Titian
Page 73
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
G. K. CHESTERTON, ‘LEPANTO’, 1915
One morning in December 1567 the Reverend Pomponio Vecellio woke up in a rage, went to his desk and threw down a hysterical letter to Titian, charging him with ruining his life in general and with tax evasion in particular. The bitterness between father and son had a long, sad history; and if the contract agreed by both parties four years earlier had brought peace between them for a while it had not lasted. According to that agreement, which had been witnessed by the papal legate in Venice, Pomponio retained ownership of the benefices of Medole, which Titian had laboriously acquired for him in 1531 through Federico Gonzaga, and of Sant’Andrea di Favaro, granted by Paul III in 1546. Titian was given the power to manage the benefices and receive the income from them in return for providing Pomponio with a monthly allowance of twenty-five ducats. In 1562 Orazio, acting on behalf of his father and his brother, had sublet Sant’Andrea di Favaro, where Pomponio had always maintained that the climate was bad for his health, to another Venetian priest for a period of three years. A year later Orazio negotiated the pensioning off of Medole for 168 ducats a year rising to 200.
Unfortunately there were underlying emotional tensions between Titian and his elder son that could not be resolved by law or by Orazio. Titian, who expected unconditional obedience from his children, regarded himself as owner of the benefices, if not strictly in ecclesiastical law then by right of his status as paterfamilias, of the efforts he had put into securing them for Pomponio, and of the respect due to him in what he called his ‘last old age’. Pomponio, now a grown man in his forties and a fully fledged priest, resented the role of remittance man; nor would it be altogether surprising if he was jealous of his father’s closer attachment to the younger brother to whom Titian was in the process of passing on a substantial proportion of his income and property.
Living in the toxic climate of Sant’Andrea di Favaro, as he had done without Titian’s permission since the three-year sublet came to an end, did nothing to improve Pomponio’s state of mind when he wrote his garbled letter and delivered it at the gate of a public notary in Piazza San Marco, where its receipt was registered on 16 December 1567. The thrust of the letter was that Titian had failed to pay taxes on the income from the benefices with the result that bailiffs had seized from Pomponio a cask of wine and eight loads of wheat, which were necessary for his sustenance. ‘I sent word to you immediately, but you paid no heed, and seeing that you have made me give up everything, and my affairs and reputation are falling into total ruin, thanks to you, I have informed the legal magistrates so that you cannot at any time protest that you did not know.’ Unfortunately, venting his spleen on paper did nothing to cool Pomponio’s ire. The two men never spoke again. But six months after that first sally Pomponio fired off another anguished letter, this time accusing Titian of withholding the monthly payments of twenty-five ducats as stipulated by the irrevocable power of attorney granted in 1563. He had taken up residence at Sant’Andrea di Favaro, as he was obliged to do, so he said, by the decrees of the holy Council of Trent, and was suffering from the bad air there and from the sequestration of his wine and wheat. He was, furthermore, worn out by visits from Titian’s agents, all of which had reduced him to such a state that he was almost embarrassed to appear in the company of other men. So would Titian kindly make the payments and hold off his agents, ‘since I have always been that honourable son that you know, and so that I will continue to live as such’. He sent his best wishes formally, in Latin, adding that the letter would be registered with a public notary at the canonical offices in Venice, as indeed it was on 22 June 1568.
This time it was Titian who lost his temper. So far he had left the management of the benefices to Orazio, as he did all practical problems, which included most recently a dispute arising from damage to a Vecellio sawmill in Ansogne near Pieve caused by a flood in a neighbouring sawmill. But he was irritated by Pomponio’s self-righteous claim to be abiding by the decrees of the Council of Trent, which he knew to be a half-truth since the requirement that priests must live in the parishes from which they derived livings had not yet come into force in Italy. (Nor for that matter was the celibacy of priests, another Tridentine decree, yet taken very seriously as we can infer from the fact that later that year, in September, Titian used his power as a knight palatine to confer legitimacy on the natural sons of a curate practising in Cadore.) But whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, where Pomponio was concerned Titian’s self-control was liable to tip over into tempestuous anger: he was not after all the first or last of those who reserve their worst behaviour for the closest members of their families.
Four days after receiving Pomponio’s second letter he hastened through the streets of Venice, seething with fury and faster than was wise for a man of his age, to the office of a scribe, where he relieved his feelings with an instruction to take down ‘word for word’ his reply to ‘messer priest Pomponio’, in which he castigated his son for contravening the terms of the irrevocable mandate by pensioning off his benefices without his father’s consent and insisted that by doing so Pomponio had contravened the terms of the irrevocable power and was therefore no longer entitled to the stipulated allowance of twenty-five ducats a month. Having begun with a promise to reply to Pomponio briefly ‘because it is the role of a father to conceal the misery and disgrace of a son so disobedient’, he found himself unable to control his rage, so that it was not easy, even for a professional scribe, to make sense of the incoherent outpouring of words, which forced the poor man to write so fast that some of them are illegible. But it was not until he finally drew breath that he allowed himself, for the first time in their relationship, to express the real source of his pain:
Not to mention that it gives me all the greater pain and distress to think of the trouble, sacrifices and sweat I have suffered in order to acquire for you these honourable benefices, setting you on the path to make yourself grand and rich, and Your Reverence did not want that, but nor do you want to agree to live on your own in your own way.
But Pomponio, who had studied law and classical languages at Padua and was more literate than his father, believed he had the upper hand. His sarcastic reply, recorded by a notary on 1 July, was intended as much to hurt as to win the argument.
Magnificent signor father, since as a layman you have no authority to order me about and I do not consent to it, I will say in reply that if I were to blame the person who replied to my letter a few days ago and if I were certain that he had glanced through the content of your quittance of ownership of my benefices with an irrevocable power of attorney, and if I were not certain that this excellent person was not making a fool of you I would deem him a great ignoramus since you must have told him the truth about having at one time paid me month after month the twenty-five ducats, beginning with the month of your quittance.
He went on to remind Titian that the power of attorney had in fact never been legally annulled, that he had renounced the benefice of Medole because he was not permitted to act as priest in two parishes, and, furthermore, that Titian had known about it because he had himself negotiated the terms with the abbot of Medole, and Orazio, who had stood in for Titian, was one of many witnesses.
As for his residence at Sant’Andrea di Favaro:
at the time of your quittance it was not obligatory, but since the reforms of the holy Council of Trent the whole town of Favaro and all of Mestre can bear witness that I have obeyed the holy decrees to my great suffering and in danger of death working in this poisonous climate and with great expense. But since, as they say, every day has its night and I being by now more old than young, I am resolved that I am no longer able to toil as I have in the past, whereby I once again declare to you that in whatever way I suffer, as much from the residence as from every other matter relating to this irrevocable power of attorney, that it will be
and understood to be to your detriment and ruin if it pleases you to revoke the quittance and power of attorney and if you don’t from now on pay out the twenty-five ducats a month that you are obliged to pay me and without prejudice to the overdue debts enforced by that power.1
And yet, although his relationship with Pomponio would never recover, Titian could not give up the habit of trying to acquire income for his elder son, and it was with his Spanish pension in mind that he revived his connection with the still powerful Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and plied him with gifts: a first impression of Cort’s engraving of the Trinity sent in December 1567; and in May of 1568 a Penitent Magdalen (Naples, Capodimonte). Farnese accepted the gifts but did nothing to help with the pension.
Titian also had the welfare of another child to consider. Emilia,2 the love child of his dotage, the precious little girl he had once described to the King of Spain as ‘the absolute patroness of my soul’, had reached marriageable age. In June 1568, while Titian was smarting from Pomponio’s latest insulting letter, a contract was drawn up that provided Emilia with a dowry of 750 ducats on her marriage to Andrea Dossena, a grain merchant. They were married later that year in Titian’s house, perhaps in the presence of Emilia’s mother, about whom, however, nothing is known.3 The dowry was half the amount he had provided for his legitimate daughter Lavinia, and unlike the family of Lavinia’s husband Cornelio Sarcinelli, who were landed gentry in Serravalle, the Dossena, although by no means penniless, were ordinary working people. The young couple started their married life under the roof of Andrea’s father Giovanni but soon moved into their own rented house near the church of San Pantalon. Nothing is known about Titian’s connection with the Dossena or why he chose Andrea for Emilia, except that his social standing probably seemed about right for a natural daughter. At least we can allow ourselves to imagine that it was a happy marriage – they were still together when Emilia died in 1582 – and that Titian enjoyed the three grandchildren they gave him: Alcide, Zanetto and Vecellia,4 who, unlike Lavinia’s children, who were brought up in Serravalle, lived close by in Venice.
The end of the decade was a miserable time for Venice. In 1569–70 a bad harvest that affected most of Italy brought a devastating famine to the lagoon city where the pressure of population, which had grown by more than 50 per cent, from about 110,000 in 1509 to approximately 175,000, was aggravated by the inflow of starving peasants from the mainland. A chronicler,5 writing about ‘the worst shortage of bread and flour ever seen within the memories even of ancient men’, described the riots, the people crushed to death in crowds pushing and shoving around bakeries that turned out to be empty, the theft of bread by some arsenal workers, the plight of impoverished immigrants who ‘hammered on the doors in the town for two months on end; and such poverty and wretchedness were truly pitiful sights … Throughout Venice one heard talk of nothing but this terrible famine, and in truth it struck the greatest imaginable terror into the hearts of men.’ At the same time there was an eruption of ‘spotted fever’ (measles-like spots are characteristic of typhus), which failed to see off enough people to relieve the shortage of bread. The unpopular doge Pietro Loredan served as scapegoat for the famine, and when he died, aged eighty-eight, in May 1570 the people rejoiced and for days afterwards little boys ran through the streets singing:
Long live our saint and lords of noble birth;
Dead is the Doge who brought upon us dearth!
Let bells ring out, for Loredan’s dead,
Who fed us tickets with our bread!
As though famine and contagious disease were not enough the most destructive fire the city had seen for more than half a century broke out in the arsenal at midnight on 13 September 1569. The stores of gunpowder blew up, the walls and towers collapsed, and the surrounding neighbourhood burned down, stopping just short of the church of San Francesco della Vigna and Titian’s timber yards on the shore of the lagoon. It was rumoured that the fire was the work of foreign saboteurs, the Jews as always being prime suspects. The Most Serene Republic of Venice was nevertheless sustained, as always through good times and bad, by the image of itself as a peaceful, well-run and harmonious community endowed with a God-given ability to overcome all natural disasters. Contemporary accounts of the fire turned it into a triumph, giving detailed encomiums of the largest, most efficient and wealthiest of all naval shipyards, and describing the catastrophe as a magnificent spectacle worthy of the very marvel it consumed: all Venice ran to watch (we can imagine Titian who had always been fascinated by fire joining the crowd of spectators); all the world spoke of it. And it is true, as the chroniclers maintained, that thanks to the superlative leadership of the Council of Ten, and the readiness of the people of Venice to respond to the challenge, the fire was quickly put out, and in a few months the arsenal was rebuilt and returned to its former splendour and productivity.
Unfortunately the Myth of Venice could not protect the Republic from its nemesis: the Turk. The Turkish sultan Selim II, successor to his father, the formidable Suleiman the Magnificent, may have been a drunkard – hence his nickname Selim ‘the Sot’ – but he was proving to be a more bellicose ruler than Christian Europe had bargained for. He devoted the first two years of his reign to continuing his father’s campaigns in Hungary. But after concluding a truce with Maximilian II in 1568 he set his sights on the fertile island of Cyprus, which Venice had owned since 1479. Cyprus, the easternmost possession of the Venetian maritime empire, was not well governed by its colonial overlords who had aroused resentment in the local populace; and since it was 2,400 kilometres from the lagoon but fewer than eighty from Selim’s own southern shores the wonder is that the Turks had not seized it earlier. Nevertheless, although it was widely believed that the loss of the Venetian fleet in the arsenal fire would be an incentive for Selim to attack Cyprus, the Venetian government hesitated to take action even as news reached the Rialto that the Turks were intriguing with disaffected local inhabitants and taking soundings in the Cypriot cities of Nicosia and Famagusta. Venetian prosperity depended on peace with the Ottoman Empire, and the policy of keeping that peace by means of diplomacy and the maintenance of an invincible defensive fleet had worked well since 1540. Neutral, independent Venice was not merely dedicated to peace on its own behalf. According to the foundation myth, images of which lined the walls of the Great Council Hall, it was the historic role of the Republic to act as peacemaker between the other great powers. As recently as 1567 Titian had been deputed to arrange a meeting in Venice between Philip II’s representative García Hernández and the Turkish ambassador Alban Bey.
Nevertheless, military preparations on both sides were under way when Selim made a formal demand for Cyprus in March 1570. He was turned down by the Senate, which sent dispatches throughout the maritime empire declaring that a state of open war existed with the Turks. Now, however, Venice paid the price of the isolationist policy it had maintained for thirty years. Admired though it was throughout Europe for its internal political stability, the Republic had no natural allies, and appeals for help from other Christian states were rejected, with the sole exceptions of Pius V and Philip of Spain who made only token contributions. The pope agreed to equip a small squadron of vessels on condition that Venice provided the hulls. Philip, who was rightly suspicious of the Venetian tendency to make peace with Islam, sent a fleet of fifty ships under the command of Gian Andrea Doria, with secret instructions to let the Venetians, who produced the largest fleet, do most of the fighting.
The opening of the War of Cyprus was a shambles. The Venetian fleet waited in vain at Zara for the Spaniards, who simply stayed in Sicily until the pope urged Philip to send Doria his sailing orders. News of unopposed Turkish landings in Cyprus reached the Venetians on 9 August, but it was not until 1 September that the papal and Spanish fleets finally joined the Venetians at Crete. They were still off Rhodes on 9 September, when, after a prolonged siege of the Cypriot capital Nicosia the Turks breached the thin medieval walls, beheaded the incompetent Ve
netian Lieutenant Nicolò Dandolo and went on to enjoy a week of massacres, gratuitous impalings and quarterings, rapes of both sexes, desecration of churches and looting.
The Turkish fleet sailed on to Famagusta, the principal port, which was better defended by its Venetian fortifications and by the commander Astorre Baglioni and Captain Marcantonio Bragadin. The Turkish siege of Famagusta began on 17 September and continued throughout the winter. A relief force of 1,500 men with arms and munitions managed to get through the Turkish blockade in January 1571, but food supplies began to run out in April. Meanwhile the Turks were closing in with siege towers from which they were able to bombard the town from above the walls. Although the Venetian–Spanish relief expedition on which the Christians had been counting failed to materialize, they fought back bravely even while powder was running short and after all the horses, donkeys and cats had been eaten and two-thirds of the defenders killed or wounded in successive bombardments. Finally, on 1 August, the Venetian generals took the decision to surrender Famagusta to the Turks.
The peace terms offered by the Turks were surprisingly generous, and the document setting them out was delivered to Baglioni and Bragadin with a covering letter personally signed by the Turkish commander Lala Mustafa Pasha complimenting them on their magnificent defence of the city. Four days after the surrender Bragadin sent word to Mustafa proposing to call on him in order to present the keys of Famagusta. Mustafa smiled pleasantly as he greeted Bragadin, Baglioni, other senior officers and a party of Italian, Greek and Albanian soldiers. Then, without warning, he began shouting accusations at the Christians. He whipped out a knife and cut off Bragadin’s right ear, ordering an attendant to dispose of the other ear and his nose while he commanded his guards to execute the rest of the delegation. The decapitated heads were later said to have numbered 350. But the atrocity that was to ring down through Venetian history was reserved for Marcantonio Bragadin, whose ghastly fate still makes Venetian schoolchildren shudder. After two weeks in prison by which time he was seriously ill from his festering wounds, he was dragged round the city walls, tied to a chair and hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship so that the sailors could hurl taunts at him, then taken to the main square and flayed alive. Death came to his rescue when the executioner reached his waist, but it was not enough for his torturers. His head was cut off, his body quartered; his skin, sewn together and stuffed with straw and cotton, was paraded through the streets mounted on a cow. Nine years later a Venetian who had survived the siege of Famagusta managed to steal the skin from the arsenal of Constantinople and return it to Bragadin’s sons. Its remains, a few shreds of browned skin, were discovered in 1961 during a restoration of the hero’s monument in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where they are kept to this day.6 We will never know what was in Titian’s mind when he chose the Flaying of Marsyas as one of his last mythological subjects. We can be sure, however, that there was not a man, woman or child in Venice who was not haunted by the story of the flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin and that Titian cannot have been an exception.