Titian

by Sheila Hale

  On 18 April Sarcinelli moved into Biri Grande at the request of Pomponio, who seems to have underestimated the ruthless character of his brother-in-law. Sarcinelli was still living in the house on 24 July when a proclamation was issued by the criminal court that Titian and Orazio had left ‘many goods of very great value, credits, writings, accounts, instruments, notes of many debtors, leases and receipts, and objects of gold, silver and gems, and other furniture and innumerable paintings of no small value’, a great quantity of which had been ‘taken away, usurped, robbed and concealed’ by unknown persons, against the interests of Pomponio and Sarcinelli. It is often assumed either that Pomponio had helped himself to the items or that the house was looted at some time after Titian’s death. The presumed looting is, however, unlikely since the house was probably never left empty, and if there had been a robbery it would not have taken nearly a year after Titian’s death before the loss of the items was noticed and reported. There was, furthermore, no reason for Pomponio to steal what was his by right as sole heir. The finger of suspicion points more plausibly at Sarcinelli, especially given his subsequent behaviour and his personal interest as a claimant in the documents, which would have had no value for a casual thief. But for the time being he had Pomponio’s trust and persuaded him that they should go together to the court to proclaim that the house had been robbed.

  By September Sarcinelli, not content with more than half the landed property, had resorted to more aggressive behaviour, which caused Pomponio to obtain an injunction on the 16th preventing him from offending, injuring or molesting himself, his sister Emilia’s husband Andrea Dossena or Andrea’s brothers, or Celso di San Fior. Pomponio failed, however, to have Sarcinelli expelled from the house. Then, on 19 October, Sarcinelli’s lawyers persuaded a Venetian magistracy that Titian’s letter of intention did exist and that the entire inheritance should therefore pass to his children. Pomponio had the case overturned on appeal, but Sarcinelli was not a man to give up. He continued to defy Pomponio’s attempts to have him removed from Biri Grande with the argument that by inviting him to stay there Pomponio had in effect conceded to him the house and its contents; and on 10 April 1578, in a renewed petition that Titian’s entire estate should pass to his children, he described Pomponio as a man who ‘is controlled by others, and his will serves someone who with different devices directs it as he pleases’. Although there may have been more than an element of truth in this observation, Pomponio’s wish to share the estate with other legitimate claimants seems to have been motivated as much by conscientiousness as by weakness. In July of 1578 he made a payment of 200 ducats to Andrea Dossena and Andrea’s brother Gian Domenico; he undertook to provide a dowry of 150 ducats for Andrea’s five-year-old daughter Vecellia; and continued to support the family thereafter. He gave half a farm previously owned by Titian at Tai in Cadore to his sister Dorotea’s son Odorico Soldano and the other half to Giovanni Alessandrini, who had helped Titian with his letters in the 1540s and later with business affairs in Cadore over many years. Odorico Soldano also received 100 ducats in recompense for providing books and documents relating to the estate. Nevertheless, not everyone was satisfied. When Pomponio sold the family house in Pieve on 25 October 1580, Andrea Dossena, on behalf of his daughter Vecellia, Gaspare Balbi and Marco Vecellio all made public declarations of interest.

  A condition placed on Sarcinelli’s continuing residence at Biri Grande was that all objects of value be placed in a sealed room. His case began to collapse on 19 April 1578 when it was discovered that the seal had been broken and replaced with another. Pomponio demanded compensation for the missing objects: money; three gold chains, one of which, bearing a medal, Titian used to wear; fourteen rings with good rubies and diamonds; a gold medal of Titian and six other medals; two silver bowls and one of copper, and two vases; twenty-five salt-cellars, cups and so on; twelve silver spoons; six silver forks; Flemish shawls and cloth; black cloth; plates and other objects in pewter; two chests; pictures of various kinds; a cross with two jewels in it; and a harpsichord. On 17 May it was agreed that Sarcinelli would compensate Pomponio with a payment of 435 ducats and hand over all Titian’s books and papers in his possession, as well as Titian’s patent of nobility and some gold cloth that had belonged to the artist. Pomponio let the studio to Jacopo Bassano’s son Francesco, who ran the Venetian branch of the Bassano family workshop there until he committed suicide in 1592 a few months after his father’s death. There were a few more matters to settle with Sarcinelli, but the dispute over the Biri Grande house and its contents was resolved by 7 September 1580 when Pomponio, his relationship with Sarcinelli evidently much improved, gave him a power of attorney to argue, on the grounds that neither of them lived in Venice, against a government demand that Titian’s heirs should pay taxes on all his property. Nevertheless, although the two men had agreed that they had no further claims against one another, Sarcinelli claimed ownership in 1584 of sixteen fields that had never belonged to Titian.

  While dealing with Cornelio Sarcinelli, Pomponio had other matters to settle. He went to the ecclesiastical court in order to obtain the arrears of a pension promised to Titian in 1552 by Torquato Bembo, whose lawyers had agreed in 1574 to pay 160 ducats in return for two pictures, a Rape of Europa and a Flagellation. There was a claim from Gasparo Balbi that Titian had promised to contribute to the dowries of his three daughters in return for Balbi’s having served him faithfully in his business affairs from 1549 to 1574. An arbitrator decided that Balbi was entitled to only 100 ducats but that Pomponio must return to him a portrait of his late wife Livia4 or pay him thirty ducats, that Balbi could keep a Madonna that he said was his, and that, because the relevant documents had been lost and the witnesses were dead, he need not pay Pomponio for a loan of 109 ducats made to him by Paolo d’Anna with the proviso that it be repaid to Titian and Orazio.5 Celso di San Fior demanded and received compensation for the time spent living in Biri Grande and looking after the estate. Emanuel Amberger, the most important assistant in the studio during the last decade of Titian’s life, received 150 ducats for services to Titian and Orazio, and to Pomponio, possibly in connection with finishing some of the pictures in the studio.

  On 27 October 1581 Pomponio leased the house in Biri Grande to Cristoforo Barbarigo, a Venetian nobleman and collector, who presumably acquired it for investment purposes because less than a year later he was living on the piano nobile of Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza at San Polo, which had been built by his father. Since Barbarigo had acted for Pomponio on previous occasions and had loaned him money it is possible that Pomponio gave him some pictures by Titian in return for his services, but a number of the paintings that had been in Titian’s studio at his death had already gone elsewhere – some probably appropriated by Cornelio Sarcinelli, others sold by Pomponio in the process of liquidating the estate. Tintoretto bought the Munich Crowning with Thorns (Ridolfi said that he also acquired a Flagellation and a Diana and Callisto), and Palma Giovane took possession of the Pietà.

  The Allegory of Prudence,6 an intriguing but not entirely successful pastiche mostly executed by the studio and left unfinished at Titian’s death, may also have remained in the studio. X-rays indicate that the three animals, the wolf, lion and dog, represented below the faces, were added after Titian’s death, as was the crudely drawn superscription which gives the painting its present title. It reads ‘EX PRAETE/RITO’ above what looks like a profile of the aged Titian; ‘PRAESENS PRVDEN/TER AGIT’ above what is probably a portrait of Orazio; and ‘NI FVTVRV/ACTIONE DE/TVRPET’ above the youngest man (from the past/the present acts prudently/lest it spoil future action). The virtue of prudence, in other words, depends on past experience and the anticipated future. Since the painting was first mentioned in Paris in the eighteenth century, there have been many theories about the meaning of the painting and the identity of the portrait heads.7 More recently it has been seen as an allegory of art as well as of time, and it has been proposed that the young man on our right is Mar
co Vecellio.8 Charles Hope9 prefers to see three generations of the Vecellio family, in which case the youth might be Titian’s eldest grandson who was a closer relative than Marco.

  But the only paintings by Titian that can be securely identified in the original Barbarigo collection, and were therefore probably in the studio after his death, are the four ‘very famous’ pictures listed in Cristoforo’s will, which was drawn up in 1600, two weeks before he died, with the provision that they should descend to his heirs by primogeniture. They are Christ Carrying the Cross, the Penitent Magdalen, both now in St Petersburg, a Madonna in an ebony frame (it has been plausibly suggested that it might be the Madonna and Child with the Magdalen in the Hermitage) and the Venus with a Mirror and Two Cupids now in Washington, DC. Ridolfi added seven more Titians owned by the Barbarigo family. The unfinished St Sebastian and a Portrait of Pope Paul III are both now in the Hermitage. The others on his list are mediocre workshop paintings or lost. The Portrait of Francis I (Leeds, Harewood House) is perhaps a studio version of the finer portrait in the Louvre; the Philip II Seated (Cincinnati Art Museum) is of such low quality that it is unlikely to be by Titian’s hand; the studio Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti may be the dismal painting in the New York Metropolitan Museum; the portrait of Doge Antonio Grimani is lost, as is a picture of Syrinx being abducted by Pan, of which nothing is known.

  The Barbarigo collection was housed in the palace at San Polo for nearly three centuries, during which Cristoforo’s descendants continued to purchase more Venetian paintings. In the eighteenth century admission to the Barbarigo gallery, which was known by then as the School of Titian, was considered an essential privilege by aristocratic tourists stopping in Venice on the Grand Tour. The highlight of the entire collection, which by then included pictures by Tintoretto, Veronese, Jacopo Bassano, Bonifacio and other Venetian painters, was the St Petersburg Penitent Magdalen, which Titian had kept in his studio as a model for his many other versions and which was regarded as the most beautiful of all his paintings. In 1850, when the Barbarigo’s financial position had been worsened by the fall of the Republic, the Russian Tsar Nicholas I acquired for the Hermitage Palace in St Petersburg no fewer than 102 paintings from the family, seventeen attributed to Titian and thirteen to Giorgione. None of the Giorgiones is accepted today, and the Titians have been considerably whittled down. There have never, however, been any doubts about the authenticity of the Magdalen, which was packed for the journey from Venice to St Petersburg with special care in its original frame in an individual double-boarded crate.

  The last mention we have of Pomponio is on 28 September 1594 when the Senate determined that a joint supplication by Cornelio Sarcinelli and Pomponio Vecellio against a requirement to pay taxes on Titian’s properties should be referred back to the Ten Savi of the Tax office, or Decima, who should see that justice was done. The next day the Senate voted unanimously that Titian’s heirs should be absolved of taxes from the date of his death, and its decision was ratified by the Savi a year later. The Senate minute of 1594 does not necessarily indicate that Pomponio, who would have been about seventy, was still alive at the time, but nor is his disappearance from the records after that date evidence that he was dead.

  With the deaths of Veronese in 1588, Jacopo Bassano in 1592 and Tintoretto in 1594 the golden age of Venetian painting was suspended until a brief but glorious revival in the eighteenth century. Copies, prints and forgeries of Titian’s paintings continued to circulate around Europe, but he had no immediately posthumous circle of followers: there were no Tizianisti – in the way there would, for example, be Caravaggisti. It was not until the dispersal of the great north Italian ducal collections in the first decades of the seventeenth century that the originals of many of his masterpieces, which had previously been seen only by a privileged few, became accessible to a wider public. They made an immediate and indelible impact on some of the greatest painters of their age.

  After Alfonso II d’Este died without a legitimate heir in 1597, the aggressive Pope Clement VIII, the former Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini, fulfilled the ambitions of his predecessors Julius II and Leo X by invading Ferrara and annexing it to the Papal States. The ducal castle was occupied by a papal legation, and by the end of 1598 Clement’s nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, had stolen the Bacchanals that had been commissioned by Titian’s first foreign patron Alfonso I d’Este.10 The pictures were taken to Rome, where they caused a sensation. Twenty-nine years later the Gonzaga collection, which had been gradually dispersed by the spendthrift fourth Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga, was sold to Charles I of England. Then, in 1630, after the male line of the della Rovere had died out, the Duchy of Urbino was annexed to the Papal States and the collection taken to Florence as part of the dowry of Vittoria della Rovere on her marriage to Fernando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. And of all the paintings that were now released from their ducal castles and palaces, it was the Titians that were the most sought after by collectors.

  Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish painter whose artistic development would be most profoundly indebted to Titian’s example, was twenty-three in 1600 when he travelled to Italy from Antwerp. In Rome he made sketches of the Andrians and the Worship of Venus which he later worked up – covering the pudenda of the reclining nude in the Andrians with a large figleaf, and changing the boy putti in the Worship of Venus into little girls – into his largest painted copies of Italian models (both Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). While in Venice he was invited to Mantua to be court painter to Vincenzo Gonzaga, whose collection enabled him to become acquainted with the Titians that had been commissioned by Vincenzo’s ancestor Federico Gonzaga. In 1603, on an embassy taking pictures and horses from Mantua to Philip III of Spain in Madrid, he may have had his first sight of the Titians in the Spanish royal collection. But it was later, in 1628–9, when he returned to Madrid on another diplomatic mission that he impressed the new king Philip IV with his own large paintings,11 and gained his permission to make full-sized painted copies of the Titians that were kept in the most private rooms of the Alcázar. With the help of assistants he painted at least twenty-two copies after Titian, which sparked a revived interest among Spanish artists and patrons in Titian and Venetian Renaissance painting. In some cases, as with his copy (Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection) of Titian’s full-length Portrait of Philip II, Rubens replicated Titian’s technique as far as possible. But elsewhere – as with his copies of Diana and Callisto (Liverpool, Knowsley Hall, Earl of Derby) and the Rape of Europa (Madrid, Prado) – we can see him asserting his own artistic personality.12

  Rubens’s enthusiasm for Titian made a strong impression on two of his younger followers, the Fleming Anthony Van Dyck and the Spaniard Diego Velázquez. Van Dyck, who started his career as Rubens’s chief assistant, spent six years in Italy, from 1621 to 1627, studying Italian art and particularly Titian. His Italian Sketchbook (British Museum), consisting of 200 sheets of drawings of paintings, prints and sculptures, has been called ‘the first illustrated book about Titian’,13 although some of his sketches ‘after Titian’ were in fact taken from prints, drawings and painted replicas, not all of them actually by Titian.14 While in Italy he bought four Titians, one of which is actually a pastiche of a buxom woman, possibly an unfinished portrait of a courtesan from the 1530s with a caricature added later of the aged Titian in profile with his hand on her belly.15 By the time of his death Van Dyck owned nineteen paintings by Titian, and his close study of the Venetian master contributed to the confidence with which he explored the volumetric composition and lush colouring that made him the great seventeenth-century portraitist of the aristocracy.

  As gentlemen painters to the aristocracy and great rulers of their day Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, both knighted by King Charles I of England, felt a social as well as artistic kinship with the Venetian painter who had been knighted by the emperor Charles V and favoured by King Philip II of Spain. Diego Velázquez, who also hoped for a knighthood at the end of his care
er,16 quoted a part of Titian’s Rape of Europa in his Fable of Arachne (Madrid, Prado) painted several years before his death in 1560, ‘like a lawyer arguing his case’ by providing ‘a famous precedent for his own aspirations’.17 As court painter to the King of Spain and curator of the Spanish royal collection from 1623 when he was twenty-four, Velázquez knew Titian’s paintings there by heart. But it was not until Rubens’s second visit to Madrid that he began to see, through the Flemish master’s eyes, the possibilities that Titian’s technique and colouring offered for the development of his own art. A year in Italy in 1631 gave him the confidence to allow himself the liberal use of pentimenti that distinguishes Titian’s and Rubens’s way of working, and to find ways of adapting and giving added luminosity to the sketchy brushstrokes that can be seen in his most famous later paintings.

  Meanwhile, in the chilly Protestant environment of the northern Netherlands, the young Rembrandt van Rijn was, so it has been suggested by a leading authority on Rembrandt,18 modelling ‘his artistic biography, so to speak, on Titian’s’. Rembrandt knew the two paintings by the already legendary Titian that were in Amsterdam,19 the Flora and the Man with a Quilted Sleeve, on which he based his Self-portrait at Thirty-Four (London, National Gallery). He also kept, with his large collection of prints after earlier masters, a book that contained almost all the works of Titian. Two of his teachers,20 furthermore, had spent most of their careers in Italy where they would have heard the theoretical discussions in studios about the artistic value of visible brushstrokes, which had unsettled Titian’s contemporaries but were now increasingly admired as evidence of a painter’s creative inner life. Vasari’s ‘Life of Titian’, parts of which had been translated into Dutch by Karel van Mander in 1604, two years before Rembrandt was born, was as much discussed in the studios of the Netherlands as in Italy. Vasari, who had written that Titian started with a fine, meticulous technique, and only later adopted what he called the ‘pittura della macchia’, painting with splotches, also warned artists that Titian’s later, apparently effortless rough style was more difficult than it looked and should not be attempted without a great deal of knowledge and experience, a caveat that may hold the key to the evolution of Rembrandt’s style from the finely wrought illusionist depictions rendered with invisible brushstrokes of his youth to the rough, apparently spontaneous but well-controlled late paintings that give the impression ‘that it was not the artist who painted but the painting that painted itself, that it appears to be the outcome of a geological process rather than paint applied by a human hand, that in some elusive way chance plays an important part in this manner of painting’.21 It is a description that could equally be applied to the late paintings of Titian.