by Sheila Hale
NINE: SACRED AND PROFANE
1 The story is summarized by Goffen 1993 and 1997a; and by Mayer 1939.
2 It was reproduced on one of the old Italian banknotes, and in the nineteenth century when the Villa Borghese was first opened to the public there was a seven-month waiting list of artists applying to copy it.
3 Wethey 1969–75, vol. 3, summarizes theories advanced up to 1975.
4 B. L. Brown 2008.
5 By Hood and Hope 1977.
6 I have this attractive speculation from Beverly Brown.
7 Sanudo incorrectly named Laura’s first husband Lombardo rather than Borromeo.
8 Thought to have commemorated the marriage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and Semiramide Appiani.
9 F. Sansovino said they wore white, with their hair unbound, in imitation of classical brides. But it is clear from Sanudo’s many descriptions of the weddings he attended on his frequent social rounds that they wore any colour they chose.
10 The theory advanced by Alice S. Wethey and mentioned in Wethey 1969–75, vol. 3, p. 177, has turned out, on closer technical examination, to be wishful thinking, although Titian’s scratches on the dish do seem to suggest a coat of arms.
11 The story is recounted in Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Polifili 1998.
12 The results of the technical examination are discussed in Rome 1995, the catalogue of the exhibition held after the cleaning. The restoration remains controversial. Some critics maintain that the cleaning was uneven, that the failure of the restorers to remove the areas of dark varnish that obscures the greens of the mid-distance upset the chromatic balance.
13 The graves have been cemented over.
14 The contemporary documents are contradictory about whether he did or did not receive the sanseria at this time. Most art historians have assumed that he did, but see Hope 1980c.
15 Valcanover 1997.
16 It was not until 1950 that the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin became Church dogma and it was therefore heretical to doubt it.
17 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
18 It was replaced in the Frari with an Assumption by Giuseppe Salviati from a suppressed church.
19 When we think of Titian, we are irresistibly led to think of music. His Assumption of the Madonna (the greatest single oil-painting in the world, if we except Raphael’s Madonna di San Sisto) can best be described as a symphony – a symphony of colour … a symphony of movement … a symphony of light without a cloud – a symphony of joy in which the heavens and earth sing Hallelujah.
Symonds 1906
In the ‘Assumption’ … the Virgin soars heavenward, not helpless in the arms of angels, but borne up by the fullness of life within her, and by the feeling that the universe is naturally her own, and that nothing can check her course. The angels seem to be there only to sing the victory of a human being over his environment. They are embodied joys, acting on our nerves like the rapturous outburst of the orchestra at the end of ‘Parsifal’.
Berenson (1930) 1938
20 Luke 20: 21–6. The episode is also recounted in Matthew 22: 17–22 and Mark 12: 14–17.
21 C. Gilbert 1980.
22 The suggestion is from Tietze-Conrat 1976.
23 Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, and possibly a Triumph of Bacchus by Pellegrino da San Daniele.
24 For the Submission of Frederick Barbarossa before Alexander III see II, 2.
25 When Rubens ‘translated The Worship of Venus into Flemish’, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881 put it, he turned some of the baby boys into baby girls.
Part II: 1518–1530
ONE: ALFONSO D’ESTE, DUKE OF FERRARA
1 Tr. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
2 The date of the portrait could be anything from 1523 to 1529. The original is lost but a copy, perhaps of a copy by Rubens, is in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3 Cited by Chambers 2006.
4 Chiappini 1967.
5 The Via Coperta is open to the public, reconstructed as it was during Alfonso’s reign and hung with reproductions of the works of art he placed there.
6 Antonio was the son of Pietro Lombardo and younger brother of the better-known Tullio.
7 The majority of Antonio’s surviving sculptures for Alfonso d’Este are in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Others are in Paris and Liechtenstein.
8 Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act IV, scene I), gives the name Philostratus to Theseus’ master of revels, hired ‘to wear away this long age of three hours, between our after supper and our bed time’.
9 He still had it in 1515 when she complained that he hadn’t returned it.
10 See Hood and Hope 1977.
11 Chiappini 1967.
12 Ariosto was employed by Ippolito and after the cardinal’s death by Alfonso from 1518 to 1522 as unofficial ambassador, and again from 1525 to 1528 when he was responsible for court theatrical entertainments.
13 The Submission of Frederick Barbarossa, begun by Giovanni Bellini, left unfinished at his death and completed by Titian.
14 Leonardo and Mantegna and the two Named Dossi, Gian Bellino, he whose skill In paint and marble may be likened to The Angel Michael’s, Bastian, Raphael, And Titian to whose mastery is due Such glory that Urbino shares no more And Venice shines no brighter, than Cador …
XXX, 10–16, TR. Barbara Reynolds
15 Her beauty is indeed beyond compare:
Not only on her brow, her eyes, her nose,
Her cheeks, her mouth, her shoulders and her hair
The observer’s glance may with delight repose,
But from her breasts descending, down to where
A gown is wont to cover her, she shows
A miracle of form, so exquisite
None in the world, perhaps, can equal it.
Whiter than snow unstained by the earth’s smutch
The perfect lily-whiteness of her skin,
And smoother far than ivory to touch;
Like milky curds but freshly heaped within
Their plaited moulds, her rounded breasts, and such
The gently curving space which lies between,
It calls to mind a valley ’twixt two hills
Which winter with its snowy softness fills.
Her lovely hips, the curving of her thighs,
Her belly, smooth as any looking-glass,
Her ivory limbs, were rounded in such wise
They might have been the work of Phidias.
Those other parts which to conceal she tries
I will, as it behoves, in silence pass,
Content to say that she, from top to toe,
Embodies all of beauty man can know.
XI, 67–9, TR. Barbara Reynolds
16 Paolo Giovio, in a translation by the Florentine Giovanni Battista Gelli, cited by Chiappini 1967.
17 This is my theory. Hope (in conversation with the present author) believes it was probably one of three things Titian painted for the duke in 1524–5.
18 Laura outlived Alfonso by thirty-nine years, during which she kept her own expensively elegant court of artists, writers, buffoons and beautiful young men. When she died in 1573 she was given a magnificent and well-attended funeral. Her legacy to a nephew was, as well as the Palazzo dei Diamanti – the most magnificent palace in Ercole I’s extension of the city – debts of over 200,000 scudi. Some nineteenth-century writers saw a younger Laura as the model for Titian’s earlier, more intimate Louvre Woman with a Mirror, with Alfonso as the man holding up a second mirror for her. There is in fact a resemblance between the two women. The pose of the Louvre model, wringing her hair like a Venus rising from the sea with her bared right arm – bared arms were considered highly erotic at a time when women did not show their arms in public – could refer to Alfonso’s passion for his lovely mistress. Since the Louvre woman looks about seven years younger than the portrait of Laura Dianti, and the painting is consistent with Titian’s style in the late 1510s and early 15
20s, Titian might have painted it during his first extended stay in Ferrara.
19 Philostratus did not specify a statue of Venus. Titian modelled his on an antique sculpture in the Grimani collection.
TWO: BACCHUS AND ARIADNE
1 Tr. James Michie, The Poems of Catullus, London 1969.
2 The principal source for Titian and Alfonso d’Este is Campori 1875. Charles Hope has shared with me a number of documents and letters that were not known to Campori.
3 He may also have been working on an altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Sts Stephen [holding a palm], Jerome and ?Maurice for a Venetian chapel dedicated to St Jerome, the most prominent saint. Titian must have been pleased with this composition, in which the Virgin and Child are, unusually at that date, on one side as they would be in the finished Pesaro Madonna, because he made three variations. The earliest, beneath the surface of which X-rays have revealed his characteristic pentimenti, is probably the one on panel in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Vienna picture was the prototype for the one in the Louvre, which is on canvas and in which St Jerome wears a cardinal’s hat, and is without pentimenti. Since this painting can be traced back to an inventory of the Este collection it is probable that Titian gave or sold it to Alfonso d’Este. Examination of a third version (London, Chiswick House) reveals pentimenti similar to those beneath the Vienna picture, a discovery that has led some authorities to speculate that there may have been a lost original from which all three derive.
4 Sanudo described the fire as like the burning of Troy, only worse.
5 D’Elia 2005.
6 In the final version in Brescia the St Sebastian is tied to a tree.
7 It could be the portrait of Tommaso Mosti.
8 Interestingly, sculptures of these two subjects are on the outside of the Palazzo Ducale where the law courts and prisons were.
9 See Schulz 1982. The house is identified as belonging to the Tron family and as located in the sestiere of San Polo in depositions concerning Titian’s marriage to Cecilia made in 1550. Anna Jameson, ‘The House of Titian’, in her Memoirs and Essays, 1846, plausibly suggested that it was in the Calle Ca’ Lipoli, behind the Frari, but her source is not known and the house is now demolished.
10 Some scholars have seen the pointing to her abdomen as signifying that it is a marriage portrait.
11 See I, 8, pp. 146–9.
12 Both seem to have been painted in the early 1520s in the early years of Titian’s work on Alfonso’s Bacchanals, although since there is no record of either of them being in the Este collection they were probably done for Venetian patrons who would not have recognized Cecilia since Titian kept her strictly at home.
13 Tr. Hope 1973.
14 While some scholars have proposed 31 May for the unveiling, Hope has demonstrated in an unpublished commentary that Averoldi cannot have been in Brescia on that day and the more likely date is 28 July, which was the feast of Sts Nazzarus and Celso.
15 Averoldi’s Resurrection altarpiece is still over the high altar of the Brescian church of Santi Nazzaro e Celso. The church itself, however, was rebuilt in the eighteenth century.
16 The painting, which had suffered over the years from blistering and relinings, was subjected to a controversial restoration by the National Gallery in the late 1960s.
17 In a document of 1598, when Ferrara had passed to the Papacy, the painting was described as ‘a Laocoön’.
18 It is not known what this panel painting was. It cannot have been the Flora, Venus Anadyomene or Tommaso Mosti, all of which seem to have been painted around this time, but all on canvas.
19 My principal source for Titian and Federico Gonzaga is Bodart 1998.
20 As imperial commander in the 1527 Sack of Rome he saved the life of his mother Isabella. The following year he was rewarded by the emperor with the dukedom of Ariano (now Ariano Irpino) for having saved Naples from a siege by the French. In 1535 he served as Charles V’s viceroy in Sicily, and from 1546 to 1554 as governor and captain general of Milan. He died in Brussels in 1557.
21 Nothing is known for certain about the Man with a Glove before Louis XIV acquired it in 1671. Other suggestions about its subject have been Girolamo Adorno, Charles V’s ambassador to Venice, or Giambattista Malatesta, Federico Gonzaga’s envoy in Venice.
THREE: A NEW DOGE, A RIVER OF WINE AND MARRIAGE
1 Elder Philostratus, Younger Philostratus, Callistratus, tr. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 156, London 1931.
2 The chronology of the Andrians is less certain than for the first two Bacchanals. It is likely to have been painted after his visit to Federico Gonzaga’s court because two of the figures are quotations from fragments of Michelangelo’s cartoons for his unfinished Battle of Cascina, which were in Mantua at that time. I am following Hope’s cogently argued theory about the sequence of the paintings executed for Alfonso d’Este in 1524–9.
3 Hadriani vita, 1551, cited by Zimmermann 1995.
4 Titian’s official portrait of Gritti with his predecessor Doge Antonio Grimani was painted in 1540 for the frieze of Venetian doges in the Great Council Hall of the doge’s palace. The original was destroyed when the hall went up in flames in 1577, but there are several surviving studio copies. The Washington portrait, which would have been taken from a record Titian had kept of his official portrait or from one of the studio copies, was probably painted for Gritti’s family. The canvas was not primed and since it has never been relined the very free paintwork has survived in good condition.
5 Destroyed by fire in the 1570s. In 1555 the government commissioned from Titian the posthumous votive portrait now in the Sala delle Quattro Porte, in which Grimani, his sins against the state long since forgotten or forgiven, wears a suit of armour under his ducal robe, his martyrdom symbolized by the cross and the cup before which he kneels in worship. It was still in Titian’s studio at the time of his death, and was later completed under the dogeship of Marino Grimani by Titian’s younger relative Marco Vecellio.
6 We know the dates from the records of wine supplied to his two assistants during that period, which were discovered by Hope in the 1970s. (See Hope 1987, p. 26 and n. 13.) The only other document that relates to this extended visit is a record in a court account book dated 10 September 1524 about a previous purchase of half an ounce of ultramarine and one ounce of lake to give to Titian, which presumably relates to the work he did for the duke in the preceding spring and summer.
7 The statue, then thought to be of Cleopatra, is now in the Vatican, where it is known as Ariadne.
8 Alberto Zio and Marco Luciano Rizzo.
9 For the mosaics see Merkel 1980. Zuccato’s St George strikes the same pose, leaning forward with one leg bent, as the men in the Padua fresco of the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, the Glasgow Christ and the Adulteress (Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery) and the Virgin and Child with Sts Anthony of Padua and Roch (Madrid, Prado). The little angels that surround the tondo of the Prophet David are cousins of the angels in the Assunta and the rollicking cupids in the Worship of Venus. Titian must have been personally responsible for the cartoon for the Prophet Ezekiel, the most technically complex and accomplished of the sacristy mosaics signed by Francesco Zuccato, in which the caryatids that support the tondo recall the pose of the bacchant pouring wine in the Andrians, while the face of the gorgon between them seems to anticipate the face of the screaming boy in the Ecce Homo, which was painted twenty years later. And these are only some of the images from his past, present and future works with which Titian paid his respects to the traditional art form that taught him something about how to make his own oil paintings sing from a distance.
10 All that is known for certain about the birthdates of his two sons, Pomponio and Orazio, is that they were born by the time he married Cecilia in November 1525.
11 Campori 1875 cites a record dated 15 January 1528 of a payment of fifteen lire to a carter who took Titian, who was on his way to Venice, from Ferrara to the port of Francolino. Ther
e are, however, no wine records for this visit, and Hope has been unable to find the document in question.
12 An inscription written much later on the reverse reads ‘Tommaso de’ Mosti, aged twenty-five, in the year 1526, by Titian’. But Tommaso de’ Mosti had become a priest in 1525, and because he is not wearing a clerical robe in this portrait some scholars have mooted that the sitter was his brother Vincenzo, while others, on the grounds that the style is closer to Titian’s portraits earlier in the 1520s, prefer the theory that it is the date that is incorrect rather than the identification of Tommaso.
13 Some scholars maintain that the portrait was done earlier, possibly during Titian’s first long stay in Ferrara in 1519–20.
14 I am grateful to Charles Hope for sharing with me the evidence of an unpublished record of a payment to a boatman for bringing Titian to Ferrara on 22 October 1525.
15 The depositions concerning the marriage by Francesco and two other witnesses are published in Ludwig Gustav, ‘Neue Funde im Staatsarchiv zu Venedig’, Jahrbuch der preuszischen Kunstsammlungen, 1903.
FOUR: THE FALL OF A WORLD
1 As reported by Gasparo Contarini, cited by Tyler 1956.
2 See I, 4, p. 62.
3 A restoration in 1977 revealed the numerous pentimenti.
