by Sheila Hale
Titian stops the narrative at the moment when Diana, seeing that Callisto’s virginity has been defiled, cries, ‘“Be gone! This sacred spring must not be polluted!”/And so her favourite was sternly commanded to leave her presence.’ On the banded stone pillar, inset with fictive carvings that foretell the transformation of Actaeon into a stag, a putto empties the water from an urn in an act of purification. It is the end of the day’s hunting, and the setting sun has turned the clouds to amber. A bow and quiver lie discarded on the ground; one of the dogs rests by the stream. But a spaniel prowls among the girls clustered round Diana still bearing their weapons ready to defend her against intruders. Since no man is present, Diana’s naked body is seen from the front, in counterpoise to the Michelangelesque girl seated on the ground next to her with her back to us. The goddess of chastity points at the exposed belly of Callisto with one extended arm, curling the other around the shoulders of a woman richly dressed in pink, her hair adorned with pearls.
The two paintings are framed, as though by curtains, by the red robe that Titian added at the last minute to Diana and Actaeon and by the gold cloth he flung into the branches of the tree in the far corner of Diana and Callisto. If Titian made a start on the Death of Actaeon, the painting of ‘Actaeon torn to pieces by his hounds’ that he had promised Philip, he put it aside for the time being. Towards the end of his life he returned to it, but he left it unfinished and never sent it to Spain. Everyone knew how the story ended, and at the time he painted the Diana poems he was perhaps not in the mood for the sombre tonality that would have been appropriate.
In October, soon after this latest batch of pictures had been sent to Spain, García Hernández, who had spent a good deal of time at Biri Grande urging Titian on and discussing arrangements for packing and dispatch about which Philip was so very particular, wrote to the king about ‘a large picture with the three Magi’ that he had seen in the studio. The Adoration of the Magi (Madrid, Escorial), a subject more in Jacopo Bassano’s repertoire than in Titian’s, had been commissioned three years previously by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este as a gift for the French king Henry II, whose emblematic lilies and the falcon of his mistress Diane de Poitiers are on the saddle and bridle of the white horse in the foreground. The painting is ruined by fire and inept restoration, but one can just make out how beautiful it was when Hernández persuaded Titian to present it instead to Philip. Since Henry had died at the end of June, the cardinal was no longer in urgent need of it, and he had to wait five years before Titian sent him a copy (Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana) in the autumn of 1564 in a gilded frame decorated with lilies and falcons. Those symbols, which would have conferred importance by association on any owner, were retained not only in Philip’s painting but also in the several later copies made in Titian’s studio or by local painters in Spain.
But it was Philip’s reaction to the Diana pictures that most concerned Titian. With these innovative tone poems Titian had gambled on the king’s ever more sophisticated appreciation of his way of painting. But when months passed without so much as an acknowledgement from Spain he became increasingly apprehensive about the king’s reaction. He waited for a letter or even a word from someone close to Philip until 24 March 1560 when, no longer able contain his impatience, he wrote to the king that it was ‘many days’ since he had sent His Majesty the pictures he had ordered. ‘And not having heard anything at all, I am inclined to wonder either whether Your Majesty has received them, or whether they have not pleased you, in which case I would exert myself to redo them in such a way that would satisfy Your Majesty.’ The rest of the letter is about Leoni’s attempt on Orazio’s life and the need to bring him to justice.
A month later, on 22 April, he wrote again, this time in more direct language.
It is seven months ago today that I sent Your Majesty the Pictures that were ordered by you and not having had any advice about their reception I would be singularly grateful to hear if they have pleased, and if they have not pleased the perfect judgement of Your Majesty I will labour to remake them again, to correct past errors and when they have pleased I will be able to put more heart into finishing the fable of Jove with Europa [the Rape of Europa] and the story of Christ in the Orchard [the Agony in the Garden], in order to make something that will not prove entirely unworthy of such a great King.
He goes on to inform the king that the warrants issued for the payment of his recompense in Genoa have had no effect:
from which it seems that he who knows how to vanquish the most powerful and haughty enemies with his most indomitable valour [a reference to Philip’s victory at Saint-Quentin] is not obeyed by his ministers in such a way that I do not see how I can hope ever to obtain those moneys kindly assigned to me. Nevertheless I humbly beseech Your Royal Majesty to overcome their obstinate insolence …
Finally, prompted, Titian says, by his devotion, he underlines his close relationship with Philip’s father the emperor by suggesting that His Majesty might consider ordering:
that the glorious and immortal victories of Caesar should be painted as a memorial to posterity, and of these I should be the first to paint one, as a sign of gratitude for the many benefits I have received from their Caesarean and Catholic Majesties. So I should esteem it a favour of Your Majesty if you would deign to let me know the light and shape of the rooms where these pictures are to hang.
He received no reply to this letter. Philip never took up his offer to paint the victories of Charles V; and another year passed before he heard, even then at second hand, that the Diana poems and the Entombment had pleased the king.
While he was painting these latest masterpieces for Philip, Titian had a young muse in his studio. Irene di Spilimbergo, a gifted poet and musician, admired also for her embroidery, was not yet twenty when Titian took her on as a pupil. She was the daughter of Giulia da Ponte and the granddaughter of Paolo da Ponte, both close friends since his early years in Venice: according to Vasari, Titian had portrayed both of them and Giulia had stood as godmother to one of his sons. After Giulia had married Irene’s father, Adriano di Spilimbergo, a member of a distinguished Friulian family, Titian must have called on them from time to time in their castle, which is not far from Pieve di Cadore. Adriano died when Irene was still in her teens, and she and her sister Emilia were taken to Venice to be educated by their grandfather Paolo. It was Paolo who persuaded Titian, usually a reluctant teacher, to introduce her to the art of painting after she had been inspired by the self-portrait of the Cremonese painter Sofonisba Anguissola (Milan, Brera), a woman of high birth like herself. It was said that Irene learned by copying Titian’s paintings, and with such success that those who saw her works were amazed and envious. Daniele Barbaro and the powerful patrician and author Nicolò Zen, both of whom sat to Titian, are among those recorded as admiring her work. Had she lived a little longer and left paintings for posterity to judge she might be hailed today as one of the very few talented women of her times, and for centuries more to come, who were permitted let alone encouraged to take up the messy business of painting in oils.
Irene was only twenty when she died in December 1559. In the previous year Gian Paolo Pace had sketched a portrait of her, which Paolo da Ponte judged to be a very inferior piece of work. So, soon after her death, he persuaded Titian to finish the portrait, which he said that Titian, working from memory, did so much better than he could have desired that it was as though she was actually present, and for which he charged only six ducats. It seems that da Ponte was blinded by Titian’s generosity and reputation, because the Portrait of Irene di Spilimbergo and its pendant portrait of her sister Emilia (both Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), look as though they were largely entrusted to the workshop. The compositions, sharply divided by a dark pillar in one case and by a curtain in the other, with a landscape background behind Irene and a seascape behind Emilia, are typical of Titian; but the doll-like features and flaccid gestures of the girls cannot have been painted by Titian even on a bad day.
It is not altogether surprising that Titian did not actually take the trouble to make a convincing record of Irene’s appearance. Portraiture had interested him less and less since the early 1550s when he had turned his attention to the more challenging work for Philip of Spain. His posthumous votive Portrait of Doge Antonio Grimani (Venice, Doge’s Palace, Sala delle Quattro Porte) – Grimani had died thirty-two years earlier – was ordered by the Council of Ten in 1555 for a payment of 171 ducats. It was his last portrait of a doge and the only one to survive a fire in 1574, possibly because it was still unfinished in Titian’s studio at the time.19 It was a relief when, in the year he was supposed to begin the Grimani portrait, the obligation to provide portraits of doges was transferred to Tintoretto. Titian was also, on the whole, content to leave privately commissioned portraits to the studio or younger artists. When he made exceptions, however, we can guess that he charged a good deal more than the six ducats he had been paid by Paolo da Ponte. And some of his late portraits are of the highest quality. In the Portrait of Fabrizio Salvaresio (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) the sitter is identified by the cartouche on the wall behind him as aged fifty when Titian portrayed him in 1558. The Salvaresio family were wealthy merchants trading in velvet, silk, grain and slaves, and were in charge of Venetian mercantile activities outside the Republic. They made a fortune from supplying Venice with Turkish wheat at a time when the expanding population increased demand; and it is possible that the timing of Titian’s portrait is in some way related to a contract in which Salvaresio is recorded as providing wheat to the Serenissima in 1558 and again in 1559. Titian portrayed him as an amiably self-confident extrovert wearing a fur-lined jacket, the fingers of his right hand hooked informally around his striped sash. The magnificent table clock behind him, which would refer to his age and prosperity, is painted in white lead glazed with yellow. The little black page who offers him flowers may be a real portrait of one of Salvaresio’s retinue of servants.
The subject of the Portrait of a Man with a Palm (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), however, remains a mystery. The inscription is not autograph but there is no reason to doubt the information, which gives the date as 1561 and the age of the sitter as forty-six. One theory is that the palm held by the man identifies him as the painter Antonio Palma, a nephew of Palma Vecchio and father of Palma Giovane. Antonio may have worked for a time in Titian’s studio and would have been around the right age. Another proposal20 is that the box of colours on the windowsill may identify the portrait of a Venetian vendecolore from whom Titian and Orazio chose pigments sent to Spain at the request of Philip II. The problem with both suggestions is that the man is dressed expensively in a black toga and stole with silk-lined sleeves, the costume, that is, of a wealthy gentleman or aristocrat rather than a minor painter or merchant of pigments, and that the painting is one of only seven that Titian signed ‘AEQVES CAESARIS’, Knight of Caesar.
Titian must have missed Irene’s feminine presence in the house. It would have been some compensation for the absence of Orsa, who had recently died, and of Lavinia and the Alessandrini girls, all three now married and living in Serravalle. But then, within a month of her death, came a far greater personal loss. Francesco, the brother of whom it was said that to give a gift to Titian’s brother was to give it also to Titian, died at the end of the year. In January 1560 the brothers’ first cousin Vincenzo Vecellio delivered Francesco’s funeral oration in Latin. He stressed Francesco’s service to the community of Cadore, and described him as an ideal humanist: ‘an admirable man in every respect, wise, honest, pious’, generous to the poor, a convivial and loyal friend who never failed to share his wisdom and learning with others. The orator devoted only a few lines to Francesco’s prolific career as a painter, which he claimed, incorrectly, he had given up early in life when he recognized Titian’s superior talent.
Francesco is portrayed with a long white beard as St Andrew21 in the Madonna and Child Worshipped by Titian with Sts Titian and Andrew (Pieve di Cadore, Santa Maria Nascente),22 painted not long after his death for the family chapel in the parish church of Cadore. Titian in his black cap is behind St Titian gazing at the Madonna nursing her child. His early biographers said he had painted it because he wanted to leave something of himself in his birthplace. He must also have wished it to express his devotion to Francesco and to his own patron saint, whose feast day he remembered in a note written in his own hand on New Year’s Day 1561 to his first cousin the notary Toma Tito Vecellio, the relative in Cadore to whom he was closest after Francesco, saying that since he is not able to be in Cadore for Christmas he is sending some sweets with his love, and will follow with twelve lire for charity on the feast day of St Titian (16 January).
Francesco’s death placed the burden of managing Titian’s affairs in Cadore and the properties elsewhere on the mainland squarely on the shoulders of Orazio; and Orazio’s energies seem to have been released by the opportunity to exercise his entrepreneurial talents on behalf of his father. In the course of the next fifteen years Orazio engaged in numerous business ventures (some of them on his own account, and some dubious). He supplied the Duke of Urbino, whose agent complained about his hard bargaining, with timber (1562–4), invested in a wine business (1565), supplied Murano with the wood to rebuild a bridge (1568) and part financed the design and construction of a machine to grind wheat (1573). At the same time he was required to supervise the studio while acting on his father’s behalf in the increasingly complex and acrimonious matter of Pomponio’s benefices, as well as the ongoing problem of the timber yard at San Francesco della Vigna, which was, with the sawmills near Pieve, a linchpin in their timber business.
The timber yard belonged technically to the commune of Cadore, but the Vecellio relatives, who were strongly represented on the council, had long since, albeit unofficially, reserved them for Titian’s use as a quid pro quo for loans. Orazio was charged with the troublesome problem of retrieving the most recent loans, which had been requested to cover a shortage of funds to buy food and amounted to 1,300 ducats. These loans had been made as leverage to persuade the council to apply to the Council of Ten for planning permission to fence off the timber yard and erect buildings there to protect his imported wood. This was not the first time Titian had tried the same tactic, and when, as previously, it didn’t have the desired result, probably because the expense of the improvements was considered too great, he wrote to the Magnifica Comunità di Cadore – two of the surviving letters are in his own hand – requesting repayment of the debt with interest, insisting that his own need for the money was now greater than theirs ‘for many and many reasons which I need not spell out to you’.
Titian turned to Vecello Vecellio, the son of Tiziano di Andrea Vecellio, to whom he had directed a similar appeal as long ago as 1534. Orazio was dispatched to Cadore bearing gifts for Vecello, including a copy of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, which Titian described as ‘a little picture of Adonis, which is very beautiful’. Orazio also wrote to Vecello under Titian’s signature on 20 April 1561 asking that the loans be repaid and that ambassadors from Cadore should be sent to Venice to seek planning permission for the improvements from the Ten. We don’t know if or how the Council of Ten responded to the petition, or if it was ever issued, only that the improvements to the timber yard seem not to have taken place. Nevertheless a letter Titian sent to Vecello in August 1561 may provide a clue to the identity of one of his rare late portraits. In this letter Titian wrote that he had prepared comfortable rooms in his house for Vecello and Toma Tito, who had evidently been chosen to act as ambassadors to the Council of Ten, and that they should come to Venice soon so as to submit their petition before a new Ten were elected on 1 October. It sounds as though Titian may have had one or more well-wishers on the acting Council, and it is not impossible that one of them was Nicolò Zen, the prominent patrician. It was in any case around this time that Zen sat to Titian for his magnificent portrait (Dorset, Kingston Lacy, Bankes Collection) wearing the scarlet sash and fur-l
ined sleeves of a high-ranking member of government. If only we could make out the not quite legible letter on the desk in front of him it might be possible to confirm or deny the hypothesis.
For all Titian’s close attention to local matters of business, the Kingston Lacy portrait shows us a painter still at the top of his form in his early seventies. He was a vigorous survivor, but time was running out. He had to make choices and had already decided to devote the rest of his artistic life, with only a few exceptions, to serving the King of Spain, who understood his art better than any other patron.
ELEVEN
The Rape of Europa
In the contrary wind her lovely golden hair plays over her breasts; her garment waves in the wind and blows behind her, one hand
grasps his back, the other his horn.
She gathers in her bare feet as if fearing lest the sea wash over her; in such a pose of fear and grief, she seems to call in vain to her dear companions; they, left behind among the flowers and leaves, each mournfully cry for Europa. ‘Europa,’ the shore resounds. ‘Europa, come back.’ The bull swims on, and now and then kisses
her feet.
ANGELO POLIZIANO, LATE 1470S1
On 3 April 1559, when Orazio was in Milan and Titian was working on his Diana poems for Philip II, high-ranking representatives of Spain, France and England met for talks in a dilapidated bishop’s château at Cateau-Cambrésis on the outskirts of Cambrai and concluded the peace treaty that was to prove a watershed in the early modern history of western Europe. Although the fate of Italy was the main issue on the agenda, no Italian state was represented; nor was Ferdinand’s increasingly marginalized Holy Roman Empire. England, ruled by Mary Tudor’s twenty-six-year-old half-sister, the Protestant Elizabeth I, accepted the reconquest of Calais by the French, who also kept the fortress-bishoprics Metz, Toul and Verdun in the Rhineland in return for ceding Piedmont-Savoy back to its duke, Emanuel Philibert, who had led the victory at Saint-Quentin. The most significant outcome of the settlement was the confirmation of Spanish control over Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and indirectly over Siena and its territories, which became a fiefdom of ducal Florence. Cateau-Cambrésis brought to a close the Wars of Italy that had begun in 1494 with the invasion of the peninsula by the French king Charles VIII. The long-standing contest between France and the Habsburgs was laid to rest for the remainder of the century, not so much because of the terms of the treaty – treaties, after all, were routinely broken – but because both sides were bankrupt and preoccupied with their own more pressing domestic problems.
