by Sheila Hale
In May of the following year Bembo wrote from Rome to Girolamo Querini asking him to convey his thanks to M. Tiziano for the gift of his second portrait for which he had intended to pay as was only proper. But ‘now that he in his courtesy wishes that I should remain in his debt so it shall be, and one day I will do something else for him’. The return favour Titian may have had in mind when he refused payment, something that he rarely sacrificed, was Bembo’s assistance in engineering a papal benefice for Pomponio. The benefice in question was attached to San Pietro in Colle, an imposing castle that stood across the valley from the property he was in the process of buying for his holiday villa on the Col di Manza. The abbey itself had been suppressed in the previous century, but still provided a very handsome income from the extensive lands it had owned. Possessing this living for Pomponio was to become an obsession that Titian would pursue relentlessly over the coming years.
Two portraits of military men – Gabriele Tadino, Charles V’s artillery commander, 1538 (Winterthur, Bühler Collection) and Vincenzo Cappello, 1540 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), five times supreme commander of the Venetian navy – are of questionable authenticity.27 But the Allocution of Alfonso d’Avalos (Madrid, Prado), before it was damaged by a fire in the Madrid Alcázar and subsequently repainted so extensively that virtually nothing of Titian remains of it, was so impressive that it deceived generations to come about the true character of d’Avalos28 and of the event it purportedly records. Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara and Vasto, whom Charles V had appointed military governor of Milan in 1538, commissioned the painting when he was in Venice in January 1539. He had been sent there by Charles to attend the celebrations surrounding the installation as doge of Pietro Lando, and to try to persuade the Venetians to join a crusade against the Turks in alliance with Charles and Francis I. He was given a grand reception but failed to accomplish his mission. Early in the following year when Titian was in Milan they agreed that the portrait would show him addressing his troops from a podium with his nine-year-old son Francesco Ferrante standing by his side as helmet bearer. There were a number of Italian precedents for the depiction of the ancient Roman ceremony known as an adlocutio, and the subject must have interested Titian at a time when he was absorbed by the Roman portrait busts and medals he was using as models for Federico Gonzaga’s Roman Emperors.
Because he was still working on the Emperors at the time of the commission he did not make an immediate start on the Allocution. Aretino, however, kept d’Avalos in touch with its progress. In November 1540 he wrote explaining that the delay was due to Titian having been detained at Mantua and praising the painting that he said he had seen the previous day: the reflections from the plates of armour flashing like lightning which would blind if not dazzle the eyes of those who beheld it; d’Avalos’s son wearing armour similar to that worn by Roman heroes on antique arches, looking like Phoebus by the side of Mars. When the picture was not ready a month later, Aretino sent d’Avalos a large painted sketch of it in an attempt to mollify his mounting impatience. But even then the armour Aretino had described was not yet painted. Titian wanted to encase d’Avalos in the most up-to-date suit, the one in which he had portrayed him ten years earlier being by then out of fashion. In February 1541 Aretino wrote to Girolamo Martinengo, a Brescian nobleman and army captain through whom he sometimes obtained knives, weapons and armour for his friends from the famous manufacturers in Brescia, suggesting that Titian would immortalize him with a portrait in exchange for ‘a breastplate with a matching light helmet and arm pieces in today’s style but pure white’.
Titian may or may not have been aware that his Allocution was a piece of dishonest propaganda. The event to which it referred had taken place in 1537 when d’Avalos’s Spanish troops in Lombardy had mutinied. Far from rallying them with his eloquence, he had hesitated before taking action and when the insurrection got out of hand he had managed to quell it by offering his son as hostage, a courageous gesture that was lost on the people of Milan from whom he had raised the necessary money. He was in any case a disastrous governor, whose repressive measures had included persecuting Augustinian friars whom he suspected of heresy. Nevertheless, when Titian’s painting reached Milan in time for a visit by Charles V on 22 August 1541 it caused a sensation with the crowds d’Avalos invited to admire it. Francesco Marcolini, who had seen it there, wrote to Aretino praising the painting in which ‘your more than brother Tiziano has painted a lifelike portrait of Alfonso Davolos del Vasto Marchese who addresses his army in the action and form of Julius Caesar … which the entire population of Milan saw as a Divine and most distinguished simulacrum’. Titian rewarded Aretino for his help by portraying him as one of the halberdiers, and d’Avalos was sufficiently satisfied by the success of the painting to reward Titian with a lifetime pension of fifty ducats a year.
The painting did not, however, succeed in appeasing the emperor, who was aware of d’Avalos’s unpopularity in Milan and of the inglorious circumstances of the episode it was supposed to record. D’Avalos was further discredited in the emperor’s eyes when the French defeated his army in 1544, and he died in disgrace two years later. Nevertheless, Titian’s Allocution worked its magic on his posthumous reputation. For the rest of the century many people were persuaded by Titian’s skill and use of classical imagery that this Roman general in shining armour represented personal sacrifice and the fidelity of armies to the emperor’s commanders.
The main business of Titian’s visit to Milan in early 1540, when he had discussed plans for the Allocution, was to receive Pomponio’s canonicate of the church of Santa Maria della Scala, promised by the emperor and now vacant, which was handed over by d’Avalos. It may have been d’Avalos who persuaded him while he was in Milan to accept a commission from the Confraternity of the Holy Crown for an altarpiece for its chapel in the Dominican church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in which one of the thorns from Christ’s crown of thorns was preserved. Titian did not contest the fee for the Crowning with Thorns (Paris, Louvre) although it was only 200 scudi, less than half the payment he had asked from the nuns of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli for his Annunciation and was demanding from the canons of Santo Spirito for the Pentecost. The panel was relatively small and there were probably other considerations that persuaded him to paint for quite a modest fee his only major altarpiece of the period for a church outside Venice. He may have wished to commemorate Pomponio’s benefice by establishing his artistic presence in Milan. Perhaps he liked the idea of seeing his work compared with Leonardo’s Last Supper in the refectory of the same church, where it had already begun to deteriorate because Leonardo had used oil instead of fresco on plaster.
And yet there is something unconvincing about the Crowning with Thorns, which suggests that Titian was not yet comfortable with the Catholic Reformation emphasis on the redemption of mankind through Christ’s suffering, which was no longer compatible with the religious pastoral idylls that had been favoured by Neoplatonic humanists in his youth. Unable to engage his emotions with the subject, he built the picture with images that were fresh in his mind’s eye. The heavily rusticated wall in the background recalls Giulio Romano’s architecture in Mantua,29 while the two Herculean brutes who press the crown into His skull are quotations from Giulio’s frescos of giants in the Palazzo Tè. The pose of the man in chain mail with his back to us is the same figure in reverse as the halberdier in the Allocution, and the bust in the arch of the Roman emperor Tiberius, who ruled at the time of the Crucifixion, is taken from his Emperor Nero for Federico Gonzaga. Although the triangular halo around Christ’s head formed by the sticks of His torturers is a clever device, His flaccid figure looks more like a model posing than a Redeemer suffering intolerable pain. Christ’s toes are unnaturally relaxed while His plump legs twist in one direction and His upper body the other in a way that was presumably intended to refer to the Laocoön – a source that had become something of a cliché by then.30
The Crowning with Thorns
has been taken as evidence that the ageing Titian was undergoing a ‘Mannerist crisis’ caused by a need to come to terms with the styles of the young breakaway Tintoretto, of Michelangelo, the only living artist whose reputation rivalled his own, and of the Tuscan Mannerists Vasari and Francesco Salviati, both of whom were in close touch with Aretino when they came to Venice on short working visits in the late 1530s and early 1540s. Although crisis is perhaps too strong a word – Titian, after all, had been absorbing ideas from Michelangelo and other central Italian artists since the beginning of his career while retaining his own distinctly Venetian painterly style – it is true that in the next two decades, as his patrons became more aware of the latest artistic trends outside Venice, his artistic relationship with Michelangelo became more intense, his figures more monumental, but his brushwork looser as though in defiance of the Tuscan preference for high finish.
His depiction of Christ’s agony and the barbarous brutality of those who torture Him is certainly disturbing – some critics have gone so far as to dismiss the painting as merely histrionic – in a way that none of his religious paintings had been up to that point. The subject, however, was not his choice. It was dictated by the Confraternity for whose chapel it was destined. Titian was always sensitive to the wishes of his patrons and was able to adapt his style to their chosen subjects. It was not until later in life that his palette and his religious subjects would darken as though in sympathy with the tortures undergone by Christ and the Catholic saints who had died at the hands of brutal heretics in order to redeem mankind from its fall from grace.
The days when pastoral and religious texts were often conflated by humanists, when the Virgilian Arcadia was identified with the Garden of Eden, and Titian had painted his charming Madonnas and saints dressed as fine ladies picnicking in the mountain pastures of the Veneto, were over. Times had changed since a sophisticated young Venetian elite, recently liberated from the seafaring duties that had preoccupied their parents and steeped in the pastoral literature published by the Venetian presses, had enjoyed Titian’s identification of the Christian story with the pagan Golden Age. The earliest of his Giorgionesque idylls had been painted during the Cambrai war, the greatest external threat that the Republic of Venice had ever faced. The battle now was of an altogether different order: it was for the very souls of all Catholics; and if few of them understood the finer points of the higher theological dialectic no one, neither Titian nor his wealthy patrons, would be able to escape the new religious uneasiness.
Titian returned to Venice from Milan in February when he received the first instalment of three payments31 for the Crowning of Thorns. In April Aretino negotiated on his behalf with a maker of musical instruments, Alessandro Trasontino, known as ‘dagli Organi’, for a harpsichord, ‘one of those machines’, as Aretino described it in his letter to Trasontino, ‘which makes the soul a prey to ecstasy’. Titian, wrote Aretino, would pay for the instrument with a portrait of Trasontino which would be one of those examples of his work so true to living nature that it would fill people with wonder. The harpsichord had been installed in Biri Grande when Titian gave a supper party on 1 August.
The guests were Aretino, Sansovino and two other Tuscans, Francesco Priscianese, a Latin grammarian, and Giacomo Nardi, an historian and playwright, both Florentine republicans living in exile. It is the only occasion on which Titian is reported to have dined in literary company, and at the beginning of the evening a conversation about art was interrupted by the arrival of a letter deploring the behaviour of an unnamed grammarian who had spoiled a similar occasion in Rome with ‘the bitterness of grammatical questions’. Nevertheless Priscianese was so struck by Titian’s hospitality that he wrote a letter about it to two friends. Later he appended it to his magnum opus, which was being printed in Venice at the time.
On 1 August I was invited to celebrate the kind of Bacchanal which, I know not why, is called ferrare agosto,32 so that for most of the evening I argued about it in a delightful garden belonging to Missier Titiano Vecellio, the excellent Venetian painter (as everyone knows), a person truly suited to spice every feast with his pleasantries. There were gathered together with the said Missier Titiano (because birds of a feather flock together) some of the most rare intellects that are found today in this city … so that I was the fourth amongst so much wisdom. Here, before the tables were set out, because the sun despite the shade was still making his heat much felt, we spent the time looking at the lifelike figures in the excellent pictures which fill the house and in discussing the real beauty and charm of the garden, which everyone marvelled at with singular pleasure. The house is situated at the far end of Venice by the edge of the sea, and from it one sees the pretty little island of Murano and other lovely places. As soon as the sun set, this part of the sea teemed with gondolas adorned with beautiful women and resounded with the varied harmony of voice and musical instruments which accompanied our delightful supper until midnight.33
Titian at this time had crossed the threshold into what the Venetian census classified as old age. If he had died then he would still be marked out by posterity as one of the supreme masters of European painting. What neither he nor his guests could possibly have known on that idyllic evening in Biri Grande was that Titian in his fifties was at the mid-point of his career, and that the most extraordinary work was still to come.
PART IV
1543–1562
In the last three decades of his long career, Titian did not paint man as if he were as free from care and as fitted to his environment as a lark on an April morning. Rather did he represent man as acting on his environment and suffering from its reactions … Yet Titian became neither soured nor a pessimist. Many of his late portraits are even more energetic than those of his early maturity.
BERNARD BERENSON, ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE, 1938
ONE
Aretino Plays Pontius Pilate
Why do you continue to torture Him when there is no cause? Do you not hear that the earth and the sky cry out at the wrong that your wickedness does Him? Ah put off every injury and calm your souls which are moved by lack of reason …
Take Him away and crucify Him then, but I should not consent to the death of a man who has done no wrong.
PONTIUS PILATE IN PIETRO ARETINO’S THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST, 1535
Daily life was good for Titian in his early fifties. There were some days when he locked himself away from the world in the studio on the top floor of the house in Biri Grande, painting up a storm, turning from one work to another as the mood took him. But Titian – unlike the solitary, spiritually tortured Michelangelo, who considered socializing a waste of time that weakened the powers of serious artists – was a man who could balance an intense and complex inner life with an appetite for society. When he put down his brushes and changed from his paint-splattered work clothes into the silks, satins and furs that befitted his status as a wealthy gentleman, he was ready for the company of family and friends. The house in Biri Grande had enough rooms to accommodate Pomponio, Orazio, his little daughter Lavinia, a few servants and any of the numerous Vecellio relatives when they were in Venice. Having sown his wild oats in his youth he now (much to Aretino’s despairing incredulity) preferred a peaceful, monogamous relationship with a domesticated wife who looked after his household – and who kept such a low profile that we know nothing about her. Pomponio was always a worry, but whatever his problems he could forget them for a while when relaxing with old friends and new acquaintances, dining with Aretino and Sansovino at Casa Aretino on the Grand Canal or entertaining at Biri Grande where his guests whiled away hot summer evenings sitting under the trees, catching the breeze from the lagoon, admiring the pictures on his walls, making music, dining on rare delicacies.
When he made his way through the city he saw a Venice – ‘this Venice of his’, as an imperial ambassador had put it when Titian refused one of the emperor’s several invitations to his court in Spain – that was different in many ways from the city h
e had first known four decades previously as an awestruck boy from the mountains. He could remember the days when the outskirts had been occupied by monasteries, gardens, orchards and sheds for drying dyed textiles. Now the suburbs were being developed – his own house had been built as recently as 1527 – to accommodate an expanding population; and the waters of the northern lagoon, which had once bordered his garden, were receding. New palaces of gleaming Istrian stone in the High Renaissance classical style were replacing brick or painted façades pierced by lacy Gothic windows. The Piazza San Marco, the centre of government and hub of the Venetian Empire, was a building site while his friend Jacopo Sansovino planned the most ambitious architectural transformation of any Renaissance city. After decades of war, Venice was at peace with the rest of Europe and would remain at peace with the Ottoman Empire until the last years of Titian’s life. Peace, however unsatisfactory the terms, was always beneficial to an economy based on trade. When people put tags on Italian cities – Florence ‘the Fair’, Bologna ‘the Studious’, and so on – Venice was once again ‘the Rich’.
