by Sheila Hale
in Marsyas the stylistic features common to this period of Titian’s work are maintained with particular intensity and reveal, not only Titian’s strenuous physical involvement with the making of this work, but a fusing of idea and form of the highest order. The manner appears so fresh, so spontaneous, that we seem to be in the presence of a highly complex whole which has just erupted entire onto the canvas, much as thoughts appear in our minds.
The Flaying of Marsyas was probably in Titian’s studio at his death, but can be traced back only as far as the early seventeenth century when it was in the Arundel collection.11 In 1673 the painting was acquired at a lottery by the Bishop of Olmütz, and hung in the archiepiscopal palace at Kromíž, now in the Czech Republic, where it remains to this day at one end of a large and beautiful room lit by windows overlooking the palace gardens. The painting was all but forgotten until the early twentieth century when it was authenticated by scholars (with some exceptions, notably Erwin Panofsky who rejected it sight unseen on the grounds that the subject was too repellent to have been painted by Titian). Shown for the first time in western Europe in 1983 at the London Royal Academy’s Genius of Venice exhibition it was greeted with astonished admiration. The American painter Frank Stella found it impossible to focus on the painting except in snatches: ‘The idea of studying a painting of such cruelty became embarrassing.’12 Since then the Flaying of Marsyas has become the most discussed, revered and loathed of all Titian’s paintings. The novelist Iris Murdoch considered it the greatest painting in the Western canon; Tom Phillips copied it as the background of his portrait of her. Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and R. B. Kitaj are only some of the modern painters who have drawn from it. Frank Stella is one of several who have read it as a warning about the difficulties and perils of a life devoted to artistic creation.
This picture forces us to take it personally, to identify it as a personal statement by Titian, first about himself, second about anyone, including ourselves, who would hope to succeed him as an artist. This painting is more accurate about showing the personal costs inherent in the mechanics of painting than it is profound about describing the human condition in sixteenth-century Italy. By stripping away a surface created by the artist’s gifted touch Titian reveals the blood-filled sinew and bone of pictorial technique, showing us how difficult it is for the artist to nurture and manipulate the body of his creation without mutilating it.13
By February 1576, a total of 3,696 plague deaths, about 2 per cent of the Venetian population, were recorded as having occurred since the previous August (the Provveditori alla Sanità kept precise records), but the majority of cases were in the slums and the crowded ghetto where Jews were confined. Those Venetians who, like Titian, could afford spacious and airy accommodation had been largely spared. The bans on crowds, manufacturing and trade were lifted. But with the onset of spring and an unusually early and hot summer the fatalities rose. On 16 June the doge, Alvise Mocenigo, presided over a debate in the Great Council Hall at which two learned physicians from Padua, Girolamo Mercuriale and Girolamo Capodivacca, asserted that the infection was not plague but a famine fever that affected only the undernourished poor. The Serenissima had only a few days to rejoice before, suddenly, the contagion spread like wildfire into the houses of rich and poor alike, throughout the city, its mainland domains and beyond.
A cloud of black smoke from burning bodies hung over Venice until the stench became so great that a cemetery was established near the Lido where the corpses were piled into deep pits, in rows between layers of lime. The dead were shrouded and carried away by the picegamorti, corpse bearers, who had to be recruited from the prisons and mainland villages because few law-abiding Venetians, however poor, were prepared to risk their lives even with a promised reward of 100 ducats when the plague ended. Not all corpse bearers resisted the temptation to loot the houses of the dead, and some were said to be necrophiliacs; nor were they fastidious about distinguishing the dead from the dying, some of whom were buried alive in the lime pits. Doctors, circulating the city in gondolas followed by barbers and Jesuit priests, took pulses, lanced boils, applied leeches, and spread the contagion by marking the doors of contaminated houses with the infected blood of their patients. Some of the sick were sequestered in their houses along with anyone who had been in contact with them; others were stripped naked, their clothes and bedding burned, before they were taken to one of the lazzaretti.
No one was permitted to enter condemned houses except priests and public officials. Transport of the victims was slowed when the decision was taken to drain the canals of infected water. Still, a veritable armada of boats plied the lagoon carrying the sick, the well who had been in close contact with them, and the dead, all to dreadful destinations. A survivor writing many years later14 recalled the hospital island, the Lazzaretto Vecchio, as like hell itself. The stench was unendurable, the groans and sighs ceaseless. Some 7,000–8,000 patients slept three to a bed: ‘We should not be surprised if scarcely one in ten survived, and if hundreds died every day upon those beds, stinking and blackened with smoke as they were.’ The Lazzaretto Novo, the quarantine island, which was also crowded beyond capacity, ‘seemed a mere Purgatory, where unfortunate people, in a poor state, suffered and lamented the death of their relatives, their own wretched plight and the break-up of their homes’. The cost of feeding and caring for so many people sent the public debt soaring to a record 5,714,439 ducats; and before the plague finally subsided in 1577 it had claimed 46,721 Venetians, nearly a quarter of the population. Wealthy patricians and civil servants fled to their comfortable houses on the mainland. Attendance at the Great Council fell to only thirty, and many ministries were paralysed. The Marquis of Ayamonte escaped from Milan while the saintly Carlo Borromeo, who attributed the outbreak of plague to the lavish celebrations of a visit by Don John of Austria, stayed behind and laboured tirelessly to comfort the bodies and souls of the sick.
Titian did not retreat to the villa in the Cenedese Hills. It was too hot; it may be that he was too frail to face the journey, or considered that it would be unseemly for a man of his age to flee the inevitability of death. It may be that a few of the most loyal servants and assistants stayed with him. But it was Orazio he needed most, however vulnerable the young man might be to plague. We can imagine the aged master stooped, toothless, deaf and half blind shuffling through the stifling empty rooms, shouting irritably, fearfully for Orazio. At least it was less hot in the north-facing studio where the occasional breeze from the lagoon cooled his brow as he worked. There was so much to do. We can guess that he turned, as he always had, from one easel to another, squinting at the paintings through his magnifying glasses, hesitating before adding new strokes. But with one exception we can only guess what they were: the Munich Crowning with Thorns? the London Death of Actaeon? the St Petersburg St Sebastian? the Kromíž Flaying of Marsyas? The only work that we know with certainty that Titian painted in the last months of his life is the Pietà (Venice, Accademia), which he intended for his birthplace in Cadore. It is a commemoration of his artistic life, a dialogue with the paintings, sculptures and architecture that had nourished his genius, a final declaration of the capacity of paint to represent and improve upon stone sculpture, and a testament of his devotion to Christ and His mother Mary. The Pietà he had recovered from the Frari was painted on two strips of canvas of unequal size over a discarded Entombment.15 When it was back in the studio, Titian had Orazio add five more pieces of a different weave – two on either side, one for the entire upper section, a long strip at the bottom and a small piece at the bottom right – until its dimensions fitted exactly the high altar of the parish church of Pieve di Cadore.
The Madonna and her dead Son answer in reverse Michelangelo’s early sculpture of the Pietà in the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome. They are set in an enormous aedicule, its painted stone seemingly more alive than their figures, which is framed by pillars of rusticated blocks in the classical architectural style introduced to Venice by Jacopo Sans
ovino and Sebastiano Serlio. Six of the seven lamps of the apocalypse (the seventh is nearly hidden on the keystone) burn on the raked cornice of the pediment, over which spill the figleaves of the Fall of Man. The tripartite keystone of the pediment, symbol of the Holy Trinity, the cornerstone of Christ’s Church, rests on a shimmering golden semi-dome encasing the pelican that was associated with Christ’s Resurrection because the pelican was thought to revive its young with blood plucked from its breast. With this by then archaic mosaic semi-dome Titian looked back to his earliest recollections of Venice: to the Byzantine domes and vaults he had seen with the eyes of an impressionable young boy from the mountains; to his long friendship with Francesco and Valerio Zuccati, the leading mosaicists in the city; to the neo-Byzantine semi-domes painted by his greatest master and founder of the Venetian Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini, whom Titian had supplanted with his more daring and dynamic works, but to whom he now expressed his gratitude and respect.
The aedicule is flanked by stone statues, both adaptations of statues in Rome by Michelangelo,16 which recall predictions of Christ’s coming from the pagan past. On our left is Moses, who prefigured Christ, holding the Tablet of the Ten Commandments and the rod with which he struck water from the rock. On our right is the Hellespontine Sybil, who predicted the crucifixion of the messiah, wears a crown of thorns and carries a cross that is taller than herself. They stand on bases carved with snarling lions, references perhaps to the lion of St Mark, but more likely in this context to devouring death, as in the Salva me psalm – ‘Save me from the mouth of the lion’ – recited in masses for the dead. The Madonna directs her stoical, selfless gaze at St Jerome the intercessor in his crimson toga who kneels on Christ’s right side gently holding His hand.17 But the true living protagonist is Mary Magdalen whose figure, taken from a relief of Aphrodite grieving for the dead Adonis on a sarcophagus in the ducal palace in Mantua, rushes at us out of the picture plane like a Maenad, mantle swirling, shouting her impassioned message that Christ, who will choose her to be the sole witness of His Resurrection, has redeemed mankind from Adam’s original sin with His suffering. Propped against the lion socle on the right and so small that they are easily missed is a shield with Titian’s coat of arms bearing the Habsburg eagle, and a tablet with portraits of himself and Orazio kneeling in prayer before a celestial vision of the Pietà.
Titian died on 27 August 1576. Orazio was by his bedside when the parish priest of San Canciano gave him extreme unction. A doctor from the Provveditori alla Sanità examined the body and found no symptoms of plague: the death certificate, which is lodged in the records of Titian’s parish church of San Canciano, gives the cause of death as fever and his age as 103. With the plague at its height it was not possible to honour Titian’s wish that his body should be transported for burial to Pieve di Cadore. Ridolfi ends his biography of Titian with an account of a long and elaborate funeral ceremony in Venice – it was intended to rival Vasari’s description of Michelangelo’s funeral in Florence – which he says never took place but was written up by one of the Venetian painters who wished to honour Titian. He was carried instead through the silent, plague-ridden city to the Frari where a modest funeral was celebrated by a canon of San Marco, two subcanons, twenty-one other people and perhaps a choir, before he was interred in the chapel of the Crucifixion.18 The cost of the funeral was thirty-eight lire and sixteen soldi. A week or so later Orazio, who may already have been ill, was visited by the plague doctors, who had him taken to the hell of the Lazzaretto Vecchio. He never returned. Had he lived Orazio would doubtless have ensured that the Pietà was taken to Pieve. But his death was followed by an acrimonious dispute about Titian’s estate between the surviving next of kin who were less sensitive to Titian’s wishes; and so the picture, which was part of that estate, remained in Venice.
Titian left no will, perhaps because he had decided to entrust the dispersal of his estate to Orazio, his sole heir, who also died intestate. There is no surviving record of a ceremony or oration in Pieve di Cadore, or of a report of Titian’s death by an ambassador or the papal nuncio in Venice at the time. But we do have, in the Pietà, Titian’s autobiographical epitaph to himself. Looking at it in the Accademia Gallery in Venice, where it hangs opposite Tintoretto’s first masterpiece, the Miracle of the Slave, and reflecting on the paragone – the comparison between the merits of painting, sculpture and writing that exercised Titian and his contemporaries – we may decide for ourselves whether this painting expresses emotion better than words or stone could do. At some point after Titian’s death Palma Giovane took possession of the Pietà. He retouched it here and there and added the flying angel carrying an Easter candle, and an inscription, which reads ‘QVOD TITIANVS INCHOATVM RELIQVIT PALMA REVERENTER ABSOLVIT DEOQ. DICAVIT OPVS’ (What Titian left unfinished Palma reverently set free, dedicating the work to God). It is a reference to a then well-known passage from Cicero,19 who, writing about a Venus left unfinished at the death of Apelles, used the verb absolvit, he discharges or sets free, rather than perfecit, he finishes, to indicate that no other artist would be capable of completing a work by that greatest of masters.
Titian’s Legacy
The argument that the finest artists have not been affected by changing tastes can be reduced in the last analysis to the proposition that for no extended periods since their lifetimes have Raphael, Titian, and Rubens not been considered great painters by the most influential sections of articulate opinion.
FRANCIS HASKELL, REDISCOVERIES IN ART, 1976
It is no exaggeration to say that Titian’s late style brought about a fundamental change in the course of the history of painting.
ERNST VAN DE WETERING, ‘REMBRANDT’S MANNER: TECHNIQUE IN THE SERVICE OF ILLUSION’, 19911
When the plague finally lifted, the Venetian Senate took the decision to erect on the Giudecca a church designed by Andrea Palladio and dedicated to Christ the Most Holy Redeemer as a demonstration of the gratitude of the Most Serene Republic and of its power to survive even the worst disasters. It was determined that there would be an annual procession across a bridge of pontoons from the Zattere to the church where a mass would be said with prayers of thanksgiving for the mercy of the Lord God. The church was consecrated in 1592; and the procession, which takes place on the third Sunday in July with a display of fireworks on the previous evening, remains a major event in the Venetian calendar. The rejoicing was muted on 10 December 1577 when a raging fire in the doge’s palace destroyed the Great Council Hall and all of the canvases in it including Titian’s Battle of Spoleto. But the hall was soon rebuilt and the pictures replaced with glorifications of Venice by Veronese, Leandro Bassano, Federico Zuccari and others, and the colossal Paradiso, said to be the largest oil painting ever made, by Tintoretto and his son Domenico. Such displays of resilience could not, however, delay the slow decline of the Most Serene Republic of Venice as a great imperial and trading power.
Meanwhile it fell to Pomponio to sort out his father’s estate, most of which was invested in landed property.2 This he did in the years after Titian’s death, sometimes acting with the weakness and naivety that one would expect from a man who had never been capable of managing his own affairs, but also with a degree of good humour, fairness and generosity to his friends and relatives that may come as a surprise after what we know of his confrontational attitude to an authoritarian father whom he had never been able to please. Now he had his chance to show that he could behave properly, and he did so to the best of his ability in difficult circumstances. Pomponio had his faults, but the avariciousness for which his father and brother had been so well known was not one of them.
The first we hear of him after the deaths of Titian and Orazio is on 22 September 1576 when he gave an art dealer, Francesco Brachieri, who had been in touch with Titian, power of attorney to withdraw thirty ducats from Orazio’s account in the Tiepolo and Pisani bank.3 Five days later he applied to the giudici del proprio, the judges that dealt with inheritance and property, to
be recognized as Orazio’s sole heir. The application, which was not contested, was granted on 23 October. Meanwhile, anxious to be away from the family house that held so many unhappy memories, he persuaded Celso di San Fior, who had acted for many years as Titian’s agent in Serravalle, to live in the Biri Grande house and look after the estate. Celso moved in early in October and stayed until the end of March of the following year.
Pomponio’s troubles started on 15 February 1577 when Cornelio Sarcinelli, the grasping husband of Titian’s daughter Lavinia, issued a court order requiring Celso di San Fior to produce within ten days a letter of intention written, so Sarcinelli insisted, by Titian stating that on the death of Orazio without legitimate descendants the entire estate should pass to his sons by Lavinia. Lavinia was dead or dying, perhaps of the plague, which may explain why Sarcinelli had waited six months after Orazio’s death to make his bid. Both Celso and Pomponio denied any knowledge of such a letter, which is in fact unlikely to have existed. There is no reason why Titian, if he had made a will, would have failed to make some provision for other members of his family, not least his natural daughter Emilia, whom he had described in a letter to Philip II as ‘the absolute patroness of my soul’. Sarcinelli then put a judicial seal on the house, which Celso or Pomponio had to have removed by court order. Nevertheless, on 26 March Pomponio, in the interests of restoring harmony within the family, co-signed a notarized agreement with Sarcinelli giving his children the properties in and around Serravalle, about thirty fields and some buildings, which constituted the greater part of Titian’s wealth, while Pomponio retained the land and buildings in and around Pieve di Cadore. Copies of the agreement were obtained by Gian Domenico Dossena, the brother of Emilia’s husband Andrea, and by Gaspare Balbi and his wife Livia, all of whom presumably believed they had a stake in the inheritance.
