by Sheila Hale
When Carlo Ridolfi’s biography of Titian was published in 1648 Rubens and Van Dyck were dead. Rembrandt had another twenty-one years to live, and Velázquez another twelve. Ridolfi concluded his account of Titian’s life with a rhetorical flourish written in Latin:
Time will consume even the sky, but the glory of the great Vecellio will never be consumed by Time.
It was not, of course, intended to be taken literally. But looking back over the centuries since Titian’s death at the unceasing admiration his work has attracted from everyone who understands and loves the art of painting, Ridolfi’s words do seem to carry a kind of poetic truth.
NOTES
Introduction
1 The question of the size of Titian’s autograph oeuvre is complicated by an ongoing debate about the attribution of some of the paintings, by the degree of studio participation especially in the late works, and by pictures that he overpainted or that were overpainted after his death.
2 I have used the second edition, The Life and Times of Titian, published in 1881.
3 Investigative techniques such as X-radiography have been used by conservators for nearly a century. Others, such as infrared reflectography, which detects graphic preparation, and gas chromatography with mass spectroscopy for the analysis of paint mediums, have been available in well-equipped laboratories only since the last decades of the twentieth century.
Part I: 1488/90–1518
ONE: MOUNTAINS
1 Pietro Casola cited by (and tr.) Chambers and Pullan 1992.
2 The early sources differ about whether Titian or Francesco was the elder brother, and the debate continues.
3 See Cadorin 1833. The document relates to the sale of the house by Titian’s son Pomponio.
4 L’Anonimo di Tizianello 1622.
5 Towards the end of Titian’s life he was widely believed to be even older. In 1555 the Spanish ambassador in Venice informed Titian’s patron King Philip II of Spain that Titian was over eighty-five (that is, born before 1470), in 1561 that he was over eighty (born before 1481), and in 1564 that he was nearly ninety but didn’t show it (born shortly after 1474). Although a new Spanish ambassador writing in 1567 revised his age downwards to eighty-five (born 1482), Titian himself wrote to the King in 1571 that he was ninety-five (born 1576). Both Dolce and Vasari knew him personally and wrote biographies of him. Dolce (who may have wished to emphasize his precocity) implied that Titian was not even twenty in 1507 (i.e. born after 1487); while Vasari, whose life was published in 1568, estimated that he was about seventy-six when he met him in 1566 (born 1490). His death certificate, rediscovered in 1955 in his parish church in Venice, gives his age as 103 at the time of his death in 1576 (born 1473). Nevertheless if he was born much before 1490, the question arises as to what he was doing with his prodigious talent before his first work in Venice in 1507.
6 There is also a theory that the cap may have had scholarly connotations. Aristotle, St Jerome and some Renaissance humanists are also depicted wearing caps.
7 The two surviving painted self-portraits are in Berlin, 1546–7, and Madrid, Prado, c. 1560. A woodcut of a self-portrait by Giovanni Britto is c. 1550. He may also have portrayed himself as the old, bearded man in the National Gallery Allegory of Prudence. Veronese painted him playing the viola, Jacopo Bassano as a moneychanger, and El Greco who may have been in his studio a few years before his death also portrayed him. There is no certain record of what the young Titian looked like although it has been suggested that he could be the subject of the National Gallery Man with a Quilted Sleeve, the Pharisee in the Tribute Money (Dresden), the Baptist in Salome (Rome, Doria-Pamphilj) and the man supporting Christ’s legs in the early Entombment (Louvre).
8 Vasari invented a similar story about Leonardo da Vinci dying in the arms of Francis I.
9 The sources differ about Conte’s other sons. One mentions Antonio and Vecellone, both notaries; another, three others, Michele, notary, Gaspare and Nicolò.
10 Cesare Vecellio, 1590, cited by Fabbro 1976.
11 ASV, Giudici del Proprio, Vadimoni, reg. 25, cc. 41r–44v. I have seen the document, which has not been previously published, courtesy of Charles Hope.
12 Dolce and Anonymous 1622.
13 Puppi 2004.
14 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881 confessed that there was no evidence that Titian knew the classical languages.
15 Venice, Accademia; Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André.
16 Kris and Kurz 1979.
17 Hope 1994.
18 J. Gilbert 1869.
19 Ibid.
20 Constable, who like all subsequent landscape painters owed Titian a debt of gratitude, coined the axiom that there is nothing that light and shade may not make beautiful.
21 Vasari said Titian entertained in his house several German artists, ‘excellent painters of landscapes and foliage’, and tried to paint animals from life to give his work a stronger sense of realism.
22 I have John Steer to thank for some of these observations.
23 Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura et architettura, 1585.
24 Hazlitt 1856 on Diana and Actaeon painted in 1556–9.
25 Camesasca and Pertile 1957–60, vol. 1, pp. 249–52.
TWO: THE MOST TRIUMPHANT CITY
1 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
2 Cited by Roskill 2000.
3 Dolce said he was nine, Vasari ten.
4 Dolce tells us that the uncle, a brother of Gregorio, was employed ‘in one of those distinguished posts which are given out to citizens’. There is a tradition of unknown source that he was Antonio, a notary who served as Venetian magistrate in Brescia. The anonymous biographer and Ridolfi thought that he was a maternal uncle.
5 The word means fields because some of them were literally fields cultivated by horse-drawn ploughs.
6 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
7 Ibid.
8 He was referring to the sky of the St Peter Martyr, which was itself destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century.
9 Richard Goldthwaite cited by Mary R. Rogers, proceedings of the Renaissance Society of America conference, 2005.
10 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
11 It was gruelling and dangerous work. Dante, Inferno, Canto 21, condemned barrators to be submerged in boiling pitch ‘As boils in the Venetians’ arsenal’.
12 Crouzet-Pavan 2002.
13 Ibid.
14 His chiaroscuro St Jerome, on which he collaborated with the print maker Ugo da Carpi, is the first Venetian example of colour printing, a technique using multiple blocks pioneered in Germany. See I, 6 for his other woodcuts.
15 In one of the most popular, Arcadia, a prose and verse narrative by the Neapolitan writer Jacopo Sannazaro, a melancholic court poet escapes from the constraints of urban life to an idyllic countryside in ancient Greece where the community of shepherds, shepherdesses, nymphs and satyrs lives in an atmosphere of perpetual romance while his own love for the nymph Phyllis is frustrated. Sannazaro’s Arcadia had circulated in manuscript for some twenty years before it was printed in Venice in 1502 in a pirated edition.
16 In Timaeus.
17 To the present author by Sir Christopher Pinsent, a painter who has measured the intervals in some of Titian’s paintings.
18 Dürer bought a copy on his second visit to Venice in 1505.
19 According to the American bestselling novel The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, 1988, scholars even today devote their academic careers to unravelling its inner meanings and debating the identity of its author, who gives his name in code as Francesco Colonna. The authors maintain that Colonna may have been not a monk from Treviso but a Roman nobleman of the same name.
20 Although any unmarried but sexually active young woman was classed as a whore, it is probably an exaggeration to suggest as some writers have that as many as 10 per cent of the population were in some way involved in prostitution.
21 Cited by Masson 1976.
22 La Zaffeta by Lore
nzo Veniero.
23 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
24 In the Ragionamenti (The Conversations), 1534 and 1536.
25 Girolamo Priuli, 1509, cited by Laven 2002.
26 Molmenti 1906.
27 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 The wedding of the daughter of Zuan Battista Foscarini described by Sanudo.
31 Chambers 1970.
32 Ackerman 1982.
THREE: THE PAINTER’S VENICE
1 I owe this identification to Charles Hope. Although Vasari reported that Sebastiano was from Treviso, some recent writers have confused him with a Dalmatian painter referred to in documents as Zuccato, that is by his first name.
2 Francesco was active 1524–70,Valerio 1532–64.
3 I have abstracted some of the material about artists’ studios in Venice from Fletcher 2003a.
4 For pigments and the vendecolori I am indebted to Matthew 2002; Dunkerton 2003; Oberthaler and Walmsley 2006; Berrie and Matthew 2006; Wald 2009; and Charlotte Hale, conservator of paintings at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, who made substantial corrections and suggestions for this chapter.
5 I have Charles Hope to thank for this hypothetical suggestion. The man has also been plausibly identified as Antonio Palma (1510/11–75), the nephew of Palma Vecchio and father of Palma Giovane, who would have been about the right age.
6 Apelles, born c. 370 BC, was the most admired and famous of ancient Greek painters, a gifted portraitist and painter of flesh. Alexander the Great valued Apelles so much that he refused to be portrayed by anyone else and gave him his mistress. In the sixteenth century the two painters most often compared to him were Dürer and Titian, especially for their mastery of colour.
7 Bergamo, Accademia Carrara; Padua, Museo Civico; Merion, Pennsylvania, Barnes Collection.
8 Pater 1877.
9 Both are written as fictional dialogues, a form used by Plato, Cicero and Lucian and popularized in the Renaissance by Erasmus and Castiglione.
10 Tr. Roskill 2000.
11 The Farnese Danae, 1545–6.
12 Dolce, who was a prolific writer, translator and editor, insisted that the ancients regarded literature as a higher form of expression than painting.
13 Writing in the seventeenth century, the poet Marco Boschini wrote in his Carta del navegar pitoresco about what paintings taste like (spongy bread, marzipan, pasta); sound like (a sweet and loving concert) and smell like (a druggist’s shop where he had ‘under my nose those aromatic smells which completely comfort the heart’: this was said of the Tintorettos in the Scuola di San Rocco).
14 Given by various authorities to Giorgione, Sebastiano or Domenico Mancini, although the majority now support an attribution to Titian.
15 Letter from Dürer to Willibald Pirkheimer in Nuremberg, 7 February 1506.
16 Reproduced in Eisler 1989.
17 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881, vol. 1, p. 49.
18 Joannides 2001.
19 A sacra conversazione or sacred conversation is a depiction of the Virgin and Child with an informal grouping of saints who are meditating or reading together.
20 In a letter of 1505 explaining Bellini’s refusal to provide a secular painting for her collection.
21 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
22 Valcanover 1995.
23 See Fletcher 2003a.
24 There is an unreliable story that he painted it to fulfil a commission that Giorgione had not got round to before his death in 1510.
25 It has been given dates between 1511 and 1520.
26 Ferino-Pagden, citing Otto Pächt, in Washington and Vienna 2006.
27 Ruskin 1974.
28 Italian Hours, 1909.
29 Some authorities place the Jacopo Pesaro later, on the grounds that the monumentality of the figures and the way the paint is laid on are closer to his work from the early 1510s, notably to the St Mark Enthroned of about 1512 and the Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor which is usually dated about 1512–13. A cleaning in time for the 2003 Titian exhibitions in London and Madrid has, for some, reinforced that view. Some of those who support the earlier date suggest that the archaic figure of St Peter was actually started by Giovanni Bellini, while those who prefer the later date explain the rigidity of that figure by proposing that it was based on a thirteenth-century statue of the saint that was admired by Alexander VI.
30 The Pesaro Madonna will be discussed in Part II, Chapter 4.
31 Including Wethey 1969–75, vol. 1, and Hope in conversation.
32 By A. V. Kuznetsov and V. V. Shatsky.
FOUR: MYTHS OF VENICE
1 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
2 Eisler 1989.
3 Although the nominating and balloting system did prevent any one individual from seizing power, a large and mutually supportive family could commandeer significant blocks of votes.
4 We know less about the private lives and feelings of the unenfranchised majority of Venetians than we do about their Tuscan contemporaries, whose memoirs reveal the daily preoccupations of ordinary people.
5 De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae, 1493–1530 (Sanudo 1980).
6 First published in Venice between 1879 and 1903, the diaries fill 40,000 pages in fifty-eight volumes with the vivid records he kept from 1 January 1496 to 1 September 1533, three years before his death.
7 Giovanni Caldiera cited by Muir 1981.
8 Othello, Act I, scene i. Iago describes Cassio as:
More than a spinster unless the bookish theoric
Wherein the togaed consuls can propose
As masterly as he.
9 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
10 My chief authority for Venetian dress of the period is Newton 1988.
11 Sansovino 1581.
12 Chambers and Pullan 1992. From a letter written in 1509 after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello.
13 Muir 1981.
14 James Harrington praised the Venetian government in his utopian Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) for its ‘undisturbed and constant tranquillity and peace … being that which of all others is the most equal in the constitution … wherein there never happened any strife between the Senate and the people’. Oceana made an impression on John Locke among other philosophers, and through Locke on the founding fathers of the newly independent United States of America who looked to the Venetian model of checks and balances when they drew up their constitution.
15 Chambers and Pullan 1992.
16 Joannides 2001. But the attribution of the Bravo (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) is uncertain. It is often given to Titian only because it is such a good painting.
17 Goffen 1997a maintains that the portraits have flirtatious sexual overtones that may ‘represent sexual accessibility, as though these men were available for (male or female) delectation’.
18 Muir 1981.
19 Cited by Hale in London 1983.
20 Rubinstein 1973.
21 Chambers and Pullan 1992.
22 Martino Merlini cited by F. Gilbert 1980.
23 In fact he lived until 1521 and his reputation was restored by his management of the Republic’s recovery.
24 Priuli cited by F. Gilbert 1980.
FIVE: THE FONDACO, GIORGIONE AND THE MODERN MANNER
1 The Fondaco was turned into a customs house by Napoleon, then converted into the central post office in the 1930s. At the time of writing it is owned by the clothing chain Benetton, whose proposals to make the interior a shopping centre have met with resistance from Italian conservationists.
2 The document dated 12 May 1508 is cited in Chambers and Pullan 1992.
3 It is not known why he accepted less than the revalued amount. The theory that it might have been a compromise has been suggested by Charles Hope.
4 These tantalizing fragments were chipped off during a radical restoration of the Fondaco (during which two figures by Giorgione were destroyed), before the building wa
s turned over to the post office in 1930.
5 The dagger is visible in an engraving by Jacopo Piccini of 1658.
6 In his ‘Life of Giorgione’.
7 Hope suggests that buildings went up when the new, stone Rialto Bridge was built in 1580.
8 In 1548, long after Giorgione’s death, Francesco de Hollanda, a Portuguese painter and writer who had been in Venice a decade earlier, did not even mention Giorgione in his comments about the Fondaco.
9 Reported by Dolce, Vasari and Ridolfi.
10 Examples from Kris and Kurz 1979.
11 Some writers did try to add colour to Titian’s life by inventing other rivalries for which there is no evidence. Vasari claimed that Pordenone was a great rival of Titian and that Pordenone’s death in Ferrara was due to poison. Boschini 1660 conflated the two anecdotes by asserting that Titian poisoned Pordenone.
