Titian

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Titian Page 62

by Sheila Hale


  But then, three years years after the insult to his pride in Rome, he found himself engaged in a stormy literary row with the renegade priest Anton Francesco Doni, the most talented and prolific of the other writers in Venice. Aretino had openly recognized Doni’s talent since the mid-1540s, and Doni was indebted to his example. But when Doni, down on his luck, asked Aretino for a letter of recommendation to the Duke of Urbino, in whose duchy he hoped to settle, Aretino refused the favour. Doni, who was well known for his temper, responded with an explosive denunciation of the Divine Aretino in the form of a book of letters, Il Teremoto (The Earthquake), which was published on 1 March 1556 with the subtitle ‘The Earthquake of Doni the Florentine, with the Ruin of a Great Colossus, the Bestial Anti-Christ of our Age’. Il Teremoto was the most colourful and brilliant work of defamatory writing of the sixteenth century, and more than worthy of its subject, at whom Doni hurled insult after slanderous insult, some for the attention of the Dukes of Urbino and Tuscany, the doge of Venice and the emperor. Those written directly to Aretino bore poisonous dedications such as ‘To that disgraceful scoundrel, source and spring of every rascally deed, Pietro Aretino, stinking organ of devilish lies’; ‘To his Divine Hogheadedness, formerly Messer Pier of Arezzo, a Divine Wine-jug’; ‘To Aretino, the tiltyard dummy of all worthless rascals, gilded without but wooden within’. Doni also invented completely unjustified rumours, such as that Aretino was sleeping with the wife of his friend and publisher Francesco Marcolini. In the last book he predicted that Aretino would die within the year.

  And so it happened that on 21 October, a Wednesday, Aretino was dining with some friends when someone in the party cracked a joke. Roaring with laughter he leaned back in his chair, which keeled over under the weight of his enormous bulk as his face turned from livid to grey. The death certificate gave the cause of death as apoplexy, but the story went round that he had died, appropriately, of laughter. Although the death was also officially described as instantaneous, another anecdote had him live long enough to receive extreme unction and utter his last blasphemy: ‘Now I am oiled keep me from the rats.’ The funeral was held in the sacristy of the church of San Luca. Some said that the magnificent gold chain with vermilion tongues given him by Francis I was sold to defray the funeral expenses; others that it was broken up on his instructions and distributed to the poor. It was the kind of antithesis that Aretino would have appreciated.

  Not everyone was sorry to see the last of the Divine Aretino. Three days after his death the Florentine ambassador in Venice reported to Cosimo de’ Medici that ‘The mortal Pietro Aretino on Wednesday at the third hour of the night was carried off into the next world by a stroke of apoplexy without any decent man being sorry to lose him.’ And one of Ferrante Gonzaga’s creatures, a certain Antonio Pola, who had taken care to flatter the Scourge when he was alive, echoed the ambassador’s sentiment in November in a letter to his master: ‘On reaching Venice I found that that buffoon had given up his soul to Satan, whose death I think will not displease many, and particularly not those who are from henceforth relieved from paying tribute to the brute.’ Aretino’s tombstone in San Luca has long since disappeared, but the memorial for which he is best remembered is the Dialogue on Painting, which Lodovico Dolce rushed into print ten months after his death with the title L’Aretino. Dolce, although a prolific writer, translator and editor, had never written anything like this before. As we have seen, he had begun the work seven years earlier as a riposte to Vasari’s first edition of The Lives of the Artists, which had excluded Titian. Now the demise of Aretino gave him an additional purpose. L’Aretino is a celebration of the critical powers of the writer who had loved and understood the art of painting better than any of his literary contemporaries, and to whose fictional persona Dolce gave the honour of relating the first biography of Titian.

  From Titian himself not so much as a word has survived about the loss of the more than brother and dearest gossip who had helped to launch his international career, ghosted many of his best letters and ridden on his coat tails for three decades. We might have heard something about Titian’s feelings from Benedetto Agnello, the Mantuan ambassador who had recorded his sadness at the loss of his first wife Cecilia in 1530. But Agnello, who had been reporting news from Venice to the Gonzagas for some twenty-five years, had predeceased Aretino to the grave by seven months, thus depriving posterity of the candid and intimate observations of another cynical, independent-minded and sharp-witted insider. Aretino, although he had been increasingly conscious of the shadow of death in his later years, had never stopped to predict what Titian’s future would be like without his Divine, irreplaceable self. If he had written his own obituary would he have included, along with the inevitable eulogies of his own greatness, a paragraph or two about what his death would mean to Titian? He knew, although he might not have confessed it, that Titian’s worldwide reputation had long since outdistanced, and would soon all but obliterate, his own. He would never, however, be replaced as the alter ego of the painter who walked at one with nature.

  After Aretino’s death Titian, now approaching seventy, became more and more dependent on Orazio, who ran the studio, acted as his business manager and wrote some of his letters for him. For his most important official letters Titian turned to Giovanni Maria Verdizotti, a Venetian writer, draughtsman, printmaker and later man of the cloth who was thirty-one when Aretino died. Verdizotti, who came from an upper-middle-class family, had a reputation for precocious brilliance: it was said that at the age of sixteen he had translated the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But although gifted with the classical education that Aretino had pretended to despise, he lacked the rhetorical flair and independent judgement of his predecessor. Some of the letters he wrote on Titian’s behalf read as though translated from Latin into Italian; and unlike Aretino he followed instructions from Titian or Orazio about their content.

  Aretino’s death coincided with a shift in religious attitudes and in the power structure of Europe that left no place for a man of his particular ambitions and talents. Although he might have boasted that he had exited the world in the nick of time, he did have the misfortune to live just long enough to see the election in June 1555 as Pope Paul IV of his bête noire Gian Pietro Caraffa, the former Bishop of Chieti and a founder of the Theatine order. In the good old days Aretino had not hesitated to revile Caraffa, ‘that parasite of penitence’. And so it proved that Paul IV became the most destructive and hated pope of the sixteenth century.

  The new pope, who was seventy-nine when he ascended the papal throne, had devoted his entire life to implementing strict Church reform. As soon as he was elected he decided that the English cardinal Reginald Pole was a Lutheran and set about imprisoning other members of the moderate Spirituali. No matter was too large or small to escape his vigilance. He suspended the Council of Trent indefinitely. Roman Jews were herded into ghettos, forced to sell their property to Christians and to wear yellow hats. He let it be known that he preferred the male members of the Sistine choir to be celibate; and it was he who employed Daniele da Volterra to paint loincloths over the exposed genitals in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, an act of artistic vandalism in response to which Michelangelo commented that it would be better for His Holiness to attend to the more difficult task of reforming the world since ‘Reforming a painting is easily done.’ Under Paul IV the creativity and search for the truth that we think of as hallmarks of the Italian Renaissance were temporarily replaced by suppression, blind orthodoxy and fear of innovation; but only for as long as he lived. Paul’s death four years after his election was greeted in Rome with jubilation. Mobs rampaged through the streets toppling statues of the late unlamented pope and smashing open the cells in which prisoners of the inquisition had been incarcerated. He was succeeded by the moderate, conventionally religious Pius IV, an affable man and able bureaucrat, who immediately pardoned those who had participated in the riots and went on to revive the Council of Trent and see it through its final sitting.


  The Pauline Index of Prohibited Books, the most comprehensive up to that time, was at least as irrational as all previous and subsequent attempts at totalitarian censorship. Anton Francesco Doni got off quite lightly, while the nearly 600 other banned authors included Machiavelli, Erasmus, Aretino’s friend Antonio Brucioli for his translation of the Bible, and the obscene poems of Titian’s friend Giovanni della Casa, the former papal legate who had compiled the first Venetian Index of Prohibited Books. The posthumous Aretino was thus in good company when his description of the Annunciation in The Humanity of Christ was singled out in a petition to ban the rest of his religious writings. How he would have revelled in the ironic inconsistencies of the Index. No attempt was made to suppress Jacopo Caraglio’s engraving of Titian’s painting of the Annunciation that had been sent to the empress Isabella although it had been directly inspired by his own banned account. And while his religious works were Indexed, his pornographic and anticlerical writings were ignored. Venice resisted the Index and the Inquisition for a few more years, but religious and state censorship gradually took hold, and the age of the subversive poligrafi was over by the end of the decade. The Venetian presses continued to whirr, but from now on they turned out orthodox religious works.

  Titian, unaffected by the repressive strictures, continued to turn his brushes simultaneously to pagan myths intended to arouse the senses and flatter erudition and to deeply pious images of the sufferings of Christ and the saints as required by the dictates of the Counter-Reformation and his own deepening faith, adapting not only his style and chromatic range but apparently his emotional engagement to what we might think of as inimical genres. He kept his Venus with a Mirror and Two Cupids of around 1555 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) in his studio for the rest of his life, probably to serve as the prototype for commissioned versions, of which there were several. He had every reason to anticipate the popularity of this stunning tour de force, a more sophisticated and ‘modern’ departure from the Venuses with Mirrors that he and Giovanni Bellini had painted early in the century, and more glamorous and compositionally interesting than contemporary paintings of naked women with mirrors by Tintoretto and Veronese, which look vulgar or contrived by comparison. It refers to the paragone between painting and sculpture with wit, sensuality and a complex but compelling design. Venus adopts the pudica pose, covering a breast and lower abdomen with her hands as in classical statues, although he must have taken her sweet, shy, vulnerable facial expression from a living model, whose torso is modelled against a dark background. You can count the pearls that dress her golden hair, but reproductions cannot do justice to the thick, open application of paint elsewhere in the painting, notably Venus’ reflection in the mirror, which anticipates the style of his later works. Titian painted her over an abandoned double portrait of a man and woman, which he turned on its side, and from which he reused the fur-lined red velvet robe trimmed with silver-gilt embroidery that Venus clutches around her hips in such a way that the fur outlines the pudenda it is meant to conceal.5 The two cupids are posed to emphasize her tall, upright stature: one has to stretch to place the laurel wreath on her head; the other, balancing precariously on the striped coverlet of her couch, struggles to hold up the heavy rectangular mirror at an oblique angle so that we see in her blurred reflection only part of her shoulder and face with one black eye that could be admiring herself or could be directed at the viewer.

  The moving Penitent St Jerome (Milan, Brera), painted around the same time or a few years later, was originally an altarpiece in the now demolished Venetian parish church of Santa Maria Nuova.6 It is one of the least seen of Titian’s greatest paintings because it cannot be loaned to exhibitions by reason of its large size and its panel support.7 St Jerome, the ascetic intellectual, retired to the Syrian desert with his books and his faithful lion to do penance for the sexual hallucinations that plagued him, with, according to his own description, ‘only the scorpions and wild beasts for company’. Titian placed him on the dark and gloomy slope of a wooded hillside in the Veneto, realized with thick impastos of primary colours and brownish glazes. St Jerome, naked apart from a white loincloth and a red drape twisted around his hips, reaches intently towards a small crucifix, clutching in each hand stones with which to purify his soul by beating his breast. A lizard slinks towards Titian’s signature on the rock upon which the saint kneels. Two skinny tree trunks appear to tiptoe towards him like wild beasts, their heads blocking out all but tiny patches of the azure sky that once, long ago, filled the background of Titian’s youthful religious pictures. A skull, bone and hourglass on the rock behind the saint signify the transience of life, but we see from the sand, which has only just begun to flow, that there is time enough for repentance. The two books are closed while the saint focuses all his attention on the Word that was God and ‘was made flesh, and dwelt among us’.8

  Nothing was known about the circumstances of its commission until the early twenty-first century when documentary evidence was discovered9 that the patron was a merchant from Cologne by the name of Enrico. More usually known as Rigo Helman, his name appears as ‘Elman R’ in the blurred inscription on the book propped up and facing us. In 1556 Rigo Helman, wishing as a foreigner to establish his piety and the presence of himself and his large family in Venice, obtained the right to erect a family altar in the first space on the right aisle of Santa Maria Nuova, and after one of his sons, whose name was Jerome, died prematurely the decision was taken to dedicate the altar to the boy’s name saint. Although a well-established member of the German merchant community for twenty years, Helman might not have been wealthy or important enough to approach the great Titian for an altarpiece, let alone one that was entirely autograph, but he had a connection that would have been persuasive. He was happily married to and had eight children by Chiara d’Anna, the much loved sister of Titian’s friend and patron, the vastly wealthy Giovanni d’Anna. Helman’s story nevertheless has a sad ending. In 1561 he was, probably unjustly, accused of fraud and fled the lagoon never to return.

  Titian would later send versions of both these subjects to Philip,10 but for the time being he was more concerned to continue with the poesie promised at Augsburg. In March 1556, eighteen months after dispatching Venus and Adonis, he completed a group of paintings for the king that included a poesia taken from Ovid’s story of Perseus and Andromeda at the end of Book IV of the Metamorphoses, as well as a ‘most devout work’ (probably the Crucifixion now in the Madrid Escorial).11 In May Philip instructed Vargas to send the pictures to him at Brussels and to make sure they were packed carefully so as to avoid the damage done to his Venus and Adonis. They were in good condition when they reached Philip in September.

  Perseus, the son of Danaë and Jupiter, was flying on his winged sandals – a gift from Mercury – over the realm of Ethiopia when he noticed the maiden Andromeda chained to a jagged rockface by the god of that land as a punishment for her mother’s boasts about her own surpassing beauty.

  Unconscious desire was kindled within him.

  Dumbly amazed and entranced by the beautiful vision before him,

  He almost omitted to move his wings as he hovered in the air.

  Then once he’d alighted, he said to the maiden, ‘Shame on such fetters!’

  …

  When out of the sea there resounded

  a sinister roar and, advancing across the expanse of ocean,

  breasting the surge of the waves, there emerged a menacing monster.

  Perseus engages in a tremendous battle with the monster. When he flies up into the sky on his sandals the monster attacks his shadow on the water. Perseus swoops down wounding the beast with his curved sword, but the monster spews a mixture of seawater and blood that drenches his sandals and weighs them down so that Perseus, not daring to attempt flight, stands on a rock for support and delivers the kill from there, plunging his weapon again and again through the monster’s vitals. Andromeda’s parents are of course delighted and the hero is immedi
ately married to the beautiful woman he has rescued from certain death.

  When he started work on this painting Titian found himself undecided about which episode in the battle would be most effective. In one of the versions that can be detected beneath the finished painting he followed Ovid by placing Perseus standing on the ground with his back to us on the left side of the canvas and Andromeda, with both arms raised above her head, chained to her rock on the other side. His final solution is in wretched condition, thanks to having spent twenty years hanging in Sir Richard Wallace’s bathroom in the mid-nineteenth century when the attribution to Titian had been lost. Nevertheless, it remains a great painting. The overall tone is low and the chromatic range all the more exciting for that. The figures move in a fictional space – the writhing monster almost seems to turn that space inside out – that defies the laws of perspective. His final decision to have Perseus flying down from the sky in an attitude that reverses the pose of the chained Andromeda was doubtless influenced by Tintoretto’s swooping figures. It didn’t interest Titian that in real space Perseus’ shield would be too close to the monster’s mouth or that his sword would have missed its target; nor should it interest us because neither the story nor Titian’s interpretation of it is about reality.

  Philip’s Crucifixion was revealed by a cleaning in the 1970s to be a deeply moving and beautiful devotional work in which the dead Christ, high on his cross against a stormy dawn sky and receding landscape, is alone, while his murderers, their job done, ride triumphantly towards the city in the distance. If this is indeed ‘the most devout work which I have had on my hands already for ten years’ that he had mentioned in his letter to Philip of September 1554, he must have completed it originally for another patron, possibly Cardinal Alessandro Farnese for whom he had painted pictures of unspecified subjects in the second half of the 1540s which were never delivered.

 

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