Titian

by Sheila Hale

  4 Goffen 1986.

  5 See III, 1 and 4, pp. 293 and 348.

  6 Francesco Vettori, Sommario dell’istoria d’Italia dell’anno 1512–27, cited by Umberto Bile in Naples 2006.

  7 For the Sack of Rome, its background and consequences see especially Hook 1972.

  8 His only complete surviving building from before the Sack is Palazzo Gaddi in Rome.

  9 From Asti, 31 May 1536, and from Augsburg, 11 November 1550.

  10 May 1542.

  11 Camesasca and Pertile, September 1552.

  12 Ibid., January 1545.

  13 Burckhardt 1990.

  14 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.

  15 Aretino 2003–4, vol. II, no. 386.

  16 To Lope de Soria dated 20 March 1542.

  17 11 November 1550. Stella 1977 speculates that Aretino’s generosity to the poor may indicate that he had Anabaptist sympathies.

  18 Because the copyright laws in Renaissance Italy did not prevent pirated editions, writers earned less from royalties but more from patrons to whom they dedicated their books.

  19 Camesasca and Pertile, January 1544.

  FIVE: THE TRIUMVIRATE OF TASTE

  1 To Niccolò Franco, dated 25 June 1537.

  2 Ragionamento de le corti, 1538.

  3 In his first book, Opera Nova, published in 1512, he describes himself on the title page as a painter.

  4 Nine fragments of the originals are preserved in the British Museum.

  5 In his letter to Francis I he describes the chain as weighing five pounds. But in his play Il Marescalco (The Stablemaster) the groom tells a goldsmith that, unlike the flimsy chains made in Venice, they should be ‘like the one the king of France sent as a gift to Pietro Aretino as far as Venice, which weighs eight pounds’.

  6 A reference to the Old Testament, Jeremiah 9: 5: ‘they have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary themselves to commit iniquity’.

  7 Tr. Chubb 1967, no. 12.

  8 In a letter to Ippolito de’ Medici.

  9 Pronostico of 1534.

  10 1541.

  11 Hope points out (in conversation with the present author) that when Aretino wrote the letter for publication on 6 October 1527 there is no evidence that Sebastiano was in Venice, and that Federico never mentioned him or the painting in his reply to Aretino. He believes that Aretino, who often moved material from earlier letters to those intended for publication, transplanted the passage about Sebastiano and the picture from a letter written at the time it was originally commissioned in 1524, and that it was probably never painted or delivered.

  12 For Aretino’s apartment see Schulz 1982.

  13 The letter is dated October 1537.

  14 Chubb 1967, no. 38.

  15 It has traditionally been assumed that Lavinia was Cecilia’s daughter. Charles Hope has, however, provided convincing evidence that after Cecilia’s death in 1530 Titian married again (to be discussed in Part III).

  16 Laura Giannetti Ruggiero, in a paper delivered at the 2005 joint annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America and British Society for Renaissance Studies, suggested that the immoderate desire for food, and particularly for edible treats like melons that were considered dangerous, was associated with sodomy in sixteenth-century Italy.

  17 In Naples, Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, c. 1544–5, painted for Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici; and Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, c. 1549–50, painted for Philip of Spain.

  SIX: CAESAR IN ITALY

  1 Commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici but not published until 1721. Cited by Hook 1972.

  2 Charles Hope has shared with me his unpublished summary of what is known about the commissioning of the St Peter Martyr and the subsequent dispute over payment (see also II, 7).

  3 It is often assumed that Pordenone took part in the competition on the basis of his drawing of the subject now in the Uffizi. It seems unlikely because Pordenone is not documented as being in Venice between the petition of November 1525 and the death of Palma in 1528, although there is a gap in the records of his whereabouts between May and September 1525.

  4 After joining the Scuola he designed a woodcut of St Roch to raise funds for its building, which was still in progress. The charming if surprisingly conventional Annunciation that is displayed in the Sala dell’Albergo was painted much later for a patron who later became a member of the Scuola to which he bequeathed the painting.

  5 I have Charles Hope to thank for the notary’s document about the sale, dated 3 April 1528, and so far unpublished.

  6 The painting is known as the Aldobrandini Madonna because it was first recorded in the collection of Pietro Aldobrandini in 1603. Nothing is known about the patron or circumstances of the commission, but, since he probably inherited it from Lucrezia d’Este some scholars have speculated that it may have been painted for Alfonso d’Este.

  7 Titian’s Country, 1869.

  8 Alfonso took the opportunity to joke that he would keep Michelangelo prisoner until he had promised to accept an order for a painting or sculpture, whichever he preferred. And Michelangelo did in fact paint for him the Leda and the Swan, of which there is an old copy in the London National Gallery. But he was so angered by the lukewarm reaction of Alfonso’s Roman agent that he gave it instead to a disciple.

  9 Although there is no direct evidence that Titian repainted the Feast of the Gods on this extended visit to Ferrara, there is no other known large-scale work that could have detained him there at this time.

  10 See II, 3.

  11 The location of the camerino d’alabastro and the arrangement of the paintings in it has been extensively investigated by Charles Hope, 1971 and 1987. The main evidence is the inventories made of the rooms in 1598, the year in which the Bacchanals were stolen and taken to Rome. Vasari in the second edition of the Lives describes them as the best things Titian had ever done, but since his description of the contents of the room is mistaken he must have based it on information provided by someone else. The Via Coperta is now hung with reproductions in what is thought to have been their original positions and is open to the public.

  12 My principal authority for Titian’s relationship with Federico Gonzaga is Bodart 1998.

  13 In The Winter’s Tale, Act V, scene ii: ‘The princess, hearing of her mother’s statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina – a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.’

  14 Cited by Burns 1981, p. 32.

  15 Howard Burns in London 1981.

  16 Titian painted three portraits of Federico Gonzaga. The other two are lost. Not all scholars agree with Hope, Bodart and myself that the Prado portrait was painted in 1529. Some date it earlier and some to 1531 when he married Maria’s sister Margherita Paleologo.

  17 The conference centre on the borders of France and the imperial Netherlands was the setting of several agreements between the Habsburgs and Valois, most famously of the League formed in 1509 with the intention of destroying the Venetian Republic.

  18 There is a difference of opinion about whether Titian went to Parma with Federico. Hope has maintained that he did and that the plan for a portrait was rejected; Wethey 1969–75, vol. 2, implies that their first meeting was at Bologna later in the year. I am following Hope’s argument in an appendix to Hood and Hope 1977.

  19 Boschini (1660) 1966.

  20 Cited by Parker 1999.

  21 I have the description from Mitchell 1986 and Hook 1972.

  22 Cited by Hook 1972.

  23 Ibid.

  24 A member of the imperial household described the highpoints of the ceremony.

  When they had got as far in the mass as the gradual, the two cardinals came to get His Majesty [and] led him to the pope, to whom he bowed, falling to his knees. Then the pope took the naked imperial sword that the sacristan handed him and put it in the right hand of the emperor, saying: accipe gladium etc. Then the deacon
took it from the hand of the emperor and put it back into its sheath, and the pope and the cardinal deacon girded it around the emperor. [The latter] rose [and], unsheathing [the sword], brandished it three times, then put it back in its sheath and knelt. And then the pope gave him the orb in the right hand and the sceptre in the left and [put] the crown on his head, while making some prayers. Then the emperor kissed the feet of the pope and ungirded his sword, which he gave to the duke of Urbino. He sat down in a chair on the right hand of the pope and remained there until the offertory.

  25 See II, 2, p. 202.

  SEVEN: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN ITALY

  1 Jacopo Palma did an inferior version, dated c. 1527, for a small town near Bergamo, possibly based on his design for the competition with Titian that he had instigated.

  2 By Luca Bertelli, Giovanni Battista Fontana and Martino Rota.

  3 Boschini 1660, cited by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881. Boschini may have been referring to an attempt by Daniel Nijs to buy it for Charles I of England for 18,000 scudi.

  4 The transfer of paintings from panel to canvas was a radical intervention developed in Paris in the eighteenth century for the treatment of paintings where the original wood panel was considered an unstable support for the paint (for example, if it was riddled with worm channels). After securing the face of the painting, the transfer process involved planing away the wood support from the reverse, usually removing the ground, and then sticking the paint layers to a canvas support and mounting the composite on a stretcher, like a painting on canvas. The practice was largely discontinued early in the twentieth century, in favour of less invasive techniques for the treatment of wood panels.

  5 Hazlitt 1856.

  6 Burckhardt, The Cicerone, 1855.

  7 Tr. Hope 1980a.

  8 Altarpieces depicting the violence and suffering of the Crucifixion and martyred saints had been fairly usual in the fourteenth century but were abandoned during the Renaissance of classical restraint and the idealization of religious subjects, and were not considered acceptable until the Council of Trent recommended that painters emphasize the suffering caused to Christian martyrs by pagan heretics.

  9 Cozzi 1973.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Soon after the proclamations of the Peace of Bologna the pope had persuaded the Republic of Florence to send delegates to that city. Naively optimistic as ever, they arrived expecting to be received as representatives of a sovereign state only to be stopped at the gate by the police who interrogated them and ransacked their luggage. They received a chilly reception from both pope and emperor, and having refused the emperor’s order to allow Pope Clement’s Medici relatives to return to Florence, the Florentines departed the next day. The Republic of Florence held out against a combined papal–imperial siege until August when it finally surrendered and, with the support of some other members of what would become the Florentine aristocracy, was forced to accept the return of the Medici as private citizens and the right of the emperor to oversee the stabilization of its constitution. It wasn’t long before the Medici staged an armed coup d’état, and Charles V crushed any latent republican tendencies in the city by creating Alessandro de’ Medici the first duke of what would from then on be an aristocratic Florence under imperial control.

  12 Mallett and Hale 1984.

  13 1537 to Paul Manutius.

  14 Boschini 1966.

  15 Sperone Speroni, Dialogo d’Amore, 1542, cited by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.

  16 His three very large portraits of doges – Andrea Gritti 1531, Pietro Lando 1540 and Marcantonio Trevisan 1553–4 – painted for the Sala del Collegio in the doge’s palace were said to be the best in the palace but were lost to fire.

  17 Lomazzo cited by Wilde 1974.

  18 One of many examples of his failures that can be seen in provincial galleries or the basements of major public collections is a very dull but undeniably authentic portrait done in the 1520s or 1530s of Paolo da Ponte, which at the time of writing is with a Venetian dealer.

  19 Berenson 1938.

  20 D’Elia 2005 gives a useful list of Titian’s literary acquaintances and attempts to elucidate their influence on him.

  21 See for example Gentili 1988 and 1993.

  Part III: 1530–1542

  ONE: THE PORTRAIT OF CORNELIA

  1 I have abstracted the material about the portrait of Cornelia from Bodart 1998.

  2 Unfortunately all but a few are now lost.

  3 For Agnello see Chambers 1993.

  4 De civilitate morum puerilium libellus.

  5 None of Titian’s portraits of Suleiman is known to have survived, although it is possible that one or more is preserved in copies.

  6 Isabella had been secretly betrothed by her stepmother to Ferrante’s cousin Luigi Gonzaga of Sabbioneta.

  7 David Rosand in 1994 published a signed St Sebastian in a private collection, which he suggested was the one Titian sent to Federico Gonzaga. Bodart 1998, who disagrees, believes it might have been a copy of the St Sebastian painted for Averoldo Altobello in the early 1520s.

  8 Gregorio held no offices in Cadore after 1527. He was still alive in 1529, but there is no record of him after that year.

  9 There is no certain way of dating the portrait, which could have been painted on one of Titian’s visits to Mantua or in Venice, where Isabella was frequently to be found.

  10 In the Portrait of Francisco de los Cobos by Jan Gossaert painted in Flanders between 1530 and 1532, he wears in his hat a cameo portrait of a woman who we can safely assume was Cornelia Malaspina.

  TWO: THE HOUSE IN BIRI GRANDE

  1 H. C. J. Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the XVII Century, or The World, the Flesh and the Spirit, their Actions and Reaction, 1929, cited by Haskins 1993.

  2 It is often thought to be the version in the Louvre, although Hope disagrees and questions the attribution of that painting to Titian.

  3 Apart from the famous version in the Florence, Pitti Palace, Galleria Palatina, there are examples in Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana; St Petersburg, Hermitage; Los Angeles, Getty Museum; a private collection in Busto Arsizio (Varese); a private collection in Tokyo; and Genoa, Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini.

  4 Scholars disagree about whether the version in the Florence Pitti is identical or similar to the one painted for Vittoria Colonna. It cannot be identical because in the letter Titian sent to Federico with the painting on 14 April 1531 he described his Magdalen covering her breasts with her hands. Nor is the Pitti painting ‘as tearful as possible’. Views are also polarized about whether Titian intended the Pitti Magdalen to be high-class pornography or whether she carried a serious religious purpose. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Hope and Haskins have taken the former position while Goffen and D’Elia argue that she was intended to convey the ambiguities of chaste desire and that Vittoria Colonna would have appreciated her for that reason. It is also possible that d’Avalos kept the painting commissioned on his behalf by Federico Gonzaga and had another more seemly version painted for Vittoria Colonna.

  5 Ruskin 1974, vol. II.

  6 The principal source for Titian’s house is Cadorin 1833. The most useful modern account that I know of is Schulz 1982.

  7 A casa da statio not on the Grand Canal cost about 4,000 ducats to build. Patricians who preferred to rent rather than buy or build paid between 50 and 200 ducats, while low-paid workers found accommodation for less than ten.

  8 Letter to the Duke of Alba, 31 October 1573.

  9 The conventional view is that Lavinia was the daughter of Cecilia, born some time between Titian’s marriage to her in 1525 and her death in 1530. For the evidence from which Charles Hope has deduced the existence of the second wife see Hope 2007.

  10 The owner responsible for the most radical adaptations that transformed Titian’s casa da statio into a nineteenth-century tenement was Antonio Busetto, who built the railway bridge across the Lagoon, began the commercial development of the Lido and after buying
the Fondaco dei Turchi, the medieval Turkish warehouse on the Grand Canal, tore down most of it before the city bought him out.

  11 The address is Cannaregio 5179–5183.

  12 There is a good deal of confusion and controversy about this painting, which Vasari dated to the 1520s. The most detailed analysis of the two superimposed paintings that were discovered beneath its surface during its transfer to canvas in the early 1960s is Hope and Hood 1977, although not all scholars agree with their conclusions.

  13 Wilde 1974 suggested that the prototype was Michelangelo’s Redeemer of 1521.

  14 Ridolfi, who said he had copied the Verona Assumption, claimed that the apostle with his hands clasped was a portrait of the architect Michele Sanmicheli, who was working in Verona at the time.

  15 Théophile Gautier in his guide to the Louvre of 1867 was the first of many to compare it to Leonardo’s Last Supper. For much of its history it was known, after the beautifully painted white cloth that covers the table, as ‘The Tablecloth’.

  16 Titian’s underdrawing, discovered when the picture was relined in 1935, reveals a much simpler composition, which Titian may have worked up for d’Avalos.

  17 De’ Franceschi was elected grand chancellor by a large majority, although one of the electors had asked if it would be possible to re-elect Titian’s old patron Niccolò Aurelio (see I, 9) who was still in exile in Treviso even though his name had been unofficially cleared, but was told that having been deprived of all civil rights he could not be considered as a candidate. According to his will, dated 1 March 1535, de’ Franceschi owned two portraits of himself by Titian, which he bequeathed to two different nephews. A version of Titian’s portraits of de’ Franceschi appears again in a much later painting at Hampton Court in which he is accompanied by a portrait of Titian and a copy of Titian’s painting of a man known, from the inscription on a letter he holds, as Titian’s ‘Special Friend’ (San Francisco, M. H. De Young Memorial Museum). This triple portrait, now thought to have been painted by a follower of Titian, is the subject of Alan Bennett’s play A Question of Attribution. Bennett got the idea when a copy of the Special Friend, which was blanked out at some time in the painting’s history, was uncovered during a cleaning in the late twentieth century.