by Sheila Hale
Leoni’s account of Titian as easy to deal with was doubtless intended to contrast him with the difficult, the terribile, Michelangelo. His aside that Titian had painted Ranuccio’s portrait partly in his presence and partly in his absence was meant as high praise. As we have seen, Renaissance patrons admired the ability to achieve a likeness in the absence of a sitter, and were prepared to enter into a game of pretending that generalized features of people Titian had never or only briefly met were perfect likenesses. In this case, however, we are left in no doubt about the veracity of Ranuccio’s highly individualized face. The beautifully subtle composition of the boy’s uniform as a Knight of Malta may well have been done in the boy’s absence, but the charming, earnest face must have been sketched from the life. It is the face of a studious, shy child conscious of the obligation to assume grown-up responsibilities. Although it is obvious that Titian took special pains with this introductory commission from the Farnese, there is more to the portrait than its originality and technical mastery. Titian had an intuitive sympathy for children and it looks as though his heart went out to the privileged, malleable, scholarly Ranuccio, whose engaging personality and lack of personal ambition may have reminded him of his own son Pomponio. He could not, however, have predicted that four years after he completed the portrait Ranuccio would meekly accept the cardinal’s hat thrust upon his young head by his grandfather (against the wishes of the jealous Alessandro) when he would have preferred to be left alone with his books.
Gian Francesco Leoni, who was no mean diplomat and had spent time with Titian in Venice, struck exactly the right chord with the painter by suggesting the possibility of a papal benefice for Pomponio. Although it seems not to have occurred to the Farnese to pay for Ranuccio’s portrait, the prospect of this benefice for his son was more than enough to satisfy Titian for the time being. The one he had in mind was the imposing abbey of San Pietro in Colle, which benefice, unfortunately, was in the keeping of a certain Giulio Antonio Sertorio, Archbishop of Santa Severina, a diocese in Calabria, and Abbot of Nonantola, an abbey in his native province of Modena where he had the protection of the Duke of Ferrara. Although the pope in theory had the power to transfer the benefice to Pomponio it would not be easy to unseat the powerful and well-connected Sertorio. Nevertheless, the very thought of having his son endowed with such a valuable benefice11 was irresistible. It would determine his actions in the next few years and lead to some of the greatest paintings of his career.
TWO
The Last Great Pope of the Renaissance
Enormously charming, [Paul III] was also enormously intelligent … Yet there was plenty about him to worry earnest men. The first Roman nobleman to be elected pope since Martin V, he was emphatically a product of old corruption.
EAMON DUFFY, SAINTS AND SINNERS, 2006
On 10 April 1543 Pietro Aretino wrote to Duke Cosmo I de’ Medici to report that the pope had sent for Titian. It seemed that the fine portrait of Ranuccio Farnese and the possibility – mentioned by Ranuccio’s tutor in his letter of recommendation to Alessandro Farnese – that Titian could be lured to Rome in return for Pomponio’s benefice had caught the attention of Paul III. Titian was in Ferrara by 22 April, in time for the ceremonial entry of the pontiff. He followed the papal party on to Bologna, and stayed in its train as the guest of Alessandro Farnese for the next three months. For a man who enjoyed an otherwise unusually balanced temperament for an artist of genius, Titian’s ambition to obtain rich ecclesiastical livings for his son had turned into an obsession, one that, judging from a sketch for a different version that has been detected by radiography beneath the Portrait of Paul III (Naples, Capodimonte), he recognized in the pope, who was notorious for his nepotism.1 Titian in any case cannot have been unaware of Paul’s reputation for unscrupulous manipulation of his power. He was the subject of countless pasquinades accusing him of everything from rape and incest to homicide. His enemies compared him to the Antichrist; and Aretino, before changing tune when he decided to beg him for a cardinalate, had once gone so far as to describe him as worse than Nero. In Titian’s first sketch of him the pontiff’s forehead is deeply furrowed, the sunken eyes cast down; the long nose resembles the beak of a bird of prey.
But by the time Titian reached Bologna he had come to to realize that to portray the pope as an evil vulture was hardly the best way to obtain the papal benefice for Pomponio. And so he transformed his first impulse into the greatest and most penetrating portrait of papal power before Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X – which owes a great deal to Titian’s example. The hair, beard and the long, bony, manicured hand that stretches over the papal purse look at first glance as though they might have been painted with tempera: some of the hairs of the beard and eyebrows were done with individual strokes of a fine brush. But the crimson papal gown and bulky winter cape are modelled out of colour, glazes and scumbles, in one place with the butt end of the artist’s brush, with breathtaking freedom and assurance. We can almost hear the colour of the voice, softly insinuating and tinged with irony, of a great man who knew that his worldly goals for his family were in conflict with his ambition to reform the abusive practices that riddled the Holy Roman Church. Vasari in a letter to a friend2 was probably referring to this portrait when he wrote that many passers-by who saw it drying in the sun on a terrace thought it was the living pope and raised their hats to it. This was a conventional trope referring to Pliny’s stories about the illusionist power of painted images. But Aretino (who between hurling insults at Paul had also called him the Roman lion) was not overstating his case when he described the portrait as a ‘miracle’.
Born into an old noble family with close papal connections, the young Alessandro Farnese had received a fine humanist education in Florence, in the ambience of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and at the University of Pisa. He won his cardinal’s hat along with the appellation ‘Cardinal Fregnese’ (Cardinal Cunt) in 1495 by procuring his beautiful sister Giulia for the Borgia pope Alexander VI. After ascending the papal throne in 1534 at the age of sixty-six, he retained a lifelong love of the arts and literature, and was responsible for reviving the urban and artistic glory of Rome, which had lain desolate since the Sack of 1527. His commissions included Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel and the appointment of the same artist to rebuild St Peter’s.3 A true Epicurean in the ancient Roman style – Benvenuto Cellini described his habit of gorging himself and then vomiting – he brought the city back to life with carnivals, bullfights and horse races in the streets.
As a cardinal Paul had fathered at least four bastard children by his mistress Silvia Ruffini, a well-born widow.4 Although it was by no means unusual for cardinals to sire children, Paul’s flagrant nepotism, which was loudly condemned by Luther and Calvin, was beginning also to worry Catholic reformers. Paul had wasted no time in positioning his son Pier Luigi and his five grandsons, like pawns in a chess game, to secure his dynastic ambitions for his family and their continuing power in the Church after his death. Pier Luigi had four sons by his virtuous and devoted wife Gerolama Orsini: Alessandro, Ottavio, Ranuccio and Orazio. Immediately after his election Paul made cardinals of Alessandro, who was then fourteen, and of the sixteen-year-old Guido Asciano Sforza di Santa Fiora, his grandson by his daughter Costanza. Ranuccio reluctantly donned his cardinal’s hat after he had reached the age of fifteen in 1545. Ottavio and Orazio were to marry in order to ensure the perpetuation of the Farnese dynasty. In 1538 Paul had chosen Charles V’s natural daughter Margaret for Ottavio.5 Nine years later he would marry Orazio to Diana, the daughter of the new king of France, Henry II. The three cardinal grandsons were instructed that if Orazio and Ottavio should die without issue they should renounce the Church in order to marry and continue the Farnese line. Alessandro, who would have been only too eager to marry the daughter of an emperor or king and rule a duchy of his own, deeply resented having been forced into the Church – he was said to have turned pale with jealousy at Ottavio’s wedding. Although his
grandfather made him vice chancellor of the Holy Roman Church and rewarded him handsomely for the sacrifice of his primogeniture with some thirty bishoprics including the most lucrative in Christendom, Alessandro would not commit himself to the Church until he finally took major orders in 1564. Meanwhile he consoled himself with womanizing, using his vast wealth to collect works of art, bestowing his patronage on writers and artists, and throwing lavish parties at which he liked to show off his talent for energetic dancing.
Despite his flagrant nepotism, Paul was a genuine and indeed courageous advocate of Church reform. He could not, however, agree with Charles V about either the agenda or the venue of an Ecumenical Council. Paul insisted that the talks should be limited to matters of doctrine rather than disciplinary reform of abuses (of which he was himself guilty), which he maintained was the prerogative of the Curia, and wanted them held in Italy. Charles, always hoping for reconciliation with his Protestant subjects, proposed that the Council should be hosted in Germany and should focus on reform of Church abuses rather than on confirmation of Catholic dogma, which would further inflame Protestant resentment. Eventually they agreed to call the meeting at the small town of Trent.
When Titian first saw him at Bologna, Paul III, now in his seventy-fifth year, had braved the winter weather to travel from Rome to northern Italy where a preliminary Council had been called at Trent. A General Council could not take place without peace between the two Catholic monarchs, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Francis I, King of France, who between them ruled virtually the whole of continental Europe, and who loathed one another as ever on a personal, visceral as well as political level and had been continually and uselessly at war for two decades. Paul had succeeded in remaining on good terms with them both, and the first objective of his journey to northern Italy was to find a way of making peace between them.
Although the emperor was as eager to meet the pope as the pope was to meet the emperor, they had different agendas. Charles hoped to gain Paul’s support against the French, who in the summer of 1542 had launched simultaneous offensives on Luxemburg in the northern empire and Perpignan in the south. In February of that year Charles had contracted a secret alliance against the French with Henry VIII of England, but Francis’s shocking alliance with the Turks left Italy vulnerable to attack, especially now that the Venetians had made peace with the Turks. On another front Charles, aware that the balance of power in Germany was shifting to the Protestants, was looking for the support of the pope if it should prove necessary to take military action against them. His voyage to Italy was, however, delayed by business in Spain, and it was not till 24 May 1543 that Pier Luigi Farnese was dispatched to Genoa to greet the emperor and issue a formal invitation to an interview with the pope. Titian waited with the Farnese court in Bologna for another month while the papal and imperial aides argued about the venue for the meeting. The emperor proposed Mantua or Parma. The pope, alarmed by the sizeable army that accompanied the emperor and knowing that Mantua was an imperial fief and that Charles had a residual claim to Parma, suggested Busseto, a small town in papal territory between Fidenza and Cremona which Paolo Giovio later described as ‘a fetid hole where sleep was banned’ – presumably by the mosquitoes that plague that part of Italy even today.
The negotiations at Busseto finally took place between 21 and 26 June, and went badly from the start despite the presence of fourteen imperialist cardinals and the best efforts of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, the lawyer from Franche-Comté who was Charles’s first minister and chancellor. Charles, who was suffering from one of his attacks of gout, was dismayed when Paul not only refused to withdraw his friendship from the French king but pretended to doubt reports that the French and Turkish fleets were acting together. Paul, furthermore, responded to Charles’s urgent pleas that a full Council of the Church be held at Trent by postponing a definite decision. What interested the pope first and foremost was the Duchy of Milan, the most important prize in the conflict between Charles and Francis, which he hoped to acquire for his own family by settling it on his grandson Ottavio Farnese and Ottavio’s wife, Charles’s natural daughter Margaret. Charles set a price of two million ducats for transferring Milan to Ottavio and Margaret; the papal advisers refused the exorbitant demand but offered to meet him halfway with the appointment of more imperialist cardinals. But if Charles was briefly tempted to give up Milan he chose instead to take the advice of Don Diego Mendoza, his ambassador in Venice at the time, who warned him in a heated memorandum to ‘keep what you have … Milan is a fit inheritance for your only son and rightful heir [Philip]. It is contrary to sense and reason to bestow it on a natural daughter … If your conscience pricks you for Milan, why not give up Spain as well? … Milan is the gateway to Italy. Let it but once fall into the hands of the French and all your friends in the peninsula will desert you.’6 The conference ended with cordial assurances of friendship on both sides. The emperor, however, noted that the pope ‘was very much concerned for the advancement of his house, and that his relations were extremely grasping’.7
Although the short conference at Busseto was not a political success, it was a landmark in Titian’s career. For those few days he found himself in the same place at the same time as the two mightiest rulers in Christendom, both of them now his patrons. He had finished the portrait of Paul III; and although he received no payment for it, apart from two scudi and twenty soldi on 22 May for the transport of the picture to Rome, he had reason to believe that it would be rewarded with the benefice for Pomponio. It was also at Busseto that the emperor entrusted him with one of the most touching commissions in the history of patronage. Charles was still grieving for his wife Isabella of Portugal, who had died four years earlier at only thirty-five after a miscarriage. He remained in mourning, his black clothes increasingly shabby, for the rest of his life and refused to remarry even for political or dynastic advantage. Because Isabella had died young and unexpectedly, and Charles had never quite given up the hope that Titian would be persuaded to portray her sooner or later, he was alarmed to discover that he had no portrait of her. The only one he could find had been painted from life years earlier for Margaret of Austria and was in the possession of Mary of Hungary. He borrowed it from Mary, but although when he saw it he did not consider it a true likeness he had it brought to Busseto to give Titian a starting point for his own portrait. Titian took it with him when he returned to Venice, where Aretino described it as ‘very similar to her true appearance but by a trivial brush’. A year or two later Titian sent the emperor his portrait of the dead empress as a young woman dressed in black with flowers on her lap and the imperial crown behind her. The original, now known from copies and an engraving by Pieter de Jode, was destroyed by fire in the palace of El Pardo in 1604, but another posthumous portrait of her, which Titian painted several years later, survives (Madrid, Prado).8
After the unsuccessful conference at Busseto the emperor and his court moved north towards Trent, the Brenner Pass and Germany, having persuaded the eminent Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose public dissection of human bodies at the University of Padua had attracted crowds, to join the court as his personal physician and treat the battle wounds of his commanders.9 Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino and commander of the Venetian army, was one of the dignitaries appointed by the Venetian government to accompany the imperial party through Venetian territory; and it was Guidobaldo who invited his good friend Pietro Aretino to join the party of escorts. Aretino received a less than enthusiastic welcome in Verona, where he wrote to Titian pretending that he had surprised a mutual friend, himself and no doubt Titian as well by absenting himself from Venice – ‘our terrestrial paradise’ – at the persuasion of His Excellency Guidobaldo.
But then something happened, if we can believe Aretino’s account of it in a long letter to a friend,10 that was to be the apogee of his political and diplomatic career and the most gratifying fulfilment of his deep need for attention. The four Venetian ambassadors who were waitin
g in Verona for the delayed arrival of the emperor made a great fuss of the famous writer, treating him ‘with the continuous kindness due to a friend, instead of issuing commands to me as if I were their servant’. They invited him to go with them ‘to meet the Caesarian monarch’. As they caught sight of the black double-headed eagle on the crimson banners of the Habsburg court, the slight figure of Charles V, ‘the illustrious master of Christendom’, came forward and invited Aretino with a nod to ride on his right hand. The next morning, the emperor did him the honour of greeting him informally with a modest smile, or, as Aretino put it, ‘he greeted me without greeting me’. They talked about the revolts in Flanders, the strength of France and Barbarossa’s raids, and despite all these problems Caesar ‘still did not abstain from acknowledging with every possible sign of pleasure my devotions toward his deity’. Now one of the imperial courtiers came forward, pressed gold into Aretino’s hand and informed him that as soon as Caesar had heard mass he would command him ‘with a gesture of his hand and a nod of his head to become one of his followers’.
If it was true – which it may not be – that the emperor really invited Aretino to accompany him to Germany, it was not an invitation that the Scourge of Princes, who had so often expressed a hatred of princely courts and vowed never to leave Venice, could accept: ‘The reason that I did not follow him was that it did not please God that I should.’ Nevertheless, so Aretino would have us believe, after he had slipped away to Venice without bidding Caesar a final farewell, Charles summoned the Venetian ambassadors, ‘and said to these grave and respectable men: “O honoured friends, surely it will not irk you to tell your government that I will be very grateful to them if they treat the person of Aretino with the respect due to someone who is very dear to me”’. As the emperor prepared to cross the Alps, Aretino returned to Venice ‘amid such an applause of visits, praises, and embraces, that I must needs now live happily who have won immortal and perpetual fame’.
