Titian
Page 57
In September 1548 Charles disposed of the rival candidate to rule the Netherlands, Ferdinand’s adolescent son Maximilian, by ordering his marriage to his own daughter Maria. Maximilian and Maria, who were married at Madrid in September, were then dispatched to take over the regency of Spain so that Philip could join his father at Brussels for an extended tour of his future domains. Philip left Valladolid on 2 October for what his courtiers described as his felicissimo viaje, his most happy voyage. The royal party sailed a month later in fifty-eight galleys commanded by the eighty-two-year-old Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, whose private fleet had been the mainstay of the emperor’s Spanish navy for the past twenty years. Two weeks later they were in Genoa, where they remained for sixteen days of feasting and celebrations as Doria’s guests before departing for Milan on 11 December in cold and snowy weather. If Philip looked forward to inspecting the duchy with which Charles had invested him two years earlier, he was also so eager to be portrayed by his father’s friend and favourite painter that he sent his urgent summons to Titian even before the royal party arrived in Milan on 19 December.
Since the death of Philip of Spain in 1598 most English-speaking historians have portrayed him as a paradigm of evil: mediocre, pedantic, suspicious, licentious, small minded, cruel, brutal and misguided suppressor of Protestant ‘heretics’ in Flanders, and of course perpetrator of the failed attempt by the Spanish Armada in 1588 to overthrow Elizabeth I of England. But when Titian met Philip in Milan the prince was only twenty-one, with the grounds for his posthumous reputation far in the future. As effective King of Spain since the age of sixteen, when his father had left him in charge there in 1543, he had got used to taking decisions on his own account, appending to his signature the words ‘Yo el Principe’ (I, the prince). In that same year Charles had married him to his cousin Princess Maria of Portugal, who was six months younger than Philip. The union of Philip and Maria, both of them descended from Charles’s grandmother Joanna the Mad, proved to be one of the emperor’s most destructive consanguineous marital arrangements. Maria died two years after the marriage giving birth to Don Carlos, who, as the product of three generations of inbreeding between the Spanish and Portuguese royal families, had four great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. Even as a toddler he began showing signs of the mental instability that would manifest itself in fits of irrational paranoia, murderous rages and physical assaults. It must be said in Philip’s favour that he did what he could to involve his son in matters of state until he was finally forced to arrest him for violent behaviour and treasonable contacts with the rebels in Flanders.1
Philip’s own childhood had been lonely even by the standard of the future rulers of his day. Charles V had rejoiced at the birth of his firstborn, who would prove to be his only legitimate son, and although he was rarely in Spain while his heir was growing up, he took great pains to supervise from abroad matters concerning his health and education. Philip worshipped his absent father, but the formative influence in his early childhood was his beautiful, gentle mother Isabella and her Portuguese retinue. Isabella’s untimely death when Philip was twelve must have affected him all the more through his father’s grief: Charles retired to a convent for seven weeks and ordered Philip to wear mourning for the next two years. The boy turned for affection to his two sisters, Maria and Juana, to his Portuguese governess and to his guardian and tutor, Juan de Zúñiga, grand commander of Castile, who encouraged the earnestness and piety that were to be so much a part of his adult character.
His father’s letters of instruction, written for Philip’s guidance during his regency, were intended to form the style of his eventual rule: he must ‘keep God always in mind’, ‘accept good advice at all times’, ‘never allow heresies to enter your realms’, ‘support the Holy Inquisition’. He should be faithful to his wife but abstain as far as possible from enjoyable or prolonged sexual relations with her ‘because besides being harmful both to bodily growth and strength, often it impairs the capacity to have children and can kill’. In this matter, however, Philip would follow his father’s example as a serial adulterer rather than heed his advice. And despite the instruction that in order to communicate with the many peoples over whom he would rule it was essential to learn Latin and reasonable French, Philip was never at ease in Latin or French, and his lack of fluency in foreign languages was a handicap that would affect his comprehension and judgement of foreign affairs later in his life. Nor, although he greatly admired his father’s military prowess and showed some skill in the tourneys, war games and hunts that were intended to train him up as a soldier, did he ever share Charles’s zeal for the heat of battle or for leading his armies in person.
He was haughtier and even more of an introvert than Charles, although he could relax in the company of women and was energetic and flirtatious at the court festivities that were part of the royal routine. Although no scholar, he grew up surrounded by books, took an interest in science, music and particularly architecture. As he grew older he would develop a taste for painting that was keener and better informed than that of the other members of his family and more adventurously eclectic than that of any of his contemporaries. He bought paintings by Bosch as well as Titian, although he rejected El Greco; and by the end of his life he had amassed a collection of over a thousand pictures in addition to the 500 mostly Flemish works he had inherited. At the time of his first meeting with Titian, however, he was most familiar with the Flemish paintings in the Spanish royal collection, although the beginnings of a taste for Italian mythological paintings might have been sparked by Correggio’s Loves of Jupiter, originally commissioned by Federico Gonzaga, which Charles had given to Philip. As a child Philip had seen Titian’s explosive Annunciation for Isabella, which arrived in Spain when he was ten. But it was the (now lost) portrait of Charles V, the father he adored but rarely saw in person, painted in armour by Titian in 1533 when Philip was only four, that captured his attention and filled his dreams.
Philip must have had this portrait or an enlarged copy in mind when he invited Titian to Milan to paint the portrait of himself (Madrid, Prado), which is also in armour,2 of the same dimensions, and which he hung next to the portrait of his father in his chambers.3 Titian probably intended the high finish and attention to detail of this magnificent portrait – the first in a line of Spanish court portraits that would make an indelible impression on Velázquez and Van Dyck – to accord with Philip’s familiarity with the Flemish style. It would be a mistake, however, to condemn with knowledge of hindsight the character we may think we see behind the thick red lips, the sparse little beard that barely conceals the jutting Habsburg jaw, the cold, sidelong stare of the hooded eyes, because this portrait is in fact one of Titian’s most considered exercises in idealization. Philip, who was in reality an ungainly figure of medium height and a reluctant warrior, was transformed by Titian into a proud military leader, at ease in his superbly painted damascened parade armour with one hand resting on his sword, the other on his plumed helmet. The light emanating from the left splashes on his polished breastplate and describes an aura around the prince’s head. Behind him the stone shaft of a pillar (perhaps a reference to Charles V’s personal emblem of the pillars of Hercules) bisects his helmet and gauntlet to form a right angle with the burgundy plush cover of the rectangular table in one of Titian’s strongest compositions. Aretino, who saw the portrait when Titian was finishing it in Venice, rightly described it in a sonnet addressed to the prince4 as having ‘the handsome bearing of royal majesty’.
On 7 January 1549 Philip resumed his journey towards Brussels, where he was to join his father for a tour of the Netherlands, his retinue accompanied by the sculptor Leone Leoni who was to make a portrait medal of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle. Titian, who travelled with the royal party as far as Verona, may have noticed Philip’s undisguised appreciation of beautiful women. On 29 January, at Trent, where Philip’s party was greeted by the German and Spanish cardinals who had defied the pope’s orders to move th
e Council to Bologna, the prince gave orders that Titian should be paid 1,000 gold scudi for ‘certain portraits which he is making at my command’. Two of them were versions of the portrait of Philip for Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle and Mary of Hungary. Philip’s portrait was sent to him at Brussels on 9 July, when Mendoza reported that the other two versions were nearly ready, although not as good as the original done in Milan. In fact, Titian’s studio was now so crowded with commissions for the Habsburgs that he put these portraits to one side while finishing the Tityus and Sisyphus for Mary of Hungary. They reached her palace at Binche in June,5 in good time to be hung in the Grande Salle for her reception in late August for the emperor and Prince Philip, who particularly admired Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, which hung in the chapel and which he later acquired for the Escorial.
July is a hot, humid, mosquito-ridden month in Venice, and the July of 1549 was unusually unpleasant. Titian would probably have escaped to Cadore or to his villa in the hills above Ceneda had he not, as he wrote to Granvelle early in the month, been working full stretch for the court despite the ‘strange heats’, which ‘barely let us live’. Although the portrait of Philip for Granvelle was finished by the 29th, Titian did not send it to him until the following year, and work on the version for Mary seems to have been suspended altogether for the time being. Then he fell ill, and remained indisposed for the rest of the summer.6 Although we don’t know the nature of the illness it would not be surprising if the sexagenarian Titian had succumbed, in the suffocating heat of a Venetian high summer, to the combined pressures of an exceptionally heavy workload, of the energy he put into chasing his creditors and not least of his deteriorating relationship with Pomponio, who had given up all pretence of a vocation for the priesthood and was devoting himself to a life of self-indulgence at his father’s expense.
Pomponio, as Aretino wrote to the no longer so young wastrel in September 1550, was causing his father ‘such distress of mind that it made me weep to see him’:
It is all because that really great man wanted you to change your way of life. Your goings on, indeed, make me think of a low comedy. The audience does not judge it on the basis of how long they have to listen to it, but on whether it is well acted and well staged … It is not right that the money amassed by the paintbrushes, the skill, the labour, and the long journeys of Titian should be thrown away in riotous living … As your godfather I pray fervently that you will go back to the way of living that I long for and desire to see in you … If you do this, you will find your way home into your father’s heart again.
The correspondence about Pomponio’s riotous and wasteful behaviour continued over the next three years, with Titian swearing he would have nothing to do with his son, Aretino offering to intervene, Pomponio apologizing but then carrying on as before. Pomponio complained to Aretino that his father was unreasonably severe. Aretino took Titian’s side, saying that it was a son’s duty to obey, but recommended clemency to Titian. As Aretino wrote to another friend in January 1553 about the behaviour of Pomponio and Francesco Sansovino, ‘The children of those two who are so well known to the world will learn that the glory and fame of their fathers is a heavy burden to their sons who live dissolutely.’
We can guess what it was that the two young unmarried men, whose identities had been hijacked by their successful fathers, might have been up to. Pomponio, having reached the age when his patrician contemporaries were obliged to wear the toga and take their place in the Great Council of government, and his less privileged friends to earn their living, was a reluctant priest with no responsibilities and nothing to show for himself except a famous father and the church benefices his father took endless trouble to obtain for him. Like his friend Francesco Sansovino, who was for a while his companion in what Aretino called ‘lewd doings’, Pomponio wanted to be a writer; but unlike Francesco, who did later become a successful writer, he had neither the willpower nor the talent to pursue any particular goal. Pomponio, furthermore, was a priest whether he liked it or not. Although the two young men lived in a culture where it was taken for granted that the majority of men, until tamed by marriage, would misbehave, priests were at the very least expected to be discreet about unacceptable behaviour. So even Aretino would have recognized that whatever the two of them were up to – presumably prancing about town in expensive finery, getting drunk, running up debts in the shops, brothels and taverns – was particularly reprehensible in the case of a priest. He wrote to Titian and Jacopo Sansovino that they had every right to deny their sons ‘not merely luxuries, but bread, and that forthwith … But’, he went on, ‘if it should come to pass that we oldsters were willing to remember what we did at the same age, we would forgive young people their faults and laugh at them, getting back 100 per cent what we spent by enjoying their amusements and their pleasures.’
Titian, unfortunately, could not bring himself to forgive. On 6 July 1549 he asked Granvelle to obtain the emperor’s signature on a placet transferring the living of Santa Maria della Scala, where his son was not able to fulfil the obligation of residence, to another beneficiary, a certain Pietro de Randa, who would pay Pomponio a pension of eighty scudi. Four years later Titian would take control of the two other benefices he had acquired for Pomponio, that of Medole, obtained from Federico Gonzaga in 1531, and that of Sant’Andrea di Favaro, granted by Pope Paul III in 1546. On 26 April 1554, without consulting Pomponio, he wrote to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga that Pomponio ‘does not seem to be as much inclined to be a churchman as I would like’, and asked the cardinal for permission to transfer the benefice of Medole to a relative whom he did not name.7 The sweetener was an altarpiece painted by his studio of Christ Appearing to the Virgin for the church of Santa Maria in Medole, where it is still in situ. Father and son were already communicating about the benefices through lawyers on 29 October 1554 when Titian issued a warrant of attorney empowering him to claim all incomes past, present and future from the benefice of Sant’Andrea di Favaro, which he would dispose of as he pleased. Pomponio must make a solemn promise never to interfere with the power or make any claim whatsoever on the benefice.
However much time and effort Titian had put into obtaining the livings for Pomponio, and however disinclined Pomponio was to live at Medole, let alone Favaro – where the climate, so he frequently complained, was bad for his health – the father had no right under ecclesiastical law to appropriate benefices that had been granted to his son. It seems that Pomponio may in fact have retained the Medole benefice at least until 1566 when he is known to have transferred it himself to a priest named Agostino Agnelli in return for an annual pension of 168 ducats rising to 200 in the next three years. But Titian’s arrogant and illegal actions, not least his attempt to dispose of Medole without so much as informing Pomponio of his intentions, had planted seeds of a poisonous mutual resentment that would eventually destroy their relationship.
Granvelle meanwhile was doing his best to unlock the many sources of income that had been promised to Titian over the years but had never materialized. Titian’s pension on the treasury of Milan was still not forthcoming. The Prince of Salerno, who in a rash moment had offered a pension at Augsburg, had conveniently forgotten about it. The heirs of the late Alfonso d’Avalos were unwilling to come up with the pension of fifty ducats with which d’Avalos had rewarded Titian for his Allocution in 1541. And, by no means the least of Titian’s grievances, the authorities in Naples continued to withhold the 300 cartloads of grain for export duty-free which as long ago as 1535 Charles V, flushed by his victory at Tunis, had ordered the then viceroy to provide. But for now Granvelle was able to offer more explanations than solutions for the delayed payments. He informed Titian that the Milan pension could not be paid because the authenticated documents had not yet been produced, because a secretary in Milan had made a mistake, because Charles V was too ill to sign the document, and so on. Titian engaged the help of his nephew Giovanni Alessandrini, who got nowhere with the d’Avalos pension or the Prin
ce of Salerno’s. When Titian sent Alessandrini to Naples he did think he might be making some progress with the grain. But, so he grumbled to Granvelle, it was no longer worth what it had been. Alessandrini’s negotiations in any case came to nothing.
Titian was hardly a poor man. He had recently received 1,000 gold scudi from Philip, and by the early 1550s he could expect, at least on paper, an annual income from the Habsburgs alone of at least 500 ducats, about twice that of the most senior Venetian government officials and ten times the salary of a skilled workman in the arsenal; and this was in addition to payments for paintings for other patrons, his sanseria, Pomponio’s benefices, profits from the family timber and real estate businesses, and windfalls such as an annual pension of forty ducats for life given him by Bembo’s son Torquato in 1552 (which Torquato stopped paying in the 1570s). His insistent dunning letters – sometimes threatening, sometimes pathetically pleading poverty or old age – may seem surprising coming from that most poetic and temperamentally balanced of great artists. Indeed, his interest in the minutiae of his finances has no parallel in the period, which is why, four years after his death, Jacopo Bassano chose to portray Titian as the grasping moneychanger in his Purification of the Temple (1580). Nevertheless, the explanation for his obsession with money – his pensions, as he put it himself, were ‘his passions’8 – is not as simple as mere personal greed on the part of a self-made man who had spent his early childhood in a household in the mountains where every penny and stick of firewood had to be counted. Unlike the rich and famous artists of our own day, he had no gallery to manage his business affairs, and even Aretino, whose powers of persuasion were beginning to fail him, would not have recommended taking legal action against the likes of the Habsburgs. So Titian fought for what was after all his due in the only way he could – through highborn or well-connected men like Granvelle, trading gifts of paintings for their favours. He knew his worth and wanted to demonstrate it by living, dressing and behaving like an aristocrat; and he also wanted to be in a position to pass on, like an aristocrat, his wealth and status to his family, which now included, as well as a new baby daughter, two sons who were running through his money and a daughter, Lavinia, who had reached puberty and would soon need a substantial dowry if she were to marry into the nobility.