Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Pietro Lando was seventy-seven when he succeeded Andrea Gritti on 19 January 1539 after a hard-fought electoral battle against the seventy-year-old procurator Francesco Donà. The new doge was said to be still a handsome man when Titian painted a votive portrait of him for the Collegio three years later, but that picture was destroyed in the fire of 1574. Lando had studied humanities and philosophy as a young man, but had begun practising as an advocate when he was eighteen in order to support his family, which was neither rich nor one of the oldest of the patrician clans. He proved himself an able bureaucrat in a succession of government posts and a distinguished captain general at sea before his election to the procuracy, the antechamber of the doges, in 1535. He assumed with his doge’s hat what was in many ways a poisoned chalice. The government of the Most Serene Republic was going soft and becoming ever more open to corruption. The price of grain was inflated by severe shortages. Petty rulers who had once been happy to trade on favourable terms were now in the hands of the papacy, the emperor and the Turks, all of whom drove harder bargains. There was flooding on the mainland. The plagues that had formerly controlled the size of the population had ceased for the time being, but the city was infected with a breakdown of morale. The state was insolvent, the rich too lazy and pampered to think of embarking on the war galleys, the poor struggling to ward off starvation.

  As the Turkish war ground on, Lando’s government took the decision to offer the sultan, if absolutely necessary, up to 300,000 ducats for a truce that would give Venice ownership of Nauplia and Malvasia. Although the decision was of course highly classified, French spies managed to penetrate the secretariats of the Senate and the Council of Ten. A certain Agostino Abondio, an employee of the French ambassador in Venice, bribed two brothers, Constantino and Nicolò Cavazza, secretaries to the Council of Ten and the Senate respectively, to leak information about the concessions the Venetians were prepared to make, which the French ambassador passed on immediately to Constantinople. The plot was not uncovered until 1542, when the lover of Abondio’s wife found incriminating evidence that pointed also to a number of corrupt Venetian patricians. So when it came to negotiating a peace treaty in 1540 Venetian diplomats were in the dark about the reasons for the sultan’s adamant refusal to bargain, and on 2 October Venice, in addition to agreeing to pay the enormous sum of 300,000 ducats in instalments, was also obliged to sign away the fortresses of Nauplia and Malvasia, the last Venetian trading posts in the Peloponnesus, as well as islands in the Aegean that it had previously held.

  But Lando, who presided over the sorry end of a war that had not been of his making, turned out to be a capable leader. In the six years of his reign the machinery of government was reformed and strengthened with the creation of new offices and magistracies, one of which was specifically created to prevent further leaks of state secrets. Nor were the terms of the truce entirely unfavourable to Venice. Suleiman was diverted in the coming years by wars in Persia, and although the Ottoman officials required Venetian trading galleys to gain official licences to enter and leave Turkish waters, Venice retained the right to continue sending merchant fleets to Alexandria, Beirut and Tripoli. By April 1541, when relations with the Turks were stable enough for the Republic to turn its attention towards the restitution of Venetian prisoners, Aretino addressed one of his most grovelling letters, sent with a silver portrait medal of himself, to none other than ‘Khair ed-Din Barbarossa King of Algiers’. Barbarossa was not a king. He was Suleiman’s viceroy of Algiers. Aretino flattered him with his praise of the ‘famous king, worthy pasha, unconquered captain and egregious man’ and the valour and wisdom that maintained the favour of ‘his tremendous and benign majesty Suleiman, mightiest of emperors’, advising him that Christian pens, despite their different religion, had described his triumphant adventures in books that would preserve him from being forgotten; and so why not, ‘when the fortunes of war give to you as prisoner some poor Frank or other, treat him with clemency, remembering the obligation that your lofty greatness has to those whose pens have given you immortality’? The outrageous flattery was successful. Barbarossa replied with a letter addressed to ‘The first among Christian writers Pietro Aretino’ in which he observed that the portrait of his magnificent visage had impressed the grand vizier, and that he, Barbarossa, wanted to meet ‘the writer with the face of a soldier’.

  When in late October 1541 Charles V launched a delayed and ill-advised attack on Barbarossa’s Algiers – funded in large part by the treasuries of Naples and Sicily – Venice wisely did not take part. The emperor was forced to retreat after only a week during which the imperial fleet was battered by a violent storm. Aretino, with his eye on his imperial pension, wrote to the emperor praising the resourcefulness and fortitude he had shown in the face of a battle that had been won by the weather, describing – as he had done before in relation to the failure of the imperial army in Provence – what had actually been a humiliating defeat as a victory, ‘Whereby the supreme and sacred name of the great Charles has become a marvel which will hold the world in continuing admiration’. The world maybe, but not the Republic of Venice, which had learned the lesson that Andrea Gritti had failed to impart: it was not strong enough to fight the Turks alone and it could not count on allies. Its policy of peace was justified only a year later after the defeat at Algiers when an attempt by Ferdinand of Austria to reconquer part of Hungary proved another disaster for the Habsburgs. So it was that for the next thirty years of Titian’s life the Most Serene Republic of Venice remained at peace, and as a French historian writing in the nineteenth century put it, the history of the Venetians flowed on ‘without being marked by any events worthy of the attention of posterity’.32

  EIGHT

  Titian in his Fifties

  Certainly your brush has kept its miracles for the ripeness of your old age.

  ARETINO TO TITIAN, JULY 1542

  If Titian and Michelangelo were one body, or if the disegno of Michelangelo were joined with the colore of Titian, you could call him the god of painting, exactly like real gods, and whoever holds a different opinion is a stinking heretic.

  PAOLO PINO, DIALOGO DI PITTURA, 1548

  When Titian reached the then venerable age of fifty, his career was at a low ebb. In the 1520s he had juggled commissions from Alfonso d’Este, Altobello Averoldi, Broccado Malchiostro, Alvise Gozzi, Jacopo Pesaro and Federico Gonzaga. The Death of St Peter Martyr, completed in 1530, was universally regarded then and until it was consumed by fire in the nineteenth century as his supreme masterpiece; and for the rest of that decade continuing demands from Federico Gonzaga, Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Scuola della Carità, the ducal palace and not least the emperor and his entourage had stretched him and his workshop to the limit. But by 1540 four of his most appreciative and powerful patrons were dead: Alfonso d’Este in 1534, Francesco Maria della Rovere and Andrea Gritti in 1538, Federico Gonzaga in 1540. His battle scene for the Great Council Hall and Presentation of the Virgin for the Scuola della Carità had proved that he could paint difficult subjects with many figures on a very large scale. Nevertheless, the most lucrative commissions that came his way were for portraits.

  Meanwhile there was trouble at home. Titian’s second marriage and the birth of his daughter Lavinia were blows to the adolescent Pomponio. Insecure at the best of times as the motherless child of a famous father, Pomponio had more reason than most teenagers to wonder who he was and where he stood in the world. Although his lack of vocation for the priesthood cannot have been unusual at a time when 3 per cent of the male population of Europe were in the Church in one capacity or another, he must have felt, as he approached manhood, that his father had as good as disinherited him. And he may have been right. Although Titian’s ostensible motive for choosing the priesthood for the boy was to spare him the hardships and uncertainties of an artist’s life, he may also have disliked the idea of interference from anyone, least of all his elder son, with his own evolving creativity. As a priest Pomponio was excluded
from the studio, the centre of Titian’s life and thoughts, where the younger Orazio would take the place as his father’s chief assistant and heir that would normally be given to the first-born. Pomponio could never marry, could never continue the Vecellio line with legitimate children, and if he had had children (which he never did) could not have passed on property to them. Nevertheless, when the boy threw aside his studies for the priesthood and fled from Biri Grande to Cadore, Titian cared enough to turn for help to Aretino, who obliged him by writing to ‘Pomponio, my little monsignor’:

  Your father Titian has just brought me the greetings you sent, and they pleased me hardly less than the two grouse that came with them, which I was supposed to present to another gentleman in his name but instead gave to myself. And now that you have seen how generous I am allow me to pay you back ‘a thousand, thousand times, singing all night long’ as the saying goes; and asking that you give the leanest of them to your pretty little brother Orazio since he has forgotten to tell me how goes his latest fancy for spending, as soon as he can, this world and the next. Your thrift is a better way of getting worldly goods and since you are to be a priest I don’t believe you will ever have to depart from the order of Melchizedek.1

  And so, he continues, he wishes the boy good health, but has ‘worse to say’:

  It is time to return to your studies, and since as far as I know there are no schools in the country, the city must be the fur coat that keeps you warm this winter. Come away, and with the twelve years that you have try some snacks of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. I want us to drive all the learned doctors in this world to despair just as the fine things your papa does drive mad all the painters in Italy. That’s all. Keep warm and in good appetite.2

  But the Aretino whose mighty pen could persuade the most powerful rulers in the world to do his bidding could not lure Pomponio back to his studies for long. Several years later Titian, in the postscript to a letter to his first cousin Toma Tito Vecellio, a notary in Cadore, wrote, ‘About Pomponio I say nothing because I know that he is putting on weight and is a great one for hunting birds with falcons. Soon the cold will drive him away from Cadore.’

  The body of the letter to Toma Tito, which Titian wrote from Venice on 23 September 1539, was about a more immediately urgent family matter. His sister Dorotea, now getting on for fifty and still living in Cadore, had recently been widowed. She relied for her living on the dowry, worth in excess of 700 lire (110 ducats), which had been provided by their grandfather Conte on her marriage to Matteo Soldani in 1508. But the notarized affidavit confirming Dorotea’s dowry had been lost during the Cambrai war in a raid on Cadore by the emperor Maximilian. There was a claim against the estate of her late husband, and without proof of her legal right to the dowry it could be regarded as part of his estate. Although there can be no doubt that Titian was concerned for the financial security of his sister, it was also in his own interest that she should retain her dowry. If her right to it could not be proved, he would have to repay the money raised against it, and it would have fallen upon him and the rest of the family to support Dorotea in her old age. Titian requested Toma Tito to ask for the help of his father Antonio, also a notary, and of Dorotea’s brother-in-law, Ser Tomaso, and to read to Dorotea a letter he was writing to her on the same day with instructions about how to proceed. She must appoint as her agent an attorney by the name of Alexandro Ziliol, giving him the power to act for her in all respects, then have the legal document he has drawn up sent to Titian. Meanwhile she should try to remember the names of some of the witnesses to the dowry agreement, have them questioned by the Venetian representative in Cadore and see that the deposition is sent to the judges dealing with dowries in Venice. ‘Do all these things as quickly as possible, because time is of the essence, since I am being pressed by our adversary to give him the money that we raised, so do not be wanting for diligence and prompness, and be well.’

  On 16 October three men who had been present at Dorotea’s marriage testified before a judge appointed by the Council of Cadore that the value of her dowry had been something between 700 and 800 lire. And since we hear nothing more about the matter it can be assumed that Titian’s legal action was successful.

  On a visit to Cadore the following September Titian used his power as a count palatine for the first time to appoint another first cousin, Vincenzo Vecellio, as notary. (Two years later, Vincenzo sold Titian and Francesco two sawmills at Ansogne, near Pieve, for the bargain price of thirteen ducats.) But Titian’s close relationships with his family had less benign consequences for his two sons. He had forced Pomponio into a career in the Church to which the boy, as Titian himself later agreed, ‘was not much inclined’. His more biddable younger son Orazio put off deciding on a career until he took up his brushes at sixteen and began to work in a simplified version of his father’s style. But he was as lazy in his own way as Pomponio, and Titian had other uses for him. Although Orazio would marry in 1547, he remained under his father’s thumb all his life, sometimes assisting him in the studio but more often as his factotum, a role that would become more onerous after the death of Titian’s brother Francesco in 1559.

  In the early 1540s Titian was embroiled in a prolonged and bitter dispute about his Pentecost (Venice, Church of Santa Maria della Salute). This was an old commission for the high altar of the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito in Isola (for which he had painted his St Mark Enthroned many years earlier), which had recently been rebuilt by Sansovino. There were problems with the commission from the beginning. As long ago as 1529 Titian had painted the subject one way, tried another a few years later and then put it aside. That there was no contract for the painting is not surprising since none survives for so many of his Venetian altarpieces. When he failed to deliver it several years after the original commission, the patrons of the church discontinued their annual payments of the grain and wine that had been intended to defray the final fee, which was to have been decided by experts when the altarpiece was finished. In the intervening years Titian worked on it from time to time. But it was not until Vasari, in Venice in the winter of 1541–2 to design the stage sets for Aretino’s new Carnival comedy La Talenta, was offered the job of decorating the ceiling of Santo Spirito that he began to work on the commission in earnest. Vasari had turned down the request to paint the ceiling, but it may have been the whiff of competition that impelled Titian at long last to get on with his altarpiece.

  We know what happened when he finally delivered the painting from the surviving records of a legal action he took against the canons of Santo Spirito not long afterwards. One of the witnesses who testified during the case said he had seen a painted sketch of the altarpiece in Titian’s studio in 1538; another had actually seen Titian working on it. Meanwhile the prior of the church had offered 400 ducats for it. Titian had insisted on 500, and two patricians, Antonio Dandolo and Girolamo Cornaro, agreed to settle the matter. The Pentecost was still unfinished when it was installed in the church in a marble frame in 1541. Titian had himself rowed out to the church to work on it over the next several years, but had still not completed it when the paint began to blister. He then had it removed to his house for repairs. And there it remained. The original turned out to be so damaged by blistering and mould that he painted the new version, probably with studio help using the first version as a guide, that can be seen in Santa Maria della Salute today.3

  The judge appointed to hear Titian’s case was the auditor of the papal legate in Venice, Giovanni della Casa, who was to play a significant role in Titian’s later career, and who, after the canons of the church objected to the pope that della Casa was biased in Titian’s favour, acted jointly with the vicar of the patriarch Girolamo Querini. The question to be decided was whether, as Titian claimed, the painting had deteriorated because the canons had failed to take adequate precautions against the damp, or whether, as the canons insisted – with some justice considering that Titian had worked on the painting in situ – the cause was the artist’s bad workmanshi
p. Unfortunately we do not know the outcome, but it must have been resolved by 1546 when Titian began work on the three ceiling paintings for the same church that Vasari had refused.

  In the meantime Titian and Francesco, who were expanding the timber business and investing in property on the mainland, acquired some land near Vittorio Veneto, as it is known today, halfway between Venice and Cadore. Orazio had scarcely reached the age of sixteen when Titian employed him, on 24 December 1539, to pay twenty-five ducats to the relevant body in Venice for exemption from local taxes on ten fields he had purchased on a low hill, the Col di Manza, near the castle of Roganzuolo, six kilometres south of Ceneda (which is now joined with Serravalle as Vittorio Veneto). It was from these Cenedese Hills that Titian stopping as a boy on his journey from Cadore to Venice had had his first sight of the Venetian plain stretching down to the lagoon with the bell tower of San Marco just visible in the distance. Now, some four decades later, the countryside through which he made the same journey had been developed with villas and farms as more and more Venetians invested in property and agriculture on the terraferma as an alternative to trade with the Levant. Today the view from Castello Roganzuolo is obscured by the smoke from factories that have long since disfigured the beauty of the plain. But the place where Titian would spend holidays for the rest of his life has retained some of its magic. There are no signposts to Castello Roganzuolo and when you ask for directions some people say they have never heard of it. But once you have made your way through the modern suburbs around Vittorio Veneto you will finally come upon a little hamlet where stands of cypresses, olive trees and vineyards run right up to the terrace of the now forlorn little church of San Fior Sopra. The Via Tiziano passes villas, a few of them old but mostly run down or heavily restored, any one or none of which might have been the one Titian built there in the late 1540s.