by Sheila Hale
Titian remained in Bologna at least until 8 July when the papal treasury paid him fifty scudi to cover the expenses of his return to Venice. It may have been during his three months with the papal entourage, or it may have been later, that he painted in what appears to be great haste for the pope’s grandson Cardinal Guido Asciano Sforza di Santa Fiora11 a second Portrait of Paul III (Naples, Capodimonte), this one smaller and with Paul wearing the papal cap or camauro. There are numerous copies of the two portraits,12 some with and some without the camauro. All were painted by other hands, but the high quality of most testifies to the impact Titian’s originals made on lesser artists.
Paul III, although aware that the Venetian master had immortalized him in a way that his portraits of Charles V and Francis I had not done for the other two most powerful European rulers, did not deign to pay Titian in cash. Instead he proposed a reward that another artist, one with a less independent spirit, would have been only too happy to accept. He tried to lure him to Rome with the offer of the papal seal, the piombo. Twelve years earlier Clement VII had given the piombo to Titian’s old Venetian-born friend Sebastiano Luciani, who is best known today as Sebastiano del Piombo. The office of the piombatore was supposedly for life and provided the handsome income of more than 800 scudi out of which Sebastiano had agreed to pay a yearly pension13 to Giovanni da Udine, a decorative painter and master of stuccowork who had been one of Raphael’s principal assistants. Avaricious though Titian may have been, there were some lengths to which he would not go, not even for a very handsome income. Depriving two fellow artists of their livings and being trapped in Rome for life were two of them, as Aretino, who wrote him a letter of congratulation for his largeness of soul in turning down the offer, knew better than anyone.
The two friends, as they gossiped over their dinners, may have laughed at the very idea of Titian in the service of the papal court – the writer who despised all courts and had made a particular point of satirizing the papal court14 and the painter who had consistently refused to leave Venice for long, not even at the behest of the emperor. They may not, however, have been fully aware that by refusing Sebastiano’s piombo Titian was sacrificing the interest of Alessandro Farnese, who although still young was already a master broker of papal benefices and might have found a way to help with Pomponio’s benefice on San Pietro in Colle if he had been able to lure Titian to Rome as painter to the papal family. Nevertheless, Aretino was not wrong about Titian’s sense of honour in this matter. Titian changed his mind a few years later and proposed himself for the office of the piombatore, but by that time Sebastiano was dead.
As far as Titian was concerned the Farnese had bought him with the prospect of the benefice of San Pietro in Colle for Pomponio. It was a living that would raise the status, as well as the income, of the entire Vecellio family, and it was to that end that he had taken great pains with the portraits of Ranuccio and of Paul III, masterpieces for which he had received no payment. He had not, however, grasped just how well connected the incumbent Archbishop Giulio Sertorio was or how set on retaining the benefice for himself. Cardinal Farnese fulfilled a promise to write to Sertorio requesting him to relinquish the benefice. But before he received a reply he was suddenly struck by the first signs of a fever and made a hasty retreat from Bologna, leaving it to his secretary Bernardino Maffei, later an archbishop and cardinal, to communicate the unwelcome news of his departure to Titian. When Maffei softened the blow by pretending that Sertorio had agreed to cede the benefice, Titian reacted with a letter to the cardinal, dictated to his nephew Giovanni Alessandrini15 soon after his return to Venice on 26 July, in which he expressed his joy, relief and willingness to compensate His Most Reverend and Illustrious Highness with his goodwill and his works.
So I will await the letter of possession, just as Maffei has promised me, in the hope that the bull will be expedited in good time. I desire this possession not so much for my own sake, because I know that it cannot now fail to be mine, as for the satisfaction of the many of my lords and patrons who, because of the good they wish me, are waiting impatiently for the letter so they can rejoice with me from the depths of their hearts and because some of them intend to keep me company when I go to take possession of the Abbey.
When Titian had received no reply by the following March he and Alessandrini, with rhetorical flourishes probably suggested by Aretino, wrote again, this time to Maffei.
The fame of the great Alexander resounds in the ears of the world, excluding all other conversation or praise, so that I, who adore him, hear such words of praise like a return of youth and will be no less rejuvenated when I hear that the pope in his immeasurable kindness and sainted clemency has fulfilled his promise of the benefice …
The benefice, he maintained, was the minimum recompense he deserved for the works he had executed for the Farnese; and yet, in addition to having received nothing for his portraits, he had had to suffer embarrassment in Venice where everyone believed that he had secured the benefice. He concluded with a pitiful postscript asking Maffei to let him know the thoughts of the Most Reverend Cardinal Alessandro about the letter he had written to him some time before. When this request, like the others, was greeted with silence Titian might have concluded that Aretino had been right to warn him of the false promises of the ‘priestly rabble’ in Rome.
Nothing, however, could distract him from the question of Pomponio’s papal benefice, which had become a matter as much of pride as of avariciousness. He paid a visit to Ranuccio Farnese, who agreed to write to his brother Cardinal Alessandro on his behalf. He wrote to Michelangelo asking him, as a brother-in-craft, to favour his suit in Rome. Aretino, as ever his most loyal champion, poured out a stream of letters: to Michelangelo; to Carlo Gualteruzzi, a friend of Pietro Bembo who was also secretary to Ottavio Farnese, asserting that the benefice would dry the sweat from the virtuous forehead of the painter who had expended so much trouble and genius on his portraits of the Farnese, and suggesting an approach to Bembo who might use his influence with Michelangelo; and to Ottavio Farnese himself. In May 1544, when such interventions seemed to be falling on deaf ears, Aretino addressed to Titian a prose poem in the form of a letter, which of all the many letters he wrote to and about Titian is perhaps the most beautiful and heartfelt testimony of their shared sensibility. He did not publish the letter until 1546, but it is not impossible that before its publication he had it delivered directly or indirectly to the Farnese who in 1544 were so stubbornly refusing to give Titian his due.16 Aretino, who was suffering from a fever, leaned on his windowsill and turned his eyes to heaven, ‘which, from the moment when God made it, was never adorned with such painted loveliness of lights and shadows’:
The whole region of the air was what those who envy you, because they are unable to be you, would fain express. To begin with, the buildings of Venice, though of solid stone, seemed made of some ethereal substance. Then the sky was full of variety – here clear and ardent, there dulled and overclouded. What marvellous clouds there were! Masses of them in the centre of the scene hung above the house-roofs, while the immediate part was formed of a grey tint inclining to dark. I gazed astonished at the varied colours they displayed. The nearer masses burned with flames of sunset; the more remote blushed with a blaze of crimson less afire. Oh, how splendidly did Nature’s pencil treat and dispose that airy landscape, keeping the sky apart from the palaces, just as Titian does! On one side the heavens showed a greenish-blue, on another a bluish-green, invented verily by the caprice of Nature, who is mistress of the greatest masters. With her lights and her darks, there she was harmonising, toning, and bringing out into relief, just as she wished. Seeing which, I who know that your pencil is the spirit of her inmost soul, cried aloud thrice or four times, ‘Oh, Titian! Where are you now?’17
THREE
A Miracle of Nature
As heaven is the paradise of the soul, so God has transfused into Titian’s colours the paradise of our bodies.
‘TULLIA D’ARAGONE’
IN SPERONE SPERONI’S DIALOGUE ON LOVE, 1537
Titian must have been pleased that his son Pomponio, now a young man in his early twenties, had buckled down to the study of law at the University of Padua, and had grown out of his adolescent sulks well enough to have learned the three sacred languages, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, that were a requirement for the priesthood, and which Titian regretted never having had the opportunity to study himself. We can read something of Pomponio’s lack of self-confidence and anxiety to please from two letters that he wrote from Padua in May 1544 to his relative Toma Tito Vecellio, who was living temporarily in Venice at the time. Toma Tito had evidently written Pomponio an avuncular letter inviting him to show off his learning in a humorous way by giving his opinion about a legal matter. Pomponio’s replies, which he signed ‘Pomponius Vecellius’, were supposed to be a parody of legal pedantry and are full of quotes from a Latin textbook. He is trying to be witty, but claims failure of inspiration and lack of learning – ‘I have little expertise in one profession and much less in the other’ – and swears he would ‘rather be Aretino than half a Cicero’. He sends his love to Titian and everybody at home. When, a month later, he took minor orders Titian had reason to believe that his boy had accepted the career he had chosen for him.
By September 1545, however, it had become obvious that Pomponio had no intention of fulfilling the requirement of residence in return for the benefice of Santa Maria della Scala. Titian gave Giovanni Alessandrini power of attorney to exchange that living with another, but continued his relentless pursuit of the living of San Pietro in Colle, which carried greater prestige as well as a higher income. In this Titian found an ally in Giovanni della Casa, a Tuscan prelate, best known for his obscene poetry and courtly dialogues about language and manners,1 who arrived in Venice in August as papal nuncio. Della Casa was Alessandro Farnese’s principal courtier, and Titian, who may have met him previously through their mutual friend Pietro Bembo, wasted no time before paying him a visit, charming him with his pleasant manners and the gift of a copy of his portrait of Paul III,2 so that when the new nuncio called on him at Biri Grande he was already predisposed to help the Venetian master. One of the paintings he saw in Titian’s studio gave him an idea. It was a painting of a luscious reclining nude, probably the copy of the Venus of Urbino3 that Titian had promised ten years before to paint for Cardinal Jean de Lorraine, who had never collected it.
On 20 September della Casa wrote to Cardinal Farnese that Titian had ‘corrupted’ him with the gift of a portrait of the pope in such a way that he had agreed to act as his representative in reminding him that Giulio Sertorio should receive compensation for the living of San Pietro in Colle, so that Titian could have it, ‘which would be the very culmination of his happiness, and he is ready to portray the Illustrious House of Your Most Reverend Lord right down to the cats’. He went on to request a sketch of the ‘sister-in-law’ – a euphemism for Alessandro’s mistress, a courtesan by the name of Angela – so that Titian could enlarge it and he, della Casa, write a sonnet about it. Titian, he continued, had almost finished a nude that would put the devil on the back of the principal censor of the Church. The Venus [of Urbino], ‘which Your Most Reverend Lord saw in the chambers of the Duke of Urbino, is a Theatine nun compared to this one, and he wants to give her the features of the above-mentioned sister-in-law, provided that the benefice is his’.4
While della Casa was in Venice he was closely acquainted with Elisabetta Querini Massolo, a Venetian noblewoman, niece of the Venetian patriarch Girolamo Querini and a prominent figure in the literary circles he frequented. She was about fifty and had been married to Lorenzo Massolo for thirty years when the legate commissioned Titian to paint her portrait, which both della Casa and Aretino praised with sonnets celebrating the beauty he had captured. The portrait cannot be identified, but copies (one is in Rome, Galleria Borghese), suggest that she was far from beautiful by that time. Her attractiveness probably lay in a lively and cultivated mind – Bembo regarded her as the muse of his old age. It was probably at her suggestion that Lorenzo, later in the 1540s, would commission from Titian the dark, turbulent Martyrdom of St Lawrence for the family tomb in the church of Santa Maria de’ Crociferi.5 Titian did not get around to painting it until after Lorenzo’s death in 1557, when he had become intensely interested in the treatment of light, of which this painting was a landmark in his artistic development.
Although Titian was not often to be found at the Venetian literary academies, print shops and private salons where books and ideas were discussed he was the portraitist of choice for those letterati who could afford his prices. One of these was the Paduan-born Sperone Speroni, who in a will of 1569 wrote that Titian had painted his portrait in 1544 (the weak Portrait of a Man Holding a Book in the Treviso Museo Civico could be a studio copy, although it looks nothing like other portraits of Speroni). Speroni was a philosopher and dramatist best known for his fictional dialogues in which such themes as rhetoric, the use of the vernacular as preferable to Latin, the status of women and the nature of love are discussed by people of different backgrounds and perspectives.6 Although the names of his speakers were borrowed from well-known contemporaries, Speroni explained in an Apology on the Dialogues that he had used poetic licence, as one would do in portraits or plays, and had not intended to voice the real opinions of real people. In the Dialogue on Love, which was read aloud at one of Aretino’s literary soirées in 1537, he has Tullia d’Aragona, the famous philosopher-courtesan, contrast love, which she defines as an image of God created by nature, with painted portraits which show nothing but the outer semblance of a living man. ‘But’, cries the poet Bernardo Tasso,7 ‘you are unjust to Titian.’ ‘No,’ replies Tullia, ‘I hold Titian to be not a painter – his creations are not art – but his works to be miracles, and I think that his pigments must be composed of that wonderful herb which made Glaucus a god when he partook of it; since his portraits make upon me the impression of something divine, and as heaven is the paradise of the soul, so God has transfused into Titian’s colours the paradise of our bodies.’
Speroni’s collected dialogues, published by the Manutius Press8 in 1542, were edited by Daniele Barbaro, the Venetian nobleman and polymath whom Titian portrayed twice, in 1544–5, both times wearing black and holding a book. One (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) was commissioned by Paolo Giovio for his gallery in Como of portraits of famous men and women; the other, which is almost identical (Madrid, Prado), possibly kept in Titian’s studio as a record. Barbaro was a philosopher, mathematician, scientist and patron of the arts with a special interest in architecture, which he regarded as a union of science and art and therefore superior to both. He was only thirty-one when Titian portrayed him, with an impressive career ahead of him. Together with his brother Marcantonio, he would commission Palladio’s Villa Barbaro at Maser and work with Paolo Veronese on the programme for the interior frescos, which are among the liveliest and most enjoyable of all illusionist paintings. But he never abandoned his scholarly pursuits, which included a translation of Vitruvius (1556) and a later edition (1567) in Latin with illustrations by Palladio and a commentary containing his famous definition of perfection as ‘that which lacks nothing and to which nothing can be added’. In Titian’s portraits of him we see the sombre man who disliked ostentation and gave an instruction in his will that he be buried in a common grave in San Francesco della Vigna. But for Veronese, who also portrayed him twice but many years later, after he had taken up appointments as Patriarch of Aquileia, as Venetian ambassador to the court of Elizabeth I of England and as representative of Venice at the Council of Trent, he dressed once in the ermine stole of a high-ranking Venetian patrician (Florence, Galleria Palatina) and again as a high dignitary of the Church in a silver cape and pleated robe with his treatise on architectural perspective and his commentary on Vitruvius on the table beside him (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).
Barbaro, della Casa and Bembo, like Castiglione before them, were humanists and men of t
he Church who believed in the perfectibility of humankind through close study of the classical texts, which were, however, seen as supplementary rather than contradictory to faith in God as the source of all wisdom. Aretino, by contrast, was a talented but ultimately self-seeking journalist who styled himself the scourge not only of princes but also of ‘pedants’ who bored the world with the classical learning that he was proud to confess he lacked. But the portrait of himself that Aretino commissioned from Titian in 1545 (Florence, Galleria Palatina) as a gift for Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, out-dazzles Titian’s portrayals of worthier subjects. Titian painted at least four portraits of his friend. This is one of the two survivals; and, as Aretino’s publisher Marcolini said, it is far finer than the earlier portrait now in the Frick Collection that had been used in 1538 as the prototype for the frontispiece of the second printing of Aretino’s collected letters. Aretino’s initial reaction was not far short of ecstatic. In a letter to Paolo Giovio written in April 1545 when the portrait was probably still in progress he maintained that ‘such a terrifying marvel’ had never before been seen, that his portrait was nothing less than ‘a miracle sprung from the brush of such a wonderful spirit’.
