Titian

by Sheila Hale

  10 The Venus with a Mirror and Two Cupids sent to Spain in 1567 is now known only from a copy by Rubens (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza). The Penitent St Jerome (Madrid, Escorial) sent in 1575 was one of Titian’s last paintings for the king.

  11 A Jason and Medea that Titian had offered at the same time as the other paintings never materialized or was mentioned again. It may be that Vargas advised him that the story of a foreign princess not only rejected by her heroic lover but eventually beheaded and her hair turned to snakes would not be appropriate for a Spanish king who had, albeit temporarily, abandoned his English queen.

  12 Caranza was later to be tried by the Spanish Inquisition for harbouring Protestant sentiments.

  13 Friar José de Sigüenza in his History of the Jeronemite Order, 1605, cited by Cremades 1999.

  TEN: THE DIANA POEMS

  1 Titian or his studio had painted for Pérez, probably some years earlier, the rather awkward Adam and Eve (Madrid, Prado) for a fee of 400 ducats. It is in a ruined condition despite a restoration in the early twenty-first century that lightened the overall tone. Rubens’s copy, which is also in the Prado, was made during his second stay in Spain in 1628–9, and is the only one of his many copies after Titian that is an improvement on the original.

  2 Tr. Bondanella and Bondanella 1996. The letter was published by Ridolfi (1648) 1835–7.

  3 Payments to individuals were often collected in metal money, which was less subject to inflation than the bills of account used by commercial banks. The age of negotiable paper money did not begin until 1579 and even then Venice lagged behind Genoa in this respect.

  4 The equivalent at the time of twenty-two years’ worth of the salary of a university professor.

  5 Orazio’s letter is lost. We know about it only from Titian’s reply.

  6 The letter is known from a nineteenth-century copy. Presumably the person who transcribed it used ducats instead of soldi, which would have been appropriate currency in this context.

  7 The letter concludes with Titian’s greetings to ‘my cavalier’, presumably Leone Leoni, for whom he is trying to obtain a cast of Michelangelo’s statue of Christ the Redeemer in the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. This is Charles Hope’s interpretation in conversation with the present author. The cast is being brought by someone from Rome who has been delayed in Florence. Leoni later owned such a cast, although whether he obtained it through Titian is unknown.

  8 Leoni had had a close relationship with Ferrante Gonzaga, Charles V’s governor of Milan, who had been recalled in 1554 after charges of corruption by the Senate. He was acquitted and retired to Guastella, but took part in the Battle of Saint-Quentin, and died in Brussels in 1557 after falling from his horse there. Leoni’s statue in Guastella of the Triumph of Ferrante Gonzaga over Envy was commissioned by Ferrante’s son Cesare in 1564.

  9 The Death of Actaeon was finished many years later and never sent to Spain.

  10 For the portrait, now in Blenheim Palace, see Francis Russell, ‘A Portrait by Orazio Vecellio’, Burlington Magazine, CXXIX, 1987, pp. 182–8.

  11 Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland. It is not known who modelled the wax or what its relationship is to a cruder portrait medal of Titian and Orazio (Brunswick, Maine, Bowden College Museum of Art).

  12 The Allegory of Prudence is a striking pastiche mostly executed by the workshop, which could have been painted at any time from the early 1560s to 1575, and seems to have been worked up to its present state even after Titian’s death.

  13 The existence of Emilia was not known until 1935 when a scholar discovered records of her marriage in 1568, her children and her death in 1582.

  14 Hope 2007b points out that the usual identification of the Dresden girl in yellow with a fan as Lavinia in her wedding dress is impossible. Lavinia in 1561 would have been about twenty-six (or thirty-one if one accepts the traditional birthdate for her of 1530). In her portrait as a buxom matron painted some time between 1555 and 1560 she looks nothing at all like the slender and much younger girl in yellow of 1561.

  15 Joseph because of his senior age and status is usually shown at the head of Christ and Nicodemus at the feet, but their positions are sometimes reversed.

  16 John 3: 8.

  17 In 2008 when a campaign was under way to save the Diana and Actaeon for Britain after it had been put up for sale by its owner the Duke of Sutherland.

  18 Cited by Waterhouse 1951.

  19 The flanking sections were painted around 1600 by Marco Vecellio.

  20 Made by Charles Hope in conversation with the author.

  21 According to the anonymous biographer.

  22 Critics are divided about whether Titian had a hand in this now very ruined picture. It is mentioned by Vasari, the anonymous biographer of 1622 and Ridolfi as having been painted by Titian; and the Madonna nursing her Child closely resembles the very late autograph Virgin Suckling the Infant Christ (London, National Gallery).

  ELEVEN: THE RAPE OF EUROPA

  1 The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, tr. David Quint, University Park, PA, 1993.

  2 Cited by Mallet and Hale 1984.

  3 Here Verdizotti, who certainly had a hand in this letter, may be taking a clue from Aretino’s letter written for Titian to Charles V in September 1554 in which he says he is sending a Grieving Madonna to intercede on behalf of his need for payment.

  4 The anecdote and translation of the conversation with Baccio Valori is from Haskins 1993.

  5 Wilde 1974.

  6 Ridolfi called her History and Wilde an allegory of Poetry.

  7 I am grateful to Dr Patrick N. Hunt for pointing out an image of Europa and the bull on a giant red-figure Greek vase of c. 480 BC in Tarquinia on which Europa standing next to the bull fondles one of his horns, which the artist has represented as a penis with pubic hair at its base.

  8 Tr. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.

  Part V: 1562–1576

  ONE: A FACTORY OF IMAGES

  1 This must be the portrait that Vasari saw in Titian’s studio in 1566 when he said it had been finished four years earlier. It was owned for a time by Rubens, Titian’s ardent posthumous disciple, who would have identified with a portrait that showed the artist as a gentleman.

  2 Jacopo Tebaldi, the ambassador in Venice of his first foreign patron Alfonso d’Este, who had suffered Titian’s procrastinations and demands over many years, is only one of many who knew how difficult he could be. Another was Giangiacomo Leonardi, who in a letter of 18 February 1553 to the Duke of Urbino confessed that although he had spent a great deal of time talking and dining with Titian he had found him charming in every way except when asked to do what he did not want to do.

  3 In his Life of Polidoro da Lanciani.

  4 Imprese di diversi principi, duchi, signori, e d’altri personaggi et huomini letterati et illustri … Con alcune stanze del Dolce chi dicharano i motti de esse imprese (Imprese of diverse princes, dukes, lords, and other lettered personages and illustrious men … With some verses by Dolce that declare the mottos of these imprese) by the Vicentine painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Pittoni.

  5 All were consumed with the rest of the cycle by the fire in the Hall in 1577.

  6 Many authorities prefer to associate this drawing with Titian’s lost Battle of Spoleto.

  7 Tagliaferro and Aikema 2009 give the most complete recent research into the studio at different times.

  8 Two are in the Madrid Prado, and one each in the Florence Uffizi, Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum, Berlin Staatliche Museen and New York Metropolitan Museum.

  9 Panofsky 1969, p. 121, wrote that this Venus ‘was possibly intended for – although hardly commissioned by – Charles V’.

  10 The other Madrid Venus, with a cupid, is a variant of this.

  11 It was still in Venice when Van Dyck copied it in 1622.

  12 Filippo Capponi, Facile est inventis addere, Venice, 1556.

  13 Michelangelo said the same as Titian. Adrian Willaert said he had less diffic
ulty with singing than with composing.

  14 Hope 1980a.

  15 In 1563 a canon of San Salvatore described it as finished, but Vasari, in his ‘Life of Titian’ published in 1568, wrote that it was unfinished.

  16 The unfinished Christ on the Cross with the Good Thief (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) has been implausibly identified as a fragment of this lost painting. But a request by Giovanni d’Anna in his will of 1567 that his son Paolo should have the altar completed may provide a clue to one of Titian’s greatest late paintings, the Ecce Homo now in Munich which evidence suggests might have been commissioned by Paolo in 1572.

  17 Wollheim 1987.

  18 See for example Gentili 1993.

  19 The frescos perished when the old church was demolished in the nineteenth century. Fortunately a plan and description of them had been made by Taddeo Jacobi which is summarized by Hope 1994.

  20 London 2003, Madrid 2003 and Vienna and Venice 2007.

  TWO: THE SPIDER KING

  1 See Chapter 6 for more about Antonio Pérez, who is best known to historians for his corruption as leader of one of the two factions at Philip’s court and for plotting the murder of Juan de Escobedo, secretary to Don John of Austria when Don John was governor of the Netherlands.

  2 Alternatively it could be one of the other paintings Titian sent to Pérez, or one of two paintings by Titian, the other a variant of Philip’s Entombment, given to Pérez by order of the Council of Ten in 1571.

  3 A fragment very similar to that first composition (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) in which the raised arm of the third figure is visible could be a studio copy or variant of another, lost version of that first plan. In the Washington picture the lady’s hair is bound up, and she wears the pearls and costume of a Venetian noblewoman and twin bracelets like the reclining Venuses.

  4 The painting suffered severe damage in the course of its history, during which it was neglected and subjected to numerous destructive attempts at restoration as well as relocations. It was transferred to its present position from the old church of the Crociferi in 1730, taken to Paris by Napoleon in 1797 and returned to Venice in 1815. After being shown at the Titian exhibition in the doge’s palace in 1990 it was reinstalled in the church, where it remained crumbling, dimly lit and forgotten. At the time of writing a new restoration is being conducted under the auspices of the Venice Museums Authority, and the scholar Lionello Puppi of the Fondazione Centro Studi Tiziano e Cadore is undertaking in-depth research into the painting.

  5 The church was rebuilt in its present form and renamed by the Jesuits in the early eighteenth century. The first surviving reference to the commission is a codicil to Lorenzo Massolo’s will dated 18 November 1548.

  6 Its appearance is recorded in a small workshop version (Milan, Brera). Titian’s original was destroyed in 1571, and was replaced two years later by Veronese’s Christ in the House of Simon, now known as the Feast in the House of Levi (see V, 6).

  7 The tax return is reproduced in Belluno–Pieve di Cadore 2007, pp. 351 and 435–7.

  8 Puppi 2004.

  9 Ibid.

  10 See Gould 1975.

  THREE: THE BIOGRAPHER, THE ART DEALER AND THE KING’S ANNUS HORRIBILIS

  1 I have abstracted information about the compiling of Vasari’s ‘Life of Titian’ from Hope 1993 and 2007a.

  2 The suggestion is from Puppi 2004.

  3 In 1568 two of the Vendramin heirs who were determined to honour their father’s wish that the collection be kept together commissioned an inventory that was compiled by Orazio Vecellio and Domenico Tintoretto.

  4 Cited by (and tr.) Hope 1980a.

  5 By Elke Oberthaler at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.

  6 Renoir must have aware of Titian’s Portrait of Jacopo Strada when he painted his portrait of the French dealer Ambroise Vollard (London, Courtauld Gallery).

  7 The Veronese Allegories now in the New York Frick Collection (Choice between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength) were in Strada’s collection.

  8 Roland Krischel, Jacopo Tintoretto 1519–1594, Hagen, 2000, mentioned by Mazzucco 2009.

  FOUR: WARS

  1 For the letters and their background see Puppi 2004.

  2 A certificate of Emilia’s right to her dowry dated 1572 and a request by her children in 1582 for recognition of their right to inherit from their mother, in both of which she is called Milia, were discovered by a scholar in 1935. Emilia’s existence was unknown until then.

  3 The buxom younger woman whose breast the aged Titian caresses in a seventeenth-century engraving based on a sketch by Van Dyck and once known as ‘Titian and his Sweeting’ may be a reference to Titian’s affair with Emilia’s mother.

  4 It is just possible that the unfinished Portrait of a Young Woman with a Little Girl (private collection), which was discovered by a restorer at the end of the twentieth century under an overpainting of Tobias and the Angel, is of Emilia and Vecellia. The costume, however, suggests an earlier date, in which case it could be of Titian’s cousin Livia Balbi and a daughter born after her marriage in the mid-1550s, which would date it to the early 1560s.

  5 See Chambers and Pullan 1992, pp. 108–13.

  6 I have abstracted some of the details of the sieges of Nicosia and Famagusta from Norwich 1981.

  7 Andrea was the uncle of the more famous Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli.

  8 Don Quixote, Prologue to Part II, 1615.

  9 In, for example, the Milan Ambrosiana and Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.

  10 Philip lived to see seven United Provinces in the north gain their independence. But it was not until 1658 that the Netherlands gained full independence from foreign rule, by which time Amsterdam was the commercial metropolis of Europe, and France had replaced Spain as the most powerful European nation.

  11 Other painted commemorations of Lepanto and the Venetian commanders who had taken part in the victory include Tintoretto’s Portrait of Sebastiano Venier (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) with the battle raging in the background, and Veronese’s posthumous portrait of Agostino Barbarigo (Cleveland Museum of Art), Venier’s second in command, who was killed in the battle after an arrow pierced his eye. Both show an awareness of Titian’s earlier portraits of military men in armour. Venier, who was unanimously elected doge in 1577 at the age of eighty-one, died the following year. His funeral effigy is in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

  FIVE: ‘IN THIS MY OLD AGE’

  1 In the Fasti II, c. AD 8.

  2 Canto IV of the Inferno, The Divine Comedy, 1308–21.

  3 De mulieribus claris, 1374.

  4 The Legend of Good Women, c. 1385–6.

  5 In The City of God, c. 413–26.

  6 The Declamatio Lucretiae by Coluccio Salutati.

  7 A novella by Matteo Bandello.

  8 In a letter of 1537 to a stableman and poet called Malatesta.

  9 The closest is a sixteenth-century engraving by the Fontainebleau master Léon Daven.

  10 The painting was taken from the Spanish Royal Collections by Joseph Bonaparte on his flight from the Spanish throne in 1813 and passed through various hands before it was given to the Fitzwilliam in 1918 by Charles Fairfax Murray. Until loaned for exhibitions in the early twenty-first century it was one of the most ignored of Titian’s late paintings, probably because foreign experts could not be bothered to make the journey to Cambridge before the roads from London were improved.

  11 For Titian’s technique in this painting see Jill Dunkerton in London 2003.

  12 The beautiful drawing of A Couple in Embrace (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) may be associated with the underdrawing.

  13 Frank Auerbach’s drawing, Study of Titian II (Tate Collection), is based on the Vienna painting.

  14 Peter and Linda Murray, The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, London and New York, 1981, pp. 448–9.

  15 Hope 1980a and subsequently in conversation with the present author maintains that Titian must have been dissatisfied
by the late paintings and was prevented only by his deteriorating health from working them up into a more finished state. If, however, the late works should be regarded as underpaintings they do not resemble the preparatory states revealed by technical investigations of his finished works.

  16 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, writing two centuries later, echoed Boschini’s opinion: ‘It is impossible to conceive better arrangement, greater harmony of lines, or more boldness of movement. Truth in the reproduction of nature in momentary action is combined with fine contrasts of light and shade, and an inimitable richness of tone, in pigment kneaded, grained, and varied in surface beyond anything that we know of this time. Such a combination might have thrown into despair three such men as Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt …’ (1881).

  17 See Hope 2007b for evidence that Paolo d’Anna might have commissioned the painting in 1572.

  18 John 19: 2–3.

  19 Sent to Philip in 1575.

  20 Although Sylvia Ferino-Pagden in Washington and Vienna 2007 dates the picture c. 1565, Humfrey 2007 maintains that it is always regarded as a late work. The landscape certainly resembles the background of the very late Flaying of Marsyas.

  21 It has been suggested by Hans Ost, Tizian-Studien, Cologne, 1992 that the Boy with Dogs is a fragment of a protective cover for the portrait.

  22 There is an unresolved debate about whether or not this painting is finished.

  23 As noticed by Gould 1975.

  24 The director was Charles Holmes.

  25 The painting, which is not good enough to have been sent to Philip, probably entered the Spanish royal collection in the seventeenth century.

  26 When it came to the Prado in 1837 the director attributed the Ecce Homo to the young Bassano imitating Titian, as did Berenson a century later. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, 1881, were the first scholars to detect Titian’s hand.

  27 Miguel Falomir in Madrid 2003, from whom I have abstracted my account of the two paintings.