by Sheila Hale
12 See Renata Segre, ‘A rare document on Giorgione’, Burlington Magazine, CLIII, June 2011, pp. 383–6, and Lionello Puppi, ‘Il cognome di Giorgione è Barbarella, Corriere Del Veneto, October 2011. Segre maintains that the document proves that Giorgione’s family name was Gasparini, Puppi that she has misinterpreted the document and that the family name was Barbarella as in the seventeenth-century sources.
13 Notizie d’opere di disegno, first published in 1800.
14 See Hope 2003b and Vienna 2004.
15 Ridolfi claimed to have access to private collections but most of those he mentions are untraceable.
16 Pater 1877.
17 Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s A History of Painting in North Italy, published in 1871, was the first scholarly and disinterested attempt to define Giorgione’s oeuvre and the first to draw attention to the now famous Tempesta (then known as ‘The Family of Giorgione’).
18 See Hope 2003b.
19 Jaynie Anderson in Washington and Vienna 2006.
20 Pater 1877.
21 Fehl 1957.
22 Charles Hope is an exception.
SIX: MIRACLES AND DISASTERS
1 Cited (and tr.) by D’Elia 2005, p. 23.
2 The documents were not published until the early twentieth century.
3 Puppi suggests that the relevant document, although a forgery, seems to reflect common knowledge.
4 Now usually dated 1511–15. It is the only one of Titian’s greatest masterpieces not in a major gallery; the Magnani Rocca collection is now open to the public and the painting often loaned to exhibitions.
5 I am basing my account of the statue on B. L. Brown 2005.
6 It is still preserved in Ravenna’s Museo Nazionale.
7 A popular collection of lives of the saints written in the second half of the thirteenth century by an Italian chronicler, Jacobus de Voragine.
8 This chronology of the frescos is Hope’s interpretation of the evidence. Not all authorities agree that the Speaking Babe preceded the other two.
9 Edgar Degas, another painter who loved theatre, made a copy of it when passing through Padua on his way to Venice in 1858.
10 Although the Sistine ceiling was not completed until 1512 and Michelangelo was famously secretive about his work in progress, there was intense curiosity about the project, and sketches of it began to circulate soon after he began it in 1508.
11 In 1969 a sinopia (Padua, Museo Antoniano) was discovered under a later fresco by another painter of the Miracle of the Incense Boat. Since the sinopia is of a different subject and some of the figures are in a style similar to Titian’s some scholars maintain that Titian may have started to paint a fourth fresco.
12 Unfortunately he doesn’t say where the house was.
13 In subsequent documents and paintings he used various spellings of his Christian name: Tician, Ticiano, or the Latinized Ticianus or Titianus. He never used Tiziano, which was then the Tuscan version and is now, of course, the Italian one.
14 Macone da Ferrara and Serafino da Cagli.
15 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881, vol. 1, pp. 127–8. (The documentation turns out to be forged but probably represents the truth.)
16 Ibid.
17 Cited by Chambers and Pullan 1992.
18 Cited by F. Gilbert 1980.
19 Newton 1988.
20 Chambers and Pullan 1992.
21 See D’Elia 2005.
22 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881, vol. 1, p. 283. Hope dates the Entombment c. 1516 on the grounds that it has features in common with the Assunta and looks nothing like any of the pictures Titian is known to have painted in the 1520s, which is when some other authorities would prefer to place it.
23 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
24 The Mona Lisa has now been moved to a free-standing position in the middle of the room.
25 The suggestion is made by Wethey 1969–75, vol. 1.
26 Joseph of Arimathaea is traditionally shown at Christ’s head and Nicodemus at his feet, but their positions are sometimes reversed.
27 The five-block version published in 1517 is the earliest to survive, although not all scholars agree that it was the first. My account of the woodcut is based on Bury 1989 and on correspondence with Bury in the spring of 2006. Some other scholars prefer to date the woodcut and/or the composition for it either to 1508, which is the year Vasari gives, or 1511, which is when Ridolfi said that Titian frescoed the walls of the house where he was staying in Padua with a Triumph of Christ. But the first documentation is de’ Gregoriis’s application for a privilege, dated 22 April 1516, to print ‘the triumph, birth, death, resurrection and ascension of our most pious Redeemer’, which suggests that de’ Gregoriis intended a larger woodcut, or perhaps several more.
Bury points out that the woodcut is in two parts. The three right-hand blocks, from the triumphant Christ on His chariot to Adam and Eve, are in a graphic style that corresponds to Titian’s paintings of around 1516, while the two left-hand blocks of the Apostles and saints who follow the chariot are executed in a very different and less elegant technique. The two left blocks may therefore be earlier or by a different hand (possibly based on rough sketches by Titian). Although Bury believes that Titian planned the composition, or at least the right-hand sections, in the year before the application for a privilege to print, he is more cautious than I am about the idea that the subject of a woodcut intended for sale to a large international market would necessarily relate to Venice or its war.
28 In the chapel of Margaret of Austria in Brou in 1528.
SEVEN: ‘SOME LITTLE BIT OF FAME’
1 This is one of the early Titians mentioned by Vasari that has caused subsequent writers much confusion. It was originally in the church of Santa Caterina. Vasari dated it 1507, but his description fits a different much later painting by Titian of the same subject. Ridolfi assigned both pictures to Titian, but Boschini 1966 gave the Santa Caterina one now in the Accademia to a minor Venetian painter, Sante Zago. Wethey 1969–75, vol. 1, p. 171, followed Boschini in disputing the attribution of the Accademia picture to Sante Zago, but this is highly unlikely because Sante Zago was not active in Venice until 1530. Hope 1993 gives it back to Titian and suggests a date of around 1507. Joannides 2001, who sees the pointing hand of the Angel Raphael as a quotation from Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, prefers 1514, as do Tagliaferro and Aikema 2009.
2 The dog is almost identical to the one in Cima da Conegliano’s Adoration of the Shepherds with Tobias and the Angel, generally agreed to be 1510, still in the Venetian church of Santa Maria del Carmine.
3 The mosaic portrait of Bembo as a cardinal by the Zuccato brothers in the Florence Bargello Museum was probably also designed by Titian.
4 Puttfarken 2005.
5 The Great Council Hall, which is now dominated by Domenico and Jacopo Tintoretto’s enormous Paradiso of 1588–92, was gutted by a fire in 1577.
6 It was customary for each doge to have his portrait painted for the series of lunettes in the Great Council Hall; to have another of himself kneeling before the Madonna and saints painted for the Senate Hall; and to supply a shield with his coat of arms to be placed on the Bucintoro, the ceremonial state barge.
7 Chambers and Pullan 1992.
8 The building was begun in 1457 by Andrea Corner to an ambitious design by Bartolomeo Bon, of which only the rusticated base was completed. In 1499, during the war with Lodovico Sforza, it was acquired by the Venetian government, which used parts of it for studios during the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
9 Hope 1980c.
10 Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura et architettura, 1585 (Lomazzo 1974).
11 Campori 1875.
12 Boschini (1660) 1966.
13 with clusters of flowers, sumptuous with crimson, gold-bordered hangings, and luxurious with cushions and perfumes. From the walls peeped pictured fruit and fruit-like faces, between the curtains and in the corners gleamed moonlight-tinted statues; whilst on the easel reposed the b
eauty of the evening, overhung by budding boughs, and illuminated by an alabaster lamp burning scented oil. Strewn about the apartment lay musical instruments and packs of cards. On the table were silver dishes, filled with leaves and choice fruits; wonderful vessels of Venetian glass, containing rare wines and iced waters; and footless goblets, which allowed the guest no choice but to drain his bumper …
14 See Peter Dreyer, ‘Sulle silografie di Tiziano’, in Tiziano e Venezia 1980.
15 Other versions by the studio or followers are in the Prague Castle Museum, and Barcelona Museo de Artes Decorativas.
16 According to Vincenzo Vecellio, the brothers’ first cousin, in the funeral oration he delivered in 1560 after Francesco’s death.
17 See Hood and Hope 1977 for a detailed account of the history of this canvas. Titian collaborated with Niccolò Boldrini to make a woodcut of the six saints in which a plug can be seen where he altered the head of St Sebastian.
18 David Landau in London 1983.
19 This was when an application for permission to publish was registered with the Senate. There are no surviving impressions before 1549 when it was published by Domenico dalle Greche with an inscription giving the design to ‘the hand of the great and immortal Titian’. Woodcuts were extremely expensive to produce, and it may be that in those lean times the original publisher, Bernardino Benalio, was unable or unwilling to risk investing in what must have been the most complex and costly woodcut ever made.
EIGHT: ‘HIS INDUSTRIOUS BRUSH’: PENTIMENTI AND PORTRAITS
1 For example Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Luca Giordano (known as Luca ‘Fa Presto’) and the Japanese artist Hokusai.
2 Cited by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881. The anecdote may be apocryphal.
3 One of the first rules of proper courtly behaviour in the Renaissance was laid down by his older contemporary Baldassare Castiglione, author of the bestselling manual The Courtier, which was published in Venice. Castiglione used the word sprezzatura to define the gentlemanly art of making hard work look easy, suggesting that great feats were achieved as effortlessly as though they were God-given gifts.
4 The word pentimento means literally repentance, but when used about paintings is closer to deliberate modification. Although pentimenti can be found in most oil paintings Titian was the first artist to use them so liberally. Traces of his rejected passages are visible in some of his paintings, and probably were in his lifetime. In the seventeenth century many painters trying to achieve similar effects followed his example in allowing themselves pentimenti.
5 Begun c. 1514 or c. 1518– 9; completed c. 1535.
6 See Hood and Hope 1977.
7 Probably a bathing scene, a commission from Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, which was cancelled in March 1518.
8 The oratory is now incorporated into the state archive next to the church of the Frari.
9 Usually dated between c. 1506 and 1515, although most scholars today place it in the three years after Titian’s return from Padua in 1511.The Noli me tangere was an unusual subject in Venetian art at the time. The idea of representing it may have been suggested to Titian by the Florentine painter Fra Bartolommeo, who was in Venice in 1508–9, while the twisting figure of Christ seems to have been taken from an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after a drawing by Raphael. Although he used the group of fortified buildings in other early paintings, he never again painted his central figures on such a small scale.
10 Ricketts 1910.
11 A branch of the tree thought to have been added in the eighteenth century was removed by a controversial restoration in 1957, when the blue horizon, which was badly abraded, was overpainted.
12 It has been given dates between 1509 and 1516. There are two variants now in the Rome Doria Pamphilj and Borghese Galleries.
13 Wollheim 1987.
14 This important discovery was first published by Humfrey 2003a.
15 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
16 After seeing the Three Ages of Man in the early nineteenth century, William Hazlitt (1856, ‘The Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery’) exclaimed: ‘To live or to die in such a chosen still retreat must be happiness.’
17 For example, the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John and a Female Saint or Donor (the Aldobrandini Madonna) of about 1530 (see II, 6) in which St Catherine is missing both arms; and the Madonna of the Rabbit, 1530 (see III, 1) in which the position of the Madonna’s right leg is unresolved.
18 Scholars have given it various dates between 1510 and 1517.
19 Hope 1980a places it around 1507; other opinions have ranged from 1511 to 1517.
20 Wilde 1974.
21 R. Huyghe cited by Jean Habert in Paris 1993.
22 It has been dated by various authorities as between c. 1511 and c. 1520, but most now prefer the early date.
23 Since the landscape and composition of the painting are similar to those of the Gypsy Madonna, a date of around 1511 would fit with that theory. But some scholars have cast doubt on the authenticity of the Copenhagen man.
24 Now usually dated about 1511–12.
25 Pater 1877.
26 In the eighteenth century it was suggested that the painting represented Mr and Mrs Luther and Calvin.
27 Gentili cited by Pedrocco 2001.
28 A century later the Concert was hung next to a portrait of Monteverdi so that the composer should seem to be listening to the music. More recently Sir Christopher Pinsent, a painter interested in Titian’s geometry, has measured the painting with ruler and compass and discovered a geometry based on ancient Greek musical intervals, so that for example half the height of the picture equals the musical length of a fourth within the total width, which is also the distance between the ears of the two musicians and between the onlooker’s eyes and the keyboard.
29 The English title of Cartier-Bresson’s book of photographs published in 1952.
30 Giulia was godmother to one of Titian’s sons who were born in the early 1520s. According to Vasari he also painted her father, Paolo da Ponte, but the portrait (in the hands of a Venetian dealer at the time of writing), although well documented, is rather dull.
31 I have John Steer to thank for this striking comparison.
32 In the Imagines by the third-century AD Athenian writer Philostratus, painting is defined as imitation by the use of colours alone and therefore superior to carving, modelling or gem cutting.
33 The Goldman Portrait of a Man (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), which has been attributed to Giovanni Cariani or Titian; and the Young Man in a Lavender Jerkin, which has traditionally been given to Giorgione, although some claim it for Titian.
34 Gould 1959.
35 Essays and Introductions, 1961. Yeats especially loved the Man with a Quilted Sleeve.
36 Hope, who dates the Dublin picture ?1530s, points out (in Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, exh. cat., ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Vienna, 1997, pp. 165–6) that the two men cannot have met during either of Castiglione’s visits to Venice, that the portrait looks nothing like Raphael’s portrait of c. 1514, and that the inscription is probably later.
37 See Schupbach 1978.
38 There have been several attempts to describe the powerful personality of Titian’s portrait. Burckhardt called him a man ‘before whose majestic strength, as the saying goes, “Death would have to take to his heels”’; Wethey as looking ‘even more like a barrister awaiting his chance to respond to an argument’. (Both cited by Schupbach 1978.)
39 Cited by Pommier 2006.
40 Sometimes dated 1510s but most convincingly early 1520s from the costume fashionable at that time. See also II, 2 for a theory about the identity of the subject.
41 George Eliot, who saw it in the Louvre in the nineteenth century, made the Man with a Glove the physical model for her hero Daniel Deronda.
Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled, with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible, firmly-grasping hands,
such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces – belonging to the hands – in both the uniform pale-brown skin, the perpendicular brow, the calmly penetrating eyes. Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in a human dignity which can afford to acknowledge poor relations.
42 Goffen 1997.
43 Dated early 1520s by the majority of scholars, the painting was acquired by the gallery from the Trustees of the 7th Duke of Sutherland in 2003 for £11,414,178. Kenneth Clark in The Nude (1956) described it as ‘one of the most complete and concentrated embodiments of Venus in post-antique art’.
44 Matthew 14: 1–2 and Mark 6: 22–8.
45 It has been proposed that the subject is actually Judith, and that it was painted for Titian’s first foreign patron Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara as a politically motivated gift warning him not to abandon his alliance with Venice. The first notice we have of it is a sketch by Van Dyck who saw it in Rome in 1622–3. Although the attribution to Titian has never been challenged, different scholars in the twentieth century have given it dates ranging from 1511 to 1517. It became one of Titian’s most popular subjects.
46 As described, for example, in Pietro Aretino’s pornographic Ragionamenti.
47 According to Hourticq, Foscari and Panofsky as cited by Falomir in Madrid 2003.
48 Dialogo d’amore, cited by Ferino-Pagden in Washington and Vienna 2006. Paul Valéry made a similar observation when he wrote that for Titian, ‘to paint meant to caress, a conjunction of two voluptuous sensations in one supreme act in which self-mastery and mastery of his medium were identified with a masterful possession of the beauty herself, in every sense’.
49 Letter to Jacopo Sansovino, January 1553.
50 The first documented mention of ‘Violante’ that I know of was discovered by Alessandro Ballarin in 2002 in an inventory of the collection of the dukes of Ferrara. It is dated 1598 when a certain Alessandro Balbi referred to a painting he seems to have stolen from Cesare d’Este, who had bought it from the ducal collection, as ‘a Violante, formerly the lover of messer Titian’. In the end Cesare’s agent bought the picture from Balbi for 200 scudi and had it sent to him in Modena. Attempts to associate Cesare’s ‘Violante’ with the Violante now in Vienna are unconvincing, if only because the Vienna picture, which was probably not by Titian, was never in Modena. The picture in question was probably the one now in Dresden of Titian’s daughter Emilia (or according to some his elder daughter Lavinia), which Titian had sent to Alfonso II d’Este in 1561 with a note saying that the subject was the most beloved object of his heart and nothing could be dearer. Balbi was not the last person to interpret Titian’s letter as a reference to a mistress rather than a daughter.
