by Sheila Hale
28 Tr. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
29 Livia Balbi was recorded in 1561 as the daughter of the late Marco Tinto and the wife of Gaspare Balbi. Hope, 2007b, p. 411, suggests that she could have been the daughter of a sibling of Titian’s second wife.
30 Whatever Titian was doing he was surely not, as the Dutch Expressionist remarked of his own painting in 1955, ‘messing around’.
31 Boschini would have been aware of Pliny’s comment that the last unfinished works of famous Greek painters, specifically Apelles’ unfinished Venus of Cos, were more admired than their finished ones.
SIX: ANOTHER WAY OF USING COLOUR
1 The arrangement of the figures is compatible with Philip’s Perseus and Andromeda, in 1556, in which the naked Andromeda is on our left and the death-dealing activity of Perseus slaying the monster is in the middle distance on our right. Hope 1980 suggests that Titian might have started the Death of Actaeon even earlier as a companion piece to Venus and Adonis, which is also about hunting.
2 Gould 1975 proposed that the resemblance of Diana’s head to that of the angel in his San Salvatore Annunciation, which was finished at the latest by 1566, may indicate that Titian resumed work on it in the early 1560s. But the area around Diana’s head has been heavily restored and the relatively immobile face looks more like the work of another hand.
3 Quoted in the Royal Academy Magazine, Winter 2007.
4 For Titian’s changes and technique see Dunkerton 2003 for a brief account of the results of her scientific investigation of the painting, and Penny 2008.
5 Dunkerton 2003.
6 Gould 1975.
7 The Death of Actaeon was on a list of paintings then in Venice drawn up in the 1630s by the British ambassador in Venice, Lord Fielding, who described it as ‘A Diana shooting Adonis in forme of a Hart not quite finished’. Its first owner was the Marquis (later Duke) of Hamilton, one of the great collectors at the court of King Charles I.
8 See Penny 2008 for this suggestion.
9 Elke Oberthaler, conservator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, worked on the painting from 2002 to 2007. It was considered to be damaged without hope of repair after a previous restoration had been conducted in the 1930s by Sebastian Isepp, who remarked that he had restored it ‘without touching it’. For a more detailed account of Oberthaler’s important conclusions see Vienna and Venice 2007.
10 The picture had been on loan to the National Gallery for ten years when it was sold in 1970 to a dealer by the trustees of the seventh Earl of Harewood. After the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles offered £1,763,000 for it, the British Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art recommended delaying the export for a year and refusing an export licence if the Getty’s price could be matched. A public appeal launched by the National Gallery raised the amount and the painting was secured for the nation on 6 July 1972.
11 Martin Davies.
12 The only survival was Titian’s votive Portrait of Doge Antonio Grimani, ordered by the Council of Ten in 1555 – thirty-two years after Grimani’s death – and now in the Sala delle Quatro Porte for which it was destined. It may have been rescued or saved because it remained in Titian’s studio where he had not yet finished it. The flanking sections were painted by Marco Vecellio around 1600 under Doge Marino Grimani.
13 I have borrowed the conceit of ‘make-believe neo-Roman dinner parties’ from Chambers 1970.
14 A longer account of the summons is in Chambers and Pullan 1992, pp. 232–6.
15 Tintoretto worked on this cycle from 1564 to 1587.
16 A certain Francisco Reinoso, for example, paid Orazio 300 scudi in 1573 for a Noah and a Moses (both lost) painted in collaboration with Titian.
17 Philip would be forced to suspend payments to his bankers on 1 September 1575.
18 The most recent and complete edition of the correspondence about Titian between Ayamonte and de Silva, of which the original letters are preserved in the archive at Simancas, is Mancini 1998, from which I have drawn some of my abbreviated account of the background. Some of the directly quoted passages to follow are taken from Fernando Checa, ‘Titian’s Late Style’, in Vienna and Venice 2007. I am also grateful to Jonathan Keates and Felicity Wakefield for their translations and to Charles Hope for his summaries of the letters, which enabled me to follow the entire correspondence more easily than would have been possible otherwise.
19 For the theory that this Pietà may have been an early state of the painting now in the Venice Accademia see Hope 1994, with the caveat that Mancini 1998 disagrees.
SEVEN: THE PLAGUE AND THE PITY
1 The document, first published by Hope 1994, throws a new light on the history of the Pietà now in the Venice Accademia. It is possible that the painting he withdrew from the Frari was the one he offered to the Marquis of Ayamonte nineteen days later and of which he sent him a sketch and measurements on 27 April 1575.
2 Velázquez used it for his Don Juan of Austria (Madrid, Prado).
3 The additions were masked for the Titian exhibition at the Prado in 2003.
4 A reduced variant of the Brera St Jerome, but with the landscape barely sketched in, and the emphasis on the figure of the saint, who holds a book as in the Escorial painting, is in the Madrid Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Scholars differ about the degree of Titian’s participation.
5 Tr. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881.
6 Ovid 2004, Book 6.
7 Unfortunately, since the painting was first exhibited in western Europe in 1983 its tonal variations have been flattened by the application of what seems to be a coat of waxy varnish, which was presumably intended to protect the surface.
8 X-rays have shown that the instrument was originally an ancient Greek lyre, an instrument with two projecting arms supporting a cross-bar to which the strings were attached, which may indicate that the figure playing it is a second Apollo or Apollo’s son Orpheus, or, as some scholars prefer, Olympus who is sometimes given as Marsyas’ father or his son and favourite pupil. The figure also plays the lyre in Giulio’s drawing and another version of the painting in a private collection in Venice. It may therefore be that the Greek lyre was replaced by the contemporary lira da braccio after Titian’s death.
9 Some critics believe the child satyr is a later addition.
10 Melanie Hart, ‘Visualising the Mind: Seeing What Titian Saw in 1576’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 23, no. 2, January 2007, pp. 267–80.
11 Thomas Arundel, 21st Earl of Arundel (1585–1646), is best known as a wealthy Grand Tourist who amassed a large collection of paintings sculptures, books, prints, drawings and antique jewellery.
12 Frank Stella, Working Space, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1986.
13 Ibid.
14 The account of the plague written in 1630 by Rocco Benedetti, a Venetian notary, is in Chambers and Pullan 1992.
15 The head of Christ and the head and shoulders of Joseph of Arimathea can be seen in X-ray on the right of the Virgin near her shoulder. For the full explanation of the subsequent enlargement of the painting and its destination in Pieve di Cadore see Hope 1994.
16 The pose of Moses is borrowed from Michelangelo’s seated Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the Hellespontine Sibyl from the full-length Christ holding His Cross in Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
17 There is a nearly unanimous opinion among scholars – Charles Hope is an exception – that this and perhaps Titian’s other St Jeromes are self-portraits. The Council of Trent, however, had condemned as unorthodox the representation of living people as saints, and there seems no reason why Titian would have defied that order, least of all in a painting intended for public display in a church.
18 The chapel, now occupied by the nineteenth-century memorial to Titian, is the second on the right. Strangely enough no bones were found when foundations were dug for the monument.
19 De officiis (44 BC), III, 3: ‘Ut pictor nemo esset inventus, qui Coae Veneris eam partem, quam Apelles inchoatam reliquisset, a
bsolveret.’
Titian’s Legacy
1 Van de Wetering 1991.
2 For documented details of Pomponio’s management of the estate see Hope 2007b and Puppi 2004, who give very different interpretations of Pomponio’s behaviour.
3 Puppi 2004, who dates the withdrawal to 6 September, regards it as a cynical, ‘almost revolting’ action taken in a spirit of revenge against Titian and Orazio. But thirty ducats was not a large sum and probably represented only a small percentage of the account.
4 The portrait, the last to be mentioned in any surviving document, is the most likely of several candidates for the portrait of a young lady and her daughter discovered by X-radiography in 1948 beneath an overpainted Tobias and the Angel, and revealed by a restoration in the early twenty-first century. The portrait is unsold at the time of writing.
5 Charles Hope has evidence, some of it unpublished, that this clause of the settlement between Pomponio and Gaspare Balbi relates to the Munich Crowning with Thorns, which was commissioned by Paolo d’Anna for the church of San Salvatore but left unfinished at Titian’s death. Pomponio on several occasions asked d’Anna to let him know if he wanted the picture finished, for a fee, by one of Titian’s assistants.
6 See Penny 2008, vol. 2, pp. 236–47 for a full account of the history of this painting.
7 When in Paris it was thought to be an allegory of the dilemma of Alfonso I d’Este (supposedly the central head) who had to decide whether to support the pope (the old man in a red cap whom we now recognize as Titian) or the emperor, Charles V (the youngest man). When someone remembered that Julius II died in 1513, six years before Charles V was elected emperor, ‘Julius II’ was changed to ‘Paul III’, but that didn’t work either because Alfonso I d’Este died in 1534, which was the year of Paul III’s election.
8 The youngest man (who was originally bearded) is clearly by the same assistant who squeezed the three boys into the left end of Titian’s Vendramin Family (which hangs next to it in the London National Gallery) in the mid-1550s, which suggests that the youth was painted in Titian’s lifetime and that the Allegory might have been originally intended for a decorative frieze in the Vendramin palace, or possibly as a cover for another painting in the collection.
9 In conversation with the present author.
10 He acquired much of the rest of the collection legitimately by inheritance.
11 One of them, an equestrian portrait of Philip IV, known only from a copy (Florence, Uffizi), was regarded as better than the one executed by Velázquez in 1626, which was removed to make room for the Rubens.
12 My authority for this brief note about a large subject is Jeremy Wood, Rubens: Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Masters: Italian Artists, vol. 2: Titian and North Italian Art, London and Turnhout, 2010.
13 By Erica Tietze-Conrat in ‘Das Skizzenbuch des Van Dyck als Quelle für die Tizianforschung’, Critica d’Arte, VIII, 1949–50, p. 441.
14 See David Jaffé, ‘New Thoughts on Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook, Burlington Magazine, vol. 143, no. 1183, October 2001, pp. 614–24.
15 When in the Borghese collection in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the painting was famous with English Grand Tourists who knew it as ‘Titian and his sweetinge’. Van Dyck also made an engraving of it at some time in the 1630s.
16 He was admitted to the Order of Santiago in 1659, but only after attempts by the king’s Council of Orders to refuse the knighthood ostensibly on the grounds of his humble family background but in fact because it was not considered a suitable honour for a painter.
17 Jonathan Brown, The Golden Age of Painting in Spain, London, 1991, p. 221.
18 Van de Wetering 1991.
19 Both in the collection of Alfonso Lopez, a Portuguese resident.
20 Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh and Pieter Lastman.
21 Van de Wetering 1991.
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