by Sheila Hale
Ridolfi also identified de’ Franceschi as one of the government officials wearing black caps in Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin, commissioned by the Scuola della Carità, but since he was not a member of the Scuola this idea has to be discounted.
THREE: THE MOST POWERFUL RULER IN THE WORLD
1 Sebastian Franck cited by Hale 1993.
2 Maximilian had made a point of having Albrecht Altdorfer depict him resolving a mutiny among his multilingual troops by understanding what they were all saying.
3 G. R. Elton, in Elton 1958.
4 The subsequent engagements were to Henry VII’s daughter Mary Tudor, who later married the widowed Louis XII; to Renée, another daughter of Louis XII, who married Ercole d’Este; and in 1516 to Francis I’s daughter Louise, who died the following year at the age of two.
5 After various deductions it actually amounted to 400,000 ducats, still an enormous sum.
6 In the dedication to Charles V of his paraphrase of the Gospel according to St Matthew.
7 He may have drawn it on a visit to Ferrara in July of that year or it may have been based on a lost portrait.
8 In his life of Titian, Vasari dates the first portrait of Charles in armour and the anecdote about Lombardo’s participation in the sitting to 1530, when Charles was in Bologna for the coronation, and says that Titian did another portrait on this second visit to that city. For that reason some scholars believe that there were two portraits, and some that the episode of the one-ducat tip (see II, 6) took place at Bologna in 1530. His reference to Genoa makes it clear, however, that Vasari, as often happened, mixed up his dates. In 1530 Charles travelled from Italy across the Alps to Austria. It was in 1533 that he embarked from Genoa. And it was in 1533 that Alfonso Lombardo was in Bologna.
9 See Hope 2005 for the various theories and for Hope’s controversial argument that the Prado portrait was not painted by Titian.
10 The Portrait of Alfonso d’Avalos, which was formerly in a private collection and on show in the Louvre, was bought in 2004 by the Getty Museum for $70 million, one of the highest prices paid for an Old Master painting at that time.
11 In the last edition of Orlando Furioso.
12 But see Joannides 2001 for a theory that they were by Titian.
13 The three paintings Titian selected for Cobos have never been convincingly identified. Titian may have made a replica for Alfonso of his portrait of him, and he certainly made one later for Alfonso’s son Ercole, but the only record we have of the portrait is the copy by another hand in the New York Metropolitan Museum.
14 Most were painted after 1548, when Titian visited the emperor’s court at Augsburg.
15 The farmland was finally sold at public auction for thirty-seven ducats per field, having failed to reach a reserve of thirty at two previous auctions.
16 Charles did not in fact come to Italy until June when he launched his crusade from Cagliari.
FOUR: THE VENUS OF URBINO
1 Most scholars have followed Vasari in suggesting that the portrait was painted in Bologna in 1532–3, but examination of archival evidence makes it clear that Ippolito actually sat for Titian during his stay in Venice from 18 to 31 October 1532, before proceeding to Bologna.
2 Hazlitt 1856.
3 Il trentuno di Angela Zaffetta by Lorenzo Venier, final edition published in 1536.
4 Tr. Chubb 1967.
5 I am convinced by Charles Hope’s plausible suggestion in conversation that the face of the Venus of Urbino is a portrait of Angela Zaffetta. I also have Guido Rebecchini to thank for his support of Hope’s theory and additional information given in a paper, ‘New Reflections on the Venus of Urbino’ delivered at a seminar at the London National Gallery on 17 March 2008. Other scholars have of course advanced different ideas about the identity of the reclining nude, one of which would inevitably have her as Titian’s mistress. Another, still in circulation, is that it is a bridal picture commissioned by Guidobaldo della Rovere. Guidobaldo acquired the painting in 1538, four years after his marriage to the ten-year-old Giulia Varano, daughter and heir of the Duke of Camerino. Guidobaldo, who was in love with another woman, Clarice Orsini, had been forced by his father, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, to marry Giulia, who brought with her the Duchy of Camerino. There is no evidence that he commissioned a bridal portrait, and his references to the painting call it simply a naked woman. The most absurd theory, that it is a portrait of Guidobaldo’s mother Eleonora Gonzaga, is based on the similarity of the little dog that appears also in Titian’s documented portrait of Eleonora.
6 Green or black hangings were standard decorative features in well-off Venetian houses. Such a cloth was itemized in an inventory of Titian’s possessions after his death.
7 In, for example, the Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi, the Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga and the Vendramin Family.
8 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880.
9 It was already ruined by 1900 when Charles Ricketts wrote that it had been ‘marred by minute and systematic restorations’ which made it impossible to judge its original quality.
10 There are a number of contemporary and later engravings, copies and copies of copies.
11 David Rosand who with Rona Goffen is one of the proponents of this theory has written that to deny her mythological status would be ‘to turn her out on the streets’.
12 The portrait of Lorraine was still in Titian’s possession in 1539. It may have been the one Vasari mentions in his ‘Life of Titian’ as being in the della Rovere collection, but seems to be lost. It is perhaps worth noting that while Cardinal Lorraine, who evidently shared Ippolito’s taste for orgies, was in Venice he attended a party ‘with masks and whores, with various furious sounds and lusty carousing’.
13 The copy for Cardinal Lorraine of Ippolito’s reclining Venus may be the very similar painting detected by technical investigation beneath the Danaë painted for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1544–5. Another possibility is that the painting he did for Lorraine is La Bella, which has the same face as the reclining nude.
14 The arousing combination of fur and an exposed breast had been exploited by Giorgione in his Laura painted early in the century. Titian’s Woman in a Fur Cloak was the prototype of Rubens’s Portrait of Helena Fourment in a Fur Wrap painted a century later. (Both Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.)
15 The ruined full-sized version at Christ Church, Oxford may be the remains of an original painted for Federico Gonzaga.
16 It looks as though he used the same model for the Christ in the two Suppers at Emmaus.
17 A pen drawing in Florence (Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe) has usually been thought to be a sketch of the armour requested by Francesco Maria in a letter to Leonardi requesting a ‘carta’ of an unidentified picture. Charles Hope offers the more likely hypothesis that the carta refers to a print of another subject and that the drawing is a later copy of the finished portrait by another hand, probably either as a sketch for a statue of Francesco Maria made for the celebrations in Urbino of the marriage of Guidobaldo della Rovere and Vittoria Farnese in 1547 or in Pesaro in 1571 for the marriage of Lucrezia d’Este and Francesco Maria II della Rovere.
18 The seated pose is based on Raphael’s Portrait of Joanna of Aragon (Paris, Louvre) of which Titian would have seen a cartoon in Ferrara in 1519.
19 Because Guidobaldo asked for these portraits in 1539 it is sometimes assumed that he commissioned them.
20 The first mention we have of it is in an inventory of the collection of Cardinal Mazarin taken in 1653.
21 There is also a sketchier version without a hat, at Harewood House in Yorkshire. There is no evidence that, as is often said, Titian based the portrait on a medal by Benvenuto Cellini made at Fontainebleau in 1537 (see John Pope-Hennessy, ed., The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, 2nd edn 1995), or that Aretino commissioned it as a gift to the French king.
22 The identification was repeated by Ridolfi, who often followed Vasari.
23 In that year
after the male line of the della Rovere had died out, the Duchy of Urbino was annexed to the Papal States and the collection brought to Florence by Vittoria della Rovere.
FIVE: THE ROMAN EMPERORS
1 Cited by Zimmerman 1995.
2 All of Titian’s portraits of Alfonso are known only from a copy in the New York Metropolitan Museum.
3 Most of the material about Federico Gonzaga and Titian that follows is abstracted from Bodart 1998.
4 Both paintings and the name of the Spaniard are lost.
5 The Scuola della Carità was occupied by the Accademia in 1807.
6 He had brought with him poets, historians and the Netherlandish artist Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, who made the first-hand sketches of every episode of the campaign, from the first mustering of troops in Barcelona to the embarkation from Tunis, that were the basis of his cartoons (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) for a set of tapestries (Madrid, Palazzo Real) to be commissioned by Charles a decade later and woven under the supervision of Mary of Hungary.
7 Neither painting survives.
8 From The Journal of Felix Platter, 1552–7, cited by Hale 1993.
9 ‘Da nuovo, il Duca de Marches va a man dritta di Sua Maestà, il qual resta Governatore in Italia de le S.ta. Così se dice.’
10 This is my hypothesis. Charles Hope believes that the postscript is more likely to refer to a person involved in the contest between Charles V and Francis I for the Duchy of Milan, probably not an Italian.
11 The General Council, which was scheduled for May of the following year, never took place because the Protestant leaders refused to attend on the grounds that a Council held in Italy would not be free.
12 Aretino, in an effusive letter of thanks on Titian’s behalf to Gonzalez Peréz, a trusted Spanish secretary of the emperor who had helped to negotiate the favour, promised that Titian would paint his portrait, thereby ‘nullifying with his effigy the reasons you may think you are mortal’.
13 In 1539, for example, Aretino solicited the help of Ottavio de’ Medici, promising that Titian would repay his intervention by going to Florence to paint portraits of himself, Duke Cosimo and his consort the Duchess Eleonora, and the widow of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere.
14 In 1571 Philip II decided to compensate him with a payment of 1,000 scudi.
15 A portrait of Ercole by Titian mentioned in contemporary sources is lost.
16 Cited by (and tr.) Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881. The officials who drew up the document had neglected to check the records. Titian had not received the sanseria until 1523. The amount owing would therefore have been 15 × 120 = 1,800 ducats.
17 He was also offering a portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent, which Federico had been requesting for some time. The portrait of Suleiman was almost finished when Agnello wrote on 23 August that Venetians who had met the Turkish sultan in Constantinople were saying that Titian’s portrayal of ‘Signor Turco’ was so like its subject that it seemed to be the living Turk himself.
18 Mendoza was waiting for Titian to return to Venice from Mantua where he hoped he would finish a portrait of his relative Pedro, which he would send to Cobos with his own.
19 It would have been difficult to fit twelve pictures into the room. There were three emperors on each wall, except for the window wall, where there were two. Bernardino Campi, who copied the series in 1562, added the twelfth, Domitian.
20 Bodart 1998, p. 163.
SIX: THE WRITERS’ VENICE
1 The entire letter is in Chambers and Pullan 1992.
2 10 March 1536. Tr. Chubb 1967.
3 Cardinals were not expected to be previously ordained as priests until the height of the Counter-Reformation.
4 After Michelangelo’s death the genitals were painted over with loincloths, which were not removed until the restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescos in the 1990s.
5 In the pronostico for 1534 he had written that Chieti would defect to Lutheranism, the implication being that for blinkered intolerance and pedantry the two of them were as bad as each other.
6 By Cleugh 1965.
7 My main authority for the poligrafi is Grendler 1966 and 1969. D’Elia 2005 has a useful list of the writers working in Venice during Titian’s lifetime with notes about their contacts with him.
8 According to Montaigne it was because ‘the princes and nobles of Italy spent more time in making themselves learned and clever rather than vigorous and warlike’ that Charles VIII had been able to take Tuscany and Naples without so much as drawing his sword.
9 I have abstracted the following comments from Hope 2008a.
10 From Horace’s Ars poetica, c. 10–8 BC.
11 D’Elia 2005 is one valiant attempt.
12 The letter is dated December 1553.
13 The attributions are endorsed by Puppi 2007. There are also three medal portraits of her by Alessandro Vittoria.
14 Tr. Chubb 1967.
15 The model was accepted in 1532, but although the gigantic brick walls were constructed by the time of Sansovino’s death the interior and the façade remain unfinished.
16 Although the Mint was Sansovino’s first major commission in the Piazza, the third storey was not raised until the 1560s. The fortress-like rustication impressed Jacopo’s son Francesco as ‘a worthy prison for precious gold’.
17 The library, which was built at the instigation of Bembo and the procurator Vettor Grimani to house Cardinal Bessarion’s collection of Greek manuscripts, was Sansovino’s masterpiece, later praised by Palladio as ‘the richest, most ornate building since Antiquity’. It took fifty years to build and cost some 30,000 ducats. The original plan was to extend its design along the south side of the Piazza, which was not completed until long after Sansovino’s death by Vincenzo Scamozzi.
18 The Loggetta, built between 1537 and 1549, was designed as a sheltered meeting place for patricians. Francesco Sansovino explained the allegorical programme his father devised in praise of Venice for his four bronze statues. Pallas represents the wisdom and good government of the Republic. Mercury signifies eloquence. Apollo stands for the sun, ‘just as Venice is a sun in the world’, and for music, that is for the harmonious government of Venice. Finally there is Peace, ‘so much loved by this Republic, and by which it has grown to such greatness …’.
19 After a fire burned down the old Corner palace in 1532 the family persuaded the government to finance a new palace on the grounds that the state owed them Caterina Cornaro’s dowry. But dispute over the estate delayed building until 1545 and the palace was not completed until 1566.
20 Sansovino never finished the façade, which was designed by Palladio. The church was finally consecrated in 1582.
21 See Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 1952, p. 91.
22 Some writers have been misled by Vasari, who said that the painting was sent to Charles V (rather than the empress) and that Titian was rewarded with 1,000 scudi.
23 I am reminded by D’Elia 2005 that, curious though it may now seem, it was Aretino’s description of the Annunciation in the Humanity of Christ, rather than his pornographic or anticlerical writings, that was singled out in 1558 in a petition to ban his books for being too physical, inventive and public in contravention of the traditional idea that the event must be kept secret to deceive the devil into thinking that it was a normal conception. Titian’s painting, however, was considered perfectly acceptable.
24 Tr. Bull 1976.
SEVEN: AN OLD BATTLE AND A NEW WAR
1 See I, 7 and III, 5, pp. 121–4 and 362.
2 See I, 7 for the sanseria, pp. 122–3.
3 Most of Pordenone’s work in Venice is lost, but the panels in the church of San Rocco give a good idea of his style.
4 The portrait is lost but an engraved portrait of Aretino by Salviati survives.
5 The sketch in Paris may have been owned at one time by Rubens, who made a drawing of the central group (Vienna, Albertina). The Rubens is also very close to a drawing in the Antwerp Muse
um Plantin-Moretus.
6 In Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni; Munich, Graphische Sammlung; Oxford, Ashmolean. While the study in Paris is unquestionably authentic there is some doubt about the others.
7 Tr. Bondanella and Bondanella 1996.
8 Tr. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
9 There seems no reason why Titian’s commission would have been an exception to the scheme of the room in which all other pictures – including those by Veronese, Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio, which were painted after Titian’s Battle – represented episodes from the legendary history of Frederic Barbarossa.
10 I owe this observation to Wilde 1974.
11 In 1545 and 1552. But his repeated requests in the 1560s that the sanseria should pass to his son Orazio were rejected.
12 Tintoretto, Veronese and Orazio Vecellio were all paid in cash for their paintings in the Hall although Tinoretto was promised a sanseria for his painting in commemoration of the Battle of Lepanto.
13 See Hope 1980c.
14 I have abstracted some of the information about the Presentation of the Virgin from Rosand 1976 and Hanning and Rosand 1983.
15 In The Cicerone, 1855, an historical guide to the art treasures of Italy.
16 Another interpretation of the obelisk would have it refer to ancient Egypt, where St Mark was martyred at Alexandria.
17 The phrase is Ricketts’s, 1900.
18 See Hope 1980a.
19 Panofsky 1969.
20 For example, Pater 1877.
21 I have taken the quotations from Ruskin and Taine from Augustus Hare’s pocket guide to Venice of 1891. Hare comments that the Presentation is one of Titian’s earliest works, an error he borrowed from Ridolfi, and that the ‘old woman with the eggs is one of his most powerful representations’.
22 It is not known exactly when Titian finished it but it was certainly by March 1539.
23 In the seventeenth century Marco Boschini wrote that he had been poisoned by Titian, an impossible charge that must have been based on exaggerated rumours about the rivalry between the two artists (Boschini 1966).
