by Sheila Hale
In the first volume of his letters he addressed an open letter dated 20 November 1537 to Jacopo Sansovino, whose transformation of the Piazza San Marco was only just under way and was already subject to endless problems and delays. Andrea Gritti, who was the architect’s chief protector, had to contend with an ‘anti-Roman’ faction in the government, which favoured traditional Gothic architecture over Sansovino’s Venetianized High Renaissance style. Some of the shops, inns, brothels, market stalls and all the other businesses that cluttered the Piazza were valuable sources of income for the procurators who owned and leased them. Others, kept by stallholders, such as those who had the hereditary right to sell grain for the pigeons, were privately owned and would have to be moved or their owners compensated. Clearing the Piazza meant prolonged negotiations with the various magistracies and the private owners. It was part of Sansovino’s job to convince the procurators that his improvements would increase the value of their property and rents, and this was something he did with remarkable diplomatic skill. Vasari noted his talent as a businessman and said he was constantly thinking of ways to improve the fortunes of the procuracy. But, although his salary as chief architect to the procurators was more than that of the director of the arsenal and he was given a generous working budget, he was sometimes discouraged by the difficulties and delays and seems to have considered accepting an invitation to return to Rome and work for the papal court.
In his letter Aretino warns him against leaving ‘Venetian senators for courtier prelates … a greeting from these noble Venetian sleeves is worth more than a gift from those ignoble mitres’. He reminds him of the fine apartments he has been given in the Procuratie Vecchie in the Piazza, ‘which shows in what esteem the talented are held by this Republic, which marvels at all that you create daily with your hands and intellect’. He goes on to list some of the buildings that have astonished, overwhelmed and aroused the unstinting admiration of all who behold them. In fact they had only just been commissioned and in most cases their foundations not yet laid. Many were still unfinished by the time of Aretino’s death in 1556, and some not until after the death of Sansovino in 1570. Nevertheless, Aretino, who must have seen Sansovino’s drawings, used his imagination and power of description to encourage his friend by envisaging the final appearance of his unrealized building projects. He singles out for praise the ‘Corinthian structure’ of the Scuola della Misericordia;15 the ‘rustication and Doric order’ of the new mint;16 the ‘carved Doric order with the Ionic above, together with appropriate decoration’ of the library of St Mark;17 the loggetta at the base of San Marco’s bell tower, ‘with its combination of different stones and marbles … the form of which is to be composed of all the beauties of architecture’;18 ‘the proud roofs of the new palace of the Corner family’ on the Grand Canal at San Maurizio;19 and the church of San Francesco della Vigna.20
Andrea Gritti, who lived in the campo of San Francisco della Vigna and was a patron of the church, took a special interest in the reconstruction of the old Gothic building, and reserved tombs for himself and his closest political counsellors in its presbytery. But soon after he had laid the foundation stone on 15 August 1534 a dispute arose about the proportions of Sansovino’s plan. Gritti commissioned Francesco Giorgi, a Franciscan monk, to write a memorandum about the model, in which he opined that, according to the Pythagorean model, the number three was the first real number, and its square and cube contained the consonances of the universe, as Plato and Aristotle, who never went beyond the number twenty-seven in their analysis of the world, had demonstrated. The number three was also sacred as the symbol of the Trinity. What mattered more, however, was not the actual numbers but their ratios, which Giorgio expressed in musical terms. He advised that the proportion of width to length of the nave should be 9:27, which represent an octave and a fifth.21 Three men were consulted about Giorgio’s memorandum: the architect Sebastiano Serlio, who was in Venice at the time preparing his treatise on architecture; Fortunio Spira, a humanist who is now forgotten but was greatly admired by, among others, Francesco Sansovino and Aretino; and Titian. The choice of Titian and his approval of the memorandum raises the intriguing questions of how much he understood about Neoplatonic theories of proportion and musical intervals and whether, consciously or unconsciously, he applied them to the geometry of his paintings.
Aretino meanwhile turned his attention to devising ways of promoting Titian, whose reputation was suffering from his failure to produce a major public painting since the St Peter Martyr. The wild but talented medallist and sculptor Leone Leoni, a fellow Aretine and possibly a relative, was in Venice at the time under Aretino’s protection, so he was in a position to order from him the medal portrait of Titian that is the earliest secure image of him we have. He is shown in profile, as Roman emperors were on antique medals, and in one version Aretino’s portrait is on the other side. At the same time the Secretary of the World thought up a plan that would serve the double purpose of advancing Titian’s friendship with the emperor while producing the chance of a nice income. In 1536 Titian had finished a very large altarpiece of the Annunciation for the nuns of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli on Murano. When they baulked at his asking fee of 500 ducats Aretino suggested that Titian send it instead as a diplomatic gift to the empress Isabella. Titian took his advice and added the emperor’s insignia ‘PLVS VLTRA’ scrolled between the angels at the top corners of the painting. Charles, just as they had hoped, rewarded him with the promise of a pension of 100 scudi per annum to be paid from the treasury of Milan.22 Isabella’s Annunciation disappeared during the Napoleonic wars. But the fine engraving by Jacopo Caraglio made in 1537, probably under Titian’s supervision before it was dispatched to Spain, suggests that it was an unprecedented treatment of a subject that had previously been depicted as a moment of quiet, private joy. This Annunciation was as dramatic and almost as large as the Frari Assunta in which God the Father bursts out of the mysterious blackness of heaven to receive the Virgin Mary. Now at the moment of her Immaculate Conception the heavens open, inspiring awe and terror as the dove of the Holy Spirit descends upon her through supernatural rays of light. The nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli, who may have found the painting too theatrical for their tastes as well as too expensive, commissioned the more obliging Pordenone to paint something more peaceful for their altar.
Titian’s interpretation of the Annunciation closely paralleled Aretino’s ecstatic, highly charged description of the event in his Humanity of Christ published in 1535, and both may have been inspired by the vision of Ezekiel in the Old Testament in which Ezekiel is so overwhelmed by terror that he falls on his face.23 Aretino echoed his earlier account in a letter to Titian dated November 1537 that colours in Caraglio’s black and white engraving with his account of the dazzling ‘refulgent light shed by the rays of Paradise’, the rainbow over the landscape at dawn, ‘the heavenly majesty’ of the countenance of Gabriel, whose ‘cheeks tremble under the flesh-tints of milk and blood which your colouring has rendered so true to Nature’.
I say nothing of the Virgin herself … because you have painted her in such a fashion and so marvellously that our eyes, dazzled in the light of her gaze … cannot bear to look at her. In the same way, because of its strange brilliance, we cannot praise enough the scene you are painting in the Palace of St Mark to honour our nobles and to reprove those who cannot deny your genius and mine and so put you in the first rank as a mere painter of portraits and me there as a slanderer, as though your works and mine could not be seen by the whole world.24
In this last sentence Aretino is rebutting claims that his friend, now well into his forties, has sold his artistic soul to the ‘mere’ art of portraiture, an easier and more profitable but less respected genre than the religious and mythological paintings with which he had made his name in the 1520s. The Annunciation was his first large public altarpiece since the St Peter Martyr. In the intervening years he had produced some forty portraits and a few small religious paintings fo
r private patrons. But the ‘scene’ Aretino said he was painting in the palace of San Marco was one of the largest and most important public works of his career. It was The Battle of Spoleto, one of the cycle of history paintings for the Great Council Hall, which Titian had managed to put off since 1513 when as a young man seeking recognition in Venice he had persuaded the Council of Ten to let him paint ‘not so much from the desire for profit as to acquire some little bit of fame … to put into that task all my intellect and spirit for as long as I live’.
SEVEN
An Old Battle and a New War
Something at once courtly and homely, a great intimacy or naïveté of perception which enchants us in the work of Gentile Bellini, or in the pictures by Carpaccio, and Titian’s frescoes at Padua, recurs again in the ‘Presentation’, perhaps for the last time in Venetian art.
CHARLES RICKETTS, TITIAN, 1900
Titian cannot have been surprised by the decision of the Council of Ten to revoke his brokerage on the German exchange house and order him to refund the annual payment of more than 100 ducats that he had been receiving while they waited for the battle scene for the Great Council Hall.1 Twenty-four years had passed since he had offered ‘to make this work with such speed and excellence that you will be very happy with it’. He was not the only holder of a sanseria2 to abuse the system, but he had done so in an unusually high-handed way, and he must have been aware of the increasingly loud grumbles in government circles that he had been working for foreigners while living on the brokerage, which, unlike the emperor’s annuity, had been paid regularly by the state since he had completed Giovanni Bellini’s Humiliation of Frederick Barbarossa in 1523. So far he had got away with his cavalier behaviour because there was no painter in Venice who could match his genius or his social skills. Titian, as Vasari put it, ‘had rivals in Venice, but none of much talent, none that he did not crush by his excellence and his knowledge of the world in converse with gentlemen’. But now the Friulian painter Giovanni Antonio Pordenone had returned to Venice, and in the November after its demand that Titian should repay the government the Council of Ten, with the backing of Andrea Gritti, offered Pordenone the canvas next to the space reserved for Titian’s Battle. Although he had more experience with painting large frescos than working with oil on canvas Pordenone was a master of the exaggerated, violent foreshortening with images bursting through the picture plane that was in vogue at the time.3 He was decorating ceilings in the ducal palace and had impressed the Council of Ten as an artist who was more reliable and in their view probably talented enough to continue the cycle of history paintings in the Great Council Hall in which Titian had apparently lost interest.
Doge Gritti, enfeebled by old age and occupying an increasingly lonely stance in government, was no longer in a position to continue protecting Titian from what would have been a serious financial setback as well as the humiliation of being replaced by Pordenone as the government’s most favoured painter. Venice, for the first time since the peace of 1503, was slowly coming to terms with the inevitability of another all-out war against the Turks, who began to confiscate Venetian estates and merchandise in the Levant. In September 1537 the Senate voted for war, but against the advice of the doge. And still the Venetians hesitated. Suleiman’s hand was immeasurably strengthened by his alliance with Francis I, which had been formalized the previous year, while the Republic was as yet without allies. Aretino now stepped in and on 18 September addressed to the French king one of the most important and widely circulated political letters of his career. He advised Francis to break his alliance with the Turks and join the pope, the emperor Charles V and the ‘religious, most excellent and magnanimous Venetians’ in their crusade against the great monster whose arrogance had enslaved his friendship. The world, Aretino proclaimed, was asking what was in the most excellent heart of the French king: Was it hatred for others or was it the love he owed to God? If it was hatred what was the meaning of his title ‘Most Christian King’? If it was love the Holy League would not merely accept him but would enfold him in its arms. ‘You, you must clear the mind of the purest and most noble king there ever was. Where, Francis, is the valorous prudence, which has enriched you with so many triumphs? It is still with you. Listen therefore to the supplications of the Church and the will of your own people. Here is Paul who calls you, here is Charles who accepts you, here is [St] Mark who exhorts you to proceed with all speed – you will be praised for haste and will regret delay – resolving that any consideration regarding your worldly arrangements with men is a wrong that you do to Christ.’
Aretino, as so often, was anticipating events: Venice had not yet gone to war and the league with the pope and emperor was not formulated until the following year. The letter, however, succeeded in damaging the reputation of the French king among his own people as well as throughout the rest of Europe. It won the unstinting praise of Alfonso d’Avalos, of the Spanish ambassador in Venice Lope de Soria, and of Gasparo Contarini. The Constable of France, the Duke of Montmorency, responded with an offer from Francis to double the emperor’s pension of 200 crowns if Aretino would write about the emperor and the French king ‘more accurately’. Since Charles’s latest payment was overdue, and it was in the interests of the government of St Mark that he should maintain his pressure on Francis, he did not refuse.
On 1 May 1538 the Secretary of the World wrote to Francis again. Paul III, who had maintained his position of neutrality in the struggle between Francis and Charles, was planning a conference at Nice where he hoped to enable an alliance of all Christian states against the Turks by engineering reconciliation between the Most Christian King and the Holy Roman Emperor. Given their mutual hatred and continuing dispute over possession of Milan, it would not be easy. But Francis, who was bankrupt and aware that Charles had the upper hand in Milan, was already half inclined to give in to the pope’s exhortations. Aretino’s letter was an attempt to tip the balance of his indecision in the pope’s favour, but he used flattery rather than condemnation and offered the king a lesson in statecraft that for cynicism and grasp of realpolitik could not have been bettered by Machiavelli. Francis, he wrote, was too sensible, valorous, generous and open-hearted for his own good. If he would only temper the sweetness of his most excellent being with keen attention to the realities of modern statecraft he would have grasped the first step towards wisdom, which was to use ‘deceit and pretence almost as though guided by military tactics’. He had already proved the goodness of which he was the very personification by failing to conquer Italy when Charles’s entire army and navy were away fighting in Tunis. And who but Francis, through his alliance with the Turks, had brought the infidels among Christians? ‘The interest of him who reigns has nothing to do with the finer points of law, he knows nothing of formalities, he does not give in to illusory honesty, and once he becomes the lord of his government everything that is forbidden is allowed and every reproof is praise.’
The implication was that there was nothing to prevent him from doing what was in his best interests, which was to restore his damaged reputation by abandoning his formal alliance with the Turks and joining forces with the pope and the emperor. The Congress of Nice lasted from 15 May to 20 June. Since Paul was unable to persuade Francis and Charles to meet there in person, he appointed three cardinals to represent each of them, and Francis was finally persuaded to sign a ten-year truce. In December of the following year Aretino asked Giuseppe Porta Salviati to send a portrait of himself to Francis4 with a letter in which he said that even Titian, ‘the life of the brush and colour of nature, who has represented my face, cannot show my heart, because if that had been possible, in the ardent centre of it you would have seen the image of Your Highness’. The Treaty of Nice did not last, and no joint action against the Turks was undertaken.
We don’t know when Titian started the battle scene for the Great Council Hall – he may have done some work on the canvas over the years – but we do know that he had finished by August 1538, only a little more tha
n a year after the threatening decree from the Council of Ten. And we can see how he planned it from a marvellously vigorous preparatory drawing (Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins)5 in black crayon and white chalk on blue paper from which one can surmise that he owed the basic arrangement of his composition to Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoons for his Battle of Anghiari. There also exist a number of drawings for the horses and riders.6 These sketches for the battle, of which there are more than for any of Titian’s other paintings, were presumably for the use of one or more assistants, without whom he could not have finished such a large and complex work in time to avert financial disaster, especially as it was one of the most elaborate and at nearly six metres high perhaps the largest he ever painted. All the other artists who had so far worked on this scale for the Great Council Hall had used assistants, and in this case the overall composition was more important than the quality of the brushwork in a very large painting that would be impossible to see in detail when it was placed high on a wall between two south-facing windows.
Like the other two great Renaissance battle scenes by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo for the Great Council Hall in Florence, Titian’s is lost. But we have some idea of how the completed work looked before it was destroyed in the fire of 1577 from an engraving of it by Giulio Fontana, from the survival of one of a number of painted copies and from contemporary descriptions. The writers Anton Doni, Lodovico Dolce and Vasari singled it out as one of the principal attractions of Venice. El Greco, who knew Titian’s work well and may have been in his workshop in 1570, thought it his supreme masterpiece. Vasari described it as ‘a fury of fighting soldiers while a terrible rain falls from heaven, which work, taken entirely from life, is held to be the best of the histories in the room and the most beautiful’. But Vasari, or the assistants who helped him with his biography of Titian, was confused about its subject. It was not a viewpoint that could possibly have been taken from life even if the artist had been present at the battle, and its subject was supposed to be the Battle of Spoleto, which according to legend had taken place in the twelfth century. Perhaps Titian later confessed to Vasari that he had based the setting on a place near Pieve di Cadore that he had known well since childhood and on accounts he had heard from relatives who had taken part in the Battle of Cadore in which the victorious Venetians had been commanded by Bartolomeo d’Alviano. But Vasari wrote that it represented the rout of Ghiara d’Adda (now Gera d’Adda), a battle that d’Alviano had actually lost in 1499.
