by Sheila Hale
In the popular imagination, the Caesar of his age had taken possession of a former Roman colony and expelled the heathen Muslim in the name of the Triumphant Christ. The citizens of Messina hailed him with the slogan devised by Virgil for the Emperor Augustus: ‘he ruled an empire on which the sun never set’; and Charles adopted the insignia ‘Carolus Africanus’ as he progressed up the Italian peninsula to be greeted by more cheering crowds and triumphal arches as he passed through Palermo, Naples, Rome, Siena, Florence, Lucca and Genoa. Although in his later years he remembered the conquest of Tunis as the most personally satisfying event of his reign,6 Charles was aware at the time that his victory was incomplete as long as Barbarossa, who had slipped away to his lair in Algiers, was on the loose. But his men were exhausted and the campaign had already cost one and a half million gold scudi, which Charles tried to recoup from his Italian dominions. The Barbary Coast remained in Turkish hands, and Barbarossa immediately resumed his raids on the coastlines of Italy and Spain. It was only a matter of time before the war would resume.
In the March before Tunis, when rumours of an impending campaign in Algiers were circulating, Titian had promised Lope de Soria that he would meet the emperor wherever he landed in Italy and present him with a portrait of himself and his consort. The promise was reiterated after the victory in July, but Apelles was not there to kiss the hand of Alexander when he disembarked at Trapani on 22 August. If the emperor was disappointed by the painter’s absence, he had more than enough business to distract him on his first visit to his Aragonese dominions. There was more empty talk about Titian meeting him in Palermo, where Charles spent two months during which he made Ferrante Gonzaga his viceroy in Sicily. He then travelled up the peninsula to Naples where he arrived on 25 November to spend Christmas and Carnival. Although rumours that Titian would meet him in Naples failed to materialize, Charles requested his Spanish viceroy there to award ‘Messer Tician de Vecelli, our first painter’ for past and future services with a permission to export annually 300 cartloads of grain free of duty, which would allow Titian at least in theory to sell at a profit.
Federico Gonzaga, who had been following Caesar’s progress with a view to advancing his claim to the Marquisate of Montferrat, had offered to visit him when he reached Naples. But an unforeseen event, one that threatened to compromise the peace in northern Italy, caused him to change his plans. On 1 November 1535 the feeble Francesco Sforza, puppet duke of the key city of Milan, the Habsburg military and bureaucratic power base in Italy, died without heirs. Charles assumed direct control of Milan and appointed the Spanish general Antonio de Leyva as his governor. But it would not be long before Francis I, who had endured six frustrating years of watching Charles strengthen his position in Italy, would assert his own claim to Milan.
Under the circumstances Federico decided it would make a better impression to stay in northern Italy and offer his services to the emperor should they be needed in case of a French attack on Lombardy. He dispatched to Naples in his stead his aristocratic ambassador extraordinary Nicola Maffei with letters to the emperor expressing profuse congratulations, apologies for not having taken part in the Tunis campaign, and assurances of his undying loyalty. Maffei was preceded by a lavish array of extravagant gifts carefully chosen to soften opposition of the emperor and his councillors to the investiture of Montferrat. Ignoring a warning from the sober diplomat Lope de Soria that attempts to bribe the emperor might backfire, Federico sent horses and edible delicacies – pork sausages, pressed tongues, sweets made of quinces and peaches that were a speciality of the Gonzaga chefs, fennels, cheeses and olives (the olives went down especially well with the court). But most marvellous for a campaigning emperor who had grown up wearing armour were the suit of armour, the light helmet, the round shield and the beautifully crafted weapons. Charles unpacked the swords one by one, testing their weight and the strength of their blades, and pronounced a finely engraved dagger the most beautiful work in the world and one that could not be improved upon by a painter.
Although opposition to the investiture of Montferrat was already evaporating in the heat of imperial greed, not to mention common sense – Charles needed a loyal ruler who would defend the marquisate from French interference – Federico held the trump card up his sleeve. He had already, the previous August, written to Titian, his ‘excellent and dearest friend’, requesting a Christ, based on a previous image he had given to Federico, to be finished by the Feast of the Madonna on 8 September.7 It was a highly suitable gift for an emperor who had conquered in the name of Christ, but when it arrived on time Federico did not send it on to Naples: he wanted to present it in person on his next encounter with Charles, who would be passing through northern Italy on his way to Genoa for embarkation to Spain. Federico also had reason to believe that he would find a way of presenting Titian, who owed him so much and who had turned down so many invitations from the emperor, to join him.
In February 1536 Francis I formalized his alliance with the Turkish sultan. ‘I cannot deny’, he explained half apologetically, ‘that I very much want to see the Turk powerful and ready for war, not for his own sake, for he is an infidel and the rest of us are Christians, but to erode the power of the emperor and involve him in crippling expense.’8 At the end of March he claimed the Duchy of Milan for his son Henry of Orleans, and a French army occupied Savoy and Turin in contravention of the Ladies’ Peace that he had signed seven years earlier. Charles reached Rome on 5 April in time for Easter and spent the next fortnight in conference with Paul III. He warned the pope of the potentially disastrous consequences for Europe of the Franco-Turkish alliance. Paul would not take sides in the dispute over Milan and flatly refused to listen to Charles’s sincere if ridiculous offer to spare the lives of imperial and French soldiers by engaging the French king in single combat. But the pope did agree to call the General Council of the Church for which Charles had repeatedly and unsuccessfully pressed the less decisive Clement VII.
On 27 April, nine days after Charles had left Rome for northern Italy, Federico Gonzaga put a fast cutter at Titian’s disposal and asked him to come to Mantua with a portrait of the emperor. Three days later Benedetto Agnello advised Federico that the portrait was on its way but that Titian was delayed in Venice by other business (he did not explain that the Duke of Urbino was sitting to him for his portrait). At last, on 24 May, Titian and Federico joined the emperor and his court at Alessandria and rode on with them to Asti with Titian’s Christ and portrait of the emperor in their baggage. Unfortunately for Federico’s scheme to nail the investiture and for Aretino, who was in the process of switching his allegiance from Francis I to the emperor in the hope of an imperial annuity, the timing of the meeting was not propitious, as Titian explained in the letter he wrote on 31 May ‘to Signor Pietro Aretino, my lord and best companion’, saying that although he would try to advance the cause of his friend everyone at Asti was preoccupied by making a start for France, ‘full of animosity’. He added a postscript: ‘One more thing. The Duke of Marche goes on the right side of His Majesty, who will be Governor in Italy of the S.ta. [de le S.ta] Or so they say.’
This postscript9 is a puzzle. There was no such person as a Duke of Marche and the meaning of the abbreviation ‘le S.ta’ is further obscured by the article, which is a feminine plural, and the ‘S.ta’, possibly Santa or Holy, which is singular. Since the original letter is missing – it is known only from a collection of letters written to Aretino that was printed later – it is impossible to say whether Titian writing in haste accidentally wrote Marche for another name or whether the clerk who transcribed the letter for the press misread his scrawled handwriting. But Santa what? Santa Chiesa, Holy Church? One possibility10 is that Marche should have been Mantua and, if ‘S.ta’ was an abbreviation of the Santa Chiesa, the Duke of Mantua was on the right side of the emperor because the pope was about to announce that he intended to summon a General Council of the Holy Church to take place in Mantua. While it sat the emperor would be secular
governor of the Church in Italy, rather than in Germany as he and the Protestants had requested. It may not be a coincidence that Paul announced the General Council on 1 June, the day after Titian had passed on the gossip about it to Aretino.11
The emperor struck out from Asti on 22 June at the head of a contingent of 50,000 men under Ferrante Gonzaga and the Duke of Alba aiming for Provence, where they planned a counter-offensive against Francis I’s invasion of Savoy and Turin. It was a campaign that soon turned into a nightmare for both sides. The imperial invaders, exhausted by a French scorched-earth policy and decimated by dysentery, retreated after failing to take Marseilles. It was Charles’s first significant military defeat, and it lost him the better part of a good army and left him more deeply in debt than ever. But Francis was equally damaged. With Provence in ruins and the rest of his country bled by war taxes he had neither the money nor the strength to press on with his conquest of Milan.
Before embarking for Spain from Genoa Charles granted Aretino, in return for his silence about his affair with his wife’s sister, the beautiful Beatrice, Duchess of Savoy, a pension of 200 gold scudi to be drawn on the treasury of Milan. He also promised Titian a canonicate for Pomponio at the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Milan.12 There was one last piece of urgent business to be concluded before the emperor and his court set sail for Spain. The problem of Federico Gonzaga’s investiture as Marquis of Montferrat had to be resolved quickly because without a ruler who was solidly faithful to the empire the citizens of Casale might open their gates to France. Federico produced more bribes, a gold vase for Cobos, drawings by Giulio Romano for the vice chancellor of Aragon. But he needn’t have bothered. Charles had in fact made up his mind to ensure the stability of Casale by ratifying the investiture, and on 25 November Federico Gonzaga entered Casale as Duke of Mantua and Marquis of Montferrat.
Pomponio’s canonicate did not fall vacant until 1540. Titian – despite repeated requests, demands, interventions by his powerful friends, assurances and requests from the emperor himself13 – never received permission from the exchequer of Naples to export the duty-free grain, which would have increased in value in the years he tried to obtain it.14 It was not the last time he would be financially disappointed by the Habsburg bureaucracy in Italy, which was not always well controlled by the emperor, or later by his son Philip, both of whom were chronically short of funds and extracted what they could from their wealthy Italian dominions. Local officials in Naples and Milan had nothing to gain from paying a painter in Venice with pensions or other privileges, and the Neapolitan nobility were free to do as they pleased with their own land. But it seems to have been Habsburg practice to offer such rewards in the knowledge that not all would be honoured. Aretino, who was a more dangerous character than Titian, did receive his pension but by no means on a regular basis.
Once the Marquisate of Montferrat was ensured, Federico lost interest in imperial politics, even to the extent of resisting the papal–imperial plan to host the General Council of the Church in Mantua, which in any case never took place because the Protestants refused to confer on Italian soil. For the remaining years of his life the Duke of Mantua and Marquis of Montferrat devoted his energies to the administration of his dominions and to commissioning works of art for his personal gratification and the glorification of his dynasty. His most ambitious project was a new suite of rooms designed by Giulio Romano in the ducal palace including a Chamber of the Caesars for which he asked Titian to paint three-quarter-length portraits of the twelve Roman Emperors as described by the ancient Roman historian Suetonius. Titian was the only foreign artist with whom Giulio, who was jealous of his position as Federico’s court artist, willingly collaborated, and it was probably during a visit to his house that Titian painted his portrait holding a plan for a centralized church (Mantua, Casa di Mantegna). The commission for the Emperors was the largest and most unusual order Titian had ever received from Federico, and he prepared for it by studying the Gonzaga collection, one of the largest in Italy, of Roman portrait busts and medals. He was already familiar with the Bembo collection of antiquities in Padua, and had often incorporated antique motifs in his paintings. But this more purposeful archaeological investigation would provide the greatest portraitist of the Renaissance with a new and deeper appreciation of Roman portraiture and the uses he could make of it.
Federico had discussed the project with Titian when they were together in Asti, but the first portrait, of Augustus, was not dispatched until 26 March of the following year, 1537. Federico wrote to ‘Messer Ticiano my dearest friend’ that the room would be ready in May and that it would give him supreme satisfaction if Titian would let him have the Emperors as soon as possible. He also advised Benedetto Agnello that he wished to reward Titian with the gift of a coat. Titian, however, was not to be fobbed off so easily. A more appropriate reward, as he saw it, would be relief from the twenty-five ducats that he was required to pay annually out of the income from Pomponio’s benefice of Medole. On 6 April one of his amanuenses addressed his last surviving letter to Federico Gonzaga, ‘My Most Illustrious and Excellent Lord, and most faithful patron’, in which he thanks the duke for his letters and the coat, but reminds him that he has not yet reacted to one of the pictures he has sent and will finish the others when he has heard that the first is satisfactory. In the meantime he hopes that Federico would be so kind as to free the benefice from the pension payable on it, which ‘apart from the loss of the money I pay out each year, causes me no little bother and disturbance from the people who are driving me crazy, from whose hands only Your Excellency can liberate me’.
Federico replied four days later that the portrait of Augustus was very satisfactory although the measurements were not quite right, and that he had the matter of freeing the benefice from the pension close to his heart and would entrust it to his brother Cardinal Ercole who was just then on his way to Mantua from Rome. In June Titian accepted an invitation to visit Mantua for the baptism of Federico’s second child Isabella when he would have the opportunity to take measurements in the Chamber of the Caesars and discuss with Ercole the question of the pension on the income from Medole.15 It was a useful visit – the spaces Giulio Romano had allocated for the Emperors turned out to be longer than his prototype portrait of Augustus – and it might have been an enjoyable one since the guest list included among many important dignitaries his old acquaintance Pietro Bembo and the polymath humanist and patron of the arts Daniele Barbaro (whom he would portray a decade later). But although he had been invited to stay in Mantua for several weeks Doge Gritti’s representative in Mantua for the occasion of the baptism conveyed a message so alarming that he cut his visit short and returned to Venice as soon as he decently could after the conclusion of the festivities.
On 23 June 1537, just a few days after Titian’s arrival in Mantua, the Council of Ten had issued the decree that Titian had been dreading.
Since December 1516 Titian has been in possession of a broker’s patent, with a salary varying from 118 to 120 ducats a year, on condition that he shall paint the canvas of the land fight on the side of the Hall of the Great Council looking out on the Grand Canal. Since that time he has held his patent and drawn his salary without performing his promise. It is proper that this state of things should cease, and accordingly Titian is called upon to refund all that he has received for the time in which he has done no work.16
Now at last, twenty-four years after he had beseeched the Council to allow him to paint the battle scene, Titian knew he must actually produce it, which he did a little more than a year later.
Nevertheless, although the completion of the battle scene was his most urgent priority, Titian was sufficiently reassured by his discussions at Mantua with Cardinal Ercole about freeing Pomponio’s benefice to deliver three more Emperors by October. But by August of the following year, when the matter of the claim on the benefice was still not resolved, Titian had produced no further Emperors. Federico now tried a strategy that he was sure would
induce Titian to carry on with the project. On 5 August he offered through Agnello to pay the pension himself, but only when all the Emperors were delivered. On 10 August Agnello reported that Titian had finished his painting for the Great Council Hall and could now turn his attention to the Emperors.17 But Federico Gonzaga and the painter he called his dearest friend had reached a stalemate. Titian would not finish the remaining Emperors until Federico relieved him of the obligation to pay the annuity and of the endless pestering of the claimants whose demands he said were making it impossible for him to work. Federico would not oblige him until he had received the remaining Emperors.
In the winter of 1538–9 an unusually high flood of the Po caused extensive damage to Giulio Romano’s new suite of rooms, and repairs were delayed by continuing heavy rain. Isabella d’Este, who was concerned about her son’s failing health, had persuaded him to spend a holiday with her in Venice in the autumn. They had a good time, but on the journey back to Mantua in bad weather she was seized with gastric pains. She remained bed-ridden but mentally alert and hungry for news of her adored grandchildren and of events in which she could no longer take part until she died on 13 February 1539. After the funeral Federico spent April and May with his family at Casale. Titian seems to have put off acting on an invitation to Mantua in July, but in November obliged Federico by sending him some paintbrushes from Venice. We have no further news of the Emperors until 4 January 1540 when Benedetto Agnello’s secretary sent an invoice to Gian Giacomo Calandra for a half a barrel of finest Malvasia wine and the cases for the paintings of Emperors which Titian had had constructed for their transport. He would ship them later that day in the ducal gondola. He also noted that he had given a gold chain and clothing to Aretino, who had expressed his gratitude and hoped that the gifts would mark the resumption of Federico’s generosity. In February Titian went to Milan to collect Pomponio’s benefice on Santa Maria della Scala, which had fallen vacant, from Alfonso d’Avolos, who was then governor of the city. He travelled from Milan to Mantua in April. We know this from a letter written from Venice to Francisco de los Cobos by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Lope de Soria’s successor as imperial ambassador to the Republic.18 The letter does not mention the Emperors, but we can allow ourselves to hope that the purpose of Titian’s visit was to finish and install the full set.
