by Sheila Hale
Titian’s letter to Granvelle of 1 September is one of the few we have written in his own hand and in his own clumsy Italian, presumably because he could not find a secretary in Augsburg to compose it for him. It was the beginning of an extended correspondence between the two men in the course of which Titian relied on Granvelle’s ‘infinite goodwill’ to solicit his help with a litany of problems in recovering delayed payments that had been promised by the emperor and others. In the postscript to this letter he lists the pictures he has painted for the emperor: ‘First the Christ which His Majesty took away with him, and then the Venus, the empress alone, and then the one of his majesty and the empress, and then that big one of his Caesarean majesty on horseback, which altogether makes six pieces.’
On 16 September Titian and his itinerant workshop took the old Roman road, the Via Claudia Augusta, stopping at Füssen where he stayed in the Bishop’s Castle as the guest of the cardinal-bishop Otto Truchsess von Waldburg, one of the leading participants in the Council of Trent and a collector and patron of the arts. Cardinal Truchsess, in a letter of recommendation to the Tyrolese governor written on 1 October, described Titian as ‘a very famous man and excellent in art, as well as religious, respectable and honest’. On 4 October Titian was in Innsbruck where he spent the next seventeen days making a start on portraits, to be completed in Venice, of seven of Ferdinand’s daughters, which Ridolfi described as ‘what seems almost to be a paradise full of terrestrial goddesses’: four single figures, and one group portrait of the three youngest, as well as a portrait of the young Archduke Ferdinand. All the portraits Titian painted at Augsburg and Innsbruck of Ferdinand and his immediate family have vanished, including replicas made for Mary of Hungary and others, leaving us with nothing to see from Titian’s stopover in Innsbruck, apart from one business letter addressed to Ferdinand in which he complains that his right to fell timber had been challenged by Ferdinand’s bureaucrats contrary to His Majesty’s orders and that he needs the wood not for merchandise but for himself and his buildings.
One of his portraits of the children, that of the Archduchess Catherine, who was then fifteen, misfired badly. The girl was evidently not very pretty and Titian, unusually, seems to have made no attempt to flatter her. A replica sent to Francesco Gonzaga, Federico’s son and successor as Duke of Mantua, who was betrothed to Catherine, was preceded by a mild caveat from one of Ferdinand’s courtiers, who wrote to a friend at the Mantuan court that the painting was very natural, but the face was somewhat more severe than in life. There was some confusion about who was supposed to pay for the portrait, and when Titian had received nothing for it by June 1549 he asked his old acquaintance Benedetto Agnello, the Mantuan ambassador in Venice, if it had actually reached the patrons. When Agnello answered in the affirmative, Titian, so Agnello reported, sighed, saying that he could not believe that His Excellency did not intend to send him a present appropriate to his greatness and to the merits of the work itself; and if nothing were forthcoming he would be forced to say even worse things than Aretino.18 When Agnello met Catherine some months later on her arrival in Italy, he wrote immediately to the duke’s mother, Margherita Paleologo, that he had found her very happy and cheerful, ‘besides which she is beautiful, and Titian can go hang himself, for the portrait that he has painted resembles Her Serenity as much as a wolf does an ass’.19 The sources are silent about the outcome of this unpleasant squabble.
After ten months in the service of the Habsburgs in Germany Titian’s homecoming was bound to cause a stir in Venice, where the Senate required a formal report. One sour note was struck by the papal legate, Giovanni della Casa, who pretended to be mildly shocked by Titian’s intimacy with the emperor, perhaps because he was irritated by the painter’s defection from the Farnese to the Habsburgs. ‘Messer Titian’, he wrote to Alessandro Farnese,
has spent a long time with His Imperial Majesty painting his portrait, and seems to have had plenty of opportunities to talk with him, while he was painting and so on. In short, he reports that His Majesty is in good health, but exceptionally anxious and melancholy, and that when the court left for Flanders Monsignor d’Arras told him, on behalf of His Majesty, that he ought to go too; but after he had excused himself on the grounds that he had spent too long away from home, and had asked permission to return to Venice, Monsignor d’Arras said that he could go, because in any case His Majesty would see him again next summer in Italy, and this would be equally satisfactory. Since Your Reverence knows the gentlemen of this court you will be able to judge whether it is customary to tell people like Messer Titian what His Majesty does or does not intend to do.20
Titian, Aretino and their large circle of friends gathered over their dinners to hang upon every word that Titian uttered about every detail of everything he had seen and heard from and about the emperor and his court.
Little did the gossips know that these were to be among the last times they would meet at Casa Aretino. Within eighteen months, while Titian was once again in Augsburg, Aretino would be evicted from the cramped apartment in the little house opposite the Rialto fish market that had been his home, and a second home to Titian and Sansovino, for twenty-two years. In all that time he had managed to pay not a penny in rent to his patrician landlords, the brothers Domenico and Jacopo Bollani, for the accommodation that all Venice knew as the Casa Aretino. The favourable arrangement, which may well have suited the Bollani when they were young, ambitious men looking for Aretino’s support in the advancement of their careers, was now if anything an embarrassment. Domenico, who had been a successful ambassador to England, was on his way to being made a bishop and a staunch ecclesiastical reformer at the Council of Trent. Jacopo, now a senator and recently married, may have wanted to live in the house with his bride.
On handing over the keys in January 1551, Aretino wrote Domenico a letter, which was of course intended for publication, condemning his lack of respect towards a person who had been received favourably by the emperor himself but adding that he was avenging his landlord’s discourtesy with the courtesy of telling him how much he had enjoyed the house. Aretino’s new home was on the upper residential floor of a palace on the Riva del Carbon a little way up the Grand Canal. It still stands, its Gothic façade now badly mutilated, at the centre of two other houses, one of them a twentieth-century replacement for the original, which were then owned by the Dandolo family. The apartment, as well as being located at a better address and in a larger, older and more distinguished palace than the former Casa Aretino, had twice as many rooms, higher ceilings and a larger portego for entertaining. The annual rent of sixty ducats rising to sixty-five a year was twice the nominal asking price, but the bills were picked up by Cosimo de’ Medici.21
Titian could hardly have failed to notice that while he was in Germany a Venetian painter half his age had bounded into the artistic limelight with an astonishing painting for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. In Jacopo Tintoretto’s Miracle of St Mark Freeing a Slave St Mark, the patron saint of Venice, dives from the heavens like Superman into a throng of Turkish heathens to rescue a man who has been condemned to martyrdom for worshipping the saint’s relics. This thunderbolt of a masterpiece, with its energy, ostentatious foreshortening and entirely new treatment of deep pictorial space, was at least as innovative, and as controversial, as Titian’s Assunta had been when it was unveiled thirty years earlier over the high altar of the Frari. It may have given Titian pause for thought if he knew that Tintoretto had been born in that same year, and that he had been about the same age as Tintoretto now was when he painted the altarpiece that had launched his own career. But Titian, who frequently quoted passages from other artists, might have been mildly flattered to see that the younger painter had used his own gesticulating disciples from the Assunta as a source for his crowd of witnesses to the miracle of St Mark.
Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto because he was the son of a silk dyer, a tintore, was not unknown to Titian. If we can believe Carlo Ridolfi, whose Life of Tintoret
to of 1642 is the only source we have for his early life, he had served for ten days in Titian’s workshop before Titian expelled him out of jealousy. While it is true that Titian was not a nurturer of young talent, it is likely that he had been not so much jealous of Tintoretto as irritated by him. The young man was everything Titian was not: impulsive, uncouth, tactless, inarticulate, badly dressed, lacking in respect for his elders and betters, not especially interested in money or honours. One of Tintoretto’s friends compared him in a letter to a peppercorn capable of overpowering ten bunches of poppies;22 The poet Marco Boschini described him as spiritoso, too clever by half. It is an indication of his brusque treatment even of members of his family who were not working in his studio that when his brother asked him, among other questions, if their mother had died, Tintoretto replied in a letter consisting of one sentence: ‘To all your questions the answer is NO.’ Ridolfi spun a tale about Tintoretto, which is almost as famous as his story of Charles V picking up Titian’s paintbrush, no less unlikely but representative of a general truth. His story goes that one day Tintoretto appeared at Aretino’s house with a pistol in his hand, saying, ‘I’m going to take your measure!’ He then announced that he was going to measure the critic in pistol lengths before painting his portrait.23 The same writer also mentioned a backhanded compliment paid to Titian by Tintoretto, who said that the older master sometimes produced works that could never be improved or more easily understood even though other artists might have designed them better still. Nevertheless, Tintoretto later acquired several paintings by Titian, and, again according to Ridolfi, once tried to pass off one of his portraits as a Titian.
Different though they were as personalities and artists, there is no evidence of outright conflict between Titian and Tintoretto, who worked exclusively for Venetian patrons and posed no threat to Titian’s international prestige; neither did Veronese, who was in his early twenties when he made his debut in Venice in 1551–2 with the altarpiece, still in the church of San Francesco della Vigna, of the Holy Family with Sts John the Baptist, Anthony Abbot and Catherine, which pays homage to Titian’s Pesaro Madonna in the Frari. Much, perhaps too much, has been made of the rivalrous relationship of the three greatest Venetian painters of the second half of the sixteenth century. But it is true that three geniuses working in the same small city at the same time – dining in the same taverns, walking the same streets, listening to the same gossip – could hardly have failed to keep a jealous eye on one another’s work.
Titian’s two younger ‘rivals’, both of whom set up flourishing family practices in Venice, could be said to represent the two sides of the Venetian temperament: the lonely, sometimes agonized search for truth and meaning versus the love of material luxury that suited a society ruled by proudly money-minded merchant-patricians. Tintoretto’s paintings seem to reveal a tortured soul, hectic, impulsive, defiant, brash, restless, too hasty for his own good – a poet whose dramatic use of linear perspective, exaggerated foreshortenings, violent lighting and elongated figures in frantic motion owe something to central Italian Mannerism. Titian may well have admired Tintoretto’s work, but he would never be interested in the deep space, swooping diagonals and exaggerations that characterized the younger artist’s paintings from the start. Veronese, by contrast, was controlled, elegant, superficial, coldly materialistic, a master of illusionism and of the voluptuous treatment of beautiful skin, hair, jewels and fashionable clothes painted in striking combinations of crystalline pastels. Both were fast workers and more interested in effect than in the humanity of their subjects. Neither achieved Titian’s balanced combination of dramatic force and deep feeling.
Nevertheless, Aretino, who was the first to recognize Tintoretto’s exceptional genius, took care to praise him only when Titian was away from Venice. In 1545 he commissioned from him the two paintings for the ceiling of his bedroom, both associated with music and the first of Tintoretto’s works that can be dated with certainty. One of these, of Apollo and Marsyas, may survive (Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum).24 The other, the story of Argus and Mercury, is lost. Aretino thanked him with a long letter, written while Titian was in Rome, expressing admiration for his ability to work both fast and well. In April 1548, when Titian was in Augsburg, he wrote to Jacopo Sansovino that Tintoretto was nearing the finishing line in the race for artistic supremacy. But in a letter written at the same time he warned his protégé that his Miracle of St Mark Freeing a Slave was ‘more true to life than finished’, and that he should try to temper speed of execution with patience.25 After January 1549, we hear no more about Tintoretto from Aretino, who may have decided that his friendship with Titian was more important than encouraging the young firebrand, although several years later he did commission from Tintoretto a portrait of Caterina Sandella, his long-standing mistress and the mother of his daughters.26
Jacopo del Ponte, known as Bassano from the town where he was born in 1510 and where he continued to work for the whole of his life, and Andrea Meldolla, called Schiavone, ‘the Slav’, after his birthplace in Dalmatia, were both about twenty years younger than Titian, who exercised a strong influence on their youthful work. But by the 1550s Bassano had developed his own style, and the large, robust, crowded religious and genre scenes he pioneered were as influential in their time as the paintings of Tintoretto and Veronese. But it was Titian – the unchallenged master of what Aretino called ‘the sense of things’, who rarely, as he grew older, let virtuosity stand in the way of his probing reifications in paint of a vision so deeply personal and original that no other artist could borrow from it – who stood head and shoulders above the others, marvellous artists though they were.
Meanwhile, in November and December 1548 after his return to Venice, Titian, with the help of his nephew and resident amanuensis Giovanni Alessandrini, continued his correspondence with Granvelle. The tone of Granvelle’s letters, which are addressed to ‘Titiano’ or ‘Ticiano’, and offer sound practical advice about how he should go about obtaining the pensions and payments due to him, is relaxed, confidential and sometimes humorous. On 4 November he sends his infinite thanks for the arrival of the three portraits commissioned at Augsburg of himself, his father Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle and the emperor. He jokes that his father, who is the eldest of the three, might not, on account of his age, have endured such a long journey but has in fact arrived in excellent shape. He hopes Titian has not forgotten an Ecce Homo he had promised to send. He wants it to differ from the version he has left with him: ‘Above all I would like it to have the beautiful, sweet and delicate face that I know you know how to do. I would also like the background to be dark brown as is the custom. The stole I would like to be purple rather than blue; the tunic can stay red as in the other one.’ But a month later he seems to have realized that it was a solecism to tell the master of colorito how to choose his colours and writes that he made the suggestions only as a matter of comparison and would always rely on Titian’s judgement.
On 17 December, Titian interrupts a letter to Granvelle about the usual subject of his unpaid pensions to make an announcement: ‘And now, my unique patron, having been invited by our most serene lord the Prince of Spain, I am obliged to leave Venice for Milan the day after tomorrow in order to make a first bow to his highness and to obey his command, which I cannot fail to do having been summoned with the greatest urgency’.
SEVEN
The Prince and the Painter
Now lies the earth all Danaë to the stars
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, THE PRINCESS, 1847
At some point after writing his political testament for Philip, Charles V made up his mind that his son would succeed him as ruler of the Netherlands, the group of seventeen semi-autonomous low-lying provinces which he had inherited or acquired, and which were governed by his sister Mary of Hungary. The Netherlands, apart from its allegiance to the emperor, was neither politically nor culturally united. Most of the greater nobles were Burgun
dian by origin but often married into German families. The harsh measures taken by the Habsburgs to put down rebellions had not been entirely forgotten, and the political situation remained potentially explosive. In the northern provinces religious liberals, in the tradition of their greatest citizen Erasmus of Rotterdam, tolerated Protestant worship, even for a time allowing the Anabaptists, the most radical of all heretical sects, to set up independent communities. At Augsburg Charles V had persuaded the Diet that the Netherlands would henceforth form a single ‘Burgundian Circle’, outside the jurisdiction of the imperial parliament but entitled to its protection in exchange for troops and money at twice the rate required of a German elector or three times in case of war with the Turks. It would prove to be one of the most short-sighted decisions of his entire reign when after his death the Netherlands, and Milan, would become military outposts of Philip’s Kingdom of Spain.
