Titian
Page 44
Dolce in a brief reference just called it a battle. Ridolfi, who was born many years after it was destroyed, knew the Fontana print but must also have seen one of the painted copies when he described it as ‘the armed encounter at Cadore between the imperial troops and the Venetians’ in which ‘he imagined the natural site of his hometown with the castle situated above on a high mountain where the flash from a lightning bolt in the form of an arrow is suspended.7
Francesco Sansovino, whose father Jacopo was one of Titian’s closest friends, recognized that the battle scene was intended to represent the episode in the cycle of history paintings in which the emperor Federick Barbarossa destroyed Spoleto in 1155:
With surprising industry and art Titian represented the Battle of Spoleto in Umbria, where – conspicuous above all others – a captain, awake on a sudden to the noise of a fight, was armed by a page. On the front of his breastplate there shone with incredible reality the lights and reflections of arms and the clothes of the page. There was a horse of extreme beauty and a young girl rising from the depth of a ditch to its banks, in whose face the utmost terror was depicted. And beneath this piece there was no inscription.8
It is this missing inscription, which had clearly identified the subject of the ruined fresco, that has given rise to continuing speculations that Titian transposed the legendary medieval battle to the setting of a Venetian victory in order to please Doge Andrea Gritti, who hoped that the scene would remind those who caught the reference to the freezing day and night in March 1508 when the Venetian cavalry had destroyed the invading forces of Charles V’s grandfather the emperor Maximilian of Habsburg. If so, it seems an oddly impolitic reference at a time when the Venetian government was in need of Charles’s support against the Turks; and we can be reasonably certain that although Titian imagined the battle as having taken place in his native territory the subject he was asked to paint was the Battle of Spoleto.9
It would be going too far to suggest that Titian’s battle was a Renaissance Guernica, but representations of the horror and confusion of real battles, which claim innocent victims as well as armed warriors, were unusual in Renaissance Italy; and it was doubtless for that reason that Dolce singled out only one of the ‘extremely notable features’: the young woman, also mentioned by Ridolfi and Sansovino, ‘who has fallen into a ditch and is climbing out: she uses the bank for support with a stretch of the leg which is highly natural, and the leg gives the impression not of painting, but of actual flesh’. But Titian must also have taken particular pleasure in painting the suits of armour. His researches for Federico Gonzaga’s Emperors, which he had not yet completed, were on his mind. He had also made close studies of the cuirasses loaned to him by Francesco Maria and Guidobaldo della Rovere. And as he sketched the model for the battle scene, the pose of his Emperor Claudius wearing Guidobaldo’s cuirass stood in for the commander in the bottom-right corner the line of whose outstretched right arm is continued by the cannon that points to the horseman on the bridge.10
Titian’s sanseria was reinstated in August 1539; and although he never produced another history painting for the palace he retained it for the rest of his life, despite two later attempts to revoke it.11 The Council of Ten was from now on more cautious about granting sanserie to artists,12 but it may be that Titian struck a deal with the government that allowed him to fulfil his obligation by continuing to paint some of the ducal portraits that hung above the history paintings.13
Although the loss of Titian’s only history painting leaves a gaping hole in our appreciation of his output in the second half of the 1530s, another very large but entirely different kind of painting that he must have finished around the same time is still to be seen in the Accademia Gallery, in the former albergo or meeting room of the Scuola Grande della Carità.14 A competition for a ‘story of Our Lady as she was presented in the temple’, which was to be one of a cycle of canvases illustrating the life of the Virgin, had originally been won in 1504 by a minor painter who died soon afterwards. The board of the Scuola, in true Venetian fashion, waited another thirty years before it became sufficiently embarrassed by the superior standard of decorations in the other Scuole Grandi to invite Titian to paint the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple – the apocryphal story is told in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. He received the commission on 29 August 1534 and was planning it at least by the following February when the officers of the Scuola decided to adapt the windows to the left of the wall ‘in order to give light to the painting going on in the room’.
For Titian the job presented a number of challenges, one of which was the sheer size of the painting, which would stretch seven and a half metres along the entire length of one of the long walls of the room and have to make allowance for an existing entrance door. He would have to find a way of reconciling the by now retardataire narrative tableaux painted for Venetian Scuole around the turn of the century by Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio (a genre which Titian had himself rendered obsolete with his frescos in the Paduan Scuole di San Antonio more than two decades earlier) with the artistic requirements of the 1530s for more complex, sophisticated and livelier paintings. Whereas the older generation of ‘eyewitness’ painters had shown the members of the Scuole processing through a literal representation of Venice – chimney pots, bridges, buildings and all – Titian’s Presentation is a capriccio, a fantasy incorporating real and imaginary visual elements from a wide variety of sources, so that as Burckhardt put it,15 ‘The real subject is nearly overlaid by the crowd of accessory motives, which are indeed represented with astonishing freshness and beauty.’
What is most immediately striking about the Presentation is the unusual weight Titian gave to its architectural setting, which suggests that he discussed it with his architect friends Jacopo Sansovino and Sebastiano Serlio. He borrowed a number of his motifs from treatments of the same subject by Cima da Conegliano and Carpaccio; and from Jacopo Bellini, whose sketchbooks he had studied as a young apprentice in the studios of Jacopo’s sons Gentile and Giovanni. Just as Jacopo had alluded to the doge’s palace in his paintings of Solomon’s temple, the patterned pink and white bricks of the wall of the building on the right of Titian’s Presentation allude to the analogy between the ancient and modern temples of wisdom and justice. Jacopo’s versions of the same subject had also used the porch of pillars on Solomon’s temple described in I Kings 7: 6 and the same vantage point for the steps seen from the side on which the little girl ascends to meet the high priests of the temple. Titian, like Jacopo, incorporated an obelisk, a symbolic representation of the sun’s rays according to Pliny’s Natural History, which in the Renaissance had come to stand also for Christian light. Titian’s obelisk may refer to the Christ Pantocrator in the central roundel of the ceiling of the room who holds an open book displaying the words Ego sum lux mundi, I am the light of the world. An obelisk in any case was a standard feature of stage sets and was often used in paintings of the Presentation of the Virgin.16 Below it, on the far left, a woman holding a baby receives alms from a member of the confraternity, whose primary purpose was to provide for the poor.
Lit from the left, the actors, among them such incidental characters as a turbaned Turk, a Roman centurion, a little boy baiting a dog with a biscuit, contemporary Venetians leaning out of windows or from balconies, move and gesture towards the ascending piccola Maria, as Venetians affectionately call her, ‘sparkling like a sapphire in her nimbus of pale gold’17 against one of Titian’s most breathtaking landscape backdrops, where an escarpment very like the one with which he had ‘signed’ his fresco of the Miracle of the Jealous Husband in Padua and the craggy blue peaks of what looks like Monte Tre Pietre or Monte Pizzocco as seen from Sedico on the road that runs along the Piave from Venice to Cadore rise into billowing white clouds. This was not the last time he would evoke his native landscape, but it was the last time he would paint it in such specific focus. Directly beneath the twinned mountains Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna in antique dress, lead
a procession of the chief officers of the Scuola and other members of the board wearing their flat black caps and official robes, each one an individualized portrait. Vasari, when he wrote that Titian had included ‘all kinds of heads depicted from life’, set the competition to identify them. Ridolfi wanted the man in the red robe to be Titian’s friend Andrea de’ Franceschi, the serving grand chancellor of Venice at the time, whose portrait he had painted twice in the early 1530s. De’ Franceschi was a member but not an official of the Scuola, and Titian’s portraits of him do not resemble this man, whose red robe and black stole suggest that he was the chief executive. Later writers have thought they saw Bembo in the high priest, as well as Aretino, Titian and his daughter Lavinia in other characters.
But who are the three ornamental ladies at the foot of the steps? Titian took them virtually unchanged from Raphael’s cartoon for Paul Preaching at Athens,18 which was in the collection of Cardinal Grimani. And who is the old hag, one of the most discussed of the ‘portraits’, sitting with her chickens and basket of eggs by the side of the steps? Erwin Panofsky, who famously called her the ‘horrid egg woman’,19 thought she represented unconverted Judaism. Others maintain that she is nothing more than a deliberate quotation of the similar figure who appears in Cima’s Presentation and Carpaccio’s Reception of the English Ambassadors. As with so many Renaissance paintings there will always be a tension between commentators who search for iconographic meaning and those who believe that in Titian subject and meaning is subordinated to sensuousness of colour and pictorial design.20
And there has always been a division of opinion between those who feel affection and admiration for Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin and those who see it as a banal return to an outmoded tradition of narrative painting – or worse. For the English Romantic John Ruskin it was:
To me simply the most stupid and uninteresting picture ever painted by Titian. The colour of the landscape is as false as a piece of common blue tapestry, and the ‘celebrated’ old woman with the basket of eggs is as dismally ugly and vulgar a filling of a spare corner as was ever daubed on a side scene in a hurry at Drury Lane.
But for Hippolyte Taine, the French champion of naturalism, it was, unlike the works of Florentine painters who created a detached, abstract, idealized world, ‘more spontaneous and happier’ because ‘Titian loves our world, he understands it, he lives within it, and he reproduces it embellishing without recasting or suppressing it’.21
The officials of the Scuola, who seem to have been singularly uninterested in art, evidently did not care much for it. Perhaps they were put off by the brushwork, which is looser and more expressive than anything seen in previous narrative paintings for the Scuole Grandi. At their annual meeting on 6 March 1538, when Titian’s painting must have been all but finished,22 they recorded their decision to commission the next picture in the cycle from Pordenone. They asked him for an Assumption of the Virgin, but it was noted that Pordenone had come to the Scuola and explained that that late episode in her life did not follow on from the subject painted by ‘the most excellent master Titian’ and a vertical picture was the wrong shape for the space allocated to it. He proposed instead a Marriage of the Virgin, but in December he left for Ferrara and died there early in the new year of violent stomach pains and diarrhoea.23 The board of the Scuola Grande della Carità remained so indifferent to the masterpiece that is now one of the star paintings in the Accademia Gallery that in 1572 they cut a new door into the left side of the painting, thus chopping off the legs of their predecessors.
Titian’s St John the Almsgiver24 (Venice, Church of San Giovanni Elemosinario), another of his rare public paintings of the 1530s, is much less visited because its quality was for a long time obscured by destructive treatments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the church was closed for many years before a restoration in 1989–90 removed overpaintings and layers of yellow varnish. Now that the church is open, those who take the trouble to find it behind the market stalls that spill out from the Rialto can judge for themselves whether they agree with Ridolfi that ‘he showed in the saint’s face and in his grey hair the idea of a perfect man standing and giving alms to a poor man, exchanging in the bank of heaven golden coins for gems of glory’; or with Antonio Zanetti25 that it was as remarkable for its massive definition of parts and its brushstrokes ‘of determined conclusiveness’; or with Crowe and Cavalcaselle,26 who saw it in ‘dim and dusty’ light after some restorers had done their worst and squared off the arched top, that it was nevertheless ‘one of the finest works of the master’s middle time’; or with Johannes Wilde:27 ‘The saint’s appearance is imposing and calm. The colours do not disturb this calm: plum-red, the blue of ripe figs, and a gold-green have been extended on broad planes and are shown in innumerable tone values.’
From what Vasari has to tell us the altarpiece seems to have played a part in Pordenone’s brief and doomed attempt to gain supremacy over Titian in Venice. In his ‘Life of Titian’ Vasari wrote that Titian, after his return from Bologna,
found that a number of gentlemen who had taken Pordenone into their favour (giving high praise to the works executed by him on the ceiling of the Sala de’ Pregadi and elsewhere) had won for him the commission to paint a little altarpiece in the church of San Giovanni Elemosinario [Sts Catherine, Sebastian and Rocco Shown the Way by an Angel in the chapel to the right of the high altar]. This was so that he should do something in competition with Titian, who shortly before had painted for the same place a picture showing St John the Almsgiver in the robes of a bishop. However, for all the diligence with which he worked, Pordenone’s altarpiece fell far short of Titian’s work.
Vasari, who thought that Titian had gone to Bologna in 1530, was thus placing the picture at shortly after that date. In his ‘Life of Pordenone’ in the first (1550) edition of his Lives he said it had been painted in Pordenone’s lifetime, that is before 1539. If he was correct, which of course he often was not, Titian could have painted St John the Almsgiver while he was working on the Presentation of the Virgin or soon after he finished it. Some scholars,28 citing the thick overlapping brushstrokes and subdued colours lit by flashes of light that characterized Titian’s later style, have preferred to place it in the middle or late 1540s. But the protean Titian, who was able to change his style to suit his subject or the taste of a patron, has a way of fooling those who try to date his paintings by their style alone. The earlier date, furthermore, is supported by the likelihood that the painting was commissioned by Andrea Gritti, who had ordered that the church should be rebuilt after a fire in 1513 and who as its patron had the right to appoint its curates.
Andrea Gritti was eighty-four when he died on 28 December 1538 apparently from eating too many grilled eels on Christmas Eve. Titian had probably begun his portrait of him for the frieze above the cycle of history paintings in the Great Council Hall soon after losing his state brokerage. But Gritti never saw the portrait, which was not finished until 1540 when Titian received the customary fee for a ducal portrait of twenty-five ducats; and we know it only from replicas and variants.29 The best record we have of his forceful personality (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art)30 was probably an unofficial commission for his family, and since it is lit from the right, which is unusual for right-handed artists, intended for a specific place. It is all the more imposing because the canvas has not been relined and the detail of the brushwork survives.31 Gritti had supervised all the arrangements for his funeral. Bernardo Navagero, brother of Andrea Navagero who had died in 1529, delivered the oration at the formal ceremony in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, but the doge chose to be buried in San Francesco della Vigna, his parish church, which he had had rebuilt by Jacopo Sansovino, and where his tomb can be seen today to the left of the main altar. Although few can have disagreed with Benedetto Agnello that he had been ‘a wise doge for these troubled times’, Gritti’s last years had not been happy or politically successful. His robust constitution was worn down by a lifetime of unstinting e
xpenditure of energy on behalf of the Republic. In 1530 he had suffered a bout of melancholy after a bad fall that left him temporarily unable to walk. The death of his son Luigi in 1534 had nearly broken his spirit. He recovered well enough to refuse advice that he should renounce the excessive pleasures of the table to which he had been addicted all his life. But it cannot have escaped his sense of irony that the government of the Venice Jacopo Sansovino was transforming into a New Rome was in trouble.
Gritti’s lifelong Francophilia had been compromised by the alliance of Francis I with the heathen Turks and his policy of neutrality shattered by the Senate’s decision to go to war at sea against the Turks. Although Francis had agreed to a ten-year truce with Venice and the papacy in the May before Gritti died, in September Suleiman’s most feared admiral and corsair, Khair ed-Din, known as Barbarossa, defeated Venice and the papacy in a naval battle off Preveza in the Gulf of Arta which marked the start of a war that would end with Venice worse off than when it began. With Charles V persuaded by his sister Mary, regent of the Netherlands, to limit his objectives and his Genoese mercenary commander Andrea Doria less interested in victory than in maintaining his fleet intact, Venice found itself bearing the brunt of a hopeless and unfocused war.