by Sheila Hale
Scholars are divided about how much of a hand Titian had in the two other versions of the Rape of Lucretia. In a cruder variation (Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts), which is more explicit but less violent, Tarquin stabs from below (as in the cancelled passage of the one sent to Philip) rather than above, aiming his curved dagger at Lucretia’s pudenda, while she turns her face away from him and towards us so that we see her scream. But the third rape (Vienna, Akademie der Bildenden Künste),13 which, even if we accept it as unfinished, is so entirely different from the other two that some scholars believe it might represent a different subject or have been executed by another hand. It is painted as though in a fury with a rich autumnal palette and varying surface texture, the paint thin in some places and in others nine layers deep. There is no doubt here about the artist’s sympathy for the innocence of the fragile, helpless victim, who wears no jewellery and is dressed in a demure white dress indicated by visible and rapidly executed sweeps of the brush. As she pushes her left hand defensively against Tarquin’s chest, the forward thrust of his body throws her off balance. X-rays have shown up a previous draft in which the figures are smaller and further apart and indicate that Titian, if it was he, moved the position of Tarquin’s hand and dagger three times.
Palma Giovane, a great-nephew of Palma Vecchio, joined Titian’s workshop around 1570 when he was in his mid-twenties and Titian at least eighty. Titian granted Palma the unusual privilege of watching him at his easels, and long after Titian’s death, when Palma was himself an old man, he remembered what he had seen and described it to Marco Boschini, who published it in 1674. It is the most vivid and revealing description of a great painter at work in the literature of art.
He laid in his pictures with a mass of colour which served as a groundwork for what he wanted to express. I myself have seen such vigorous underpainting in plain red earth [terra rossa, probably Venetian red] for the half-tones, or in white lead. With the same brush dipped in red, black, or yellow he worked up the light parts and in four strokes he could create a remarkably fine figure … Then he turned the picture to the wall and left it for months without looking at it, until he returned to it and stared critically at it, as if it were a mortal enemy … If he found something which displeased him he went to work like a surgeon … Thus, by repeated revisions he brought his pictures to a high state of perfection and while one was drying he worked on another. This quintessence of a composition he then covered with many layers of living flesh … He never painted a figure alla prima, and used to say that he who improvises can never make a perfect line of poetry. The final touches he softened occasionally modulating the highest lights into the half-tones and local colours with his finger; sometimes he used his finger to dab a dark patch in a corner as an accent, or to heighten the surface with a bit of red like a drop of blood. He finished his figures like this and in the last stages he used his fingers more than his brush.14
Palma might have seen Titian at work on Philip’s Rape of Lucretia, or even have assisted him with it. But the driven, complex working procedure he described – which tallies, at least up to a point, with the results of modern scientific investigations – helps to elucidate the style of the very different paintings Titian did not send to Philip in the last years of his life, either because they were unfinished15 or because he considered them inappropriate for the royal patron who, although he had responded positively to the open brushwork developed in the 1550s and 1560s, would not have understood the more subjective and experimental paintings from his last years, which are characterized by a disintegration of forms as though Titian’s visible, agitated strokes and stabs were consuming with paint the azure mountains, the peaceful pastures and the youthful flesh and gorgeous attire of the beautiful sacred and profane men and women that he had once brought to life with his godlike brushes.
The painting Boschini had in mind when he quoted Palma Giovane was the Crowning with Thorns (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), which he described as ‘a marvel worthy of a place in an academy to show students all the secrets of art, and teach them not to degrade but to improve nature’.16 We know that Titian never finished this painting, which evidence suggests may have been commissioned by Paolo d’Anna for his father Giovanni’s altar in the church of San Salvatore,17 because four years after Titian’s death Pomponio, who was in the process of clearing the studio, wrote to Paolo asking if he wanted the clothes to be finished by Titian’s pupils. It seems that this never happened. Eventually Tintoretto bought it, after hearing about it from a fellow member of the Scuola di San Rocco; and when Boschini saw it in the house of Tintoretto’s son it was still unfinished.
In the passage from the Gospel of St John, immediately before Pilate presented Christ to the Jews, ‘the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe, And said, Hail, King of the Jews! And they smote him with their hands’.18 Titian’s late depiction of the episode is a recasting of the very similar composition he had painted in the early 1540s for the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. He had executed that slick, assured, histrionic painting with half an eye on central Italian Mannerism and to fulfil the requirements of ecclesiastical patrons for an image of Christ’s suffering, which does not seem to have moved him greatly at the time. He must have kept a record of that altarpiece; and now, some thirty years later, he treated the same subject on a canvas of the same size and to a similar design. Although the exaggerated poses of Christ’s tormentors are all but identical to those in the earlier version, the sombre lighting and looser application of paint transformed the plump, awkwardly posed Christ in the Louvre painting into the Man whose body and face express patient acceptance of the suffering He must undergo as the Saviour of Mankind. In this, his last and most profoundly moving representation of Christ, we can believe that Titian as he prepared to meet his God had found the deeper faith that had eluded him in his earlier years; and that the emotion we feel is his own, personal response to the Passion, rather than to the requirements of the post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation.
The most striking difference between the two paintings is that in the later work he brought the scene closer to the front of the picture plane, as he had done in his second Martyrdom of St Lawrence, and set it at night lit by the smoky flames of a candelabra, which casts a phantasmagorical play of light over the scene. On the waist of the brute on our left, on Christ’s chest, robe and left ankle the ‘trails of red, almost like drops of blood’ that Palma Giovane tells us Titian used to revitalize ‘some superficial sentiment’ act like rhetorical asides that raise the temperature of our emotional response to the suffering of Christ. The fully clothed figure with his back to us, whom Titian in the Louvre version had depicted as a soldier in chain mail, is all the more sinister for being dressed as a dandified young man with a jolly red feather in his cap, as though he was just any uncaring member of the baying crowd enjoying the spectacle. The dirty white of Christ’s robe would have been purple if the painting had been finished.
Titian had always been able to vary his style to suit the requirements of his patrons, and for all his physical disabilities continued to do so right up to the year before his death. For Philip he painted the Rape of Lucretia and the later Penitent St Jerome19 (Madrid, Escorial) in the meticulous ‘feminine’ style with which he had imitated nature in his youth while at the same time experimenting with the rough ‘masculine’ way of laying on paint that Palma Giovane described to Boschini. The looser, more painterly style had come about very gradually, almost inevitably. As early as the 1540s Aretino had noticed that Titian was using his brushes in a new way, and complained to Cosimo de’ Medici that the portrait of himself now in Florence was excessively sketchy, at least by Florentine standards. Vasari/Verdizotti had described the poesie of the 1550s and early 1560s favourably as ‘painted with broad and bold strokes and blotches’. But the Florentine Vasari, who dismissed more recent paintings as inferior, evidently could not understand the even more open style – or the eccentric practice
of applying his colours in scumbles often with his fingers – that Titian was employing at the time of his visit in 1566.
The subject of the haunting Boy with Dogs20 (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) is unprecedented and mysterious. Like many painters Titian was fascinated by dogs, but had previously used them as accessories while these are full, individualized portraits, which transmit his affection as well as his delight in the visceral appeal of their faces, the warmth of their bodies and textures of their fur. He had used the blond Labrador before in a Portrait of a Soldier (Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen),21 but the black spaniel nursing her puppies from a belly lit up like a hearth is new. And since none of the art historians who are uncomfortable without allegorical explanations has come up with one for this painting there is no harm in speculating that the dogs were family pets also used for hunting in the country, that the little boy gathering grapes in his pink tunic (whether or not he is also a reference to Bacchus) was one of Titian’s youngest grandchildren, and that the nursing spaniel refers to his birth. The lighting of the painting is uneven, perhaps because it was trimmed on all sides at some point in its history; and the finish varies from the fully three-dimensional dogs and left leg of the boy to the blasted landscape, which seems to anticipate the technique of the Flaying of Marsyas, in which the boy appears again as a satyr.
The tender Virgin and Child (London, National Gallery), the last extant version of the many Titian had painted since the beginning of his career, is by contrast all of a piece, and all the more touching for being gently out of focus.22 The pose of the Virgin seems to repeat in reverse the similar figure in the family altarpiece in the church of Pieve di Cadore,23 while that of the Child, His little cheek puffed up and ruddy from the effort of suckling, is based on a drawing by Michelangelo. Like so many of Titian’s late paintings, this Virgin and Child was more or less ignored in the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth, before Claude Phillips, in his monograph of 1898, praised ‘its almost monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver’; and the director of the London National Gallery24 on its acquisition in 1924 extolled it as ‘lit as it were from within by murky and fitful fires’.
But there were also failures. Titian had frequently depicted the Ecce Homo, the episode from the passage in the Gospel of St John in which Pontius Pilate shows Christ to the Jews with the words ‘Behold the man!’ But his last two treatments of the episode (Madrid, Prado25 and St Louis Art Museum) are disappointing, certainly by comparison with the magnificent theatrical production he had painted for Giovanni d’Anna in 1543 and the moving close-up of Christ alone that he had brought to Augsburg in 1548 for the private worship of Charles V. In this much later version in the Prado26 the figure of Christ holding the reed, which was taken from an engraving made by Luca Bertelli in 1564, itself based on a version sent to Philip II, is impressive. The rest of the composition, which he expanded to include three other figures, was not improved by Titian’s numerous changes, which can still be seen with the naked eye – the executioner shown from behind was originally in profile; the reed pointed the other way; the window was originally circular and without the grille – while the uneven quality of the painting seems to betray the contribution of more than one hand. The St Louis version, which may be the later of the two, has been described by one authority27 as ‘a magnificent example of an unfinished painting by Titian’. The decorative elements, notably Pontius Pilate’s brocade tunic, are almost certainly by an anonymous assistant – possibly the one who painted the embroidered tunic worn by Philip II’s Tarquin – or added after Titian’s death. But although the composition is improved by the absence of the executioner and the grilled window in the upper right-hand corner, which was replaced by smoke and flames emerging from a torch, it could be that he grew impatient with attempts to say something new about the subject and simply gave up on it.
On 1 August 1571, on the eve of the Battle of Lepanto, Titian wrote to Philip II asking for his reaction to the Rape of Lucretia, which had been delivered to the Venetian ambassador in Spain.
The calamities of the present times, in which everyone is suffering from the continuance of war, force me to this step, and oblige me at the same time to be favoured with some kind of proof of Your Majesty’s grace, as well as with some assistance from Spain or elsewhere, since I have not been able for years past to obtain any payment, either from the Naples grant, or from my ordinary pensions. The state of my affairs is such that I do not know how to live in this my old age, devoted as it is entirely to the service of your Catholic Majesty, and to no other. Not having for eighteen years past received a quatrino for the paintings which I delivered from time to time, and of which I forward a list by this opportunity to the Secretary Pérez, I feel assured that Your Majesty’s infinite clemency will cause a careful consideration to be made of the services of an old servant of ninety-five by extending to him some evidence of munificence and liberality …28
This letter, apart perhaps from Titian’s claim to be ninety-five, was not unreasonable. Titian considered that the pensions on Milan and Spain, which were indeed often in arrears, were in reward for his work for Charles V and for Philip at the time of his second trip to Augsburg in 1550. He expected that the king would make some kind of ex-gratia payments for the pictures he sent subsequently, and the list he mentioned, which is lost, was presumably related to them. Philip, although he had given up answering Titian’s begging letters directly, was by no means indifferent to his claims. In 1569, as already noted, he had instructed the then viceroy of Naples, the Duke of Alcalá, to make a single payment of 1,000 ducats in compensation for Titian’s numerous failed attempts to activate Charles V’s promise, made as long ago as 1535, to grant his favourite painter the right to export corn from the Kingdom of Naples free of duty. But it was Philip’s appointment in 1571 of Titian’s old friend and dining companion Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle as viceroy of Naples that finally resolved the Naples problem. Granvelle, after befriending Titian at Augsburg in 1548, had gone out of his way to advise him about the recovery of his various delayed pensions and the Naples grant. Now, as Philip’s representative in Naples, he was in a position to take direct action on Titian’s behalf. On 29 October 1571 he informed the newly appointed Spanish ambassador in Venice, Diego Guzmán de Silva, that he had instructed the Neapolitan treasury to pay Titian 500 ducats and the rest shortly. When nothing happened Philip, perhaps in response to Titian’s letter about the Rape of Lucretia, wrote to Granvelle on 25 April 1572 instructing him to see that the grant was finally honoured.
In 1570 Titian was required, as a condition of drawing his Spanish pensions, to produce an annual certificate testifying that he was still alive. Jacopo Sansovino died in the same year at the age of ninety-one, and two years later he was followed by Francesco Zuccato. Girolamo Dente, Titian’s most faithful assistant since the days in the old studio in the Ca’ del Duca and a witness to his marriage to Cecilia, had gone off to pursue his own career on the back of Titian’s immense prestige. The loss of close friends and colleagues is one of the penalties of survival into extreme old age. For some people, however, a sharpened memory for the distant past may be some compensation. Although Titian was not a sentimental man, we can imagine him summoning up the details of particular minutes or hours in the studio of Francesco’s father Sebastiano where as a boy of ten he had taken his first lessons in painting. Flashing forward by nearly three decades came the arrival in Venice of Aretino and Jacopo Sansovino, the two men who quickly became his best friends. Their glory days as Doge Andrea Gritti’s Triumvirate of Taste followed – their mutual support in good times and bad, the friendly arguments, the laughter, dinners and exchanges of letters.
But if Titian missed his friends he was not solitary. There was always the extended family to console and bother him: four adult children, possibly as many as nine grandchildren, and at least five nephews and nieces. We see some of them in the Madonna of Mercy (Florence, Galleria Palatina), which was commissioned in May
1573 by Titian’s faithful patron, Guidobaldo della Rovere, ‘to put in one of our little chapels’ in Pesaro. Images of the Madonna sheltering her people with outstretched arms had been popular since the late Middle Ages and can still be seen in relief carving on buildings in Venice. Since Guidobaldo did not specify identities for the people, Titian represented them as members of his family with the men kneeling on her right and the female relatives on her left. Titian, bareheaded and wearing his gold chain of honour, is just in front of Orazio, who is dressed in an identical black cloak. We don’t know who the other four men are, but they could be sons-in-law, nephews, cousins or grown-up grandchildren. The woman with her arms crossed looks very much like Titian’s portrait of Lavinia painted after her marriage and now in Dresden. Two of the women who seem to be wearing shrouds might be dead relatives: Titian’s first wife Cecilia? His second wife? His sister Orsa? The little girl looking out at us is surely one of his youngest grandchildren by Emilia, who might be one of the other women. Livia Balbi, who had come to live with Titian after separating from her husband Gaspare, is also a candidate for one of the women.29
Madonna of Mercy
When Guidobaldo requested this painting he wrote to his agent Giovanni Francesco Agatone that ‘since we believe that the signor Titiano no longer works with his own hand, we desire nevertheless that he will take care to have it diligently executed by one of his [uno di quei suoi]’. ‘Titian’, for Guidobaldo as for many other patrons, had come to mean ‘Titian’s workshop’, supervised by the master and authenticated by a few strokes of his brush. In the case of Guidobaldo’s commission, however, Titian replied through Agatone first that he wanted to do it with his own hand, and again that he had sketched it and was still resolved to paint it himself. Perhaps the process of sketching the composition took him back to the family groups he had painted in his prime for Jacopo Pesaro and Gabriele Vendramin, and he realized that he no longer had the patience or the steady hand required to execute so many portraits in one painting. We can’t be certain which one of ‘his’ completed the picture. It could have been his young relative Marco Vecellio, who later completed Titian’s votive Portrait of Doge Antonio Grimani, the somewhat naive style of which is akin to that of the Madonna of Mercy.
