by Sheila Hale
The marble statue to which Dolce refers was the Cnidian Venus, Praxitiles’ most famous statue, the back view of which so inflamed the lust of a young admirer that he left a stain on her thigh. The story was considered the ultimate accolade of the power of an erotic work of art to arouse.
When he dispatched the painting to London after the marriage of Philip and Mary Tudor, Titian cannot have known how uncannily analogous a picture of a man tearing himself from the embrace of a woman was to the situation in which the royal couple found themselves. Although they did not share a common language – Mary spoke to Philip in French, which he just about understood; she had learned enough Spanish from her mother to follow his conversation – Mary was celebrating the first of what would be two false pregnancies and had fallen a bit in love with her consort. While he carried on adulterous affairs – one of his lovers seems to have borne him a daughter – Mary comforted herself with the observation that if she did not have a chaste king ‘at least he was free from the love of any other woman’. Philip was always at his best with women. He was the first man to have taken Mary to bed and was never less than considerate to her. She also desperately needed his support in her determined persecution and burnings of Protestants, a policy which, as Charles V had warned her, was turning her people against her.
But Charles also needed Philip by his side. The French war dragged on – in 1554 French troops raided and destroyed Mary of Hungary’s palatial château at Binche. Charles, who was now far too ill and depressed to take to the saddle, was eager to make final arrangements for his abdication, for which he had been waiting for some years until his son was in a position to replace him. He sent continual messages from Brussels begging Philip to come to him. Philip waited until Mary’s second pregnancy turned out, like the first, to be a prolonged attack of wind before making arrangements to cross the Channel to Brussels. When he took his leave of her at Greenwich on 29 August 1555 she was seen fighting back her tears. Then standing at a window in her apartments overlooking the Thames, she sobbed uncontrollably until Philip’s barge was out of sight. She would not see him again for another two years.
On 10 September 1554, the day Titian sent Philip’s Venus and Adonis to London, he wrote to Granvelle.
I know that His Caesarean Majesty is now in considerable difficulties because of the war, but I have another art as well as that of painting, which is to predict the future, and I hope that my paintings of the Holy Trinity and the Grieving Madonna, which I am sending to His Caesarean Majesty, will find him in peace and glorious victory so that he can enjoy my paintings with a light heart. And Your Most Reverent Lord, having requested your devout Magdalen, which I am sending as my intercessor, will find this a good opportunity to see that my pensions on Milan, which have never been paid either in whole or in part, come in aid of my necessity, since those of Signor Aretino are brought perfumed even to his house.
He would, furthermore, be grateful to Granvelle, his Most Reverend and Illustrious Lord, whose good will he knows will not fail him, to relieve his distress by obtaining, as well as the pension on Milan, the trade agreement to export grain from Naples, and the naturalization in Spain for Pomponio worth a pension of up to 500 scudi.
On the same day, Titian wrote directly to Charles V reminding him, without preliminaries, that he had been granted a pension on Milan worth 200 scudi, the privilege of exporting grain from the Kingdom of Naples duty free, which had cost him hundreds of scudi in maintaining an agent there, and the naturalization for his son in Spain carrying a pension of 500 scudi. It had been his ill fortune to obtain nothing from these grants, and he would now like to have a word with his Most Caesarean Majesty in the hope that the most liberal soul of the greatest Christian emperor there ever was would not allow his orders to be disregarded by his ministers.
I should consider such a benefit as an act of charity because I find myself in some financial difficulties having been ill and having married a daughter. I have appealed to the Queen of heaven that she should intercede on my behalf with Your Caesarean Majesty with a record of her image [the Grieving Madonna], which now comes before you with that semblance of grieving which expresses the quality of my troubles. I also send your painting of The Trinity, and, had it not been for the tribulations I have undergone, I should have finished it earlier, although in my desire to satisfy your C.M. I have not spared myself the pains of striking out two or three times the work of many days to bring it to perfection and satisfy myself, whereby more time was wasted than I usually take to do such things …
Granvelle’s Mary Magdalen, along with the Grieving Madonna and the Trinity for Charles, were dispatched in the same crate to Brussels a month later. Granvelle’s Magdalen is lost. The Grieving Madonna, her hands tightly clasped as she meditates on the suffering of her Son, is as moving in its restraint as the Ecce Homo for which it was intended as a pendant. But soon after its arrival Charles, who had failed to give Titian the correct measurements for it, asked for another, this one with the Virgin’s hands parted in stupefaction, for which he provided a Flemish painting as a model, and he specified that Titian’s new version should be painted on marble, an extremely unusual, delicate and costly support. It was a strange request and the resulting picture, in which the Madonna’s grief is emphasized by tears, demonstrates the limitations of Charles’s understanding of Titian’s more understated way of conveying deep emotion. Both versions, which are now in the Madrid Prado, were in Charles’s possession at his death.
The numerous pentimenti that have been detected beneath the surface of the Trinity are evidence that this extraordinary and exceptionally complex work had indeed cost Titian much trouble and hard labour. Charles may have conceived the design from a type of German painting or relief carving in which the patron and his family are shown in prayer before the Holy Trinity or some other representative image of Christian faith. Titian’s composition, however, seems to have been suggested by Lorenzo Lotto’s altarpiece of St Nicholas in Glory painted in 1529 and still in the Venetian church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Charles and Isabella, dressed in shrouds, the imperial crown cast to one side, gaze upwards in pleading adoration at the Holy Trinity, which is surrounded by a host of angels at the apex of the painting. Behind and below them are their children Philip and Juana, and Charles’s sisters Leonora and Mary of Hungary, all of them guided by angels. On the opposite side of the canvas the Virgin Mother walks towards the Holy Trinity shrouded in the same ultramarine as Christ and God the Father and followed by the other principal intercessor, St John the Baptist. The Madonna looks down on a group of large, muscular Michelangelo-like figures tumbling in different positions across the foreground. Moses hands a Tablet to a turbaned man holding up a scroll on which Titian has placed his signature, ‘TITIANVS P’. The man has been variously identified as St John the Evangelist leaning back on his attribute the eagle, or as the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. Noah lifts up his ark with the dove of peace perched on it at the exact centre of the painting directly below the dove of the Holy Ghost. The woman dressed in green with her back to us could be Mary Magdalen or a sybil. King David, robed in royal blue, clutches his harp. The portrait of himself requested by Francisco de Vargas is probably the bearded man just below the imperial family. Tiny figures in the strip of earthly landscape across the bottom of the picture witness the miraculous vision.
The quality of the painting is uneven, and the composition looks at first sight like an awkward jumble of unrelated figures, although it is largely redeemed by Titian’s incomparable use of light and shade. The golden rays of light that emanate from the heavenly host of angels penetrate a dark cloud to shine on the figures suspended below against an azure sky that reflects the blue robes of God the Father, Christ and Mary, while earthly landscape at the bottom of the painting is cast in shadow. Titian usually referred to this work as the Trinity or the Paradise. The iconographical sources have never been satisfactorily identified, although one scholar16 has maintained that the painting corresponds to St Augustine
’s vision of the blessed as described in his City of God.17 Nevertheless, we can be certain that it is primarily significant as a representation of the personal vision of Charles V, who in his will called it the ‘Last Judgement’. It is about his hopes, for himself and his family, for eternal salvation. It is a vision that Titian may have shared, or wished to be seen to share, when he squeezed his profile – grizzled, naked apart from a toga-like shroud, without the cap that normally covered his balding head – into the right edge of the painting next to Vargas and just below the imperial family.
NINE
The Passing of the Leviathans
I laughed at the dream I dreamed last night while sleeping. Resting in my bed with my eyes shut, I saw a devil and an angel side by side. They said to me that, when it pleased God, my soul would go to the other world post-haste, and that it would spend one month in Hell, and another month in Heaven.
‘How so? I asked.
They answered that the praises given by me to great lords who did not deserve them condemned me to the abyss as a liar, but that the rebukes with which I had buried them alive, won me Heaven and its joy.
PIETRO ARETINO, DECEMBER 15541
Titian had been thinking about a suitable husband for Lavinia for at least six years before he married her to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle, having put together a dowry of 1,500 gold ducats in cash, jewels and a pearl necklace, to be paid in instalments. His nephew and amanuensis Giovanni Alessandrini, who was now practising as a notary in Cadore where he also looked after the business interests of Titian and Francesco, witnessed the marriage contract on 20 March 1555. Lavinia’s dowry was less than a third of the value of the average patrician dowry at the time, but by the standards of contemporary artists, who tended to marry their daughters to fellow artists in the interest of perpetuating the family practice,2 it was an enormous sum. Titian, who was at the time renegotiating his lease on Biri Grande, was feeling the pinch when, shortly after the signing of the marriage contract, the Council of Cadore sent his favourite cousin Toma Tito Vecellio to Venice to request a loan of 250 ducats to cover debts incurred in the purchase of salt and grain. On 1 April Titian granted the Council 200 ducats, which was in addition to 200 outstanding from a previous loan. Toma Tito, acting for the Council, agreed that it would pay an annual interest of thirty-two ducats, or 8 per cent, on the 400 ducats until the entire amount was repaid voluntarily or Titian asked for it.
Lavinia’s dowry provided her with the means to climb the social ladder. Cornelio Sarcinelli was a well-off gentleman farmer belonging to the minor nobility of Serravalle where his handsome house still stands in the old town overlooking the Piazza Grande. Titian may not, however, have bargained for the provincial snobbery of a son-in-law who, although happy enough to accept Lavinia and her dowry, was more conscious of Titian’s social inferiority than impressed by his genius or his friendship with the great men of the world. Sarcinelli turned out to be an unscrupulous, grasping boor, and, judging from his behaviour after Titian’s death, slightly unhinged. After the marriage was celebrated on 19 June 1555, relations between Titian and Sarcinelli were superficially cordial but distant. It seems that Lavinia was rarely if ever allowed to visit home and that Titian did not even attend the baptisms of his grandchildren: Hersilia, Helena, Giacomo, Orazio and Bernardo.3
The Portrait of Lavinia as a Matron,4 for which she posed at some point after her marriage, may show the effect of repeated pregnancies; or it could be, since she was already plump as a little girl when she posed for Titian’s Ecce Homo in the early 1540s, that she was naturally a buxom figure and that this was a wedding portrait. She wears the string of pearls and jewels that were probably part of her dowry and fashionable identical bracelets like the ones that Titian placed on the wrists of his reclining Venuses to suggest that they were women of the upper classes. Nothing more is known about the rest of her life except that she was still alive in 1573 and dead by 1577, when she would have been in her early forties, and that her husband outlived her.
Although Orazio, to whom Titian gave power of attorney to pay over the final instalment of the dowry in 1558, continued to do business with Cornelio Sarcinelli, Titian seems not to have been in contact with him after that date. He must, however, have seen Lavinia on his frequent visits to the area where he owned property and where two of his nieces were also living in Serravalle. In 1551 Giovanni Alessandrini had given Cecilia, the elder of his two sisters, in marriage to Celso di San Fior of Serravalle with a dowry of 400 ducats. San Fior, a nephew of the syndic of that town and Titian’s business agent there, would play an important part in his later life. For Lucia, the younger sister, Alessandrini provided a dowry of 250 ducats on her marriage in 1555 to Giuseppe Zuccato, also of Serravalle. Since Zuccato was not a particularly common surname, it is reasonable to suppose that Giuseppe may have been a relative of Titian’s friends the mosaicists Francesco and Valerio Zuccato. Titian’s relationship with Pomponio meanwhile was almost but not quite at breaking point after his attempts to take over management of the church livings at Sant’Andrea di Favaro and Medole.
It was a distressing time for Aretino. The early 1550s were a period when a less resilient man might have complained that Fortune had turned against him – and a wiser one questioned his own judgement. Poor Adria, a beauty like Aretino’s mother Tita, was only thirteen when he found a husband for her, one Diotalivi Rota, who was sixteen years her elder and a man of property in Urbino. Rota insisted on a dowry of 1,000 ducats, which Aretino, who had been begging for contributions to her dowry since her birth, raised from some of his wealthy friends including Cosimo de’ Medici, who, knowing Aretino’s way with money, gave his donation directly to Rota’s father. The couple were married in June 1550 and were given a grand reception by Aretino’s friend Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. But it was soon clear that Rota and his family were fortune hunters whose only interest in the pretty little Adria was to extract more money from her famous father. They repeatedly locked her up in her bedroom, kept her on starvation rations, appropriated the jewellery and clothing that were part of her dowry and taunted her about her illegitimacy. Aretino wrote that Titian, to whom he poured out the story, was reduced by it to anguish. The girl was taken under the protection of the Duchess of Urbino, but by the time Aretino managed to persuade Guidobaldo to allow her to come home permanently it was too late. Her heart was broken, and so was Aretino’s when she died in 1554, largely through his own fault.
His hopes for a cardinalate, however, had not been altogether extinguished by the failure of Titian’s intervention with Charles V at Augsburg. He had continued to drop hints here and there that he might or might not accept the red hat, and in January 1553 he commissioned a medal from the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria with instructions to cast ‘several in bronze and silver, because people in Rome and elsewhere want them right away’. The portrait side of the medal is inscribed ‘DIVUS PETRVS ARETINVS’. On the reverse, after an invention of his own, the Divus is seated on a throne wearing a capacious toga before a group of bowing princes; the inscription reads ‘I PRINCIPI TRIBVTATI DAI POPOLI IL SERVO LORO TRIBVTANO’ (The Princes who receive tribute from their people pay tribute to their servant). When in February Guidobaldo della Rovere was created captain general of the Church and invited him to travel with him to Rome, Aretino broke his vow never to leave Venice. ‘You should know’, he wrote in a letter to Guidobaldo in March begging for fifty ducats on top of his pension to pay for the necessary wardrobe,
that the treasures of San Marco and the strength of Hercules would not have been enough to move my feet from here for even a single day, and that by persuading me to come to Rome, you have been able to accomplish something that neither Emperor nor Pope nor Duke of Florence has been able to do.
Set out he did, at the end of May, to kiss the feet of Pope Julius III, who received him with ‘fraternal tenderness’. And during that sweltering Roman summer not a word was said about the cardinalate, not by Julius nor by Aretino. The Divus left
Rome in August, and after stopping off at Urbino was home in Venice later that month only to learn that the pope’s brother Baldovino del Monte, to whom he had dedicated the latest collection of his letters, had decided to stop paying him a pension.
At last the Divine Aretino – Scourge of Princes, Secretary of the World, Prophet of Truth and Fifth Evangelist – had to admit defeat. The red hat he had worn in his hopes and dreams would never be his. His books were out of tune with the dictates of the Council of Trent, his rhetoric was getting stale, his critics outnumbered his admirers. But for a man who loved life as much as Aretino there were compensations. The sixth volume of his letters, which would be published posthumously, records many moments of pleasure. The delight of his old age, as he wrote from the heart to Benedetto Agnello, was little Austria,
who continually wants me to buy her golden bands for her head, silken slippers for her feet and dresses of every colour for her back … It is nothing to marvel at, then, that every time she wants to have me put my arms around her neck, kiss her, fondle her locks, seat her upon my knee, embrace her, and yield to her whims in every matter I do yield to her … It seems to me that to do this, is to do something pious, devoted, and real …
And so he went on for a few more years: loving from his heart, rejuvenating himself with bouts of whoring, sharing his gifts of food with Titian and Sansovino and one or two pretty Aretines, unleashing the fury of his pen ‘upon the unrighteous’ to less and less effect.
