Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Aretino had also turned out a stream of religious writings beginning with paraphrases of the Bible, which had been recently translated by his friend Antonio Brucioli. His devotional works were immensely popular, reprinted many times, and although not great literature, and certainly not as profound as the religious writings of Michelangelo or Vittoria Colonna, perhaps not as cynical as some of Aretino’s critics have suggested. He may have been a bad man, but he was a good old-fashioned Catholic who detested Martin Luther for his pedantry as well as for his heretical beliefs, just as much as he loathed and despised Cardinal Caraffa.

  The earliest of his religious books, a paraphrase of The Seven Penitential Psalms and The Humanity of Christ, had coincided with two volumes of satirical pornography, I Ragionamenti (The Dialogues) published in 1534 and 1536. In Rome, during the Sack of the Holy City in 1527, two ageing courtesans, Nanna and Antonia, reminisce about their lascivious adventures and teach Nanna’s little daughter Pippa the tricks of their trade. In one of the dialogues, set on the feast day of Mary Magdalen, they describe the instructive pornographic frescos on walls of a convent-brothel, one of which illustrates the life of St Nafissa, who for the love of God has slept with absolutely everybody – police spies, card sharps, priests, footmen ‘and all such deserving people’. St Nafissa was a joke that ran through the rest of Aretino’s writings and even found its way into one of his letters to the Duke of Urbino.

  The Ragionamenti have been accurately described as ‘probably the frankest pornography in Italian literature’.6 Translated immediately into French, they were to be the model of obscene works for the next two centuries, and were all the more deliciously shocking at a time when very little pornography was written in Italy. But although Aretino’s descriptions of every possible variation on the sexual act, not excluding masturbation in public and orgies involving chain buggery, are as explicit as the genre can get, they are never about the exploitation of women. On the contrary, the women take as much pleasure in the fun as the men, and usually outwit them. Pornography might seem a perverse way of pursuing a cardinalate, but as usual Aretino had an ulterior motive. Andrea Gritti’s Venetian government was trying to reform its convents, which were rightly regarded as brothels, while the papacy remained indifferent to the corruption in Roman religious houses of ill repute. By placing his story in Rome during the most humiliating invasion it had ever experienced and pretending to disapprove of the acts he described (it was necessary for superior minds to know evil in order to defeat it), he set up Venice, home of honourable and pure courtesans like Angela Zaffetta, as a morally superior example to a Holy City in need of reform.

  The Ragionamenti could have been published only in Venice, where the official requirement that all books should receive a privilege to publish was not enforced in practice until much later in the Counter-Reformation. From the middle of the 1530s the unparalleled freedom of expression in the lagoon and the example of Aretino’s immense success attracted vernacular writers and publishers to Venice from elsewhere in Italy. Known to historians of literature as the poligrafi,7 or polygraphs – jacks of all literary trades willing and able to turn their hands to editing or translating as well as writing their own works – they were most of them ten or twenty years younger than Aretino, angry young men who came, as he had, from relatively humble backgrounds. Some had been monks and had the classical languages that Aretino lacked, which made them useful as his secretaries. Most were followers of Erasmus and like so many Erasmian humanists deplored the abusive behaviour of the clergy and papacy. But they went further. The most articulate of the polygraphs overturned all Renaissance values. Whereas humanists stressed the importance of community life and civic responsibility, they praised solitary life in the country where men could find peace and forget vain ambitions. They were not the only Italians to regard grammar and humanist learning as irrelevant to the modern world, and their rejection of academic scholarship in favour of learning from the book of nature anticipated similar views expressed later in the century by Bacon and by Montaigne, who gave fifteenth-century Italian humanism as the cause of the peninsula’s downfall.8

  What the most conscientious of them had in common was anger. Bitterly disillusioned by the times in which they lived, they demanded redistribution of wealth, denouncing the injustices of a society in which the rich and powerful avoided the taxes they levied on the starving poor. Although none of them matched the energy, range, wit or speed of Aretino’s high-flying pen, they had one quality he lacked. They had social consciences, which made them less self-serving than their role model. While Aretino flattered the rulers who paid him best, they lashed out at Charles V and all the greedy tyrannical Italian dukes, princes and counts whose gross appetites and lack of reasoning power made the possibility of political or religious reform impossible. Their ideas were, as they knew, so far ahead of their times that no ruler could take them seriously. But the popularity of their works, which continued to sell in numerous editions into the seventeenth century, indicates that their readers shared their proto-revolutionary views.

  The centres of intellectual discussion in Venice were the publishing houses, especially those set up in the mid-1530s by the Piedmontese Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari and Francesco Marcolini of Forlì, who operated the most commercially successful of the vernacular presses. Marcolini was also an architect and a great friend of Titian, Sansovino and Aretino, whose letters he published. Venetian and foreign writers and bibliophiles, literary patricians and businessmen congregated in his printing shop to exchange ideas. Among the Venetians there were Lodovico Dolce, the productive editor, translator and writer whose treatise on the theory of art included the first biography of Titian; Francesco Sansovino, whose father the famous architect Jacopo had paid for his study of law in Padua and was a friend of Titian’s son Pomponio; Sperone Speroni, who wrote dialogues about language, love, women, usury and the active life; and Lorenzo Venier, author of The Thirty-One of Angela Zaffetta and The Wandering Whore, of whom Aretino said that for sheer malice Venier was four days ahead of him.

  The three most prominent foreign-born polygraphs were Ortensio Lando, Anton Francesco Doni and Niccolò Franco. Lando, a former monk who described his temperament as full of anger, ambitious, impatient, haughty, frenzied and inconstant, was one of the few among these men who enjoyed an uninterrupted friendship with Aretino. He had studied medicine in Bologna, and after his arrival in Venice in the late 1540s translated writings by Martin Luther and Thomas Moore. Doni, a Florentine and also formerly a monk, was the most original and imaginative of the polygraphs. He specialized in reportage, picking up anecdotes and gossip in the Piazza, and published a large collection of his letters as well as seventeen books, including a treatise on painting and sculpture. His heretical beliefs, anticlassicism and irritable temper alienated potential patrons, and he lived from hand to mouth working as an editor in Giolito’s shop and occasionally as secretary to Aretino, with whom he later had a flaming row. Franco had come to Venice from Benevento in 1536 with an introduction to Titian. He lived in Aretino’s house for a year before turning against his protectors. On meeting Titian in the street one day he pocketed his hat so he would not have to greet him, then wrote a sonnet castigating his portrait of Aretino for immortalizing ‘In the space of one tiny picture/All the infamy of our estate’. Aretino accused Franco of plagiarism; Franco charged Aretino with jealousy, and continued his verbal assaults – why did Venice bother to cleanse its canals when it did not disinfect the house of Aretino, a veritable Cloaca Maxima; and so on – until he was driven from Venice by one of Aretino’s young protégés who stabbed him. In 1570 he was sent to the gallows for lampooning the pope.

  Titian was distantly acquainted with the polygraphs, who praised him in the conventional terms of their day, usually in the same breath as Michelangelo, almost as a matter of routine.9 The prestige of artists had grown in the first decades of the sixteenth century to the point where educated people were supposed to know the names of the most famous of the
m and if they were writers to mention them as evidence of their wide culture. But there is no indication that many of the critics, not even Dolce who had probably never seen a work by Michelangelo or Raphael, understood anything about the techniques of painting or knew where individual pictures were located. Doni and Vasari, both well-travelled Florentines, were the first writers on art after Michiel in the 1520s to describe specific paintings and advise their readers where they could be found. Nevertheless, while practising artists, then as now, learned not from writers but from other artists, such critical theory as there was about art was borrowed from classical literary rhetoric. The old tag ut pictura poesis, poetry resembles painting,10 which was frequently invoked directly or indirectly – Sperone Speroni wrote that poems give voice to paintings and paintings give flesh and bones to poems – is both patently untrue and tells us nothing much about either art. Titian portrayed many men of letters – Speroni among them, as well as the learned imperial ambassador to Venice Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the patrician polymath Daniele Barbaro, the Florentine historian and humanist Benedetto Varchi, Pietro Bembo the greatest Venetian writer of his day and, of course, his friend Aretino. Nevertheless, although it is tempting to speculate about his relationships with the writers and publishers who made Venice in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s the Italian centre of vernacular literature,11 there is no indication in what we know about Titian’s day-to-day life in Venice that he spent much of his time reading or discussing literary texts. If he listened with respect to Aretino, it was because his friend, thanks to his close friendships with a great many artists working in all media, was unique in his understanding of how a work of art is actually made, of what is difficult and therefore especially praiseworthy. No other writer on art would have been capable of exploding, as Aretino did in one of his letters to Sansovino, the conventional literary dialectic about the relative merits of painting and sculpture:

  This is a controversy that has been fought out, not only more times than there is marble and are pigments in the world, but even than there are crazy thoughts among those who carve stone and paint … This kind of dispute is like trying to decide whether divine providence or human ignorance controls the fortunes of our life.12

  While Aretino rarely disappoints when writing about art, even he was unable to lift the veil that shrouds Titian’s love life. His own sexuality, however, was as complicated and public as Titian’s was apparently monogamous and certainly private. His first child, a daughter by one of his mistresses, Caterina Cataneo, was born as he was preparing the first edition of his published letters. He named the baby Adria after the Adriatic Sea and appointed Fra Sebastiano del Piombo – who had been required to take religious orders when appointed keeper of the seal (lead, piombo) for the Curia in 1531 – her godfather. He wrote to Sebastiano after her birth that he had like all expectant fathers hoped for a boy, but since it had pleased God that it should be a girl he had discovered the truth that girls – ‘apart from concerns about their chastity, which must be carefully guarded’ – are the greater consolation. He must have had Titian’s problems with Pomponio in his mind when he wrote:

  a boy at the age of twelve or thirteen begins to break free of the paternal reins and runs away from school, refuses to obey and makes those who begot him weak with unhappiness. And what is worse is the rudeness, the threats with which he assails his mother and father day and night, which they fear will be followed by denunciations and punishments from the law and from God. But a daughter is a couch upon which those who brought her into the world can take their repose in their declining years …

  He concluded the letter with one of his tributes to Venice:

  … Adria is her name and she is well named because she was born by divine grace in the lap of these waves. And I am proud of it because this place is the garden of nature as I well know who have lived here for ten years with more contentment than I would have had woes had I stayed in Rome …

  He adored his little girl from the moment he first set eyes on her. He was ‘overcome by the tenderness that welled in my heart’, and he prayed to God that:

  He grant only that I live long enough to see her married. In the meantime I must submit to being her plaything, for what are we fathers but our children’s clowns … Nor is there any pleasure in the world that could equal the delight this brings us … Every childish tear they shed, every cry they give, every sigh that escapes their lips, disturbs our very souls. Not a leaf drops nor a piece of down floats through the air that does not seem a leaden weight that might fall on their heads and crush them …

  He supervised every detail of her care and upbringing, showed her off at his dinner parties, and before she could walk began soliciting his wealthy friends and patrons for contributions to her dowry. Adria’s mother Caterina Cataneo, who came from a good Venetian family, had entered his service as an ‘Aretine’ soon after his arrival in Venice and helped him to set up his house on the Grand Canal and entertain there. If we can judge from two portraits of her, one attributed to Titian and one to Tintoretto,13 she was auburn haired, Junoesque if not quite obese, with a face suggestive of a tough character. She was already thirty-six when she gave birth to Adria in 1537, and a year or two afterwards Aretino found her a husband, Bartolo Sandelli, a wealthy minor nobleman more than ten years her junior by whom she had a son. Although Aretino, out of respect for her reputation and Sandelli’s wealth and social position, tried to persuade her to return to her husband, she clung to him, complaining piteously about her husband’s chronic unfaithfulness. And so her position in Aretino’s house and bed was scarcely changed by the marriage. She continued to organize his parties and act as his hostess, and was recognized and treated by his circle of friends as his partner.

  Aretino, feeling his age in his forties – he complained that he was writhing like Laocoön from the pain of gout and syphilis and that he could no longer write at his former speed – was experiencing a range of new emotions, from the joyous astonishment and inevitable anxieties of parental love to obsessive heterosexual passion. It was only now as his beard was going grey that he was able to write to his friend Luigi Anichini, a Ferrarese engraver of gems, that:

  Love is a wicked beast and a man who runs at its tail can’t be a poet or artist and compose verses or carve gems. I say that it’s a monstrous and intemperate appetite that is nourished by strange fancies and longings, and when it seizes a man’s heart it also invades and captures for itself his mind and soul and senses. A person in love, therefore, is like one of those raging bulls, urged on by the assillo, as in my country we call the spur given by ticks, flies and wasps to horses and asses …

  At the time of Adria’s birth he was also emotionally involved with Perina Riccia, the sickly wife of a merchant and twenty-nine years his junior, for whom his feelings were a heady mixture of paternal and erotic. He nursed her through tuberculosis, supported her and her husband, befriended her mother, and suffered terribly when she ran off with one of his assistants, a man closer to her own age. Perina’s defection seems to have been his first lesson in the truism that ‘Those who truly love cannot cease to do so whenever they wish’:

  Though love betrays us, we must endure its perfidies. The soul deprived of the presence and attention of what it loves is like a land devastated by the cruel violence of its enemies and only capable … of weeping and wailing, hoping by its tears and prayers to be granted, if not mercy, at least compassion …

  His soulmate during this time was Angela Serena, a Sienese noblewoman and minor poet who had nothing in common with Caterina or Perina apart from being married to a dissolute husband, Giannantonio Serena, who if Aretino is to be believed was a bisexual adulterer. Aretino wrote to him in praise of marriage, inviting him to admire with him Angela’s ‘tresses, scattered over her shoulders and around her temples and neck, shining almost like spun topaz with the subtlety of art, curling around her ears and above her forehead like bees in a meadow; and crystal is not as clear as the limbs of her inviolable chastity, a miracul
ous treasure in these shameless times …’. In his Poems in Honour of Angela Serena, published by Marcolini in 1537 and dedicated to the empress Isabella, he emphasized Angela’s chastity again and again, and it does seem that her appeal lay mainly in her intellect – they read each other’s work, discussed philosophy and religion. She died young in 1540 when Aretino’s obsession with Perina was at its height. In a long letter to Lope de Soria he wrote about his feelings for both: ‘to the one who is still living and to the one who has died I have not failed in any of those things which befit anyone who loves with his whole heart …’. Although the sad news about Angela had ‘widowed my sense of sight’, he had run to Perina’s bed, giving no thought to the danger that he might catch her illness.

  Instead I kissed her sunken eyes, her ghastly cheeks, and her sour mouth … I suppose the fact that her beauty had vanished should have ended once and for all my avid affection for her. Instead, it increased it so greatly that the bowels of the most loving of fathers did not ever so fill with sorrow and pity, as mine did because of her great affliction …14

  Perina lived until 1545. Two years after her death – when, after the birth of Austria, her second child by Aretino, Caterina Sandella had settled in as the permanent partner of his old age – Aretino wrote to Daniele Barbaro that when Perina died, ‘I died too … I will live the living death of her illness for ever.’

  If the habit of wearing his heart on his sleeve is one of the more engaging sides of Aretino’s character, another is his loyalty to his friends and his concern for their children. He tried, unsuccessfully, to pump some energy into the lazy and wayward Pomponio; and acted as Francesco Sansovino’s mentor, sent him money when he was in difficulties, scolded him when he disobeyed his father. And he never lost the opportunity to promote the interests of their fathers.