Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Although Titian always missed Venice and his old friends when he was abroad, he found plenty of convivial company in Augsburg. He renewed his friendship with the brilliant, amusing younger Granvelle, whose wit and sense of irony were not wasted on him, and Granvelle continued to help him with his difficulties in obtaining moneys promised by the Habsburgs and ordered a Mary Magdalen, a suitable subject for a bishop at a time when the penitent Magdalen had become an exemplar of the dictate of the reconvened Council of Trent that salvation came from penance, not, as the Protestants believed, from faith alone. Granvelle’s Magdalen is lost but may have been the prototype for a number of others painted by Titian and his studio in the 1560s in which the reformed whore, her long auburn hair falling over her bare shoulders and between her full breasts, her eyes raised and red with weeping, is given the Tridentine attributes of a skull and a prayer book.

  When the temperamental sculptor Leone Leoni of Arezzo, an old friend of Pietro Aretino, arrived in January, summoned by Granvelle to make a medal for the emperor of the late empress Isabella taken from a portrait by Titian, the two artists and Granvelle dined merrily together. But Titian’s most interesting encounter must have been with Lucas Cranach of Wittenberg, the friend of Martin Luther and court painter to the electors of Saxony, who with his studio had turned out no fewer than sixty pairs of portraits of John Frederick of Saxony and his wife Sibilla. Cranach, who had painted Charles V as a boy of eight, was permitted to visit John Frederick who was still under house arrest in roomy quarters across a bridge from the Fugger palace where the German princes at the Diet held court. Titian’s second Portrait of John Frederick of Saxony (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum)13 in which the elector seems apprehensive, the wound sustained at Mühlberg now healed into a scar, his tonsured head forming the apex of the enormous pyramidal body outlined against a plain background, looks like a bow to the style of the German painter, whose portraits he would have seen in the Fugger collection. This time the elector’s clumsy armour is replaced by the fur pelisse suitable to his rank. Perhaps Titian discussed his new portrait of him when he sat to Cranach for his own portrait. And what would we not give to have some account of the conversation between the friend of Luther and the friend of Charles V, and to see what Cranach made of Titian in his portrait, one of the many regrettable losses in the unwritten catalogue of Renaissance paintings that have vanished without trace.

  Philip, for all that he revered the father who was grooming him for power at Augsburg, must have been counting the days until the conclusion of the Diet would permit him to sail home to Spain. He was uneasy in the presence of Protestants, whom he knew he had to tolerate but privately regarded as loathsome heretics. He was alienated from his uncle Ferdinand and his cousin Maximilian who regarded him as a usurper of their rights. He could not express himself in any language except his native Spanish, and was even unable to cheer himself up by drinking wine, which made him sick. But he was not disappointed by his second encounter with Titian. In February 1551 he paid him 200 ducats plus thirty for colours for a second portrait, for which he chose to wear a sayo, a waisted Spanish coat lined with white wolf-skin. Judging from the three extant versions of this portrait,14 in which Philip’s face does not change, he looked paler, older and perhaps a little sadder than in the portrait in armour that Titian had painted less than two years earlier in Milan. Philip sent this portrait to Mary of Hungary on 16 May along with some others including her version of the portrait in armour, which Titian had evidently finished in haste, or perhaps left to an assistant, as the prince remarked in the accompanying letter: ‘You can see very well the haste with which he has painted my armour, and if there had been more time I would have had him work on it again. The other [presumably the portrait of Philip wearing the sayo] has been slightly damaged by the varnish, but not in the face; and it can be repaired there, and the fault is not mine but Titian’s.’

  But while Philip quibbled he was also more than generous. In addition to other payments, he paid 1,000 ducats for works so far completed or requested and promised an annual pension of 200 scudi to be paid for life from the Spanish treasury by the Habsburg bank in Genoa.15 Something extraordinary had happened between the gloomy young prince and the ageing painter. The prince may have been baffled and perhaps slightly shocked by the overt sensuality of his Danaë. If so, he was also intrigued by it. In the course of their conversations, necessarily conducted through an interpreter, Titian agreed to provide about ten paintings over the next decade or so. Five were to be taken from stories told by Ovid in his popular Metamorphoses, of which Philip possessed a Spanish translation as well as two editions in the original Latin. Titian must have read the Metamorphoses in one of the many sixteenth-century translations, probably Dolce’s paraphrase published in 1553. But he was not bound by Ovid’s versions. The ancient tales had been often retold,16 and Titian, who never needed more than the germ of a story to arouse his painter’s imagination, sometimes even took hints from the crude erotic woodcuts and engravings from classical mythology that were circulated by the presses for the delectation of the wider public. The other works for Philip were to be religious paintings, which he would paint in the sombre key suitable for a pious proponent of the Catholic Reformation. There was no contract for these paintings to come.17 We can, however, be sure that unlike his father, who enjoyed Titian’s company but valued his talent primarily as a vehicle for promoting his own image, Philip, a sophisticated connoisseur of painting, recognized in Titian an artist of genius possessed of independent spirit, who if left to his own devices could produce paintings that would satisfy Philip’s more highly developed aesthetic taste.

  Titian – or Dolce, who may have written his first letters to Philip – called his mythological works for Philip poesie, or poems, a word in literary currency at the time to describe paintings taken from classical poets and to indicate that painting could have a similar effect on the intellect and senses as poetry. After Philip’s Danaë, which is smaller than the others and which he did not consider part of the group, he would deliver five more: Venus and Adonis (Madrid, Prado), Perseus and Andromeda (London, Wallace Collection), Diana and Actaeon and its pair Diana and Callisto (shown together on a rotating basis in the London National Gallery and Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland)18 and the Rape of Europa (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).19 Although not originally commissioned as a series or for a particular room – Philip, who did not yet have a permanent residence, may have intended them for his bedroom in one his many country palaces – they are all of roughly similar dimensions, loosely linked by narrative and thematic threads taken from the Metamorphoses, and Titian seems to have envisaged a notional room in which they would hang in pairs. In each of his mute poems Titian would display his unique talent for painting female nudes in motion and from different angles. But his poems, which are today among his most famous and admired paintings, are first and foremost about erotic passion (or in the case of the Diana pictures about its negation), which for better or worse changes us and determines our destiny. And just as Ovid edited the much older and more detailed Greek myths in order to dramatize that underlying theme, so Titian took liberties with Ovid to convey, in a way that would be rivalled only by Shakespeare, the many manifestations of the most primitive and overwhelming of human emotions: the sadness of anticipated loss, the suspense, danger, cruelty and unfairness, and the sheer, anarchic fun. It was in these paintings that Titian, to paraphrase Marco Boschini, showed himself to be the dispenser of all emotions and the plenipotentiary of the senses.20

  After they departed from Augsburg in May, Philip for Spain and Titian for Venice, they never met again, although they communicated frequently by letter, Philip dictating to his secretaries in Spanish, Titian to his in Italian. Unlike Alfonso d’Este, for whom the young Titian had painted his exuberant Bacchanals for the ducal camerino d’alabastro, Philip usually left it to Titian to choose the subjects of his paintings, and never insisted on literal adherence to Ovid, or complained when Tit
ian changed his mind about paintings he had promised, or even when he sent paintings executed with workshop assistance. Although Titian in the first instance took care to accommodate Philip’s reservations about the painterly style of the Danaë, it was not long before the prince accepted the artist’s innovative way of laying on paint as though it were light, which Vasari, writing about the poesie in his ‘Life of Titian’, described as ‘executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they can hardly be viewed from close up, but appear perfect at a distance’. From now on Titian would, with only a few exceptions, reserve his best works for Philip, supplying him with original paintings while most other patrons had to make do with studio versions. Philip, the most generous, liberating and sensitive patron of Titian’s entire career, gave him the security of a court artist without the obligation to spend time at a court or even to leave his studio in Biri Grande. That independence, which was unprecedented in the history of patronage, released in Titian a new wellspring of creativity.

  EIGHT

  Venus and Adonis

  With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast And homeward through the dark laund runs apace; Leaves Love upon her back, deeply distressed. Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky, So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye.

  SHAKESPEARE, VENUS AND ADONIS, 1593

  Philip had to wait two years for the first of the poesie Titian had promised him at Augsburg. In the meantime Titian sent him two pictures from stock in the studio. One was a St Margaret and the Dragon (Madrid, Escorial), based on a Raphael then in a Venetian collection, and a suitable subject for Philip because St Margaret was a saint especially venerated by the Habsburgs. The other was almost certainly the painting now known as the Pardo Venus (Paris, Louvre) because it was once in the palace of El Pardo where it was described in an inventory as ‘Jupiter and Antiope’, the story mentioned in passing by Ovid in which Jupiter, aroused by Cupid’s arrows, assumes the form of a satyr and steals up on the sleeping nymph Antiope. It is Titian’s largest mythological painting, but in his correspondence with Philip he referred to it simply as ‘the landscape’. Orazio, writing to Philip many years later, identified it more precisely as ‘the nude woman with the landscape and the satyr’.1

  These two offerings, both of which are now in poor condition, were carried to Spain in the summer of 1552 in the baggage of the Bishop of Segovia having been dispatched by the new imperial ambassador in Venice, Francisco de Vargas, who had taken over from Juan Hurtado de Mendoza in early May. It was one of Vargas’s first tasks to write to Philip about the paintings, and he would remain Titian’s principal contact with the Habsburgs for the next seven years. The portrait Titian painted of him, which was praised by Aretino in generalized clichés, has not survived, although Titian had done the ambassador the honour of accepting his request to include him in Charles’s Adoration of the Trinity. It is through Vargas that we have one of Titian’s rare explanations of his artistic philosophy. The ambassador, who apparently claimed to have seen Titian painting with a brush that was as big as a birch broom, asked him why he did not paint in the more refined manner of his great contemporaries, to which Titian is said to have replied:

  Sir, I am not confident of achieving the delicacy and beauty of the brushwork of Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio and Parmigianino; and if I did, I would be judged with them, or else considered to be an imitator. But ambition, which is as natural in my art as in any other, urges me to choose a new path to make myself famous, much as the others acquired their own fame from the way they followed.2

  The St Margaret and Pardo Venus were followed to Spain in October 1552 by a Queen of Persia, probably a painting of a pretty girl in oriental costume, which may have been related to the so-called Sultana series of pretty women painted by or in collaboration with the workshop. In one of the studio versions, Sultana Rossa (Sarasota, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art), the woman wears an oriental hat. In another, the Girl with an Apple (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), the same girl, clutching an apple presumably to signify her sexual availability, wears a loose green robe. Philip seems never to have received his version, or if he did he never acknowledged it.

  Philip did however make him a gift of 500 scudi, which prompted Titian to send a now lost self-portrait holding a small portrait of the prince3 with a letter composed by Dolce dated March 1553:

  I have had the letter from Your Highness of 12 December, which is so gracious and generous that although old I am restored to youth. In such a way has Your Highness wrought a miracle in me … And so nothing can issue from my mouth or my heart but the great Philip my lord, and in testimony of this while I am putting in order the poesie I am sending to Your Highness yourself …

  On the back of Titian’s letter Philip noted ‘Answer Titian’:

  Well beloved and Faithful,

  … We received your letter and the portrait that accompanied it; it is as though from your own hand and for which, as well as for the trouble you have taken, we give you many thanks, together with assurance of our goodwill in respect of your offer.

  Nevertheless, the emperor and Mary of Hungary continued to claim more of his painting time than Philip. Mary had ordered more family portraits as well as two other pictures, a lost Psyche Presented to Venus, and a Noli me tangere, of which only the head and shoulders of Christ survive (Madrid, Prado). One autograph masterpiece for Mary does, however, survive intact. It is another St Margaret and the Dragon (Madrid, Prado), probably painted at some time before her death in 15584 and far more exciting than what is left of Philip’s version. In the distance, across a shallow lagoon, a city has been set alight by the dragon.5 The green-blue sky is filled with smoke, which balances the escarpment that looms over the action in the foreground. The dragon, still belching fire, sprawls across the base of the painting clutching the right thigh of the terrified and dishevelled young saint, who, her figure lit up by the flames that would consume her, but cool in her scanty lime-green dress, vanquishes the force of evil by brandishing a tiny crucifix. Mary, as Titian knew, took a more sophisticated delight in the aesthetics of painting than her brother Charles, whose Trinity he was required to compose to the emperor’s instructions, and her St Margaret is one of Titian’s spectacular evocations of fire, an anticipation of the freely suggestive way of laying on paint that we see more often in his later work.

  The Trinity was under way by the end of May 1553 when Charles, who had heard a rumour circulating in Brussels that Titian was dead, wrote to Vargas asking for confirmation that the story, as he suspected, was untrue. Titian wrote to reassure him, and so, on 30 June, did Vargas.

  Titian is alive and well, and not a little pleased to know that Your Majesty was inquiring for him. He took me to see the ‘Trinity’, which he promised to finish towards the end of September. It seems to me a fine work. Equally so a Christ appearing to the Magdalen in the garden for the Most Serene Queen Mary. The other picture he says will be a ‘grieving Madonna’, companion to the ‘Ecce Homo’ already in possession of Your Majesty, which he has not done because the size was not given, but which he will execute so soon as the particulars are sent to him.6

  Another priority for Titian after three prolonged absences abroad was to re-establish his presence in Venice. He was one of several artists who joined the Accademia Pellegrina (The Wanderers’ Academy), which had been founded in 1549 by Anton Francesco Doni and other letterati with financial aid from the Venetian nobility for the education of their sons. Before leaving for his second visit to Augsburg he had taken the precaution of asking to be reinstated as a member of the Scuola di San Rocco, where as far as we know he had not attended a meeting since 1528 and had not paid his membership dues for eighteen years. He was at a meeting there in March 1552, was elected to the advisory board in June, and in September 1553 he offered to paint a large canvas for the albergo. Nothing came of this suggestion, which Titian would doubtless have left to assistants and ma
y have made simply to spur the board on to doing something about the long-delayed interior decorations of the building. The board in any case were not unanimously in favour of committing themselves to the expense. Titian did not press the matter, and the wall in the albergo was filled twelve years later by Tintoretto’s astounding Crucifixion.

  There was also the matter of the sanseria. The broker’s patent that paid an annual 100 ducats had quite properly been withdrawn during Titian’s absences on the grounds that he was too busy working abroad for foreigners to fulfil the requirement of supplying paintings for the ducal palace. The sanseria was reinstated in October 1552, no doubt after some networking in high places by Titian and his friends; and Titian was called upon to paint official portraits of two more doges for the palace. Marcantonio Trevisan was a compromise candidate who had succeeded Francesco Donà in June of that year. Aretino praised Titian’s portrait of him and of Vargas in a letter written in November 1553, which tells us nothing about the painting itself: