by Sheila Hale
The pattern was all too familiar: Titian proposing a subject, Philip expressing enthusiasm, Titian obsequious but withholding the painting until he was certain of receiving overdue payments, Philip’s officials reluctant to release the funds. The rhythm of their relationship skipped a beat on 31 August when Philip, who in the previous year had laid the cornerstone of the monastery at the Escorial, requested a specific subject for the first time since his arrangement with Titian at Augsburg. In a short minute to Hernández the king enquired whether Titian was still disposed to work because he would like him to paint a picture of the señor sant lorenço. Hernández, who seems to have regarded Titian with a mixture of admiration and exasperation, replied briefly that the painter was well able to work ‘since in order to get money he has gone from here to Brescia’. On the same day, 8 October, he wrote a longer and more interesting letter to Antonio Pérez in which he informed him that, although ‘the painting of Christ at the Supper’ was finished, Titian was claiming that it was not, ‘which I suspect is due to his covetousness and avarice, which make him keep it back, and may continue to do so, till the King’s dispatch arrives ordering the payment to be made’. Hernández would, however, still try to obtain it and make him begin the St Lawrence:
For though he is old he works and can still work, and if there were but money forthcoming we should get more out of him than we would expect from his age; seeing that for the sake of earning he went from hence to Brescia to look at the place in which he has to set certain pictures just ordered of him … and if Your Magnificence should like some little things from the master’s hand it would be a fitting and easy opportunity …
Titian, who was accustomed to trading pictures for favours, would have understood, and may have been behind, the suggestion that ‘some little things’ might engage the secretary’s interest in pursuing the matter of his pension, which had still not been paid by the new governor of Milan Don Gabriel de la Cueva. Venus Blindfolding Cupid (Rome, Galleria Borghese) looks as though it was painted around this time; and since a picture of the same subject is mentioned in 1585 as belonging to Antonio Pérez, it is not impossible that it was painted for him.2 Although in bad condition it has the hallmarks of a largely autograph work: the broken brushwork, the sensuous textures of hair, flesh and skin, the palpability of the cupid at Venus’ back nestling in her blonde curls, the subtle colouristic harmony and rosy glow cast by evening light over the mountains of Cadore, as well as the major pentimenti associated with his method of working on autograph paintings.
The composition was modelled on the Allegory of Marriage of three decades earlier, and the features of Venus – black eyes, blonde hair pulled back off her face, straight-bridged nose and small, full mouth – are similar to his Reclining Venuses. His original idea, which has been detected by X-ray, was for a portrait of a lady in court dress wearing a tilted hat with feathers accompanied by the two cupids, as in the Rome picture, but three rather than the two female figures we see today.3 The presence of two cupids has invited a number of allegorical interpretations according to which they are Venus’ twin sons Anteros and Eros. Anteros represented either Platonic ‘higher’ or divine love, or love reciprocated, Eros earthly, irresponsible love. So the higher or reciprocated love watches over his mother’s shoulder as she blindfolds Eros to prevent him from doing harm.
Hernández continued his letter to Pérez with a suggestion.
In a monastery of this city there is a picture of St Lawrence done by Titian many years ago … The friars have told me that they would give it for 200 scudi, and it could be copied by Girolamo Titiano, a relative or pupil who has been in Titian’s house more than thirty years, and is considered the next best after him; and if His Majesty should like these they could be had more quickly. I beg Your Magnificence to advise me as to this …
He was referring to the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (Venice, Church of Santa Maria dei Gesuiti)4 which had been commissioned by Lorenzo Massolo and his wife Elisabetta Querini, for the family tomb in the church of Santa Maria dei Crociferi,5 in the late 1540s but remained unfinished after Lorenzo Massolo’s death in 1557, when Elisabetta instructed the executors of his will to see that it was brought to completion as soon as possible. We don’t know for certain if she saw it in situ before she died in 1559 because there is no documented mention of it before Hernández’s letter to Pérez. Titian’s source was the account of the martyrdom of St Lawrence in The Golden Legend in which the Roman emperor Decius commands the saint, ‘Sacrifice to the gods or thou shalt pass the night in torments,’ and Lawrence answers: ‘My night hath no darkness. All things shine with light.’ Those lines prompted Titian to explore the chromatic qualities of the different sources of light – the firelight under St Lawrence, the torches held up by his executioners, the Holy Spirit that breaks through the clouds in a bolt of lightning – so that you see, as his anonymous biographer put it, ‘not only the figures of the bodies but the very air of the dark night illustrated by light’. He employed a visual vocabulary enriched by first-hand knowledge of the works of Michelangelo, Raphael and other central Italian artists and of the antique buildings he had seen in Rome. The giant Corinthian colonnade that runs diagonally across the left side of the picture may refer to the Temple of Hadrian in the Campus Martius in Rome: there was no building like it in Venice until Palladio’s façade of the church of San Francesco della Vigna was completed in 1564. The torso of the figure of St Lawrence is taken from a Hellenistic statue, the Dying Gaul, that was then in the Grimani collection in the doge’s palace, but with his left arm stretched towards the lightning that will transform the saint’s physical body – according to a dictum of the Council of Trent – into spirit. The executioner prods the torso with his long fork in response to the saint’s stoically ironic request: ‘See, I am done enough on this side. Turn me over and cook the other. Now you can test the work of your god Vulcan.’
It was his first night scene and the most authentically Roman of his paintings so far. But the monks of the Crociferi, who were prepared to sell their St Lawrence for the derisory sum of 200 ducats, cannot have thought very highly of it. Nevertheless, if Hernández and Girolamo Dente had reason to believe that Titian would accept the idea of sending it and a copy by Dente to Philip he changed his mind on his return from Brescia when Titian insisted that he would paint a new version himself, and, so Hernández informed the king, would not remove his hands from it until it was finished. Hernández also reported to Philip that Titian was in excellent form but that this was the time, if ever, to get ‘other things’ from him because according to some people who knew him Titian was about ninety years old, though he didn’t show it, and would do anything for money. Philip, who was given a précis of Hernández’s latest letters about the Last Supper, the pensions, Dente’s offer of a copy of the St Lawrence and Titian’s decision to paint a new one, wrote his usual laconic notes in the margin.
Orders have been sent to Milan to make the payment; and as to matters here, I don’t know how they stand.
The picture should be bought from Titian’s relative for 50 ducats. Titian’s should not be taken unless it differs from the first, for then there would be two instead of one.
The Last Supper was finally dispatched later in October. It was probably a variation of a now lost Last Supper he had done a decade earlier for the refectory of the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo;6 and it cannot have been originally intended for Philip because he had not mentioned it to him until 1563 when he said he had been working on it for six years, the years in which he had reserved his best autograph paintings for the king. Indeed, technical investigation has shown that it was executed with considerable studio assistance. Even so the Last Supper that arrived at the Escorial may have been as fine a painting as Titian and Hernández had claimed. Unfortunately, however, it was too large for the wall in the refectory for which it was intended, and an immediate decision was taken to cut it down on all four sides. The painter Juan Fernandez Navarrette, known as ‘the Titian of Spai
n’, protested, but Navarrette, who was deaf and dumb, failed to prevent the amputation. And that was just the beginning of the destruction of Titian’s Last Supper, which was subsequently repainted so often that original surface colours were buried alive, leaving only the rhythmic grouping of the figures, especially of the Apostles on the right of Christ, as evidence of the master’s contribution.
While his most recent offering to Philip was being mutilated in Spain, Titian in Venice had the outline composition of his first Martyrdom of St Lawrence for the Massolo transferred on to a fresh canvas of similar size but slightly different dimensions and with a squared rather than an arched top. He must have known how important the subject was for Philip, given that he had never before requested a specific subject; and Philip’s St Lawrence, which he executed without assistance, was the most significant project under way in the studio and one of the most expressive of all his paintings. It is unlikely that the variations Titian made on the earlier version were intended to comply with Philip’s order that his St Lawrence should differ from the first, which the king had never seen and never would. This was not the first time that the opportunity to reconsider a previous painting would inspire in Titian an even greater, more deeply considered treatment of the same subject.
He cancelled the stagey Roman portico and replaced it with the arch of an atrium in which the action is enclosed. It is less theatrical than the Gesuiti painting but more intensely dramatic and more crowded. Titian, who had never been interested in exploring deep space, pushed the scene more insistently forward to the front of the painting. Expecting that the picture would be seen in flickering candlelight, he used his own interior lighting: the flames that roast the saint and the flickering torches that flank the pagan altar sending sparks into the darkness explore the textures of flesh, stone and metal. The brushwork is very loose, the paint apparently applied at speed as though the old painter could scarcely keep up with his ideas. There are new elements: a Roman soldier directing the martyrdom on horseback, a spaniel looking the other way, a barefoot boy in green with his hands manacled – is he another innocent prisoner? Two baby angels (quoted from his most famous work, the St Peter Martyr of 1530) tread the smoke-filled air at the top of the painting waiting to crown the spirit of the saint when it is released from his tormented body. Did Titian dream the nightmare he painted in the background outside the atrium arch? A pale sickle moon emerging from windswept clouds casts its eerie light on – what? Is it an escarpment? the ruin of a fountain? Is the indistinct stick-like figure carrying some kind of weapon and running towards the martyrdom another Roman soldier or a Christian seeking his own salvation? Perhaps he is attempting to rescue the innocent boy in green? Is it the spectre of approaching death?
The Martyrdom of St Lawrence (Madrid, Escorial, Old Church) was ready for dispatch to Spain on 2 December 1567, when Titian addressed a mean-minded letter to the king blaming its late delivery on ‘the delays, indisposition and death’ of García Hernández: not a word of commiseration about the envoy, who had been his intermediary with the king for years and had been responsible for advising Philip that Titian was not too old to take on the new St Lawrence. Titian went on to say that he had heard that His Majesty wished to have paintings of scenes from the life of St Lawrence, and if he would inform him of the size and lighting of each piece the saint’s life could be illustrated in eight or ten pictures, which he would do with the assistance of Orazio and ‘another clever assistant’, presumably Emanuel Amberger. But this series, like the one of the emperor’s military victories that he had offered previously, was never realized. The letter concludes with the usual complaints about the overdue pensions from Spain and Milan, as well as a renewed request for the claim on Naples, about which he had lost the relevant documents, to be settled. This was followed by further apologies for the delay in sending the St Lawrence ‘through the fault of Your Majesty’s ministers’, and a douceur: ‘I may add that I send with that picture a Naked Venus, which I finished after the St Lawrence was completed.’ This was a variant on the Washington DC Venus with a Mirror and Two Cupids of about a decade earlier, which Titian had kept in his studio. Philip’s Venus is lost but is known from a copy by Rubens.
Philip had intended his St Lawrence for the high altar of the basilica, which was to be the centrepiece and raison d’être of the Escorial but for which he had not yet settled on a plan. The painting was placed temporarily over the high altar of the Escorial Old Church, but turned out to be the wrong size for the basilica altar as finally designed. And so it remains to this day in the Old Church, a small oblong room on the first floor of the monastery, where it covers the whole altar wall up to the ceiling. Despite considerable damage, the vibrancy of the brushwork with which Titian has modelled his figures against the dark background has not been lost. And when, after centuries of its being locked away from the gaze of all but the most persistent or well-connected visitors, it was shown for the first time at a public exhibition at the Prado in 2003, it prompted a reassessment of Titian’s capacity to paint in his old age.
Although the Martyrdom of St Lawrence was the largest and most ambitious work of Titian’s later years, it was by no means his only preoccupation in the three years it took to complete. Nor was he above using a subject especially dear to Philip’s heart to twist the king’s arm with regard to overdue payments by stalling and pleading poverty. On 18 July 1565, in the summer after he had agreed to paint the St Lawrence himself, he wrote to Philip complaining that the treasury of Milan had had the effrontery to pay some of his pension in the form of a warrant for rice, which had put him at a loss of more than 100 ducats, so would His Majesty make good ‘the loss I have sustained so that, having no other salary, I may be able to live in the service of Your Majesty with that small sum which the glorious memory of Caesar Your Majesty’s Sire and Your Majesty’s self conceded to me’. He would await the effect of Philip’s infinite kindness, meanwhile proceeding with the ‘picture of the Blessed Lawrence’.
Philip would not have known or cared that Titian was an extremely wealthy man who, far from having no salary, could count on his sanseria, the annual brokerage fee on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, for life (although the tax exemption worth about eighteen to twenty ducats per annum was cancelled in 1566), never mind high fees for paintings, as well as the proceeds from the timber and real estate businesses managed by Orazio. We know something about the extent of his holdings in real estate from a tax return on landed property that all Venetians were required to present to the tax authorities, the Ten Savi alle Decime, the Magistrates of the Tithes, which Orazio wrote out in the summer of 1566.7 He declared the house at Biri Grande for which he was paying a rent of sixty ducats annually to Madonna Bianca Polani for the piano nobile, studio and garden, in addition to which he paid her thirty-two ducats for two mezzanine flats which he subleased to tenants (he took care to say they were not prostitutes) who paid fourteen and sixteen ducats respectively, thereby incurring a loss of two ducats. The house at Cadore in which Francesco had lived produced nothing more than a load of hay from an adjoining meadow. Two sawmills at Ansogne (which he and Francesco had bought from Vincenzo Vecellio in 1542 for the knock-down price of thirteen ducats), were let for twenty-four ducats each but involved expenses for embanking the River Piave. There was a house in Conegliano, and various fields, meadows and cottages, some of them rented out, in the territory around Cadore and Serravalle including the ten fields, cottage and villa on the Col di Manza. He gave his income from property as about 101 ducats. The return, which has been described as ‘a masterpiece of fiscal evasion’,8 makes no mention of the timber yard at San Francesco della Vigna, which belonged technically to the community of Cadore, or of another one on the Zattere, which seems to have belonged to Orazio.9 Although he was not required to declare other sources of income, let alone the profits Orazio was making from the timber business, he gave the impression that the 101 ducats represented his entire wealth, a sum so small, he claimed, that he found difficulty in maintaini
ng his family.
If Titian in his late seventies had become more close-handed than ever about money, his capacity to switch the beam of his creative intelligence from one to another of the unrelated artistic projects in his studio at the same time was scarcely diminished. In the winter of 1565–6, while working on the final stages of Philip’s Martyrdom of St Lawrence, he invited the Flemish master engraver Cornelis Cort to live in his house in order to begin, under his close supervision, a process of recording with copperplate engravings a selection of his works from the previous fifteen years. Titian, who had designed his own original woodcuts as a young man, understood the art and the commercial value of printmaking. He licensed engravings of his works before and after his collaboration with Cort, and it is thanks only to printed versions of some of his most important earlier paintings that are now lost that we know what they looked like and that Ridolfi was able to describe paintings he had never seen because they had long since been sent away from Italy.
