Titian

by Sheila Hale

  The capital city of the Most Serene Republic was more famous than ever for its spectacular public processions, its carnivals, markets, music and theatrical entertainments, often with architectural stage sets designed by Sebastiano Serlio, a member of Titian’s inner circle whose treatise on the classical style, The General Rules of Architecture (the fourth volume of which was published in Venice in 1537), was spreading the language of Italian Renaissance architecture across Europe. Venice would remain the courtesan city par excellence until well after the Counter-Reformation, despite the usual occasional attempts by the authorities to crack down on prostitution and on courtesans whose style mimicked noble ladies. The government continued to issue sumptuary laws. One proclaimed in 1543 forbade prostitutes to wear, ‘nor have on any part of her person, gold, silver or silk, nor wear necklaces, pearl or jewelled or plain rings … and the use of all jewels is forbidden them, both out of doors and in their houses’. Nevertheless, some forty years later Montaigne would admire the luxurious apartments and dress of the courtesans he met in Venice, and by the seventeenth century the word ‘Venice’ over a door in other European cities was a euphemism for brothel.

  Venice was still set apart from all other cities by the beauty and singularity of its location in the middle of a lagoon; by its polyglot population of merchants, fortune seekers and refugees; by its independence from foreign rule; and by the stability of its unique oligarchic government. Governed as a republic by a closed class of patricians who inherited their right and obligation to rule, Venice nevertheless remained famous for the degree of tolerance and freedom of expression so eloquently celebrated by Titian’s dearest friend, ‘other self’ and publicist, the journalist, author and international powerbroker Pietro Aretino. From the safety of his house on the Grand Canal, Aretino continued to address his thundering, manipulative letters to everyone of consequence in the Renaissance world. The first volume of his letters published in 1537 had made him an international celebrity. The second volume appeared in 1542, dedicated to ‘the magnanimous and most supremely excellent’ Henry VIII, King of England, who responded by promising him a reward of 300 scudi.1

  Titian’s Venice was at the centre of the intensifying debate about the need to reform the Catholic Church in the face of the Protestant challenge. In 1536 the Farnese pope Paul III had chosen the Venetian nobleman, diplomat and historian Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, who as a younger man had undergone a spiritual crisis anticipating Martin Luther’s vision of justification by faith and abiding love of Christ, to preside over a committee of eminent prelates charged with investigating malpractices in the Church and proposing solutions. Their report, Concilium de emendenda ecclesia, published in 1537, exposed gross abuses and made recommendations about how to stamp them out. The Catholic Reformation, however, was split into two factions. The austere Theatine order, whose founding members had taken refuge in Venice from the Sack of Rome in 1527, were uncompromising theological reactionaries dedicated to rooting out as heresy anything that smacked of Protestantism. Paolo Giovio was one of many humanists who recognized the deficits of the obsessively high-minded Theatines, ‘who with strange appetites want tart sugar and who want to bind the elements of this ancient machine [the Catholic Church], and put them in a sack and reduce them to make them more beautiful and do not see that the wish to reduce them down to the primary materials would be to bring the machine itself to destruction’.2 Cardinal Gianpietro Caraffa, the zealous bigot who would become pope as Paul IV in 1555, was the leader and most powerful spokesman of the order.

  The more progressive Spirituali, also known as Italian Evangelists, were with very few exceptions loyal Catholics but occupied a middle ground that recognized the importance of such Protestant beliefs as personal religious renewal, justification in the eyes of God by faith, and guidance by the Scriptures. Their inner circle included the pious widow and poet Vittoria Colonna, whose bleak religious sonnets were admired by Michelangelo; the English cardinal Reginald Pole, who was Colonna’s spiritual adviser; the beautiful widow Giulia Gonzaga; Gianmatteo Giberti, Bishop of Verona; and the Sienese friar Bernardino Ochino, vicar general of the Capuchin order. Cardinal Contarini was their leader, and the pope, Paul III, was at first inclined to favour his liberal approach to reform, which was in tune with the policy favoured by Charles V, over Caraffa’s belligerent intolerance.

  When, in 1541, the emperor convened a colloquy of Catholic and Protestant theologians chaired by Contarini at Ratisbon (modern Regensburg), Paul’s hopes for a compromise seemed justified as the Catholic delegates came close to accepting the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. The Protestants, however, refused to agree with the Catholic position on transubstantiation, and the negotiations broke down. After Contarini’s failure to achieve a compromise, and his death in 1542, the pope, fearing that the Erasmian approach to compromise favoured by Contarini and Charles V might go too far towards appeasing the Protestant reformers, decided to give Caraffa his head. In July 1542 the reign of terror began when the Roman Inquisition, the first in Italy since the Middle Ages, was revived, and Caraffa became the most eager of six cardinals appointed ‘to suppress and uproot’, as he put it, ‘permitting no trace [of heresy] to remain’.

  One of the first and most prominent targets of the Inquisition was the Sienese Franciscan Bernardo Ochino, the most brilliant and charismatic preacher of the day, whose sermons, voicing the concerns of his fellow Spirituali, were especially popular in a Venice that had always been distrustful of papal interference and inclined towards anticlericalism. Pietro Bembo, who persuaded Vittoria Colonna to invite Ochino to deliver the Lenten sermon of 1539 in the Venetian church of Santi Apostoli, afterwards described to her the deeply emotional response of the crowds that packed the church: Ochino is ‘adored in this city, nor is there a man or woman who does not praise him to the skies’. Aretino was overwhelmed3 by his intellect, grace, deep sincerity, profound knowledge, elegant language and magisterial presence. The Venetians, he proclaimed, could not have been more eager to hear him if he had been John the Baptist. The friar, whom he described as ‘the trumpet and bell of the word of God’, had opened his own heart and mind ‘as though he had stood before Jesus Christ’ and shown him, so he claimed in a letter to the pope (in which he was angling for a cardinalate for himself), the errors of his ways. Santi Apostoli was, as it happened, Aretino’s parish church, and after Ochino had delivered a second sermon there in 1542 he wrote to the parish priest thanking him for giving his pulpit to a preacher whose ‘apostolic voice and Catholic words made kings good and the just perfect’.

  A few days later Ochino was summoned to Rome to appear before the Inquisition. Disguised in lay clothes and with Giberti and Ercole Gonzaga acting as his cover, he escaped across the Alps to Protestant Germany and went on to join Calvin in Geneva. The apostate Ochino wrote to a Venetian patrician that he would have taken refuge in Venice – ‘my Venice’ as he always called it – and knew he would have been welcomed there but had wanted to suffer alone and quickly rather than bring suffering on others by delaying the inevitable. He went on: ‘… God knows how much I want to see Christ [by which he now meant the Christ of the Protestants] reign in my Venice … Christ has begun to penetrate into Italy; but I want Him to enter in glory and openly, and I believe that Venice will be the gateway …’4

  Ochino’s belief that Venice would be the gateway of Protestantism into Italy was by no means far fetched. Protestant or quasi-Protestant academies continued to flourish in the lagoon where some of the young patricians held philo-Protestant views despite the disapproval of their elders. Concern with inner personal conversion and profound love of God was more widely and deeply felt in Counter-Reformation Venice than in any other Italian city. And it was in Venice that the intense, ecstatic, elaborated retellings of the biblical stories and lives of saints that poured from the fluent pen of Pietro Aretino in the late 1530s and 1540s made their greatest impact. Embellished with visual metaphors and added incidents, written in a racy demotic t
hat was deliberately more accessible than the high-flown rhetoric of his letters, they were bestsellers frequently reprinted.

  Titian took the cue for his large, stormy Ecce Homo (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) from Aretino’s Humanity of Christ, first published in 1535, in which the writer had added his own anecdotes to the episode from John 19: 2–3 and portrayed Pontius Pilate – the Roman governor of Judaea who reluctantly authorized the Crucifixion of Christ with the words ‘Behold the Man. I find no fault in him’ – as just and peaceable because he had after all done his best to save Christ. Titian, who finished his painting in 1543, gave the story an added dimension of contemporary relevance with references to events that affected Venice in the years while he was working on it. He cast Aretino as Pontius Pilate, the wise man who could see both sides of a problem but could not impose his judgement of Christ as innocent on the baying mob. He dressed him in shimmering pale-blue satin as he presents the bleeding, broken King of the Jews to a multitude of onlookers. From the steps of a Roman palace that might have been designed by Sebastiano Serlio, Aretino/Pilate directs the other players: some biblical figures in modern dress, some portraits of contemporaries, each relating in one way or another to the self-styled repository of the world’s secrets and chief propagandist for a Venice that called itself the City of Christ and the New Rome.

  The Ecce Homo was commissioned by Giovanni d’Anna, an immensely wealthy merchant of Flemish extraction and friend of Titian and Aretino, for the piano nobile of his family palace at San Benedetto. Giovanni’s father Martin van Haanan had Italianized the family name to d’Anna after settling in Venice in 1529 when he had the palace frescoed by Pordenone. Martin’s father had been ennobled by the Habsburgs in recognition of his financial contributions to their wars against the Ottoman Turks, and his son Giovanni remained close to the inner circle of the Habsburg court, which was chronically short of funds. The prominent two-headed Habsburg eagle on the shield held by the Roman soldier with his back to us at the bottom of the steps proclaims the patron’s imperial connection, as does Titian’s signature, ‘TITIANVS EQVES CES F’ (Titian Caesar’s Knight made this), the first of only seven extant paintings to refer to the knighthood that had been conferred upon him by Charles V.

  It is one of the largest5 and most spatially complex paintings that Titian produced in this period. Since he was in any case a slow worker who made changes to his paintings as he went along6 it is likely that he had started it some years before 1543, the date that appears beneath his signature on the scroll propped against the steps. He may have set to work on it in the late 1530s, shortly after completing the Presentation of the Virgin, which is organized on similar lines with a classical architectural setting as well as hints of the open brushwork that vibrates on the surface of the Ecce Homo. It is not impossible that Giovanni d’Anna’s commission was inspired by Bernardino Ochino’s first Lenten sermon in Venice, which had so greatly impressed Aretino and which d’Anna is likely also to have attended. If so, the lean figure in black carrying a wayfarer’s staff could be the friar in the simple dress that indicated his humility, conducting an ‘impossible dialogue’ across centuries about the significance of Christ’s sacrifice with the fat, goitered high priest Caiaphas, the real villain of the story, represented here as a rich contemporary Jew overdressed in an opulent purple robe and ermine shawl.7

  The two dynamic horsemen at the opposite end of the composition are the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and Alfonso d’Avalos. At the end of 1539 Charles V had sent d’Avalos to Venice to try to persuade the doge to continue fighting the unsuccessful war against the Ottoman Turks, who were threatening to invade Italy at that time. Titian cast him here as an ideal of the Christian soldier who directs the attention of the turbaned infidel across the gesticulating crowd to the episode of the Passion of Christ. Titian’s other portraits of Suleiman, whose image he painted often for various patrons from coins, medals and verbal descriptions, are lost to us. In this, the only one to survive, he gives him a surprisingly individualized face. The old enemy of the Venetian Republic and scourge of the Habsburg Empire on land and sea was by no means without his admirers, among them Paolo Giovio, who had observed in a commentary on the Turks dedicated to Charles V:

  Your Majesty should know that he is resolute and minutely informed on the affairs of Christianity and that he keeps his mind and forces in instant readiness for more wars. He has marvellous intuition. Not only is he adorned with many virtues, he lacks the salient vices of cruelty, avarice, and treachery … Above all, he is religious and liberal, and with these two qualities one flies to heaven.8

  The only women in the painting stand apart from the action. A ray of light shines on the white dress of the slender, blonde, older girl who catches our eye as though inviting us to share her feminine perspective on the cruelty and violence of a world dominated by men. Titian’s model for this representative of purity and common sense may have been Cecilia Alessandrini, possibly the daughter of a sister of his first wife and thus the first cousin of Pomponio and Orazio. The plump little girl in black who leans against her, apparently bored and restless because she is too young to understand the significance of what is happening, could be Aretino’s daughter, Adria, who was born in 1537. But a more likely candidate is Titian’s own daughter, Lavinia, by his second wife, who would have been about the right age; moreover, this little girl looks remarkably like Titian’s Portrait of Lavinia as a Matron (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie) painted after she had married and borne several children.9

  By the time the Ecce Homo was installed in the Palazzo d’Anna in 1543 its contemporary references would have assumed a more ambiguous significance. But if the altered circumstances affected the d’Anna family’s appreciation of Titian’s great painting there is no sign of it. Giovanni d’Anna must have been pleased with it because he commissioned Titian to paint a Christ at Golgotha as a pendant, as well as a Virgin and Child and two portraits of himself. (All these are lost.) The family continued to value the Ecce Homo so highly that they refused an offer of 800 ducats for it from the French king Henry III when he passed through Venice in 1574, and it remained in the palace until 1621 when it was acquired by the English envoy in Venice for the Duke of Buckingham. Carlo Ridolfi, who must have seen it before it was taken to England, was the first writer to recognize Aretino as Pontius Pilate and Suleiman as the turbaned horseman; and it was Ridolfi who set off attempts by subsequent writers to identify the other characters. Some have explained the crowd of onlookers as members of the d’Anna family, some the slender figure in black as the patron Giovanni d’Anna or Titian. But it was not until 1992 that an Italian scholar10 published the most revealing and plausible analysis so far of the painting in the context of the times.

  If Giovanni d’Anna’s Ecce Homo was not the only work in progress in Titian’s studio in the early 1540s, there was less steady work at that time than there had been in the previous two decades. It may have crossed the painter’s mind to reconsider the invitations from Charles V to join the imperial court. That thought, however, was put to one side when Aretino suggested another equally exalted source of patronage, one furthermore that offered the possibility of a lucrative benefice for Pomponio, which, in addition to those he had already obtained from Federico Gonzaga and Charles V, could bring in a very handsome living indeed for his son. Aretino had leaked Titian’s willingness to work for the Farnese pope Paul III and his family in a letter dated July 1539 to his friend the sculptor and medallist Leone Leoni: ‘It is clear that my old friend did not want to go to Spain, even when the emperor asked our everlasting government for him; but he would like to leave the memory of his art with portraits of the princes of the most celebrated house of Farnese …’ He added that it would be good for Titian to see at last the Roman antiquities and the work of Michelangelo first hand. Paul III was an enlightened patron of the arts; and his eldest grandson Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who supported Bembo and Vasari and was responsible for Michelangelo’s completion of the Palazzo F
arnese, the most imposing Roman palace built in the sixteenth century, was on his way to becoming one of the greatest Italian patrons and collectors of that century. But the Farnese, although aware of Titian’s unsurpassed fame as a court portraitist and of course impressed by the high favour in which he was held by the emperor, had so far held back from approaching him. Aware that Titian had turned down several opportunities to visit Rome, they may not have wished to risk rejection. Alessandro, in any case, had never been to Venice or seen a painting by Titian.

  It was not until the summer of 1542 that the opportunity arose for Titian to paint one of the Farnese family without so much as crossing the Venetian lagoon. In August 1541 the eleven-year-old Ranuccio Farnese, Alessandro’s younger brother and the second youngest of the pope’s four grandsons, had come to pursue his studies in Padua accompanied by a private tutor, the humanist Gian Francesco Leoni. Ranuccio was also put in the care of two Venetian patricians, Marco Grimani, Patriarch of Aquileia, and Andrea Corner, Bishop of Brescia (later cardinal). Ranuccio’s mother Girolama Orsini pined for her absent son, and Alessandro, perhaps as a way of comforting their mother while also testing Titian’s skill, requested a portrait of the boy through the intercession of the Bishop of Brescia. Titian made a start on the Portrait of Ranuccio Farnese (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) in the summer of 1542. The boy is dressed as a knight of Malta because he was in Venice to attend a congregation at the church of San Giovanni di Malta where he had been prior since the age of four.

  The painting, one of the most beguiling and sensitive of all Titian’s portraits, was ready by 22 September when Gian Francesco Leoni wrote from Padua to Alessandro Farnese that the Bishop of Brescia would bring it with him to Rome. He stressed, as evidence of Titian’s genius, that he had painted it ‘partly in the presence and partly in the absence of the Lord Prior’. He also reported that Titian might be persuaded to come to Rome, ‘having as he does a son who is studying here, whom he has destined for the Church and who has already received benefices’, and assured the cardinal that ‘Titian, apart from his talent, seemed to all of us tractable, gentle and easy to deal with, which is a thing worthy of consideration in respect of such exceptional men as he is.’