Titian

by Sheila Hale

  CHARLES V IN A LETTER TO HIS SISTER MARY OF HUNGARY, 1546

  Soon after his return from Rome Titian painted his self-portrait (Berlin, Staatliche Museen)1 as a gentleman about town dressed in silk and fur with a gold chain of honour around his neck. He did not include a brush or palette or any other reference to his profession. His forehead is high and broad, nose powerfully arched, mouth, framed by a greying moustache and beard, turned down at the corners. The eyes, a little watery at his age but alert, look away as though summoning a muse that has temporarily disobeyed its master. The confrontational pose of the upper body with its broad shoulders emphasized by the fur shawl may not have been deliberate since this part of the portrait is unfinished. As he left it the fingers of his large right hand seem to be drumming impatiently on the table in front of him while the right hand rests on his knee, fingers pointing inwards in an attitude that causes the elbow to protrude aggressively beyond the edge of the painting. The black cap may serve the purpose of concealing his baldness or allude to Renaissance portraits of famous intellectuals – Aristotle and St Jerome were among thinkers depicted wearing a similar cap – or both. It is in any case a trademark that appears again in Titian’s subsequent self-portraits as well as in portraits of him by other artists, and in the finely modelled lead medal portrait made around the same time by the Sienese medallist Pastorino de’ Pastorini, in which Titian’s face is shown in profile as in antique Roman medal portraits and the inscription identifies him as a knight, ‘EQVES’, of Caesar. If we knew nothing else about Titian’s personality we might guess from the Berlin self-portrait that we are looking at a wealthy, socially distinguished man in his early fifties, in vigorous good health for his years, who knows his own worth but is not vain (unlike his friends Aretino, Sansovino and Sebastiano del Piombo), and who will put all his formidable energies into getting his way whatever the task in hand, whether it is confronting a difficult painting or getting the best possible result from a business deal, a patron or a lazy son.

  Titian, or possibly Orazio, used the self-portrait as the sketch for a reduced version of the head, now lost,2 which had been commissioned by Paolo Giovio, perhaps when the two met in Rome, for his gallery of famous men in Como. The only portrait of a major Venetian artist represented in Giovio’s private gallery, it reached Como in May 1549 with a consignment of other portraits including one of Michelangelo. It is possible that Titian started the Berlin sketch as a pendant to his earlier portrait of Aretino now in the Pitti’s Galleria Palatina in Florence, which is roughly the same size. He probably kept it in his studio for the rest of his life, for reference or as a memoir for his children.

  Titian’s house was full of family in these years.3 His second wife and their daughter Lavinia, now approaching puberty, were there to welcome him back from Rome. Francesco commuted to and from Cadore where he continued the family tradition of holding offices in the local government and managing the Vecellio timber business, as well as painting altarpieces in and around Cadore and Belluno. Giovanni Alessandrini, a notary who was a first cousin of Pomponio and Orazio – his father Pietro Alessandrini had probably been married to a sister of Titian’s first wife Cecilia – was living near by or perhaps in Titian’s house with his two sisters, Cecilia and Lucia (the name of Titian’s mother). Giovanni, to whom Titian had entrusted power of attorney before departing for Rome, wrote letters for Titian, made fair copies for Aretino and later moved to Pieve di Cadore where he continued to conduct business on Titian’s behalf. Titian’s sister Orsa is not recorded as living at Biri Grande until 1549 but may well have been in residence there for many years before that.4

  There were problems with the boys. Orazio married in 1547 when he was in his early twenties. We know this only from a letter that Aretino wrote to him in April of that year congratulating him for having invited a courtesan named Lucrezia to his wedding. Aretino did not mention the bride’s name, and like so many of the women in Titian’s clan she left no other trace of her identity. Marriage did not immediately persuade Orazio to settle down. Always a spendthrift, he tagged along with Pomponio and Francesco Sansovino in wild and wasteful ways for a few more years. He had a low threshold of boredom, and had inherited his father’s taste for luxury but not his commitment to his art. He took up his brush when required to do so, but preferred dabbling in dubious business ventures and experimenting with alchemy, which had the effect, as Ridolfi put it, of sending his father’s gold up in smoke. Francesco Sansovino eventually became a successful writer. Orazio had some talent as a painter, especially of portraits, and might have developed it under different circumstances. But Titian, while pouring into Orazio all the care, affection and forgiveness he denied Pomponio, had determined that his second son would become his irreplaceable factotum. It was a role that would become more onerous with the passage of time as Titian became increasingly reliant on him to negotiate his business deals and run his enlarged studio as it filled the growing demand for replicas of the master’s originals.

  Titian must have been embarrassed when Pomponio refused, on the grounds that the damp climate disagreed with him, to take up the residence as parish priest at Favaro given by the Farnese. Poor Pomponio. Abandoned by his mother’s death at a sensitive age in his childhood, displaced in his father’s heart by a stepmother, a half-sister and his own younger brother, destined at birth for a career not of his own choosing – how could he ever have found the confidence to take on the role of a wealthy and socially prominent man of the Church? How hard he must have found it to be confronted time and again by that down-turned mouth, that averted gaze and those drumming fingers. Like many weak and aimless people he played the rebel while yearning for affection. But this father, this famous artist who charmed the high and mighty, whose brush could discover the essential humanity of his sitters and tap into the dramatic wellsprings of ancient tragedies, was incapable of averting the deteriorating relationship with his son that was to be the greatest tragedy of his own personal life.

  Aretino was always ready to give sympathetic advice to Titian and Sansovino about their difficult sons. He told them that they must not despair, that they must remember that they too were once young, and did his best to make peace between the artist fathers and the ungrateful sons they had sent to college to learn classical languages that would equip them to avoid the uncertainty of an artist’s career. Aretino thanked God for giving him a daughter, the biddable and affectionate Adria, who turned nine in 1546, prompting him to begin thinking seriously about the dowry he had been soliciting from powerful friends since her birth. Adria’s mother, Caterina Sandella, had been his mistress and hostess at Casa Aretino for nearly twenty years when he wrote to her in January 1546 declaring his immeasurable love for her as ‘more than a father’ but trying to persuade her for the sake of her own reputation and his to return to the adulterous husband he had found for her soon after the birth of Adria. He would, he assured her in a published letter, continue to provide her with the magnificent dresses and rich necklaces that made other women incapable of hiding their jealousy. If the letter was intended to demonstrate that he was prepared to sacrifice love for honour he changed his mind a few months later when Caterina discovered that she was pregnant by him once again. A second daughter, whom he named Austria in honour of the Habsburg Empire, was born in 1547. As far as we know the robust Caterina, who was forty-six at the time of Austria’s birth and who lived to be ninety, stayed with Aretino for the rest of his life.

  It was in 1546 that Sansovino began his commemoration of the Triumvirate of Taste with the bronze portrait heads of Titian, Aretino, himself and others including his son Francesco in the guise of prophets, that were eventually installed on the frame of the sacristy door in the basilica of San Marco.5 Although Sansovino’s reputation was still shadowed by the collapse of part of his library of St Mark he was entrusted with the rebuilding, financed by the government, of the Corner palace at San Maurizio – the old palace had burned to the ground in 1532 but its replacement had been delayed by c
omplicated family disputes – which his son Francesco would rate as the most memorable in Venice and Vasari would say was reputed to be the finest in Italy.

  Sansovino could rely on the patronage of the new doge, Francesco Donà. Titian now revised the portrait he had painted of Donà as a senator, giving him full ducal regalia with a view of the Piazza in the background that includes Sansovino’s library. (The portrait is lost. The best of several copies is in a private collection in Scotland at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute.)6 Donà was seventy-seven when elected, with a long career as a prominent senator and administrator behind him. Unlike Andrea Gritti he had no military experience; nor did he allow his personal politics, which were Francophile, anti-imperial and anticlerical, to sway his policy of maintaining Venetian neutrality in the Habsburg–Valois struggles. After three ducal reigns that had seen disastrous wars, he was welcomed in Venice as the herald of a period of peace, and by a group of young patrician philo-Protestants who saw him as an advocate of liberal Church reform in the tradition of Gasparo Contarini and the other Italian Evangelists. Although he appeased the Roman Inquisition by establishing a new magistracy against heresy, he retained the jurisprudential independence of Venetian courts. But he did not give way to the young hotheads in his government who supported the campaign of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany in the name of restoring Italian independence from imperial rule. Before he died eight years after his election his many admirers had reason to believe him when he wrote that he had revived the ideal of Venice as defender of peace and justice.

  Although there was never a period in his life when Titian did not paint portraits, with increasing fame and demands on his time he became more selective about the status of his sitters, and there are fewer portraits after the mid-1540s than from earlier periods. One is the Portrait of Titian’s Special Friend (San Francisco, M. H. De Young Memorial Museum), so called after a letter in the subject’s hand that reads ‘special friend of Tiziano Vecellio’. Because he holds the letter in his left hand (mano sinistra) – and because Vasari refers to a portrait by Titian of a friend of his called Sinistri – it is likely that the subject is a member of the Sinistri family, several of whom were Titian’s friends. The portrait was copied much later, perhaps as a student exercise, in the mysterious Triple Portrait of Titian and Friends (Hampton Court, Royal Collection), a pastiche in which the grand chancellor Andrea de’ Franceschi, as Titian had portrayed him in the early 1530s, is in the middle with Titian as in the Berlin self-portrait on his right and the ‘Special Friend’ on de’ Franceschi’s left.

  Although Titian, as Aretino once wrote, could throw off portraits ‘as quickly as another could scratch the ornament on a chest’, for larger, time-consuming pictures with many figures he relied more and more on assistants to execute the work under his supervision. He used assistants for two sets of illusionist ceiling paintings, one for the new boardroom of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, the other for the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito in Isola.7 The commission for ceiling paintings for the new boardroom of the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista probably dates from about 1544 when Titian was called upon in April of that year for advice about whether some existing paintings in the old boardroom should be cut down to provide access to the new building. The centrepiece of his ceiling, the Vision of St John on Patmos (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), is more confident than the Santo Spirito ceiling, and numerous pentimenti beneath the final outline of the figures suggest that Titian played a direct part in its planning. The St John was directly inspired by Correggio’s figure of the same saint in the dome of the cathedral of Parma, although Titian modified Correggio’s illusionism. The canvas was set in an elaborately carved and gilded framework with a surrounding of smaller paintings of different sizes and shapes (all but one, which is lost, are in Venice, Accademia): cherubs, grotesque masks and rectangular canvases of the symbols of the Four Evangelists, two flanked by reclining nudes, two by cavorting putti. The ceiling was dismantled during the Napoleonic era and in 1818 the central canvas was sold as a ruin to a dealer in Turin. It subsequently disappeared before surfacing on the art market in the 1950s when it was acquired by the Kress Foundation.8

  Venetian ceilings, which were normally flat, because vaults and domes are liable to crack when buildings move on their foundations of wooden piles, were traditionally decorated with carved and gilded wood and coffering, sometimes set with small paintings that had no illusionist effect. Titian, however, was familiar from his many visits to Mantua with Giulio Romano’s frescos of giants on the vaulted ceilings of the Palazzo Tè. He had admired Correggio’s frescos in the dome of the cathedral of Parma when he first saw them in 1529 and had had the opportunity to study them again more recently while in that city with the entourage of Paul III. Now, after the overwhelming experience of studying Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling in Rome, he was ready for the challenge of adapting the perspective of heroic, twisting figures to be seen at a distance from below (di sotto in sù) to the more oblique arrangement suitable for the flat surfaces of Venetian ceilings.

  The Santo Spirito commission (the painting is now in the sacristy of the church of Santa Maria della Salute) had been transferred to Titian some time after Vasari, who had more experience than he with illusionist ceiling paintings, turned down the job. The three Old Testament stories may have been chosen by an Augustinian hermit preacher, Agostino Museo, who had been acquitted of a charge of heresy and was under the protection of Cardinal Marino Grimani and Giovanni Grimani, Patriarch of Aquileia. It has been suggested9 that the stories allude to St Augustine’s vision of the predestination of Christ and of the elect members of the Church through free will, faith and mercy, in which case Cain and Abel would represent predestination and free will (however tragic the outcome), Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac justification by faith, and David and Goliath mercy (David is shown praying to God after he has killed Goliath). The figures, which are twice life-size, form a zigzag pattern, perhaps suggested by the similar design of the Sistine ceiling, which gives the three paintings a dramatic unity. It was a daunting task, and Titian, whose detailed drawing for the Sacrifice of Isaac (Paris, École des Beaux-Arts), probably for the benefit of an assistant, survives,10 must have supervised the execution of the entire project, including the eight flanking roundels of the Four Evangelists and Four Fathers of the Church. Although the foreshortening doesn’t entirely work in the Cain and Abel, the Santo Spirito ceiling paintings, although deprived of their original architectural setting and of Sansovino’s carved and gilded framework, fascinated Van Dyck and Rubens.

  But Titian had not relied exclusively on Venetian patronage since his earliest years and he had no intention of doing so now that he was the only European artist who had had the honour of portraying both the reigning emperor and pope, patrons who could provide him with the maximum prestige as well, he hoped, as a stable income. The most prominent foreign patrons of his youth – the Dukes of Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino – were related to one another by blood or marriage and were prepared to share him. Their duchies were within easy reach of Venice, and he had been able to work for them, up to a point, on his own terms, in his own studio and in his own good time. To work concurrently for the pope in Rome and the emperor in Germany would be another matter. Sooner or later he would have to make a choice. Meanwhile he hedged his bets for as long as he could.

  Shortly before setting off for Rome he had sent Charles his posthumous portraits of the empress Isabella with a note saying that he would have brought them himself had he not been prevented by old age from undertaking such a long journey. He sent a stronger hint while working for the Farnese in Rome where, just as he was starting work on the Portrait of Paul III and his Grandsons, he hired a professional scribe to compose and pen a very fine-looking letter to the emperor informing His Majesty in suitable language that he, Titian, had painted a Venus for him, which he hoped, the Good Lord permitting, to present to him in person. He was now studying the marvellous ancient stone
s of Rome so that his art might become worthy of portraying the victories over the infidels in the East that God was preparing for His Majesty. Finally he took the opportunity of kissing the emperor’s most indomitable hand with all the affection and reverence in his heart to remind him that he had not yet received the permission to export the Neapolitan grain promised so many years before nor the annual pension of 100 scudi payable on the treasury of Milan promised as a reward for the Annunciation he had presented to the empress Isabella.

  Titian was aware that he could not, for the time being, expect a summons from the emperor, who was making preparations for war against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany. And so, on 18 June 1546, only a few days after his return from Rome, he turned to Alessandro Farnese offering his services in exchange for Pomponio’s benefice. He received no reply, but Farnese, on his way south from Germany where he had been acting for the pope in the formation of a papal–imperial league against the Protestants, put in a surprise appearance in Venice in late November when he visited Titian’s studio and ordered some paintings he saw there to be finished and sent to him in Rome.11

  In June of 1547 Titian wrote again to the cardinal to say that one painting was finished. This time he begged His Lordship ‘to prepare to employ me and give me commands’. Sebastiano del Piombo having recently died, Titian was now ready to obey these commands, ‘even though your Lordship should impose on me for the third time the acceptance of the cowl of the late Fra Sebastiano’. Two weeks later Giovanni della Casa wrote to Farnese to say that Titian had been informed that the seals of the piombo were reserved for him. ‘It seems to me’, della Casa continued, ‘that Titian is more inclined to accept the place now than he was on former occasions, and that it would be very desirable that Your Lordship should acquire such an ornament as he is for the court of His Holiness’.