by Sheila Hale
24 St John the Almsgiver, a wealthy patriarch of Alexandria in the seventh century who was very generous to the poor, was an unusual and engaging saint. He was married and died of natural causes rather than of martyrdom. The dedication to him of the first church on the site, which was probably founded not long after his lifetime, is an example of the close links between the Greek Orthodox and the Venetian Christian Churches.
25 Zanetti, 1733, cited by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
26 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
27 Wilde 1974.
28 Including Hans Tietze 1950. Augusto Gentili in Vienna 2008 moves the date forward to 1549–50, the patron to Doge Francesco Donà of whom he suggests the face of the saint is a ‘masked image’.
29 The votive portrait in the Collegio was destroyed by fire in 1574, the portrait for the frieze in the Great Council Hall in 1577.
30 Others are in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and a private collection in Scotland.
31 The date is unknown. Some scholars believe it was painted in the 1530s before Gritti’s death; others that the free style suggests a date in the late 1540s.
32 P. Daru, Histoire de la République Patricienne, 1828, cited by Norwich 1981.
EIGHT: TITIAN IN HIS FIFTIES
1 Melchizedek was the Old Testament priest to whom Abraham paid one-tenth of the spoils of a victory.
2 The letter is dated November 1537, which gives the impression that the twelve-year-old Pomponio was born in 1525, the year when Titian married his mother in order to legitimize the two boys, who were already born. Since Pomponio, the elder of the two, cannot have been born later than 1523, Aretino may have got his age wrong, but it is more likely that the letter was written earlier than 1537 and is one of the many in the first volume of his letters that he misdated November or December 1537 because the letters were supposed to be in chronological order and by the time he sent copies to the printers that was as far as he had got.
3 All Titian’s paintings for Santo Spirito in Isola were removed to Longhena’s newly built Salute in 1656. Santo Spirito, which was used by Napoleon’s navy for storing gunpowder, no longer survives.
4 For recently discovered documents about the property see Tagliaferro and Aikema 2009.
5 The Hellenistic History of the Loves of Leucippus and Clytophonte by Achille Tatius, of which a Latin translation was dedicated to Mendoza in 1544.
6 The Fable of Adonis, Hippomenes and Atalanta, published in Venice in 1553 but written during his years as ambassador there.
7 The sonnet is in a letter to Mendoza dated 15 August 1542.
8 The sonnet is in a letter addressed to Marc’Antonio d’Urbino which Aretino dated 16 August 1540.
9 Tr. Bondanella and Bondanella 1996.
10 It is for this reason that some scholars have thought that the full-length portrait of a man in Spanish dress (Florence, Galleria Palatina) might be of Mendoza. But the identification remains at best controversial because it is known that the portrait of Mendoza, which was last recorded in Guadalajara in the nineteenth century, was subsequently lost.
11 Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
12 For the arguments in favour of the earlier date see Hope 1993.
13 Burckhardt, 1898, cited by Enrico Castelnuovo in Naples 2006.
14 The similarity of the features to a medal by Domenico Poggini (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) has convinced many scholars of its subject. The portrait is not, however, documented, and Vasari, who was a close friend of Varchi, never mentioned it, although it would have been well known in Florence if it had existed.
15 Beverly Brown has suggested to me in conversation that the putti represent Eros and anti-Eros fighting over the erotic destiny of the child.
16 Before the painting was cleaned in 1965–6 and the two men subsequently identified by Michael Jaffé, theories about their identities included Machiavelli and Francesco Sforza, Cosimo de’ Medici and his secretary, and a Venetian senator and his secretary.
17 Suggested by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881 and by Charles Hope in conversation with the present author.
18 The hypothesis is from Hope, who confesses that it is weakened by a medal portrait of Lando heavily bearded that bears little resemblance to Titian’s portrait.
19 I have abstracted information about new research into the Vendramin family and Titian’s portrait from Penny in Madrid 2003 and Penny 2008.
20 This self-portrait, which is lost, was the prototype Titian chose for the woodcut self-portrait he commissioned from Giovanni Britto in 1550.
21 See Whistler and Dunkerton 2009. The painting was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum in 2008.
22 There is a theory, mentioned by Hudson 2009 who does not however name his source, that Giorgione’s Tempesta was a cover for a portrait of the Venetian commander Bartolomeo d’Alviano.
23 Gabriele, who died in 1552, had left the collection to three of his nephews on condition that it remained intact. The inventory, dated March 1569, was ordered because one of the brothers was trying to sell it off to Albrecht V of Bavaria without the consent of the others. This part of it was drawn up by Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio.
24 Gabriele died on 15 March 1552, two days after Titian had witnessed a codicil to his will.
25 It entered Van Dyck’s collection in England in the early seventeenth century and was copied by several English painters including Gainsborough.
26 Bembo had failed to advance his career in the Roman Curia under the papacies of the virtuous Adrian VI and Clement VII, who disapproved of his private life. Paul III, a keen patron of the arts and literature who had kept a mistress while a cardinal, had no such objections. Before accepting his cardinal’s hat he had spent nearly two decades in the family house in Padua where he wrote among other works his famous and influential treatise on language, the Prose della vulgar lingua, advocating the literary use of vernacular Italian, which was in his view Tuscan.
27 Titian is known to have portrayed Vincenzo Cappello in 1540 from a letter and a sonnet praising the painting and its subject sent by Aretino to his nephew on Christmas Day. The composition is based on the Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, but some authorities attribute it to Tintoretto.
28 For d’Avalos see also III, 3.
29 Some authorities prefer to see the source of his inspiration in the architecture of Michele Sanmicheli, who was building the new city gates of Verona and the magnificent fortress on the Venetian island of Sant’Andrea.
30 Like all celebrities that have been around too long the Laocoön had become the subject of jokes, and was to some extent discredited after Michelangelo discovered that it was not all of one piece. The design of a woodcut by Boldrini of monkeys ‘aping’ the statue was attributed to Titian by Ridolfi, but could equally be by, for example, Domenico Campagnola.
31 The other two payments were made in April 1541 and January 1543.
32 Ferragosto, the Italian holiday, which now takes place on 15 August, was an ancient Roman celebration of midsummer, the season of ripening and fertility. Its name derives from the Latin Feriae Augusti, the fairs of the (emperor) Augustus.
33 Tr. Chambers and Pullan 1992.
Part IV: 1543–1562
ONE: ARETINO PLAYS PONTIUS PILATE
1 When it failed to arrive Aretino published an accusation that the money had been stolen by the English ambassador, who had him beaten up by seven Englishmen. The public outrage was such that he finally received his reward.
2 Cited by Zimmerman 1995.
3 See, for example, letters dated 20 July 1538, 15 and 20 March and 21 April 1539.
4 Cited by Flavia Polignano, ‘I ritratti dei volti e i registri dei fatti: L’Ecce Homo di Tiziano per Giovanni d’Anna’, Venezia Cinquecento, no. 4, 1992, pp. 7–54.
5 The painting measures 2.40 × 3.60 metres.
6 Technical investigation has shown that the Ecce Homo was originally planned as a multi-figure composition but that Titian al
tered the gestures and postures of some of his figures and that the Roman soldier who bears the Habsburg shield at the foot of the steps was a last addition.
7 The red robe and ermine shawl, which was worn by Venetian doges, has persuaded some authorities that this is the reigning doge Pietro Lando. But he looks nothing at all like contemporary portraits of the lean and ascetic Lando and more like stock representations of Jews. Woodcuts by Dürer in which Caiaphas is portrayed in this way were in circulation in Venice and would have been known to Titian. The doge’s costume may be a further suggestion of a rich Jew’s presumptuous ignorance of protocol in the City of Christ.
8 Cited by Zimmerman 1995 from the Commentario de le cose de’Turchi first printed in 1532.
9 See Hope 2007b. Hope is the first scholar to have found evidence that Titian married again some time after the death of his first wife Cecilia in 1530 and that Lavinia, who has previously been thought to have been Cecilia’s daughter, was born around 1535. Previous authorities, assuming that Lavinia would have been in her early teens when Titian was painting the Ecce Homo, have proposed her as the girl in white. Hope is also the first authority to suggest that the older girl might be Cecilia Alessandrini and the first to have noticed the resemblance of the little girl to the later portrait of Lavinia.
10 Polignano 1992, from whom I have drawn my account with some reservations.
11 The value of the benefice in the 1540s is not known, but by Titian’s death in 1576 it was worth 400 ducats per annum.
TWO: THE LAST GREAT POPE OF THE RENAISSANCE
1 I have this suggestion from Zapperi 1990.
2 To Benedetto Varchi, 12 February 1547.
3 The foundation stone of the new St Peter’s had been laid in 1506 by Julius II, but his death and the death of his architect Bramante left the project incomplete. Michelangelo was seventy-two in 1547 when he was appointed chief architect of the rebuilding. He worked on it for the rest of his life but only the drum of his stupendous dome was completed by the time of his death in 1564.
4 Rabelais recounted the story of the pope’s bastard children in a letter written from Rome in 1536 to a French bishop who had requested information about Paul’s private life.
5 They were married after the death of Margaret’s betrothed Alessandro de’ Medici when she was sixteen and Ottavio fifteen. The marriage proved extremely unhappy. Margaret never thought the grandson of a pope a good enough match for the natural daughter of the emperor. They soon parted, and later in life she became regent of the Netherlands under Charles’s son Philip II of Spain.
6 Cited by Brandi 1970.
7 Ibid.
8 The sources about Titian’s two portraits of Isabella – the one now in Madrid probably painted at Augsburg in 1548 – are incomplete and confusing. Titian wrote to the emperor on 5 October 1544 that he was dispatching two portraits of the empress and begging him to send word of any faults and failings so that he could correct them. But since there is also a letter from Charles written in April 1545 asking about Titian’s progress with a portrait of Isabella it could be that one of the two portraits sent in 1544 was the ‘trivial’ model, which he had been asked to return.
9 The seven volumes of Vesalius’ groundbreaking book De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) were published in Basel in 1543 with a dedication to Charles V and illustrations by one of Titian’s pupils.
10 Giovanni dei Rossi of Pisa.
11 Although Vasari said he painted the portrait for Guido di Santa Fiora shortly after the first some scholars prefer to place it later, during Titian’s time in Rome in 1545–6, a view that is supported by its similarity to Raphael’s Portrait of Julius II, of which Titian made a copy during his Roman visit for Guidobaldo della Rovere.
12 Wethey 1969–75, vol. 1, identifies twelve copies in existence and four more mentioned in literary sources.
13 Vasari in both editions of his ‘Life of Sebastiano’ said that the pension was worth 300 scudi per annum. But in his ‘Life of Giovanni da Udine’ he gave the figure as eighty scudi.
14 I Ragionamenti delle Corti (The Dialogues about Courts).
15 Alessandrini was living in Titian’s house at the time, writing letters for him and making fair copies for Aretino.
16 Charles Hope points out that there is no evidence that Aretino circulated his letters before publication. My own view is that no journalist can resist having his work read as soon as possible.
17 Tr. Symonds 1906.
THREE: A MIRACLE OF NATURE
1 The most famous was Galateo, a witty and sensible treatise on proper behaviour in polite society first published in 1558. Although della Casa was inevitably influenced by Castiglione’s The Courtier, first published in 1528, Galateo is more concerned with proper behaviour in polite society, which at the time it was written was composed of people from many different countries and backgrounds.
2 It is not known whether the copy was by Titian’s or another hand.
3 A painting very like the Venus of Urbino has been detected beneath the finished Danaë that Titian revised in Rome for Alessandro Farnese. Zapperi 1991 maintains that it was a nude previously commissioned by Cardinal Farnese, but there is no evidence that Farnese had ordered such a painting.
4 This letter was first published in 1908 but did not enter the mainstream literature about Titian until republished by Hope 1977.
5 See V, 2.
6 Speroni’s dialogues were banned by the Inquisition in the 1570s, but when he went to Rome to defend them the chief inquisitor was sympathetic to his arguments.
7 The father of Torquato Tasso.
8 The famous Manutius press originally founded by Aldo Manutio was at that time run by Aldo’s son Paolo.
9 In what was presumably an autobiographical reference he had a character in his play La Talenta maintain that the white hairs in his beard are the result of stress, not of age.
10 It is interesting to note that in the nineteenth century when Aretino was regarded as a monster and unworthy of Titian’s friendship Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who greatly admired this portrait, described the face as ‘disengaged from an atmosphere of corruption’. Evidently surprised by his own reaction he saw it ‘as far as such a thing is possible’ as ‘idealized and ennobled’ (1881); while in the twentieth century, when Aretino’s behaviour had come to be seen as no worse than that of many modern journalists, Roberto Zapperi (1990) maintained that Titian had been getting his own back for Aretino’s mean bargaining about the price and cites Federico Zeri’s view of the face as evidence of ‘the shameless arrogance of a moralist nourished by vice, the bombastic capacity for gesticulation of a power built on blackmail, the unpunished cynicism of those who have the means to manipulate public opinion’.
11 Later in the same letter in which he had complained that his portrait was more like a sketch than a finished work of art.
FOUR: ROME
1 For Titian’s stay in Rome, and the circumstances surrounding the Danaë and Portrait of Paul III and his Grandsons, I am especially indebted to Zapperi 1990 and 1991.
2 The underdrawings were revealed by X-rays taken during a restoration of the painting for the 2006 exhibition in Naples. The portrait, which had never been relined, had been in such bad condition that some scholars, including Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Berenson, Zapperi and Hope, doubted that it was autograph. The cleaning, however, has for most authorities vindicated the opinion of Pallucchini, Valcanover and Wethey, among others, that the painting is of high enough quality to have been painted by Titian although spoiled by the heavily overpainted background and green curtain.
3 The portrait of a girl in yellow was one of only three painted in Rome by Titian to be mentioned in subsequent inventories of the Farnese collection. For the plausible hypothesis that it began as the portrait of Angela mentioned by della Casa in his letter to Alessandro Farnese of 20 September 1544, see Zapperi 1991.
4 The change has been detected by X-ray investigation. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who w
ere not aware of della Casa’s letter, were the first to notice the similarity of the two faces.
5 Titian would have known this from drawings of the Medici tombs Vasari had sent to Aretino in 1535.
6 Which Alfonso d’Este had commissioned in 1530, soon after Titian completed his Bacchanals, and of which Vasari had sold a copy when he was in Venice in 1541.
7 Vasari’s Hall of a Hundred Days, celebrating Paul III as a peacemaker, commissioned for the Palazzo della Cancelleria by Alessandro Farnese, was completed in 1546. It was while he was in Rome that Paolo Giovio gave him the idea of writing a collection of artists’ lives.
8 Tr. Bull 1974.
9 The real Aretino was never antagonistically critical of Sebastiano.
10 Tr. Roskill 2000.
11 The letter, dated 1 January 1546, is signed ‘PA Romano’.
12 Paul was familiar, for example, with Melozzo da Forlì’s fresco in the Vatican library of Pope Sixtus IV with the Librarian and Four Grandsons, one of whom, Giuliano della Rovere, followed Sixtus to the papal throne as Julius II.
13 Although many authorities attribute the very damaged Portrait of Pier Luigi Farnese in Armour (Naples, Capodimonte) to Titian, Pier Luigi was not in Rome during Titian’s stay there and there is no evidence that he painted him either before or after.
14 Orazio seems to have painted other portraits in Rome including one mentioned by Vasari of a musician, Batista Ciciliano.
15 The monastery was no longer in existence but still provided a handsome income from the land.
16 Ottavio turned to the French for help in carving out a state for himself in that most strategic region, causing Charles to send troops against him. But much later he attached himself to his Habsburg in-laws. Philip II returned Piacenza to him in 1556, and his estranged wife Margaret and their son Alessandro served Philip with distinction in the Netherlands.
17 Later in the century Montaigne took Roman citizenship but said he did it out of vanity and that the ceremony on the Campidoglio made him feel silly.
