by Sheila Hale
But of the thirty or so engravings made after his works those Cornelis Cort made in 1565–6 and on a return visit to Venice in 1571–2 are in a class of their own. Cort, who was thirty when he was summoned to Biri Grande from Antwerp, was a genius in his medium. Although he had the advantage of working closely with Titian, it is the artistry with which he employed his burins that reproduces in black and white the fluttering lines of Titian’s brushstrokes and gives a sensation of colour with a masterly use of light and shade. Titian chose five paintings and one drawing for Cort: the recently completed San Salvatore Annunciation, Charles V’s Trinity, Mary of Hungary’s Tityus, Philip II’s Diana and Callisto and its studio variation, a Mary Magdalen, and Ruggiero and Angelica, an episode from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso of which he had made a superb drawing (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat) some ten years earlier. The selection was based on several considerations. They were subjects likely to appeal to a wide public; three of them paid homage to the patronage of the Habsburgs; and the set intentionally demonstrated the diversity of his creative range: sacred and mythological subjects, landscapes with figures, the monumental Trinity, and a half-figure of the ever-popular Weeping Magdalen.
Cort’s Annunciation is the most faithful to the painting apart from the way the image, which was not reversed on the copperplate, appears on impressions in mirror image. This must have been deliberate because Cort was not an artist who would have made that kind of blunder, and the impressions of Ruggiero and Angelica and Diana and Callisto are also reversed. Was it an experiment that allowed Titian to see how his inventions looked in reverse order? He often reversed later versions of earlier subjects, as with the Entombment, the Tribute Money for Philip of Spain, and the Death of Actaeon in which Diana, who was positioned on the spectator’s right in Philip’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto presides over the tragic denouement of the story from our left. If the Annunciation was their first project, most of the engravings that followed were reinterpretations rather than copies of the originals, the compositions were simplified and some details changed to make them more accessible, to work better in black and white or perhaps to satisfy Titian’s restless habit of making changes. The engraving of St Jerome is a new variation on a favourite theme in which the saint seated on a rock is absorbed in reading against a wild mountain landscape.
The most ambitious of the six engravings, and the one that carried most prestige, was taken from the Trinity, which, although the painting had been sent to Charles V more than ten years previously, is close enough to suggest that it must have been based on a prototype drawing or painted model that had been kept in the studio. Cort made numerous small changes to the lighting and to the gestures and costume of the figures, not least to the profile of Titian on the right edge of the picture, which is much more explicitly recognizable than in the painting. Whereas in Charles’s original he had portrayed himself as a bareheaded and half-naked supplicant, in the engraving he wears the more dignified turban and cloak suitable to his status. There is a reduced painted version of the Trinity in the London National Gallery, but its relationship, if any, to Cort’s engraving is problematic. Although superficially very similar to the original picture in the Prado, it was painted over a cruder version that has been detected by X-ray and parts of which can be seen with the naked eye where the top layer of paint has worn away revealing different colours – Mary Magdalen’s dress, for example, was pink; the robes of Christ and David were partly red – that would not have been used as base colours for the Magdalen’s green dress or the blue robes worn by Christ and David. A plausible theory about the evolution of the London painting10 is that it was first taken from Cort’s engraving by an inferior and unidentifiable artist who did not have access to the original in Spain. At some time not later than the eighteenth century, the picture came to Spain (where it is in fact first recorded) where a painter, probably a clever forger who was in a position to see the original, corrected the colours and all but a few of Cort’s changes, perhaps with a view to convincing a dealer that his version was the model that had been kept in Titian’s studio.
On 4 January 1567 the inquisitor Valerio Faenzi, who was responsible for vetting the content of religious works seeking publication in the territory of the Venetian Republic, authorized Cort’s engraving of ‘the most saintly Trinity by the excellent master Ticiano, in which there are many figures from the Old Testament’ as ‘a work that deserves to be seen to the honour of God and worthy of every privilege’. On 22 January the three capi of the Council of Ten granted a privilege to publish, which was followed on 4 February by a copyright authorized by the Senate. It entailed strict fines for plagiarists – plagiarism was a not uncommon practice in the Veneto – to be valid for the next fifteen years. This was unusual. A copyright, which gave the holder the right to all proceeds from sales, would normally have been granted to the engraver. But it may be that Cort, whose name had not appeared on the first impressions, was content with the prize of having his name along with Titian’s on subsequent states of the engravings.
Titian supervised the international distribution of the prints, sending first impressions of the Trinity to his most illustrious patrons, among them Philip II, Margaret of Parma and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. He used a dealer in art and antiques, Niccolò Stoppio, to dispatch the complete set to the Flemish humanist Dominique Lampsonius, secretary to the Prince-Bishop of Liège and responsible for recommending Cort to Titian in the first place. On 3 March 1567, soon after Cort had left for Rome taking with him an impression of the Trinity, Lampsonius wrote to Titian praising all six but especially the St Jerome Reading in the Desert. The hand of Cort, he wrote, was bolder and more rapid than that of any other engraver who had reproduced Titian’s compositions and gave grace to the wildness of his landscapes,
among which that desolate and lonely little landscape with St Jerome is unique in the world and which I can imagine with the greatest pleasure how it would have been coloured by the most felicitous hand of your Lordship in such a way that the figure of St Jerome would have been large as life, just as I persuade myself that Your Lordship has made it. And in fact Your Lordship has by a long way stolen the reputation for landscape from our Flemish landscape painters (because you Italians are the winners as regards figures) in that aspect of painting in which we thought to hold the field.
Titian was close to eighty when he sent the Martyrdom of St Lawrence to Spain, and on some days, when the Venetian winter crept into his bones or the humidity of high summer caused the brushes to slip in his arthritic fingers, he felt even older. Although he knew he had long since been immortalized by his paintings, he wanted the studio to continue operating after his death. Unlike Tintoretto, Veronese and the Bassano, who ran family practices in the Venetian tradition, Titian had only one child who was competent to succeed him. He had done his best to promote Orazio’s paintings with the Venetian government and with Philip of Spain. Now the time had come to reward the son who had served him so faithfully and would continue to do so until they were parted by death. In April 1567 he applied to the Council of Ten to transfer his sanseria to Orazio, ‘the image of myself’. It was an unusual request, one that would have required the government to pay Orazio, who was still only in his early forties, for many years to come; and it was turned down, although by only one vote. A few months later he applied again, this time suggesting a reduced time limit of twenty-five years for the payments. This too failed. He tried again. This time he admitted to what he thought might be the stumbling block. Yes, he had worked for many foreign patrons. Nevertheless, he had refused all invitations to join their courts on a permanent basis and had served the Republic faithfully throughout his life. The granting of his petition would therefore be an example to other artists to live virtuously and faithfully in order to perpetuate the glory of the Republic, in the service of which ‘Orazio my son desires above everything to live and to die in your good graces’. In April 1569 the Ten voted that the sanseria would be paid to Orazio for a period of fift
een years.
The process of passing on to his younger son the wealth that Titian had all his life gone to such lengths to enhance and protect continued into the 1570s. A plan to transfer his pension on Milan to Orazio, which Titian had first mooted in a letter to Granvelle in 1548, was ratified by Philip in July 1571 and confirmed by the Senate of Milan in June of the following year. By 1573 most of the real estate acquired over the years by Titian and Francesco, including the villa on the Col di Manza and the fields near Ceneda, were registered in the name of Orazio. Orazio went to Brescia once more in 1570 to negotiate with the town councillors about the ceiling paintings. But three years later Titian sent his young relative Marco Vecellio there instead. Orazio never again left Venice or his father’s side where, as well as running the businesses and the studio, he collaborated more often on the commissioned paintings.
THREE
The Biographer, the Art Dealer and the King’s Annus Horribilis
It is true that his method of painting in these late works is very different from the way he worked as a young man. For the early works are executed with a certain finesse and an incredible diligence, so that they can be seen from close to as well as from a distance; while these last pictures are executed with broad and bold strokes and smudges, so that from near by nothing can be seen whereas from a distance they appear perfect. This method of painting has caused many artists, who have wished to imitate him and thus display their skill, to produce clumsy pictures.
GIORGIO VASARI, ‘LIFE OF TITIAN’, 1568
Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Life of Titian’, published in 1568 in the second edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, is an essential source for all subsequent biographies of Titian. But the story of how it came to be written is not straightforward; nor, although anyone who writes about Titian cannot avoid referring to ‘Vasari’, was the ‘Life’ composed entirely by Vasari.1 When in the early 1560s Vasari decided to include Titian in a second edition of his Lives he knew very little about his subject’s life and works, apart from those he had seen in Venice and Rome. And at the time he visited Titian’s studio in 1566, the two men had met only twice before: in 1541–2 when Vasari had spent thirteen months in Venice and again in Rome in 1546 when he had acted as Titian’s guide to the Holy City. He therefore delegated the task of gathering information to his friend and fellow Tuscan Cosimo Bartoli, who was the Florentine ambassador in Venice; and shortly after Bartoli had taken up his post there in 1563 he wrote to Vasari promising a list of paintings by the Venetian master. But Titian, who was still offended by his exclusion from the first edition, proved uncooperative. Bartoli, unable or unwilling to force himself on the venerable master, turned instead for information to Titian’s amanuensis Giovanni Maria Verdizotti. By the time Vasari visited Titian’s studio in May 1566 the ‘Life’ had already been drafted by more than one hand, as one might suspect from internal evidence and the different styles in which it is written, sometimes in the first person as though by Vasari, but sometimes referring to Vasari in the third person as in ‘When Vasari was in Venice … Titian introduced to him his talented young friend Giovanni Maria Verdizotti.’
Vasari, who spent only five days in Venice, from 21 to 25 May, was further handicapped by the absence of most of Titian’s greatest paintings, which had been sent to their foreign patrons, some as far back as the 1520s. Although he had been travelling for the book in northern Italy, he is vague about the Este Bacchanals in Ferrara (he fails to mention Bacchus and Ariadne and conflates the Worship of Venus with the Andrians), the great Gonzaga collection in Mantua and the della Rovere paintings in Pesaro, presumably because he did not gain access to the ducal palaces. Verdizotti was in a position to fill him in about the Habsburg pictures and may have been responsible for the famous passage about the blotchy style of Philip II’s poesie. He had been working for Titian since the death of Aretino in 1556, and since he was treated as a member of the household may also have provided details of the early life, which are remarkably accurate. But the chronology of the rest of the biography is muddled partly by lack of information (it seems that the authors failed to consult Aretino’s letters or Dolce’s L’Aretino), partly by a decision to organize the biography thematically rather than chronologically, and partly because it would have been impossible to discuss Titian’s entire life’s work up to 1566 in the few pages Vasari allocated to his ‘Life’. He confesses as much when he interrupts a section about the portraits to comment, ‘But what a waste of time this is! For there has been hardly a single lord of great name, or prince or great lady who has not been portrayed by Titian, a painter of extraordinary talent in this branch of art,’ then covers his omissions: ‘As well as the works I mentioned earlier he did many others at various times.’
The ‘Life of Titian’ as put together by Cosimo Bartoli and Giovanni Maria Verdizotti was ready for the typesetters in 1564 or 1565, before Vasari interviewed Titian in Venice. As it happened, work on the last section of the book was suspended during his preparations for the ceremonial entry into Florence of the Archduchess Joanna of Austria, the consort of Cosimo de’ Medici’s heir Francesco. This is fortunate because Vasari was able to extract some valuable information from Titian that we might not otherwise have had. Titian, for example, persuaded him that he, rather than Giorgione, as Vasari had stated in the first edition, had painted the Christ Carrying the Cross for the church of San Rocco: ‘This image (which many people have attributed to Giorgione) is today held in the greatest veneration in Venice, where it has received in alms more crowns than Titian and Giorgione ever earned in all their lives.’ In the studio Vasari saw, among other paintings, some of which cannot be traced, the Self-Portrait of Titian, which we can date to 1562 because Titian told Vasari that he had finished it four years earlier. We also know from Vasari that the Martyrdom of St Lawrence for Philip, the Crucifixion for Giovanni d’Anna’s altar in the church of San Salvatore, the votive Portrait of Doge Antonio Grimani and the three ceiling paintings for Brescia were all still in the studio ‘sketched in and begun’.
When printing of the Lives resumed early in 1568 it was done in such great haste that errors inevitably went unnoticed. A portrait of Titian accompanies the ‘Life of Alfonso Lombardi’ and Titian’s ‘Life’ is illustrated with a portrait of another man. There is also an inconsistency, probably a typographical error, that continues to cause confusion about the thorny question of Titian’s date of birth. In the first sentence of the ‘Life’ Vasari recounts that Titian was born in Cadore in the year 1480. At the end, however, he gives Titian’s present age at the time of his visit to the studio in 1566 as seventy-six, that is, born in 1490, a date that accords approximately with the views of most scholars today.
After Vasari had returned to Tuscany in the autumn of 1566 a group of Venetian artists applied jointly for membership of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, which had been founded three years earlier by Cosimo de’ Medici acting on Vasari’s advice (it still exists with the purpose of safeguarding Italian art). The applicants were Titian, Andrea Palladio, Giuseppe Salviati, the sculptor Danese Cattaneo, Battista Zelotti and Tintoretto. The council of the Accademia noted that the artists were all known to Vasari and answered their letter immediately, having waived whatever reservations they may have had about the Venetian style to vote unanimously to enrol them as members.
Vasari, who had found Titian ‘in his studio, despite his great age, busy about his painting, with his brushes in his hand’, was not alone in his opinion that it would have been better if Titian had given up painting when his powers began to fail. It was also in 1566 that the Venetian agent of the friendly Guidobaldo II, Duke of Urbino, felt it necessary to reassure the duke that a Christ and a Madonna were by Titian’s hand. Guidobaldo was in fact delighted by the Madonna when he received it the following year. But in 1568, in a letter addressed to Max Fugger on 29 February, Niccolò Stoppio, a gossipmonger and dealer in art and antiquities, reported to Max Fugger that:
Everyone
says he no longer sees what he is doing, and his hand trembles so much that he cannot bring anything to completion, but leaves this to his pupils. He has a German in his house, Emanuel … who is excellent and does many things for him which he then finishes with two strokes of his brush and sells as his own work.
Stoppio, who was Flemish by birth but had been resident in Venice since the early 1540s, was one of a flock of predatory scholar-dealers who swarmed over northern Italy in the second half of the century searching for the rich pickings in collections of art and antiquities assembled by a previous generation, whose heirs were more interested, as he wrote to Max Fugger in 1567, in ‘play and betting and women’. Their principal clients were German: the Fugger bankers, the Habsburg Holy Roman emperors and the dukes of Bavaria. Their targets included the Venetian palaces of the Vendramin, Cornaro, Grimani and Venier families and of Andrea Odoni – who was portrayed with his antique sculptures by Lorenzo Lotto in 1532 – as well as Pietro Bembo’s collection in Padua, and Giulio Romano’s in Mantua. The Vendramin collection was temporarily protected by Gabriel Vendramin’s will, which stipulated that it should be kept together in the palace, but Bembo’s son Torquato, despite his father’s similar request, began disposing of the best pieces in the 1560s and had sold most of the collection by the early 1580s.
Titian was occasionally asked for his opinion about works of art for sale, and Stoppio, for a while, nurtured a friendly relationship with him to add authority to his own eye. In a letter to Hans Jacob Fugger written on 14 December 1567 he claimed, as evidence that he was ‘not as slow witted as some people thought’, that he had been in Titian’s studio fifteen years earlier when the master had taken his advice about two changes to his Venus and Adonis. Whether this was true or not, Titian used Stoppio for his own purposes. It was Stoppio who had arranged delivery of Cornelis Cort’s engravings to Liège. And in August of 1567 the dealer wrote to Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, about a silver-gilt casket set with crystals that was for sale in Titian’s house. It belonged to Carlo della Serpa, a friend of Titian and a former high chamberlain to Pope Julius II. Serpa had turned down an offer from the Venetian government of 1,200 crowns and entrusted the casket to Titian with instructions to sell, but only for cash, to the highest bidder. Albrecht was keen. His agent in Venice, David Ott, beat down Titian’s asking price from 1,000 golden crowns to 1,000 ducats, but the duke set the condition that although he would pay for transport of the fragile object it must be sent at Titian’s risk. There followed heated arguments between Orazio and Ott and Orazio and Serpa about the means of delivery to Munich. Stoppio wrote that Serpa and Titian’s son ‘chaffered so long that neither of them could speak. It is hard to deal with such curious people.’ In November it was agreed in the presence of two witnesses that Ott would take the risk of transport and either pay the 1,000 ducats and send the casket or return it six weeks hence. It is possible, since a silver-gilt casket was mentioned in an inventory of Titian’s possessions after his death, that it was never delivered to Albrecht V.2
