Titian

by Sheila Hale

  Although plague was easily diagnosed from the boils, or buboes, on the necks and armpits of its victims, and it was obvious that it was transmitted by human contact, the disease was not fully understood by sixteenth-century Venetians, who thought it was caused by a poisonous miasma or by swallowing rotten food or polluted water. The superstitious blamed the disease on vampires. Because the majority of victims were the poor who subsisted on unhealthy or inadequate diets in overcrowded and insanitary conditions some doctors concluded that the epidemic was a kind of famine fever, which could be controlled by poor relief or by transferring the inhabitants of slums to settlements on the islands or mainland. Within the limits of current medical knowledge, however, the Serenissima responded to the crisis with its usual efficiency and good sense, although it was forced to take what our modern politicians like to call ‘tough decisions’, such as putting out of work everyone – from charlatans and strolling players to schoolmasters – whose jobs depended on gathering crowds. More problematic was the general belief that the infection was carried by merchandise, especially textiles, whose manufacture and trade were fundamental to Venetian prosperity and to the employment of workers, not least of Jews who dealt in second-hand furnishings and whose loans were often a last resort for the poor. The government was thus in a no-win situation. Banning industry and trade would depress the economy, reduce the wealth of merchants and manufacturers (many of them members of the governing class) and inflate the numbers of the starving poor by creating mass unemployment. Failure to do so could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths across the Veneto. Representatives from Verona, on which a blockade had been imposed after a severe outbreak of plague in September, were successful in persuading the Senate that such preventive measures were more harmful than the plague itself.

  Titian, relieved of his obligations to Philip and probably immune to plague after so many exposures to it, continued painting in his airy studio in Biri Grande. His depiction of St Sebastian (St Petersburg, Hermitage), the convert soldier tortured by a hail of arrows and associated with plague because his wounds were thought to resemble the buboes, was probably commissioned during the onset of the infection. At the beginning of his career Titian had painted a heroic St Sebastian in his altarpiece, St Mark Enthroned, ordered by the monks of the church of Santo Spirito during the epidemic of 1510–12 that had killed Giorgione. In 1520 another St Sebastian, a panel for Altobello Averoldi’s Resurrection polyptych in Brescia, had caused a sensation when it was shown separately in Venice. The youthful Titian had intended that writhing figure, inspired by the then recently discovered Hellenistic statue of Laocoön and his Sons, to show off his skill by rivalling Michelangelo. Now he wanted to convey the martyr’s quiet agony, his acceptance of God’s will and the chaos that seems to be encroaching around him. The twist of St Sebastian’s body repeats the subtler pose of another Hellenistic statue, the Apollo Belvedere. He stands alone against a black tree and livid sky streaked with angry red – the colours of plague. His face, half in shadow, is raised to heaven. A trickle of blood from an arrow piercing his torso runs down his body and loincloth smearing his right leg. Titian began with a half-length figure to which he added strips of canvas below and to the right to accommodate the legs, the very sketchy landscape and the blurred beginnings of what would have been the former soldier’s discarded cuirass if he had finished the picture.

  Then, with the arrival of winter, the plague lifted. Titian did not mention it when, on Christmas Day, he wrote a begging letter to Philip, in which he referred to another of his ‘memorials’, this one compiled by Sánchez Coello, of the pictures ‘sent at various times by command of Your Majesty’ for which he had not been paid. The conclusion of the letter echoes the pessimism expressed by the governor of Milan only twenty-five days earlier: ‘There is so much ill fortune in the world now that I feel great want of the power and royal liberality of a holy prince of the world, such as Your Catholic Majesty, whom I pray that God may keep for a long time.’

  When he wrote again to Philip on 27 February 1576, there was once again no reference to the plague. It is a long, rambling letter in which he hopes to ‘recall myself to your royal memory’, as though imagining that the king had forgotten his existence. He reminded him that it was twenty years since His Majesty had paid him for the many pictures he had sent, that his father Charles V had numbered him among his ‘familiar, nay, most faithful servants’ by honouring him with the title of cavaliere, and that ‘it may be known that the services done by me during many years to the most serene House of Austria have met with grateful return, thus causing me, with more joyful heart than hitherto, to spend what remains of my days in the service of Your Majesty’.5

  This was to be Titian’s last letter to the most powerful monarch in the world, who was, however, bankrupt and without the power to repay his creditors, let alone persuade his ministers to compensate a foreign painter for pictures that meant considerably less to them than managing their slender budgets and drawing their own salaries. At least the Milan pension, which had so often been in arrears, was paid in full by 1575, and Titian seems to have got almost all that he was owed on the Spanish pension by the end of 1574 and to have received the balance in 1575 or 1576. He was thus rewarded for the work he had done for Charles V and Philip II before and during his trip to Augsburg in 1551. But for the masterpieces, some of them the greatest of the Italian Renaissance, that were sent to Philip after 1551 he would never receive, as he had so often complained, so much as a quatrino.

  At least he was free to paint as he liked without the constraint of pleasing the king. For his last mythological work, the harrowing Flaying of Marsyas (Kromž, Archbishop’s Palace), Titian chose the horrific story, as recounted by Ovid in Book VI of the Metamorphoses, of the Phrygian satyr Marsyas, who challenged Apollo to a musical contest, pitting his shrill pan pipes against the heavenly music of the sun god’s lyre, and was punished for his hubris by being flayed alive.

  ‘Don’t rip me away from myself!’ he entreated;

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he shouted between his shrieks, ‘Don’t flay me for piping!’

  In spite of his cries, the skin was peeled from his flesh, and his body

  was turned into one great wound; the blood was pouring all over him,

  muscles were fully exposed, his uncovered veins convulsively

  quivered; the palpitating intestines could well be counted,

  and so could the organs glistening through the wall of his chest.

  The piper was mourned by the rustic fauns who watch over the woodlands,

  his brother satyrs, the nymphs and Olympus, the pupil he loved,

  by all who tended their flocks or herds on the Lycian mountains.

  Their tears dropped down and saturated the fertile earth,

  who absorbed them deep in her veins and discharged them back to the air

  in the form of a spring. This found its way to the sea through a channel,

  which took the name of the Marsyas, clearest of Phrygian rivers.6

  The story was often confused or deliberately conflated, as in Titian’s painting, with that of another musical contest, the one between Apollo and Pan from Book XI of the Metamorphoses in which the foolish King Midas, the only judge to prefer the barbarous strains of Pan’s rustic pipes to the courtly music of Apollo’s lyre, has his insensitive ears turned by Apollo into those of an ass.

  Since classical antiquity there had been numerous illustrations of the story of Marsyas. The figure of the flayed satyr had been engraved on gemstones, carved on sarcophagus reliefs or as freestanding statues, woven into tapestries and depicted in paintings. His gruesome punishment had taken on a variety of extended meanings: the victory of the arts that appeal to superior intellects, exemplified by Apollo’s lyre, over coarser arts like the satyr’s pipes that merely excite the senses; Marsyas as the crucified Christ and Apollo the risen Christ; the ascent of man from baseness and confusion to the realm of universal harmony; the escape of the soul from its eart
hbound body. Dante, placing himself under the protection of Apollo at the beginning of the Paradiso, beseeches the god: ‘Enter my breast, and breathe there as you did when you tore Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.’ Titian would have known, among other representations, the woodcut of Apollo and Marsyas in a 1497 paraphrase of the Metamorphoses; Tintoretto’s painting in Aretino’s house; the fresco on a ceiling of Raphael’s Stanze della Segnatura in the Vatican; Perino del Vaga’s decorations of Castel Sant’Angelo where Apollo flays Marsyas in the centre of the vaulting of the Sala di Apollo. He may also have been inspired by Michelangelo’s self-portrait as the flayed skin of St Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgement. But when it came to planning his own painting he took his cue from an awkward sketch for a now damaged fresco in the Palazzo Tè in Mantua, which had been executed some fifty years earlier by his old friend Giulio Romano for their mutual patron Federico Gonzaga.

  In Giulio’s drawing (Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins) Marsyas is seen sideways, hanging upside down with his goat’s legs tied to the branches of a tree. Titian revolved the satyr’s upended body to face us and narrowed the composition, so that we are directly confronted by the terrifying sight of the tormented Marsyas strung up like a butchered animal, hairy legs secured to the tree by jolly pink bows.7 There is no distant horizon or window of blue sky through which we can escape the brutal, slow torture we are forced to witness on this stormy summer night. The angry sky is visible in small patches of white impasto through the pulsating foliage of the forest that closes in on the scene. The air in this claustrophobic space is difficult to breathe. On our left Apollo – crowned, just as Ovid described him in Book XI, ‘with a wreath of Parnassian bay on his golden hair’, and wearing ‘his mantle of Tyrian purple’ – kneels on the ground, completely absorbed by the task of stripping away the flesh of the goat-man who has dared to challenge with his primitive pop music the classical harmonies associated, especially in Venice, with orderly civic virtue. The god of harmony probes the area of skin close to Marsyas’ heart but delicately, holding as though it were a painter’s brush a knife that resembles the scalpels surgeons used to lance the boils of plague victims. His face is in shadow, his expression childlike and intensely curious as he inflicts his brutal punishment, like a child pulling off the wings of a fly, seeking perhaps to penetrate the source of his victim’s pristine, human fallibility. The god has left the cruder task of skinning the satyr’s hairy haunches to a Scythian assistant. Marsyas’ offending pipes are hung high from a tree branch next to an ethereal figure in a rose tunic who accompanies the scene on the lira da braccio.8 On the ground beneath the satyr’s head a little pet dog – it is the Papillon spaniel we have seen peacefully curled up on beds or chairs in so many previous paintings – is lapping up the pool of blood that drips from the skinned body.

  The rectangle of dark paint to the right of Marsyas’ waist could be the river that Ovid tells us sprang from the earth that was saturated with the tears of his fellow woodland creatures. One of them, another satyr, has emerged from the wind-tossed forest with a pail brimming with – is it the martyr’s blood or is it water to sluice his body? The child from Titian’s Boy with Dogs stares at us from the bottom-right corner restraining his black and white spaniel from attacking Marsyas head first. But this child has satyr’s legs. Fifty years earlier Titian had placed a prancing baby satyr at the centre of his Bacchus and Ariadne, apparently inviting us to enjoy the gory Dionysian revels. Now the child is crying, his face turned towards us in helpless appeal.9 King Midas, most famous for the granting of his foolish wish that everything he touched be turned to gold, sits between the two satyrs, lost in thought. He has Titian’s features, and it seems he has not yet made a judgement about the punishment he is witnessing. What is he thinking? Why did he choose this terrifying subject – the only life-sized painting of the skinned Marsyas in Renaissance art? What meaning did the story have for him?

  The shocking news of the flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin at Famagusta in August 1571, and of the slaughtering and torturing by Philip’s armies in the Netherlands, must have affected Titian as it did everyone in Venice. But as the painting evolved it became something much more ambiguous, so subjective that he could not have put into words a range of conflicting emotions that could – and can – only be expressed in paint. It is barely conceivable that Titian, who had spent his life courting and flattering the European establishment, who could convey aristocratic status better than any other artist, would have empathized with the lowly, half-human being who had challenged the accepted hierarchical order of art and society. And yet the suffering Marsyas, whose broad peasant’s features resemble those of Titian’s last St Sebastian, his eyes expressing brave, bewildered acceptance, whose mouth seems to be smiling unless we turn ourselves upside down, must be intended to arouse our sympathy. Did Titian, like the immortal, omnipotent Apollo, half envy this primitive creature who was capable of a kind of suffering – and of a kind of original creativity – that no god would ever know? Did he want to discover what lay beneath the living flesh that his contemporaries said he painted not with pigments but as though with real, trembling skin? Was he, as his own aged flesh thinned and decayed, sitting in judgement, in the guise of the foolish, greedy Midas, on his own hubris and love of gold, he who was famous for rivalling God’s creations, who, as it was said, was loved by the world but hated by jealous nature? Was it the studio, as some authorities believe, who finished certain details – the bucket, the teeth of the little dog that laps up the satyr’s blood, Apollo’s wreath, Midas’ crown? Or did Titian use them to highlight the terror by standing out against the smoky, flickering brushwork of the claustrophobic setting of his horrific scene?

  If the Death of Actaeon (to which Titian may have returned after completing his last pictures for Philip) is a pessimistic painting, in the Flaying of Marsyas he seems to give vent to rage, or to something that feels almost like demonic elation, as though there was an element of the wild satyr in the creative genius of this suave gentleman who knew so well how to flatter his social superiors and had scarcely ever written a letter that was not about money, as though he knew he was breaking the mould of High Renaissance decorum in anticipation of the course his art would take centuries after his death. Although his signature on the painting may indicate that it was done for a patron, it is difficult to imagine let alone identify any contemporary collector who would have been capable of following him into a far distant future where this painting from his old age would be in tune with the artistic sensibilities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when he would be recognized as the ur-father of modern painting. And still it retains the power to shock us – we in the West who are used to the images of violence and suffering that flash at us on a daily basis from our newspapers and television sets and from the work of modern artists, we who, whatever our religious faith or lack of faith, have been brought up in a world dominated by a Christian story that is about extreme cruelty. Titian and his Catholic contemporaries, who knew more at first hand about pain and violence than most of us who live today in the developed world, worshipped in churches the walls and altars of which were covered with paintings, frescos and sculptures of the agonies suffered by Christ and the martyred saints, which must, through their very familiarity and orthodoxy, have inured them to the appalling suffering they described.

  Had Titian, meditating on the Christian story in what he knew were his final years, ‘found a subject through which, consciously or unconsciously, he can articulate something of the meaning embedded in the cruelty of the Crucifixion’? This is the view of a psychoanalyst10 who has made a close study of the Flaying of Marsyas as a way of investigating a hypothesis about non-verbalized thought, ‘that what goes on in our unconscious minds is not just proto thinking, as is usually assumed, but thinking that can be highly evolved and complex’. By portraying himself as the meditating Midas, she suggests, Titian is inviting us to understand that what we see is ‘the content of his mind. This is Titian�
��s final testament. We are looking at thinking.’