by Sheila Hale
The treaty was further sealed by two events, one a dynastic calculation in the Habsburg tradition, the other totally unexpected. On 22 June Philip was married by proxy to Elizabeth de Valois, the eldest daughter of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, who had originally been intended for Philip’s son Don Carlos. A magnificent wedding was celebrated in Paris, in the cathedral of Notre Dame, with the Duke of Alba standing in for the king, and was followed by festivities at the French court. Eight days after his daughter’s wedding Henry took part in a celebratory jousting tournament during which a young Scots Guard accidentally penetrated his visor with his lance and pierced his right eye. Henry was only forty when he died of the wound on 10 July to be succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son Francis II, husband of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. Francis survived for barely a year. His brother Charles being only ten when he followed him to the throne, it was left to the Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici to preside uncertainly over a France that was soon plunged into factional chaos and religious wars between Huguenots (French Calvinists) and Catholics.
Religious tendencies across Europe were becoming more rigorous and uncompromising. Ideological calls for action surged from Calvin’s Geneva into countries where government was weakest: Scotland, France, the Netherlands, the Rhineland (where antagonisms between Calvinists and Lutherans were sharper than those between Lutherans and Catholics), Hungary, and Bohemia. In Counter-Reformation Rome the old humanist liberals were dying out or taking a harder stance against Protestant heresy. The final session of the Council of Trent, which opened in January 1562, was dominated by new men: Carlo Borromeo, nephew and right-hand man of Pope Pius IV; the austere Dominican Michele Gislieri, son of a shepherd and later to be elected pope as Pius V (both Borromeo and Pius V were subsequently canonized); and Gabriele Paleotti, whose diary of the proceedings of the Council remains one of its most informative accounts. When the Council rose for the last time in December 1563 after approving an array of decrees – about, among other matters, the condemnation of heresy, definitions of disputed doctrines, recognition of the absolute rule of the pope, the organization and behaviour of the clergy, and the importance of simplified and decorous religious art as fundamental to the teaching and dissemination of Catholic orthodoxy – any lingering dreams about Charles V’s always unrealistic aspirations for a universal Christendom embracing reformed Catholics and Protestants were quashed for ever. The Catholic doctrine of redemption from Original Sin through devotion to Christ’s sufferings in the Passion was triumphantly proclaimed, while the Protestant belief that salvation was obtainable through faith alone was totally rejected. It took many years to implement the reforms, but no further general council took place until 1869; and there was to be no comparable review of Catholic teaching and procedures until the Second Vatican Council initiated by Pope John XXIII in the twentieth century.
Venice, which had always cherished its independence from Holy Rome, remained relatively unaffected by the conclusions reached at Trent. And for utopian intellectuals who yearned for the pan-European unity and peace provided by sanitized ideas about the ancient Roman and Carolingian empires (both of which had been plagued by continual wars) Venice remained the social and political model. Determined to stay out of power politics but armed for defence, the Venetian oligarchy continued in practice and propaganda to sustain its mythic status as guardian of the republican values of harmonious government, liberty, peace and justice. The patrician humanist Bernardo Navagero, ambassador to Rome during the negotiations at Cateau-Cambrésis, summed up Venetian foreign policy in his reports to the Senate: ‘It is better, in my view, to treat all enemy rulers as potential friends, and friends as potential enemies … I have also noted that it is wise to overestimate the enemy’s strength and to underestimate that of oneself and one’s allies … I have become convinced, Most Serene Prince, that wars are always to be avoided for the disadvantages they bring.’2 The last three paintings of the cycle in the Great Council Hall celebrating the foundation myth, according to which a twelfth-century doge made peace between a pope and an emperor, were completed in the early 1560s by Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian’s son Orazio. In 1566 Jacopo Sansovino’s enormous statues of Mars and Neptune, personifying wealth and dominance of the sea, were placed at the head of the great staircase to the doge’s palace.
Philip had not yet heard news of the recent death of Henry II when he wrote to Titian on 13 July 1559 requesting that the Diana poesie and the Entombment be sent to Genoa for embarkation to Spain, where he planned to return shortly. He delayed his departure out of respect for his deceased father-in-law, but after attending the funeral ceremonies and winding up last-minute business with the States General of the Netherlands he sailed in August. He left his thirty-nine-year-old half-sister Margaret of Parma, natural daughter of Charles V and estranged wife of Ottavio Farnese, as regent of the Netherlands with Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle as the prime minister of the council of state. Philip was in Castile when Titian’s pictures, dispatched by García Hernández with a consignment of Venetian glass, arrived in October. By that time, however, he was overwhelmed by a deluge of problems, many of them unforeseen, and while attending to the paperwork that had piled up on his desk may have put off unpacking Titian’s paintings until he had the leisure to enjoy them.
During his four years in the Netherlands Philip had relied exclusively on money imported or expected from Spain, the only European country with direct access to American silver, and had found it increasingly difficult to extract funds for his wars, let alone to pay Titian, from his Italian dominions. After declaring bankruptcy in 1557 he had realized that the only way to manage his finances was to be close to the source of his wealth. But on his return there he found the Spanish treasury in desperate straits, far worse, as he informed Granvelle, than the situation in Brussels: ‘I confess that I never thought it could be like this … Apart from nearly all my revenues being sold or mortgaged, I owe very large sums of money and have need of very much more for the maintenance of my realms.’ The flow of American bullion had increased during Charles’s reign (and would triple during Philip’s), but prices in Spain had doubled, and debts to financiers and other creditors were consuming two-thirds of ordinary income despite punitive taxation imposed on the populace of Spain. Many of the poor were already starving when their misery was increased by the failure of harvests, always unreliable in Castile, in 1559 and again in 1561. The regency government had tried to resolve the desperate financial problems by fiscal expedients – selling municipal offices and alienating Crown lands and jurisdiction – that had weakened royal authority.
Control of the government, which Philip had left in the hands of his sister the Infanta Juana, was in disarray after the nobles had taken advantage of his absence to jostle for power. It was also deemed necessary to deal with the nests of Protestant heretics discovered in Seville and Valladolid during the last year of his father’s life. In October 1559 Philip presided in the main square of Valladolid over one of the autos da fé for which his reign would be notorious, although it should be said in his defence that he never witnessed the burnings, which took place on the outskirts of cities. The arrival of Elizabeth de Valois in December was a welcome relief in an otherwise dire period of his reign. His new queen was not quite fourteen, bright eyed, vivacious and with an appealing personality, although ‘not greatly beautiful’ in the judgement of the Venetian ambassador. Philip at any rate was delighted by her. The attraction was mutual, and Elizabeth, an amateur painter, shared Philip’s interest in art. After their marriage was formalized at Guadalajara at the end of January 1560, he carried on a long-standing affair with his lover, Eufrasia de Guzmán, a lady in waiting to Juana. But when Eufrasia became pregnant four years later he married her off to a nobleman and gradually became accustomed to the deeper peace of the marital bed.
The worst of the problems facing the king, then and over the coming years, was the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire of Suleiman the Magnificent, whose Muslim allies in Tri
poli and Algiers, commanded by the pirate-general Dragut, were preying on Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean. Before leaving Brussels Philip had, unwisely as it turned out, given his approval to a siege of Tripoli by a huge Spanish–Italian expeditionary force commanded by Gian Andrea Doria, who had succeeded his uncle as head of Spain’s Mediterranean fleet. In July 1560, while Titian was waiting impatiently for Philip’s reaction to his paintings, Dragut’s navy sank half the Christian fleet and captured more than 10,000 men, who were paraded through the streets of Constantinople. It was the most calamitous military defeat in the history of Spain, and it brought home to the humbled Philip the need to give his full attention to a kingdom that was vulnerable not only to bankruptcy, heresy and rebellion but also to the Turks.
Under the circumstances it is not surprising that he did not reply immediately to Titian’s letters of March and April 1560 pressing for a reaction to Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto and the Entombment, for the punishment of Leone Leoni and for payment of the outstanding 2,000 scudi from Genoa, or that he ignored Titian’s suggestion that the victories of Charles V should be immortalized in a series of paintings of which he would execute the first. When he did hear, from a friend who was a Venetian diplomat in Spain, that his masterpieces had met with His Majesty’s approval it was enough to embolden him to write to the king on 2 April thanking him in advance for the outstanding 2,000 scudi ‘of which payment was ordered three years since in Genoa’, claiming that in anticipation of the promised funds he had bought ‘some possessions for the support of myself and my children, which, to my great distress, I have been obliged to sell’.
As an intercessor in the case, I have prepared a picture in which the Magdalen appears before you with tears and as a suppliant in favour of your most devoted servant.3 But before sending this I wait to be informed by Your Majesty to whom it shall be consigned, that it may not be lost like the Entombment; and in the meantime I shall get ready the Christ in the Garden and the poesia of Europa, and pray for the happiness which your Royal Crown deserves.
Philip, apparently surprised that his orders to pay Titian had not been obeyed, appended a marginal note to this letter: ‘It seems to me that this matter has already been arranged, and that a written order was sent to pay and settle what is here stated.’ But it was not until high summer that 2,000 ducats were sent to Titian in Venice. Titian thanked the Most Potent Catholic King on 17 August for the money, which ‘frees me from some embarrassment’, but pointed out that because the Genoese had paid him by banker’s order rather than in gold he had received 200 less than the original promise. He was sure His Majesty would make up the difference and awaited his instructions about the delivery of the St Mary Magdalen, promised long before,
and which I have completed in such a manner that, if ever Your Majesty was pleased with any work of mine, Your Majesty will be pleased with this … Meanwhile I shall proceed with the Christ in the Orchard [the Agony in the Garden], the Europa [the Rape of Europa], and the other paintings that I have already designed to make for Your Majesty …
When a précis of this letter was laid on Philip’s desk on 22 October, he appended in his own hand numbered instructions that: 1. The 200 scudi should be sent from Spain, ‘which will be least inconvenient’; 2. The Magdalen should be forwarded by Hernández by a safe conveyance with some more of the Venetian glass as previously purchased; 3. Titian should be told to hasten the completion of the other pictures, which should also go by safe conveyance and be dispatched with similar care from Genoa. On the same day Philip, ‘by the grace of God King of Spain, etc.’, wrote by way of Hernández to Titian ‘our beloved’ that he was certain from what Titian had said that the Magdalen would be quite perfect and he looked forward to having it very soon and in such a way that it was not damaged. Hernández should also send the other pictures of Christ in the Garden and the poesia of Europa, and the others when they were finished.
Hernández reported to Philip on 20 November that his letter had given Titian considerable pleasure. Although he had said he had finished the Magdalen, he was in truth still working on it, but good judges of art were saying it was the best thing he had done.
He is labouring on the other pictures slowly as is natural to a man who is past eighty, but he says they shall be completed by February next … I have pressed him to keep his word and not to miss so good an opportunity. Your Majesty will be pleased to order the payment of 400 scudi, which are due for two years’ pension to Titian, who being old is somewhat covetous.
Titian cannot have been more than seventy-three at this time. Although he may not have known or remembered exactly how old he was, it is unlikely that he really thought he was ‘past eighty’, as he had apparently told Hernández or as the envoy had assumed from Titian’s claim six years earlier, when he was at most sixty-seven, to be eighty-five. He had been exaggerating his age for many years as an excuse for prevarication, as a bargaining chip and as evidence of an achievement that commanded respectful obedience, especially in an artist whose brush could still work miracles. But now that old age really had caught up with him the sense of entitlement that had always characterized his insistent demands to be paid what he had been promised was reinforced by claims of neediness that were either unspecified or greatly exaggerated. Titian may have felt, as many old people do, poorer than he actually was. But his reiterated claims of financial distress were often invented. There is, for example, no evidence that when he wrote to Philip on 2 April begging for the unpaid 2,000 scudi he had bought or sold ‘possessions purchased on behalf of myself and my children’, unless he was referring to property near Serravalle purchased by Orazio as an investment in 1560 for 100 ducats and leased back to the vendor.
On 1 December 1561 Titian wrote Philip a letter to accompany the weeping St Mary Magdalen that he had promised the previous April and which he hoped His Majesty would deign to accept and enjoy and which his Catholic eyes would see from the expression of her face towards God as an example of his own devotion towards the king. Meanwhile, he wrote, he was bringing the other pictures to completion. Twelve days later Hernández entrusted the painting to the Marquis of Pescara for dispatch to Spain. But it was not the same Magdalen that the secretary had described as considered by good judges of art to be the best thing Titian had done. That Magdalen, so Vasari tells us, had been snapped up by the Venetian patrician and connoisseur Silvio Badoer, an admirer of Titian who owned and probably commissioned the version of his Danaë now in the St Petersburg Hermitage. Badoer, seeing Philip’s Magdalen on Titian’s easel, had offered 100 scudi for it, a price Titian had found too good to refuse especially since he knew that the studio could easily run up another. Although neither Badoer’s nor Philip’s Magdalens can be identified we can assume that they looked like extant versions (including those in the St Petersburg Hermitage, the Los Angeles Getty and the Naples Capodimonte) in which the reformed saint wears a striped Jewish shawl and, despite her red eyes, supplicating expression and prayer book, has not, for all her suffering and fasting in the desert, lost her voluptuous sexuality or the gleaming auburn hair that flows provocatively over her bare shoulders and lightly veiled breasts. The paradox struck a young Florentine nobleman who recorded a visit he had paid to Titian’s studio at around the time he was working on the Magdalen sold to Badoer and the one sent to Philip.
There I met Titian, almost immobilised by age who, despite the fact that he was appreciated for painting from the life, showed me a very attractive Magdalen in the desert. Also I remember now that I told him she was too attractive, so fresh and dewy, for such penitence. Having understood that I meant that she should be gaunt through fasting, he answered laughing that he had painted her on the first day she had entered, before she began fasting, in order to be able to paint her as a penitent indeed, but also as lovely as he could, and that she certainly was.4
Philip’s Magdalen was a replica of the one he sold to Badoer, probably mostly by his own hand: at this time he generally reserved his autograph
work for Philip. There is, however, a painting in Venice that is as beautiful as anything he sent to the king, and which visitors to the city too often miss. It is a hexagonal painting, once aptly described as ‘a bouquet of pure colours’,5 which can still be seen today on the ceiling of the vestibule to the Biblioteca Marciana, where it is set in an elaborate illusionist architectural framework, itself a tour de force, completed in 1560 by Cristoforo and Stefano Rosa, Brescian specialists in quadratura painting. The figure of Wisdom, as she is usually identified,6 is seen in profile reclining gracefully on a pillow of billowing blue-grey clouds. She is dressed in a rose-red skirt, a gold shawl, with her legs covered by an olive-green drape. A scroll rests on her left palm while her right arm stretches out to receive a folio – perhaps it is one of the Greek manuscripts given to the Republic a century earlier and which had only recently found a home in Sansovino’s library – from a winged putto representing the inspiration of literature on art. Titian created this wonderfully seamless composition by using the minimum of foreshortening necessary for a ceiling painting and the mosaic-like technique of applying colours that he had absorbed from the Zuccati brothers and brought to perfection in Philip’s poesie.
