Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Although Giulio Romano’s final design had allowed for only eleven Emperors,19 they must have looked magnificent in their elaborate stucco frames between niches containing bronze statuettes of the Emperors, each with a fresco illustrating a scene from his life below. After his relatively weak prototype portrait of Augustus, Titian’s imagination had been increasingly fired by the Roman busts and medals he studied in the Gonzaga collection. He took the features from those antique examples but made them look as though they had sat for him in person – he dressed Claudius, indeed, in the cuirass left on loan in his studio by Guidobaldo della Rovere when he was painting his portrait in armour. As he worked on the series he used all his skills as a portraitist to vary the poses, which became more effortlessly forceful, each Emperor grasping his baton of command at a different angle that seems to give a clue to his character. The armoured warrior rulers of ancient Rome, with whom all Renaissance princes wished to be associated, had sprung to life in Federico Gonzaga’s Cabinet of the Caesars. Federico’s critical vocabulary had always been limited to the clichés of his day – ‘very beautiful’, ‘very perfect’, ‘so natural that no one, not nature itself, could have done better’, and so on. Although we don’t know what if anything he said about his Emperors, we can assume that when he saw them in place his heart beat faster than his descriptive abilities might suggest.

  Although Federico had been unwell for some time, his death on 28 June,20 at his favourite villa Marmirola, was unexpected. He had been conducting a long correspondence in Latin with a distant German relative about an offer he had made to present him with portraits by Titian of himself and Margherita, which Titian may have begun during his Mantuan visit in April. Aretino, who had made up his differences with Federico just in time, sent the widowed Duchess Margherita a copy of his recently published Life of St Catherine with a letter advising her that just as ‘the illustrious qualities of such a great duke and splendid marquis have left the world with an eternal example of generosity’ she should ‘convert her sadness into a joy like that of the earth when lit up by the sun’. In his will Federico left a horse each to Titian and Giulio Romano – Titian’s was called Zoia. And in October Margherita and Ercole, who were acting as joint regents for Federico’s seven-year-old son and heir Francesco III, ordered their treasurer Gian Giacomo Calandra to issue a decree liberating Pomponio’s benefice on Medole from the annual payment of twenty-five ducats, according to the wishes of the late Federico Gonzaga who had expressed a desire to reward Titian in this way for ‘the images of the most serene and modern Emperors’. That settlement, however, marked the end of his working relationship with the Gonzagas. Although they remained on cordial terms, Federico’s limitless appetite for art and luxury had exhausted the treasury to such an extent that his widow and brother were obliged to institute a regime of austerity. There would be no more letters to Benedetto Agnello and Titian requesting precious objects, exotic animals, edible delicacies or paintings.

  Titian would never have another patron who took such a close personal interest in his financial welfare and the promotion of his career. Federico’s reiterated protestations of friendship had been to a large extent proprietorial. He had enjoyed Titian’s engaging personality and the fruits of his genius but also recognized their diplomatic value. Although it would be anachronistic to assume that he considered Titian his social equal, he had, unlike his uncle Alfonso d’Este, accepted that his independent-minded favourite painter would never be entirely at his beck and call. While the two men jousted in their correspondence about Titian’s delays and rewards, Federico never resorted to threats, and as a result rarely had to wait long for his paintings or for Titian’s visits. Without Federico Gonzaga, Titian would probably not have met Charles V, whose high regard for his ‘first painter’ was the key to an international success unmatched by any other artist of the time. Without him he would not have enjoyed the opportunity to immerse himself in the Gonzaga relics of the ancient Roman world.

  In his own lifetime and for the next two centuries the Emperors were the most admired of Titian’s paintings for the Gonzagas. Dolce wrote that they were ‘of such perfection that an infinitude of people’ came to Mantua with the sole purpose of seeing them, ‘imagining that they were seeing the real Caesars and not pictures of them’. Vasari singled them out for mention with only two other of Titian’s Mantuan paintings (a portrait of Federico and one of his brother Ercole). In 1628 they were sold with the rest of the Gonzaga paintings to Charles I of England, who displayed them in St James’s Palace. On the dispersal of the royal collection during the Commonwealth they were given to Spain, where they were destroyed in 1734 by a fire in the Alcázar in Madrid.

  The Roman Emperors were among the most copied of Titian’s works, with no fewer than seven complete sets recorded in his lifetime. Aegidius Sadler made a set of engravings of them in the 1590s, but to judge from other extant reproductions Ippolito Andreasi’s pen-and-ink copies are more accurate. Visitors to the ducal palace today can at least get an impression of the appearance of Federico’s Chamber of the Caesars, which has been restored as far as possible and hung with painted reproductions. But no copy conveys the qualities that inspired Titian’s contemporaries to glimpse as through a window those valorous ancient warrior rulers reborn in the guise of their own Renaissance Caesars. For Titian the discipline of a task that required him to work within pre-set dimensions from archaeological models stimulated his virtuosity and deepened his visual culture in ways that lent a new stature to his portraits of contemporaries. The most obvious surviving example – and the work that gives the best impression of how the original Emperors might have looked – is the Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere in armour holding his baton of command. But we can see how deeply imbued Titian was with Roman portraiture in a number of other works painted during and after the four years he spent researching and painting the Emperors. One of them is the portrait he painted of Aretino in 1537 or 1538, not of course in armour but posed like an emperor, an emperor of letters.

  SIX

  The Writers’ Venice

  There are four people lodging here … We have one bed between the two of us, and each has his own (O beautiful secret!) chamberpot, because the privies are common to all … at night, in the manner of a cruel doctor, an army of huge bedbugs … and a mob of fat fleas, test my pulse and bleed me; above my head, in an old loft, I think there is a college of mice and a consistory of cobwebs … No sooner is it daybreak than the boats, barge and gondolas appear in a stinking, fetid, vile canal, with people shouting and braying with coarse and disjointed voices, competing with each other, one with Brenta water, another onions and fresh garlic and mouldy melons, rotten grapes, stale fish and green kindling wood, enough to drive crazy everyone of sound mind.

  ANTON FRANCESCO DONI, FROM A LETTER TO A FRIEND DESCRIBING HIS LODGINGS IN VENICE, 15501

  When Titian painted, in just three days, the friend he called the brigand chief of letters gazing thoughtfully into the distance with one of the heavy gold chains he had extracted from his patrons resting on his fur lapels (New York, Frick Collection) Aretino was powerbroker to the world. The first volume of his collected letters, dedicated to the Duke of Urbino and published by Marcolini in January 1538, sold out. In the next five years it went through ten editions (including numerous pirated editions) and was followed by five more volumes. Titian’s portrait was the prototype for the woodcut frontispiece of the second, enlarged edition printed in September 1538. The published letters turned Aretino into an international literary celebrity. Entertaining, absurd, preposterous, pompous, obsequious, self-serving, shrewd, some are wise, and some, when he wrote from the heart about bereavement, love or art, are deeply moving. They were the closest texts the Renaissance had to newspapers, and we can read them as biased editorials on the times in which they were written, although there is a caveat. For a prolific writer with a maimed right hand and disorderly habits of filing, the editing process was extremely laborious. As he confessed to Vasa
ri when asking him to return a letter describing Charles V’s entry into Florence in 1536, ‘I shall be careful to place it with the more than two hundred letters I am printing, but they would be more than two thousand if I had all those I have written without keeping copies of the originals.’ He had also neglected in many cases to make a note of the dates on which those he had kept were written. In a last-minute attempt to impose some kind of chronological order he simply dated those at the end of the volume, some of which must have been written earlier, to November and December 1537.

  In the May after the first publication of his letters two of Aretino’s enemies brought against him a charge of blasphemy and sodomy (per bestemmiatore e rompitore de tondi). But a decade after crossing the lagoon with a dubious reputation and the remains of a tip from Federico Gonzaga to speed him on his way, Aretino had manipulated for himself a position in Venice that guaranteed immunity from punishments for behaviour that sent less useful men to the gallows or into permanent exile. While the heat was on he retreated to a villa on the Brenta, but returned to Venice at the end of June when Benedetto Agnello reported that the charges had been dismissed on the intervention of the Duke of Urbino – with, we can assume, the compliance of Aretino’s most powerful protector, Doge Andrea Gritti. Since the charges against Aretino are absent from the otherwise well-preserved government records it seems that his case was not brought to trial.

  Meanwhile, Charles V’s victory at Tunis followed by Francis I’s unholy alliance with the Turks had suggested that it was time to reconsider his political allegiance. Without breaking with Francis he began to court the emperor with adulation that ‘soon passed’, as Burckhardt put it, ‘into the most ludicrous worship’.

  Because your majesty is more like a God than any man there ever was … I make bold to celebrate the Faith, the Religion, the Piety, the Good Fortune, the Courtesy, the Goodness, the Prudence and the Worth of Your Majesty in this my letter. If the paper on which it was written lived and breathed, it would turn up its nose at even the most glorious sheets of paper of the olden days, and that because it was not merely read, but touched by that true friend of Christ, Charles the August, before whose merits the entire universe should bow … For there is not room enough in the whole empyrean for your winged fame.2

  After the disastrous campaign in Provence and Charles’s promise of a pension, he wrote again praising what had in fact been an ignominious retreat as a wise manoeuvre and eulogizing the ‘superhuman courage’ with which ‘the great Charles overcoming impossible difficulties had flown into the enemy camp where no soldier had dared to attack him’. He urged Caesar to follow his ‘victory’ in Provence by joining Venice in raising a fleet against the Turks. Finally he offered grudging thanks for the pension, ‘which has partly relieved the weight of my poverty’ – it would do for the moment, that is, but was not enough to cover his expenses or the price of his loyalty.

  As a journalist in the service of the Venetian government, Aretino’s self-appointed job was not only to manipulate the great rulers of Europe but also to extract from them the largest possible rewards for himself. But even his love of art, which he understood better than any of his contemporaries and wrote about with a sinuous rhetoric that aimed to equal or outdo the works he described, was not entirely untainted by self-interest and greed. He pestered Michelangelo for a drawing: ‘two marks of charcoal on a sheet’ would give him ‘greater pleasure than any number of chains from a prince’. Michelangelo sent sketches by an inferior artist after his own drawings for some sculptures. Aretino continued to pester him with flattering requests for ‘one of those marvels which are continually given birth to by the divinity which your genius makes pregnant’. Not long after he had received the disappointing drawings, Aretino addressed to Michelangelo a long letter sharing his vision of how he should paint his Last Judgement for the Sistine Chapel, to which Michelangelo replied that he was sorry, because Aretino was ‘the only model of knowledge in the world’, that he could not avail himself of the treasures of his imagination because he had already finished part of his painting but that he hoped Aretino would publish the advice he had given. Aretino offered to come to Rome to see the painting. Michelangelo replied that he must not break his vow of never revisiting Rome merely on account of his picture. But Aretino was not one to be brushed off by irony.

  Having seen an engraving of the finished Last Judgement he addressed to Michelangelo and the world a long letter expressing his shock and horror as a baptized Christian at the exposed genitals of the naked figures in the highest temple of God, comparing the Last Judgement to a fresco in a brothel, suggesting that Michelangelo should restore his good name by covering the indecent parts. Aretino’s opinion, which was repeated later in Dolce’s fictitious dialogue L’Aretino, and was shared by many others, was based less on morality – he was after all a published pornographer – than on the Renaissance theory of decorum: what was appropriate in a brothel or for the private amusement of an artist was an outrage in a temple of God. But he had a selfish motive as well. Aretino was after nothing less than a cardinal’s hat,3 and although the very idea may seem to us the acme of absurdity, as indeed it did to some of his contemporaries, he had his supporters. Clement VII had suggested that he might have the makings of a cardinal if he learned how to behave himself, which he did not do to the satisfaction of that pope.

  The substance of his denunciation of the Last Judgement, although the wording was more colourful, echoed the charges being made by Cardinal Gianpietro Caraffa and his fellow Theatine censors in Rome, who were conducting their ‘figleaf’ campaign against what they regarded as the intolerable obscenity of Michelangelo’s naked figures.4 Gianpietro Caraffa, formerly Bishop of Chieti – and later pope as Paul IV – was so famous for his rigid and intransigent reformist Catholicism that Aretino, who loathed him and everything he stood for, used his ecclesiastical title as a synonym for bigotry – chietino, chietismo. The Scourge had in the past lampooned him5 but had briefly changed his tune when Caraffa moved to Venice in 1536 as a papal agent with a brief to suppress all discussion and writing about Lutheranism. When Caraffa was made a cardinal the following year, Aretino had written a letter of congratulation at the end of which he compared himself to Saul who had been converted by Our Redeemer in order to sound the bell of His name, suggesting that he might be considered as ‘a minister of His temple’, a cardinal.

  Two years after that gentle hint had failed, he found another opportunity when his friend Bembo became a cardinal. If Bembo, who was after all a writer and a womanizer like himself, was worthy of a cardinalate why not Aretino? This time he wrote directly to Paul III. He congratulated him on Bembo’s appointment, assured him that he had been shown the path of virtue by the charismatic Sienese preacher Bernardino Ochino who had delivered an enthralling sermon in his parish church, and threw himself at the feet of the pope. His satire of the papal court, I Ragionamenti delle Corti (The Dialogues about Courts), a fictional dialogue about the courts of this world and those in heaven in which he had not spared Caraffa or his old enemy Gianmatteo Giberti, now Bishop of Verona, had been published the previous year. Now he begged pardon for the foolishness of his anticlerical writings, hoping that his repentance would be rewarded rather than punished.

  Meanwhile, following the charges against him of blasphemy and sodomy, Aretino set about restoring his reputation and demonstrating his suitability for a career in the Church by putting together a selection of letters written to him by notable members of the European establishment up to 1538. The Letters Written to Aretino, 405 of them, were published by Marcolini in 1542 with a dedication to Innocenzo del Monte, an illegitimate boy who was the adoptive nephew, monkey keeper and, so it was rumoured, lover of Cardinal Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte. It was in Aretino’s interests to cultivate the del Monte family, who were leading aristocrats in his native Arezzo. It may be that his uncanny ability to predict the future told him that they would soon be even better placed to help him don his red hat. And so it happ
ened that in 1550 Giovanni Maria, on his election as Pope Julius III, legitimized the seventeen-year-old Innocenzo and made him a cardinal.

  Letters written to, rather than from, a famous person were unusual in the period, and these were the first to be published during the lifetime of a recipient. They are actually not so much ‘to’ as about the paragon of all virtues who is addressed by his correspondents as divine or most divine, magnificent or most magnificent or magnificent and most learned, or our most beloved and honoured; or in the case of the first letter, from his deceased best friend Giovanni de’ Medici, as the Stupendous Pietro Aretino a True Friend and Miracle of Nature. There is no way of knowing if the letters were doctored by Aretino or Marcolini because the originals have disappeared. It is perhaps more likely that only the most praising examples were selected. Nevertheless, the final letter in the collection, from Anton Francesco Doni, which proclaims that Aretino’s goodness has reached such a peak that it could climb no higher, is dated 1538, ten years before the two men actually met.