Titian
Page 78
Ayamonte was an unusual patron in being neither a connoisseur nor a collector. He was primarily concerned with the condition of the paintings he received from Titian, in their prices and in the effect they would have on his standing in Milan. He left the bargaining and aesthetic judgements to Guzmán de Silva, who was to be the last in a long line of ambassadors in Venice charged with cajoling the ever dilatory Titian into producing paintings for their impatient clients. Unlike most diplomats, however, de Silva was interested in painting – at one point in their correspondence he mentioned his discovery of a painter called Bassano – and was willing to express his opinions. Although Titian and de Silva disagreed about the quality of Titian’s most recent paintings, and Titian seems to have hidden from de Silva the earlier ones that the ambassador preferred, the master respected him well enough to give him free access to the workshop, and to paint his portrait (lost) in 1574 at a time when he had virtually given up portraiture.
Until de Silva’s death in 1577 he and Ayamonte, who died in office three years later, were in frequent touch about official business and current events (sensitive information was relayed in code). But between 1 October 1573 and 1 December 1575, nine months before Titian’s death, a third of their official correspondence and half of their private letters were also or exclusively about Titian.18 Although de Silva did not name or precisely describe the pictures he saw in the studio his accounts of his meetings with the aged painter cast a light, albeit a flickering light, on Titian in the last two years of his life, the time when he was working on his last pictures for Philip II and on the more radical paintings – de Silva may have seen in progress the Death of Actaeon, Nymph and Shepherd, the Flaying of Marsyas and the Pietà – that looked to de Silva, who had never seen anything like them, to be incomprehensible blotches, which he put down to the master’s age and failing powers. This was the standard reaction of contemporaries who were not themselves painters. And to do justice to de Silva’s connoisseurship we should remember that it was not until the twentieth century that the general preference for Titian’s earlier paintings would begin to give way to our present appreciation of the last dark, expressive, freehanded style.
By November 1574 the use of the Milan pension as a bribe seems to have had the desired effect because Titian was working on a panel or canvas, which, so the governor understood from de Silva, the painter was making anew; he could only hope that it would ever be finished. It was in fact ready for dispatch in December when Ayamonte told de Silva that, even though it had not yet arrived, he would trust his judgement and do what he could to release at least some of the pension. He did not in fact sign the mandate until 12 February of the next year (and even then his officials dragged their heels), perhaps because when the painting arrived in January he was annoyed to find that it had been done on an old and torn canvas, with a patch on Christ’s face near the ear where a nail had been clumsily inserted during the packing. Nevertheless, Ayamonte wrote, since Titian ‘is so old that one must suspect he is dying’ he would be grateful if de Silva would see if Titian had other examples of the subject and price them. De Silva replied that the canvas was indeed old ‘for the painting is old as well, if it has not been renewed. Thus Your Excellency should appreciate it all the more, as it belongs to those he created when he still painted everything in his own hand, while he hardly still does that today.’
By 27 January 1575 the governor had had another idea. He would like a picture of the dead Christ on his winding-sheet (an Entombment) with the Madonna standing (as was consistent with Spanish preference) and looking at Him with a suitable expression. On 5 February de Silva reiterated his opinion that the older pictures were better than the new ones, despite Titian’s insistence that he valued his new paintings just as highly. ‘As for Titian’s painting I have nothing else to say than what I have already written, namely that his earlier paintings were good … the new ones are not, even though he likes them as much as his earlier ones.’ And on 24 February:
Like Your Grace, I fear that Titian is of more advanced age than can be of advantage to good painting; his trembling hand may not affect the atmosphere and spirit of his paintings, but it does affect the application of paint and other things that can be executed only with a steady hand. I fear that it will prove difficult for him to start it and even more difficult for him to finish it.
On 3 March de Silva wrote that although Titian was too old to do anything but daubs his assistants gave life to what they could finish, especially Orazio, ‘who works well, if only he were to devote as much time to painting as he does to other sources of profit, which he must think are more advantageous uses of his father’s money and his own industry’. Ayamonte replied seven days later.
I am convinced, as Your Grace says, that those pictures that he paints now or will still paint will not be worth very much, as the imagination is incapable of producing more than the merit of the work, but instead of those he painted earlier, he would rather take one of the recent ones into the other world with him, as great craftsmen almost always become strange with age.
Nevertheless, it seems that de Silva was beginning to recognize that there was something about the products of Titian’s trembling hand that he could not quite define. On 17 March Ayamonte agreed with him that ‘a blotch by Titian is better than anything done by another painter’. And two days later de Silva replied that although the works Titian was doing now were not to his taste, ‘nonetheless they are his, because although the bodies are not all there, the souls will be, and this is what gives them life’. It seems from this letter that Titian had decided to do something surprisingly ambitious for the governor. It was ‘a design of Our Lady with her Son on the ground’, a Pietà that is, which Titian would send in three or four days. When Ayamonte had seen the outline sketch and the measurements of it, he wrote to de Silva on 27 April that it was big, but:
since the master is so old it will be better that way, because he can no longer work as well as he could on small pieces; although where there is the Mother and the Son little is needed to achieve any effect. Nonetheless the Magdalen will be good, since she is such a great example of the effect that God has on sinners and such a great teacher of how those who have sinned ought to behave; and so it will be good that the picture comes with the Mother and with the Son.
But Ayamonte was to be disappointed. Titian had never intended to let him have the large Pietà with the Magdalen. He had used the offer as a way of forcing the governor’s hand over the still unpaid Milan pension, and by the time that manoeuvre had proved successful he had another destination in mind for the painting, which neither Ayamonte nor de Silva ever mentioned again.19
SEVEN
The Plague and the Pity
All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.
HOKUSAI, PREFACE TO ONE HUNDRED VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJI, 1834–5
All his life Titian had assumed he would be buried where he was born, close to his family in Pieve di Cadore, the tiny mountain village that he continued to think of as his homeland. His bones would rest in the parish church of Pieve, Santa Maria Nascente, where he had been baptised and had attended mass as a small child, and where his assistants had decorated the choir with frescos to his design. His Madonna and Child Worshipped by Titian, through the intercession of his patron St Titian, with St Andrew portrayed as his brother Francesco, can still be seen in the rebuilt church. But after the drawn-out dispute over the prevarications of the Magnifica Comunità an
d his Vecellio relatives over the timber yards at San Francesco della Vigna and the repayment of his generous loans, followed by the petty vendetta against his nephew Odorico Soldano, he changed his plan. At some time after 1572 he decided that his last resting place would be in the Venetian church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where the triumphant Assunta that had launched his fame dominates the interior from the high altar, and the asymmetrical painting of the Pesaro family that set a new style for altarpieces still greets us as we walk down the left aisle.
He struck a deal with the guardian and the friars of the church for burial rights in the chapel of the Crucifix and donated a painting by his hand of the Pietà – a representation of the seated Virgin cradling her dead Son on her lap – to be placed over his tomb. The friars accepted the painting, but refused to replace the sacred image of the Crucifix and hung Titian’s painting over another altar. Titian, enraged by the insult, sought the intervention of the papal nuncio, who issued a decree on 1 March 1575 instructing the church authorities to return the painted image of the Pietà to the artist ‘so that he can dispose of it as he wishes’.1 Titian then changed his mind once again, and returned to his original plan to be buried in Pieve di Cadore. Over the next year and a half he enlarged the picture he had recovered from the ungrateful friars, until it fitted the space over the high altar of the parish church of his home town.
Meanwhile there was unfinished work for Philip of Spain, who was expecting the three paintings Titian had promised him. They were ready by 24 September 1575 when Diego Guzmán de Silva informed the king that he was about to send ‘the Victory over the Turks, a St Jerome, and the Religion’, as well as a copy by Geronimo Sánchez, who had recently been in Venice, of Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr, ‘one of the best things Titian ever made’.
Philip had requested the Allegory of Lepanto (Madrid, Prado) in 1571 as a joint celebration of the victory at Lepanto and the birth soon afterwards of his son Prince Ferdinand by Anna of Austria. He had specified a subject for Titian only once before when asking for his Martyrdom of St Lawrence, but this was the first time he also gave explicit instructions for how it should look. He sent portraits of himself and the newborn prince, which was reasonable enough considering that Titian had not met Philip for twenty years and had never seen the baby. What Titian must have found more dispiriting was that for the first and only time in their relationship Philip, who had his doubts about whether the aged painter would be able to achieve the desired result without direction, also provided a design for the picture. It was by his court painter Alonso Sánchez Coello, a competent artist but hardly in Titian’s league. The monarch offers the Infante Don Ferdinand to heaven through the mediation of a swooping angel, boldly foreshortened in the manner of Tintoretto, who proffers the palm of victory and a banner bearing the words ‘MAIORA TIBI’ (Greater triumphs await you). On our right a colonnade runs down the side of a terrace that opens on to the sea, where the battle raging in the distance is the most convincing part of the painting.2 A shackled Turk with his turban and the spoils of war are in the left foreground. Although Titian signed the painting with his imperial title ‘TICIANVS VECELLIVS EQVES CAESARIS FECIT’, something that he rarely did, it is far from an inspired work and, apart possibly from the battle scene, looks as though he left it mostly to the studio to follow Coello’s design. It should however be noted that the composition worked better before it was enlarged in 1625 to match the dimensions of Titian’s Charles V on Horseback,3 and that it attracted admiration in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Guidobaldo della Rovere, who saw it in Titian’s studio in May 1573, and Antonio Pérez were only the first of a number of patrons to order replicas or variants.
Since Philip did not request Religion Succoured by Spain (Madrid, Prado), it may be that Titian assumed from his eagerness to have the Lepanto painting that the king would welcome another allegorical celebration of Spain’s role as defender of the true faith against the Turkish heretic. He had never been interested in pictorial allegory and made the self-appointed task easier for himself by adapting a studio replica of a mythological painting sent to Maximilian II at some time after 1566. Maximilian’s painting is lost but is known from an engraving by Giulio Fontana and a description by Vasari who saw it in the studio and said the picture had been begun for Alfonso I d’Este many years earlier but left unfinished. Vasari described that painting as of a young nude kneeling before Minerva with a seascape where Neptune rides on his chariot. Titian transformed Minerva into a personification of Spain, armed as Pallas Athena and holding a shield with the arms of Philip II. He replaced Neptune’s crown with a Turkish turban, and made the kneeling woman an allegory of Religion by the addition of a cross and chalice on the rock behind her, so that the serpents winding around the tree trunk at her back, which would originally have been seen as threatening the purity of the young woman, would be read as the false heretical religions of Protestantism and Islam. It was a neat trick, but the result is even less compelling than the Allegory of Lepanto.
If the allegories for Philip are devoid of the animating soul that Guzmán de Silva recognized in Titian’s late paintings, the Penitent St Jerome (Madrid, Escorial) that sailed with them to Spain is another matter altogether. Until 2003, when it was shown at the London National Gallery and Prado exhibitions, it was hidden away in the Escorial and was, with the Cambridge Rape of Lucretia, one of Titian’s least-known paintings. Since then some critics, baffled by the remarkable quality and high finish of some passages, have explained it as in part an earlier work, begun before the master’s eyesight had started to fail, perhaps as a variation of the same subject from the late 1550s now in the Milan Brera. This St Jerome, however, is not really comparable to the Brera picture.4 Its dimensions are different – wider and shorter – as is its design, which he based on a well-known woodcut made by Dürer in 1512; and it is a more tranquil, optimistic and colourful vision of the story of the penitent saint who went into the desert to make peace with himself and his God, a painting that must have given comfort and aesthetic pleasure to the monks praying in the chapel in the Escorial where it was placed.
St Jerome’s elderly but lithe and muscular body, the carmine robe around his loins and the open book he holds to aid his meditations are illuminated by an opening in the rocky glade through which we see a brilliant blue sky, a distant mountain frosted by snow and a heavenly ray of light, confirmation that God has heard his prayers, which beams towards the tiny portable Crucifix the saint has brought with him into the desert. The spooky nighttime setting of the Brera picture has given way to full daylight; the creeping lizard, the skull and the bones have disappeared. A crystal-clear stream bubbling in the right foreground is rendered with masterly strokes of white lead, as are the highlights on St Jerome’s robe and on the beautiful still life of two closed books, an hourglass and scattered papers on the rock behind his kneeling figure. These meticulously polished passages contrast with the rough treatment of the rocky glade, which is rendered in a subdued palette: ochre, greys, browns and dark greens, enlivened here and there by those ‘strokes of red like drops of blood’ that Palma Giovane described.
The Escorial St Jerome is a painting that poses unanswerable questions about Titian’s aesthetic intentions and physical capabilities in the last years of his life. Ayamonte’s comment, made only eight months before the picture was dispatched to Spain, that Titian was so old that one must assume he was dying does suggest that the polished passages had been executed years earlier. Or was he still capable of working with precision – eyeglasses after all had been available for centuries – as he may have been in the Cambridge Rape of Lucretia? The superb quality of the highlights on the saint, his attributes and the bubbling stream would seem to rule out the contribution of the studio. As for the much sketchier setting, which is typical of the late paintings that some critics regard as unfinished, it may have been the best he could do, but it is unlikely that he would have insulted Philip with a work that he, Titian, regarded as unfini
shed.
The Marquis of Ayamonte, writing from Milan on 1 December 1575 in the last of his preserved letters about Titian to Diego Guzmán de Silva, urged the ambassador not to forget about Titian’s work because of the salutary influence upon him of one of his paintings, which ‘forces me to perform the duties of my office through the good effect of a few moments of looking at it’. He also asked for a precise report of the contagious disease that was rumoured to be spreading in Venice. He does not, however, enlarge on one abruptly ominous sentence: ‘Fear and mistrust are threatening us from every corner of the world.’
The Venetian authorities had been monitoring the progress of a plague, probably an Ebola-like virus, which had killed 200,000 people in Moscow and its environs in 1570, and had been raging in Constantinople before it travelled to Trent, Schio and Bassano. Nevertheless, the first cases to strike Venice in the summer of 1575 took the government almost by surprise. Every generation since the tenth century had suffered at least one plague; but some, like the most recent epidemic in 1556, had been relatively mild, and it was hoped that isolating the first victim, a visitor from Trent, and his Venetian hosts would contain the disease. A major outbreak at this time would spell disaster for the Serenissima: the Turks had been rearming after Spain withdrew from the alliance that had won the Battle of Lepanto; and Philip II, who was aiming to strengthen his position in Italy, made no secret of his antipathy for the Most Serene Republic. As the disease spread, Venetian ambassadors were instructed to give reassuring reports and to underestimate the fatalities while the health office, the Provveditori alla Sanità, took the usual sensible precautions. Infected individuals and those living with them were sequestered in their houses or sent to quarantine stations established in the previous century on islands in the lagoon: to the old hospital, the Lazzaretto Vecchio near the Lido, for treatment; to the Lazzaretto Novo, between Murano and Mazzorbo, for a period of quarantine. But there was no stopping the current of panic that ran through the population. As always in times of catastrophe there was a surge of religious fervour and collective guilt. Processions of supplicants carrying images of the Redeemer and the Blessed Virgin wound through the streets chanting litanies and prayers of penitence. Quacks set up stalls hoping to make their fortunes by selling remedies. Charitable donations to the poor increased. More miracles occurred than usual. But the Holy Office sensibly banned as superstitious printed flyers that promised protection or cure to those who followed particular programmes of recitations, invocations to Christ and Mary and multiple makings of the sign of the cross.