Titian

by Sheila Hale

  There is no simple explanation for the care he took with a variant of Philip’s Crucifixion (Ancona, Church of San Domenico) for a less important patron except that he had always liked to start from a given – a landscape, an architectural setting, a painting by another artist, and now increasingly as he grew older from his own previous works. The Ancona Crucifixion was commissioned in the same year, while Philip’s version was still fresh in his mind, by a wealthy Venetian merchant, Pietro Cornovi della Vecchia, who had recently moved to Ancona. Eight years after della Vecchia’s painting was installed over the high altar of the Dominican church in Ancona on 22 July 1558 Titian told Vasari, who cannot have seen the original, that he had painted it in his later style, that is, ‘with patches of colour’. The technique of rendering form through colour had now become as important to him as new inventions. In the Ancona version, which is half again the size of Philip’s Crucifixion, the hill town and landscape have been replaced by fire, which Titian imagined following the earthquake that occurred, according to St Matthew’s account, and rent the veil of the temple in twain after Christ yielded up the ghost. The fire that has destroyed the old religion describes a halo around the bowed figure of Christ’s Mother as its smoke rises into the dramatically striated sky – ‘there was darkness over all the land’ – where the wood of Christ’s cross merges with the heavens as though He were already with God. St Dominic, titular saint of the church and altar, clutches the foot of the cross while St John the Evangelist, his arms flung out in grief, gazes up at the dead Christ.

  When Philip received his most recent paintings from Titian in September 1556 he was ruler of the most extensive monarchy in the world. In the course of the previous year his father had relinquished in his favour sovereignty of the Netherlands, Spain, its American possessions and most of Italy. Philip’s domain did not, however, embrace the Holy Roman Empire, which Charles V had decided after all to give to his brother Ferdinand and Ferdinand’s heirs (although the German electors did not accept this decision for another two years). Philip II of Spain, as he now was, had said his last goodbyes to the father he adored in August; and Charles, having abdicated all his titles, was now sailing to Spain in a small fleet of Flemish, English and Spanish ships with a reduced household in the charge of Don Luis Méndez de Quijada, who had served him for three decades, and his two sisters Mary of Hungary and Eleanor of France.

  Charles had been pondering his succession since his fortieth birthday, and had decided that Spain would be his last resting place as early as 1544 when he had asked Philip to find him a retirement home in the country he had first known as an awkward and unwelcome king of sixteen and which was now closest to his heart: Spanish, he had once said, was the language one speaks to one’s God. Abdication in favour of Philip had been in the forefront of his mind since as early as 1550. And in the years that followed he had struggled with increasing exhaustion, bodily ill health, mental depression, disillusionment and an overwhelming recognition that his imperial programme had failed. He had hoped for peace, but his reign had been marked by continual wars. In Italy he was once again at war with a pope and a French king who was also threatening the Netherlands. His authority in Germany had collapsed after the Battle of Metz in 1553. His plans for a dynastic alliance with England and the Netherlands against France had been dashed when Mary Tudor proved to be barren.

  But the timing of his final decision to abdicate was precipitated more than any other factor by a peace treaty between the German Lutherans and Catholics negotiated by Ferdinand and signed at Augsburg by Charles, only at his brother’s behest, on 25 September 1555. The Peace of Augsburg allowed local rulers in Germany to determine the religion of their subjects with the formula cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion). It was an historic turning point, which brought religious peace to Germany for the next sixty years. But the recognition of Lutheranism as an independent power in the Holy Roman Empire, one that could not be suppressed either by compromise or by force of arms, brought an end to Charles’s vision of himself as the secular ruler of a universal Christendom: Titian’s portrait of him as a Christian soldier fighting triumphantly for that goal after the Battle of Mühlberg was not among the paintings that he brought with him to contemplate in his retirement.

  A month after the signing of the Peace of Augsburg, Charles renounced sovereignty of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In a ceremony in the great hall of the castle of Brussels, where his coming of age had been declared forty years earlier, he delivered a speech summarizing his life at the end of which, white with exhaustion, he asked Philip to kneel before him and announced his desire to cede his own lands to his son, and the empire to his brother Ferdinand. The hall was silent except for the sound of suppressed sobs. The English envoy observed that there was ‘not one man in the whole assemblie that poured not oute abundantly teares’. Philip, after a few words in halting French, asked Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle to deliver his address. Mary of Hungary indicated that she would resign as governor of the Netherlands and follow her brother to Spain. At the end of the ceremony Charles formally invested his son as sovereign of the Netherlands.

  The remaining acts of abdication took place on 16 January 1556, when Charles transferred to Philip sovereignty of Castile, Aragon, Sicily and the Indies, and 5 February when he gave Philip the province of Franche-Comté. He had hoped to see Ferdinand once again before his departure, but when this proved impossible he sent him a letter on 12 September, just before embarking for Spain, in which he gave him the imperial crown. The decision to split the empire – one about which he had misgivings, which he would later regret and which greatly disappointed Philip although he had the good sense not to contest it – was to have long-lasting consequences. The Spanish Habsburgs, Charles’s direct descendants, would rule Spain, the Netherlands, Milan, the Kingdom of Naples and the New World until 1700. They were to be outlasted by the Austrian branch descended from Ferdinand which continued to rule the old imperial heartlands of Germany, Austria, most of modern Czechoslovakia and part of Hungary until 1918. At the time the abdication and division of the empire with Ferdinand was, of all the actions Charles had taken in his life, the one that most impressed his contemporaries as the humble and self-sacrificing behaviour of a true Christian ruler.

  Philip had located a suitable site for his father’s retirement at Yuste, in the foothills of the Sierra de Gredos in the Estramadura, where a comfortable villa adjoining a monastery dedicated to St Jerome was still under construction when Charles arrived in Spain. When he settled there in February 1557 he took with him the Ecce Homo Titian had brought with him on his first visit to Augsburg; and he had Titian’s posthumous portrait of Isabella hung in his bedroom, while the Adoration of the Trinity was placed over the high altar of the church. He spent his days praying, reading, sitting in the sun overlooking the beautiful valley of the Vera, devouring enormous meals in defiance of his doctors’ orders. At first he refused to see visitors apart from his sisters. Gradually he got back in touch with events in the world, although he rebuffed Philip’s request to come to his aid as he faced his first battle with the French since his father’s abdication.

  The Duke of Alba, acting on Philip’s instructions, had invaded the papal territories and forced a peace settlement on Paul IV and Henry II. Charles had objected on the grounds that this would have the effect of strengthening the papal alliance with the French. And so it happened in January 1557 that the French broke a truce by attacking Italy and the Netherlands. Philip, acting from Brussels as commander in chief, took charge of co-ordinating troops – about half were German, some were Netherlanders, with only a small contingent of Spanish and, at the last minute, of English soldiers – and masterminding strategy. A brilliant tactician but a reluctant warrior, the king put his young cousin Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy and regent of the Netherlands since Mary’s retirement, in active command of his forces. But it was Philip who took the decision to attack Saint-Quentin, in Picardy on the direct route from Brussels to Paris, w
here the French had taken a stand. The battle waged there on 10 August 1558, the feast day of St Lawrence, ended in a decisive victory for the Duke of Savoy, who lost only 500 or so men while the French dead were reckoned at more than 5,000 and thousands more were taken as prisoners. Charles, although delighted by news of the victory, did register his disappointment that Savoy had not pressed on to Paris and that Philip had failed to command his troops in person.

  Nevertheless, although the victory was not complete and the French retaliated by seizing Calais, the last of England’s possessions in France, the Battle of Saint-Quentin can be seen in retrospect as the most significant battle of the sixteenth century. It marked the end of Paul IV’s aggressive foreign policy and the beginning of the end of French expansionist ambitions – less, however, on account of the battle itself than because both sides of the Habsburg–Valois struggle were exhausted and bankrupt. In the previous year Philip had been forced by the massive debts inherited from his father to issue a decree of bankruptcy. He suspended payments from his treasury in Castile, and embarked on negotiations with his creditors, above all with the Fugger bank, about rescheduling repayments. Charles had warned him as early as 1543 that when he succeeded him in Spain ‘your treasury will be in such a state that it will give you a lot of trouble’. But neither Philip nor the imperial bankers knew just how deeply in debt the emperor was: the full extent of the problem had been kept secret even from his Financial Council. Throughout his reign Charles had almost never succeeded in balancing income against expenditure; and as time went on his debts were compounded by rising interest rates. Proceeds from American bullion were fully mortgaged; and when it began to arrive in increasing amounts its value was eroded by the inflation it caused, while private importers who failed to register imported specie reduced the king’s official share of one-fifth. In March 1557 when it was discovered that 90 per cent of a shipment unloaded at Seville had been smuggled with the connivance of bribed officials, Charles wrote from Yuste that had he still been ruler he would have seized the corrupt officials and tortured them until they disgorged.

  In May 1558 the imperial title was formally transferred to Ferdinand, and from then on Charles signed his letters simply ‘Carlos’. In August he contracted a heavy cold and fever, which his doctors attributed to overindulgence in venison and anchovies. It was complicated by an attack of gout that tortured every bone and muscle in his body. He took to his bed and began to prepare for death, still haunted by the spectre of Lutheranism, the iceberg on which his empire had finally foundered. When he heard that Lutheran cells had been uncovered in Seville and Valladolid he advised Philip and Juana in the strongest terms of which he was capable to take action against them. The future Don John of Austria, born eleven years earlier from his affair with Barbara Blomberg at Ratisbon, was not yet openly recognized as Charles’s son, but was living close by in the care of the master of the household, Don Luis Méndez de Quijada and his childless wife Magdalena. It was one of Charles’s last pleasures to watch his fair-haired little boy scurrying about as a page. He wrote a codicil in his will ensuring the boy’s future and leaving a legacy to his mother.

  Bartolomé Caranza, Archbishop of Toledo,12 arrived in time to hear his last confession and deliver extreme unction, and to place in Charles’s hand the little crucifix that had comforted Isabella at the moment of her death. A witness13 described one of his last days at Yuste:

  The very day that this happened between the emperor and his confessor – I don’t know what drove him or what he felt – he went out and summoned his treasurer, and when he came, told him to bring the portrait of the empress, his wife, and spent some time looking at it. He then asked for the painting of the Last Judgement. Here the space was larger and the meditation longer, so long that Mathisio, the doctor, came to advise him to suspend the powers of the soul, which govern the operations of the body. Trembling, he turned to the doctor and said: I don’t feel well; this was the last day of August at four o’clock in the afternoon …

  Charles V died, his eyes fixed on Titian’s painting of the Adoration of the Trinity, his Last Judgement as he saw it, on 21 September, four months short of his fifty-ninth birthday. ‘Thus’, wrote Luis Méndez de Quijada, ‘ended the greatest gentleman there ever was.’

  TEN

  The Diana Poems

  No crime was committed. Why punish a man for a pure mistake? …

  OVID, METAMORPHOSES, BOOK II

  The news of his father’s death reached Philip on 1 November 1558 at Arras, where he was engaged in peace talks with the French. Eighteen days later, on his way to Brussels to arrange the funeral ceremonies, he heard that his wife Mary Tudor had died during a flu epidemic in England. Before the month was over she was followed to the grave by his aunt Mary of Hungary. Philip retired to mourn in the monastery of Grunendal, and from there, on Christmas Day, he dictated a letter addressed to the Duke of Sessa, whom he had appointed as his governor and commander-in-chief in Milan, instructing him to pay Titian the arrears of the pensions assigned to him in 1541 and 1548 by Charles V. The letter was written out by Philip’s chief secretary Gonzalo Pérez, who had served Charles V in that office and was a patron of Titian in his own right.1 Philip appended a note in his own hand.

  You already know the joy I shall experience in having this matter taken care of, because it concerns Titian, and I therefore urgently charge you with the task of having him paid immediately, in a way that there will be no further need for turning to me again or for having me issue the order yet again.2

  In the new year the Duke of Sessa invited Titian to come to Milan to collect the accrued value of the pensions,3 which amounted by this time to the very substantial sum of 2,200 scudi.4 Titian, who was feeling slightly unwell and wanted to conserve his energies for the paintings he was preparing for the new King of Spain, sent Orazio to Milan as his representative. Orazio took rooms in the Falcon Inn and wrote to his father on 19 March 1559, Palm Sunday, that all was going well: he hoped the funds would be handed over after Easter. He planned to go on to Genoa, if he could obtain a letter of recommendation from the Duke of Sessa to His Majesty’s ambassador there, to collect 2,000 scudi of the Spanish pension Philip had promised Titian at Augsburg. Unfortunately, Orazio’s visit to Genoa proved fruitless because the treasurer did not have the means to pay that amount. The 2,000 scudi owing from the treasury of Milan was, however, paid in cash to Orazio in April and was followed by a further payment of 200 in May.

  Orazio did not return immediately to Venice. He had business of his own in Milan, where he sold forty paintings to the Duke of Sessa, who also sat to him for a full-length portrait (all of these are apparently lost). So Leone Leoni, medallist and court sculptor to the Habsburgs and master of the mint in Milan, invited him to be his guest and sent an escort of riders to accompany him to the palace where he lived in considerable style. Leoni was a wilfully violent man who had had a turbulent youth, but by the time Orazio arrived as his guest in Milan he was fifty and well established as an artist. He had good reason to be grateful to Titian, of whom he had made a medal portrait and with whom he was on friendly terms. The two artists had renewed their friendship over a pleasant dinner together with Granvelle at Augsburg, and Titian had played a part in promoting Leoni’s interests with the Habsburgs.

  Orazio stayed on in Milan to supervise the framing of his canvases for the Duke of Sessa, and wrote to his father, evidently in great haste, that he had obtained four ducats from the Duke and was about to depart again for Genoa to try to arrange payment of the 2,000 scudi promised by Philip at Augsburg.5 Titian, aware that the full amount owing from Milan had been paid, replied on 17 June:

  Orazio, your delay in writing to me has worried me. You write that you have had 4 ducats:6 so it is in your letter. That wouldn’t cover the cost of sending a letter to Milan; or perhaps in your joy you made an error with your pen, with which you wanted to say two thousand, but said four ducats instead. It’s enough that you think things will go well.

  I h
ave written to His Majesty that the treasurer of Genoa has no means to pay me. I hope that His Majesty will make that provision. From what you write it is your intention to go to Genoa. If you think that will bear fruit you will do well with the favour of His Excellency. It might however be better if you consider yourself rather than me. Now if you do go take care that you don’t ride in the heat; if you could go in two days, go in four.7

  By then Orazio, planning to prolong his stay Milan while he supervised the framing of his canvases for the Duke of Sessa, had decided that he had overstayed his welcome at the Palazzo Leoni and returned to his lodgings at the Falcon. He may in fact have experienced the violent temper that his host, despite his age and success, had not learned to control. He was nevertheless unprepared for what happened when, on 14 June, he went to collect his belongings with a servant to help carry his paintings and even later was not sure of Leoni’s motive in what was nothing less than an attempt to assassinate him. While he was packing, a cloak was thrown over his head and Leoni and his servants attacked him again and again with daggers and swords. Orazio fell senseless to the floor and would have perished had it not been for his servant who unsheathed his sword while shouting as loudly as he could. The servant received three wounds before neighbours heard the commotion and helped the two victims to escape on to the street. Orazio was carried to the Falcon where the Duke of Sessa’s barber was summoned to attend to his wounds. The assault, so Orazio told the magistrate the next day, had been motivated by Leoni’s jealousy of the favour shown him by the present duke.8 In subsequent submissions he insisted that Leoni had wanted to rob him of the 2,200 scudi that he knew to be in his possession.