by Sheila Hale
Titian was unaware of the attack when on 19 June he wrote to ‘The Most Potent Catholic King’ that he had finished and would be sending two more poesie, ‘the one of Diana at the fountain surprised by Actaeon [Diana and Actaeon] and the other of Callisto pregnant by Jove and stripped at the fountain at the command of Diana by her nymphs [Diana and Callisto]’. He added that he had made a start on ‘Christ in the Orchard’ (the Agony in the Garden) and on two more poesie, ‘one of Europa on top of the bull [the Rape of Europa] and the other of Actaeon torn to pieces by his hounds [the Death of Actaeon]’.9 The letter concludes with one of his appeals for payment of the pensions due from Philip’s agents at Genoa.
Philip replied from Ghent on 13 July, addressing Titian as ‘our most beloved’, that the paintings should be handed over to García Hernández, his representative in Venice – Philip had sent Vargas to Rome as Spanish ambassador to the Holy See – who would dispatch them to Genoa for embarkation to Spain. He was very particular about the arrangements because Titian’s Entombment of Christ had been lost two years previously on the way from Venice to Flanders. Titian must pack the new paintings with his own hands to avoid damage. Philip would also be pleased if Titian would make haste to complete the Agony in the Garden as well as the two mythological paintings, and would be delighted if he would execute another Christ dead in the Sepulchre (the Entombment of Christ, Madrid, Prado) to replace the one that had been lost. He added that he was displeased that his order to pay the outstanding amount had not been obeyed and would write again to ensure that this time there would be no oversight.
It was several weeks before Orazio wrote to his father about the attack, and when Titian heard about it he was distraught. On 12 July he wrote a very long letter to Philip (which crossed with Philip’s to him about the paintings) relating the attempted assassination in detail, and describing Leoni, for whom he, Titian, had done so many favours, as moved by the devil, an enemy of God, a well-known criminal, knave and scoundrel whose son (Pomponio Leoni, who was employed by the court in Spain) had been exiled from Spain as a Lutheran. The letter, although probably polished by Verdizotti – who may have added touches, suitable for a pious king at the height of the Counter-Reformation, about Lutheranism and the devil – has the straightforward, no-nonsense ring of Titian’s own style. It begins, as was Titian’s wont when his emotions were involved, by condemning Leone’s wickedness without preliminaries, and concludes with a plea that Philip should see that justice is done to that ‘most villainous man in the world’ and with a profession of love for Orazio:
If Orazio had been killed I swear to you with all my faith that from the pain of it I, who have placed all my life and my hope in his wellbeing in this my impotent old age, would have been deprived of spirit and consequently of the ability to serve my most potent Catholic King, in whose service I consider myself to be happy and most fortunate.
Without Orazio by his side to manage his business affairs and his studio, the septuagenarian Titian knew he might not have found the strength to continue to supervise the workshop and produce masterpieces for Philip that required his undisturbed concentration. The troublesome young spendthrift, now a married middle-aged man, had grown into a very different character from his weak if ingratiating brother Pomponio. He shared his father’s entrepreneurial flair and knew how to drive a hard bargain; and as more of his autonomous paintings are discovered the posthumous view of him as a lazy, indifferent painter has had to be revised. If he was untouched by Titian’s genius, he was admired in his lifetime as an adept portraitist, although only one portrait that bears his signature has come to light.10 Signed ‘HORATIVS TITIANI FILIVS/FACIEBAT’ it is an accomplished Portrait of a Man of about 1560–5, which is typical of his father’s manner: the lively face challenging the spectator, the body in three-quarter length slightly rotated and at ease.
Of Orazio himself we have one certain image, in a wax medallion framed in seed pearls that portrays Titian holding a small portrait of a bearded man who is identified by an inscription as his son.11 The central head in the Allegory of Prudence,12 which seems to have been originally envisaged as an independent portrait that was only later incorporated into the Allegory, is also usually taken to be a portrait of Orazio, although the nose, hairline and colour of the beard do not quite match those of the medallion portrait. But if it is Orazio, who is portrayed in the Allegory with his eyes brimming with tears, it is tempting to speculate that Titian portrayed him after the assassination attempt, perhaps with the idea of sending the portrait to Philip.
Orazio continued to live in fear of his life for several years, but his repeated requests to the Council of Ten for a permit to carry arms or to be given an armed bodyguard were turned down. Titian, tenacious as ever, continued to plead with Philip that the scoundrel Leoni should be brought to justice, repeating in subsequent letters that Orazio’s death would have been followed by his own, reminding the king of Leoni’s past crimes and insisting that there were dozens of other Italian sculptors who could have served the emperor just as well. But Philip, probably for lack of time and perhaps out of respect for his late father’s patronage of Leoni, was unmoved by the appeals; and the villain remained Caesarean sculptor and master of the mint in Milan until shortly before his death in 1590.
Titian was still polishing and adding to the two Diana pictures and the Entombment on 3 August 1559 when Hernández informed Philip that they would be ready in twenty days ‘because they are large and involve much work, and he wants to do some little things to them which no one else would think necessary’. The ‘little things’ were not completed to the master’s satisfaction until 22 September, when, with Verdizotti’s help, Titian wrote to Philip apologizing for the delay: ‘I send Your Majesty the pictures of Adonis, Callisto and Our Saviour in the sepulchre in place of the one that was lost on the way and I rejoice that this second [Entombment], besides being larger, has succeeded better than the first and is more worthy of acceptance by Your Majesty.’ He goes on to say that he considers himself so flattered to serve the king that he does not envy ‘the famous Apelles, who was so dear to Alexander the Great … because the authority of your kindly judgement … makes me equal to Apelles, and perhaps his superior in the opinion of men’.
And so, in order to show my gratitude in every way I can think of, I send, besides the other pictures, the portrait of her who is absolute patroness of my soul, and that is her who is dressed in yellow, who, though in truth only painted, is the dearest and most precious thing I could send away … and so enough as to paintings.
The letter now turned to the attempt on his son’s life:
I wrote some days ago to Your Majesty in reference to the assassination of my son Orazio, at Milan, by Leone Aretino, and of the mortal wounds which he received, praying for the deserved punishment of the offender after the custom of Your Majesty’s justice. Process was issued in due form against him, and great effort was made after his recovery by my son to hasten the trial, and for this he was forced to spend much of the money obtained by Your Majesty’s bounty at Milan, but the wretch is so clever and so favoured on account of the name which he bears of Sculptor to Your Majesty, and my son is so much a stranger at Milan, that the case has been subjected to delays, and will probably end in smoke, to the great detriment of justice, and the more so because my son has come home, and there is no one at Milan who can counteract the cunning ways of this wicked man. I therefore most humbly pray that Your Majesty will deign to give orders to the senate to hasten the judgement and exercise justice in a manner suitable to so great an offence, showing that Your Majesty holds me to be one of your servants. My son Orazio above named (I had almost forgotten) sends with mine a small picture of Christ on the Cross, painted by himself. Will Your Majesty deign to accept it as a small testimony of his great desire to imitate his father in serving you? And with all the inclination of the heart, I and he recommend ourselves, and I kiss your Royal and Catholic hand.
Although Titian had frequently been dubbed the A
pelles of his age, this seems to have been the first time he had made the comparison himself. He may have been referring to a painting by Apelles of Diana and her Nymphs, one of only two large compositions by the artist mentioned by the ancient sources, which ‘in the opinion of men’ he had outdone with his own Diana paintings for Philip. Orazio’s small Crucifixion with Angels (Madrid, Escorial) is indeed very small, and not in good condition. It is, however, more expertly painted than his other surviving religious pictures, and we can guess that Titian in his desire to promote his son with the king may have had a hand in it. The portrait of the girl in yellow ‘the absolute patroness of his soul’ and ‘the dearest and most precious thing he could send away’, must have been of his natural daughter Emilia, who would have been in her early teens at the time.13 That portrait is known only from a copy by Rubens. But two years later Titian sent another very similar Portrait of Emilia with a Fan (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie) to Alfonso II d’Este with a letter saying that the girl was ‘his most beloved object’ and that he could not send Alfonso ‘anything dearer’.14 The pretty and vivacious young Emilia, illegitimate though she was, was evidently a delight of Titian in his old age. There is no clue to her mother’s identity: she may have been a housekeeper acting also as a resident model like Titian’s first wife Cecilia. Whoever she was, Titian had kept her a secret, even from Aretino. Emilia lived with Titian in Biri Grande until her marriage in 1568; and when she was perhaps twenty she posed for two paintings of dancing girls, one bare armed as Salome in a brick-red dress holding up the head of John the Baptist on a silver salver (Madrid, Prado), and again in the same dress but with her arms covered and the grisly head replaced by an arrangement of fruit (Berlin, Staatliche Museen). Her pose and features were to be templates for a number of workshop paintings of girls holding up different objects.
The Entombment of Christ, now in the Prado, which Titian sent to Philip with the two Diana pictures, was his third treatment of the subject after his early Giorgionesque Entombment in the Louvre and the version for Philip that had gone astray in 1557. It is the best preserved of his religious pictures for the king (despite having been stolen from the Escorial by Napoleon’s army) and perhaps the most moving in its expression of human grief. Titian’s signature, ‘TITIANVS VECELLIVS OPVS AEQVES CAES.’ (The work of Titian Vecellio Knight of Caesar), is incised on a stone slab propped against the corner of Christ’s tomb, which Joseph of Arimathea, according to the Gospels, had prepared for himself, and on which Titian painted fictive relief carvings of Cain and Abel and the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Old Testament story that prefigures God’s sacrifice of His Son. The clean white sheet that will serve as Christ’s shroud is draped over the near side of the sarcophagus. The arrangement of the figures follows Aretino’s description of the event in The Humanity of Christ, as does the position of the Virgin’s hands holding the inert arm of her dead Son, which is not mentioned in the Gospel accounts. The aged Nicodemus bears the head of His body and Joseph His feet as they lower the slack figure of the Saviour into the tomb.15 Some may see Titian’s features in the toothless, grey-bearded face of Nicodemus, the Pharisee who sought Christ’s teaching by night and to whom Christ compared the spirit of God to the wind that ‘bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’.16 Joseph has his shoulders and head turned away from us in counterpoint to the body of Christ. The light falls on his belted red tunic, the only bright colour in the painting apart from the undiluted ultramarine of the Virgin’s cloak, and focuses on the bald spot on the back of his head as though to emphasize his vulnerable humanity. Titian’s pentimenti are most numerous beneath the beautiful, ethereal figure of Mary Magdalen, whose outflung arm seems to echo through the scene like a cry while her virginal white gown floats into the leaden grey of the wind-blown clouds.
The Diana poems that accompanied the Entombment to Spain are quite unlike any treatments of the stories before or since, and their play of colours comes as a surprise after Titian’s preference over the previous decades for more sombre earth tones. The explanation for their raised tonality could be his admiration for the younger arch-colourist Paolo Veronese. In 1556, when Titian was planning the pictures, Veronese had completed his luminous paintings in the church of San Sebastiano in Venice. In the same year Titian and Sansovino chose him as one of seven painters to take part in a competition by decorating the compartmented ceiling of Sansovino’s library of St Mark. Since the other six painters were relatively undistinguished, and Tintoretto was excluded, it was a foregone conclusion that Veronese would win the prize for the best, a gold chain, for his Allegory of Music.
But if Veronese was the inspiration for Titian’s brighter tonality his chromatic range is in no way comparable to the younger master’s sharp, vivid, arbitrarily decorative colour schemes. Titian blended and wove together crimson, scarlet, rose; ochres, golds and browns; blue greens and green blues; and all the varied tints of youthful flesh as though revealed by light. It is as though the curtains in a darkened room had been thrown open on a sunny afternoon, so that the King of Spain, whose enlightened patronage had emboldened the old painter to take new risks, could see what no mere mortal was permitted to see: the naked bodies of the virgin goddess Diana and her attendant nymphs transported from Ovid’s Gargáphië to a glade in the Veneto. There are many artists working today who would agree with Lucian Freud that the Diana poems are ‘quite simply the most beautiful pictures in the world’.17
The tale of Diana and Actaeon, as recounted by Ovid in Book III of the Metamorphoses, was put into a nutshell by Boccaccio:
Actaeon was a hunter. One day, tired from the chase, he had gone up into the valley of Gargafia, probably to quench his thirst, for there was a fresh and clear spring in the valley, and it happened that he beheld Diana in the spring, who was naked and washing herself. Diana, discovering this, took it ill, and she took some water in her hands and splashed it in Actaeon’s face, saying: ‘Go, and say what you have seen, if you can.’ And Actaeon was immediately changed into a stag, and when his hounds saw him he was killed immediately and gashed with their teeth and eaten up.18
The fable was so popular that it was frequently illustrated by artists and referred to by writers as a trope for the magnificent injustice that might lie in wait for their own unwitting protagonists. It is Titian’s version, however, that most people today associate with the story. What is striking at first sight of the painting is the tension he created between Actaeon, the hapless young hunter, and the outraged moon goddess, sister of the sun god Apollo, whose virginity has been compromised by his seeing her naked body. Actaeon’s penetration of the goddess’s private space is trumpeted by her red robe, which Titian flung as an afterthought against the azure sky over a line at the entrance to the grotto. She rears back, snatching up a cloth to conceal, not her sex as a mortal woman might react, but the crescent moon of divinity in her hair. ‘She stood with her front turned sideways and looked at the rash intruder over her shoulder’: so much taller than her attendants, as Ovid told it, that the tallest barely reached to her navel and could not have concealed her neck and shoulders. Titian took immense trouble with the figure of Diana, first painting her realistically from the side, and only at the end deciding on the anatomically impossible pose – a deliberate solecism that was unprecedented in European painting – that shows the breast in profile as well as nearly the whole of the back. Her averted head, too small for her body, gives a snake-like venom to her pose. The silence is deepened by the yapping of the lapdog at her feet.
Between the two protagonists Diana’s nymphs, also naked as they warm themselves in the sun after their bath, lounge, stand, crouch or bend around a stone basin that sags under the weight of its antiquity into the stream. Titian created a deep space by showing the scene at a slight diagonal, which is counterbalanced by the stream that flows diagonally in the other direction through the picture, with each of the eight figures occupying a separate plane. Colours, textures an
d shapes, of flesh, fabric, sky, trees, water and stone, are magicked by Titian’s chromatic alchemy into what seems from a distance like an enchanted three-dimensional reality. Everywhere you look in this glorious painting you see his colours dancing to subtle patterns that are never arbitrary. The purple plush on which Diana sits answers her rose-red robe. The ochre of Actaeon’s tunic and the orange of his boot cuffs modulate into the stripes of the dress that slips from the shoulders of Diana’s African slave, whose ebony skin highlights the pearly white of the goddess’s flesh while her right arm merges with the lighter brown bark of one of those trees painted by Titian that seems to sum up the beauty and strangeness of all trees. The skull of a stag’s head on the rusticated stone pillar foretells the tragic fate that awaits Actaeon.
The stream runs on to another part of the glade where Titian set the poem of Diana and Callisto. Ovid had made no connection between the two fables: ‘Diana and Callisto’ comes in Book II of the Metamorphoses, ‘Diana and Actaeon’ in Book III. Titian was the first, but not the last, artist to put them together. Callisto was, like Actaeon, an innocent victim of pure chance; like him she had committed no crime. Jove, spotting her at rest in a glade, had assumed the form of Diana in order to win her trust before raping and impregnating her. Eight months later Diana and her companions stopped to bathe in a stream. When Callisto refused to undress the other nymphs stripped off her tunic revealing her swollen belly, and the outraged Diana banished her for ever from her presence. When Callisto gave birth to Jove’s son, Arcas, Juno, incensed with jealousy, destroyed the girl’s beauty by turning her into a bear. But Jove took pity on his mistress and son. He transported them through space and gave them places in the heavens as the neighbouring constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the big and little bear.
