noble ladies of Italy and Europe. But if we didn’t know the circumstances in which the portrait was painted we could be forgiven for thinking, despite the anachronistic costume, that it is one of Titian’s anonymous young beauties, like the Duke of Urbino’s contemporaneous La Bella for which he adopted a similar format.
Titian’s most challenging order in 1534 was from the Scuola Grande della Carità, the oldest and wealthiest of the Venetian Scuole, for the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, which is still in situ in the Accademia Gallery in Venice in its original place in what was the albergo or boardroom of the Scuola.5 It was his only commission for a narrative painting for a Venetian Scuola Grande, and he took immense pains with it over the next four years. In May 1535, while Titian was making a start on the Presentation, Charles V, his war chest enriched by a first windfall worth 800,000 ducats from Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, was mustering his troops in Barcelona for a massive amphibious attack on Tunis, occupied the previous year by Barbarossa. Brandishing an image of the Crucified Christ in the name of whose suffering he, ‘God’s standard-bearer’, would expel the heathen pirate, Charles set sail for the African coast where he took personal command of forces captained at sea by the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria and on land by Ferrante Gonzaga and Alfonso d’Avalos. The siege, launched on 14 July, was followed by furious fighting in the heat of the African high summer. The water ran out, but C
harles, despite an attack of gout, fought on the front lines until on 21 July he took control of the vast harbour of Goletta, which had once sheltered the fleets of Roman Carthage.
