Venetians

by Paul Strathern

  Titian had been born Tiziano Vecelli, sometime during the late 1480s, in the picturesque lakeside town of Cadore at the foot of the Alpine pass some sixty miles north of Venice. According to Vasari, ‘Because he was seen to have a lively spirit and keen intelligence, at the age of ten he was sent to Venice to live with his uncle, who soon perceived that he had a gift for painting and placed him in the studio of Giovanni Bellini.’ In his early twenties Titian developed a supreme technical ability, influenced by both Giovanni Bellini and, later, Giorgione. As a result the authorities would later entrust him with the prestigious task of completing the series of paintings left unfinished by Bellini in the hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace. When the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was rebuilt, after having burned down in 1505, Titian was commissioned, alongside Giorgione, with decorating the façade of this prestigious centre of foreign commerce. Upon the deaths of Giorgione and Bellini, Titian would emerge as the acknowledged master of Venetian art, having developed an individual style of his own, which took full advantage of the new possibilities of colour opened up by the use of oils. It is known that he further developed Bellini’s technique of using his fingers to smear the oil paint over the surface of his works, to the point of creating a three-dimensional effect. By means of this method, as well as by employing forthright brushstrokes, Titian pioneered the use of impasto (from the Italian for ‘dough’, ‘mixture’ or ‘paste’), which vitalised the artist’s ability to convey the effect of light, lend an expressiveness to scenes or add reality to images (as, for instance, in conveying the folds in a gown or highlighting jewels).

  Such was the length of Titian’s life and his transcendent mastery of his medium that soon he would be receiving commissions from all over Europe. Leading citizens now proudly displayed the works of the city’s artists on their walls, while the council chambers and churches were decorated with flamboyant historical and biblical scenes. Meanwhile the outer walls of palaces along the Grand Canal were decorated with frescoes and filigree mouldings; and the façade of the Ca d’Oro was even embellished with gold leaf, along with rare pigments such as ultramarine and vermilion. For those who gathered in the Doge’s Palace, did business in the Rialto or were rowed along the Grand Canal, this was indeed a golden city – one of the great wonders of Europe.

  In keeping with the more pragmatic commercial aspect of the Venetian ethos, the city had by this time also established itself as the leading centre of book-printing in Italy. The German Johannes Gutenberg had invented the movable-type printing press around 1439. Prior to this, books had circulated only in manuscript form, with all copies needing to be hand-written, a painstaking and time-consuming process that led to frequent errors and obscurities in the text. The invention of printing, and the subsequent dissemination of knowledge, would prove the great generating force of the Renaissance, with printing presses soon spreading through Germany and then across the Alps to Italy. In 1469 the first printing press was established in Venice. Within a decade there were no fewer than twenty-two printing establishments in the city, and by 1500 some 150 printing houses were in business, producing nearly 4,000 editions. Initially these were mainly of works in Latin (for scholars) and Italian (for the more general educated reading public); but given Venice’s international links it is no surprise that the city’s presses were soon producing works in languages as wide-ranging as Serbo-Croat, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian and even Arabic – spreading Venice’s fame as a publishing centre far and wide. Indeed, this was one of the main reasons why Leonardo da Vinci visited the city in 1500. He was accompanied by his close friend, the monk Luca Pacioli, who wished to have printed his recently completed manuscript De divina proportione, a work on mathematical and artistic proportions. Pacioli had persuaded Leonardo to illustrate this work with a series of beautiful and meticulous drawings representing three-dimensional regular geometric solids, such as the dodecahedron (with twelve faces) and the icosahedron (with twenty faces). Copies of these works would be made with the new copper-plate engraving technique, which used acid to fix the image on the sheet of metal. This would reproduce geometric images with a much finer line than was possible using the traditional woodcut, and was an indication of the advanced printing skills now being developed in Venice.

  The best-known printer in Venice during this period was Aldus Manutius, who would be responsible for creating the typeface known today as italic, which is said to have been based on the hand-writing of Petrarch. Initially, this type was not used for emphasis, as it is today, but purely for its commercial value; Manutius patented his new type on account of its narrowness and forward slant, which enabled the printer to include more words on the page and thus reduce production costs. In certain ways printing remained a fairly haphazard business, and Manutius, along with his grandson, would be instrumental in establishing a standard form of punctuation. His press was also responsible for producing the first octavo-sized volumes, designed so that the reader could carry them about with him in a shoulder bag or large coat pocket.

  Manutius specialised in reproducing classical texts from Ancient Greece. This was no small task, given the comparative complexities of the Greek alphabet, and to overcome this difficulty he assembled a team of expert typesetters from Crete. His famous emblem, which he included on the frontispiece of works emanating from his Aldine Press (after Aldus), consisted of a dolphin and anchor, said to embody the speed and firmness that characterised his printing, a device which continued to be used by the modern publisher Doubleday, with others using variations on this theme.

  Not all works issuing from Venetian printers were quite so elevated as those produced by the Aldine Press, which though widely distributed in their octavo editions would eventually reduce Manutius to ruin. Others published scurrilous pamphlets, works of erotica, topical satirical verse, and so forth. These were in part the forerunners of modern newspapers, and it was this milieu that would produce Pietro Aretino, recognised by many as the first journalist.

  However, Aretino was in many ways much more than the first journalist. He was born in 1492, the illegitimate son of a cobbler in the Florentine town of Arezzo (from which his name derives). By his own account he seems to have received a piecemeal education; however, his native wit and natural inclination towards the subversive soon marked him out, and as a result he was probably banished from Arezzo at an early age. After wandering about northern Italy he ended up in Rome at around the age of twenty, possessed of little else but a precociously developed talent as a verbal prankster. He seems to have been a volatile but likeable character, given to outrageous boasting and scandalous gossip. Such talents drew him into the circle surrounding the painter Raphael, who (along with a rich banker) became Aretino’s patron and protector. Raphael was at the time employed by the chubby and extravagant Pope Leo X, who set the tone of his rule by exclaiming upon being elected, ‘We have the papacy, so now let us enjoy ourselves.’

  Leo X would play a crucial but unexpected role in Aretino’s life. Amongst his many foibles, the pope had a particular affection for his pet, an albino elephant called Hanno, which had been transported from India and given to him as a present by the King of Portugal. When Hanno died in 1516, after being fed a laxative laced with gold in an attempt to cure him of constipation, Leo X was deeply upset and composed an epitaph for his pet, to which he paid far more attention than to his faithful flock. Raphael was commissioned to paint a fresco of Hanno, and Leo X added the epitaph:

  What Nature has taken in death,

  Has been restored by Raphael to life.

  Such sentimentality proved too much for Aretino, who wrote a satirical pamphlet entitled:

  The Last Will and Testament

  Of Hannibal the Elephant.

  This poked fun at many of the leading figures in Rome, including Leo X himself. Aretino’s satire caught the public mood, and overnight he became famous. But such renown brought few rewards and considerable danger, requiring the protection of his patrons amongst the rich and powerful. These soon included
Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, a fellow Florentine, who happened to be Leo X’s cousin. Despite such close connections to the Church, these sophisticated admirers were highly appreciative of Aretino, who boasted of himself, ‘Born in a foundlings’ hospital, but with the soul of a king’. His poems and satirical works ran the whole gamut from libellous lampoon to unashamed pornography. Dating from this period are his sixteen Sonetti Lussuriosi (Lust Sonnets), each written to accompany a drawing of a different sexual position. And such were the power and range of Aretino’s satire that the great contemporary poet Ludovico Ariosto, who was then living in Rome, called him admiringly ‘the scourge of princes’. In the end, such works inevitably forced him to flee Rome and seek patronage elsewhere. He excused his hurried departure, explaining in a letter to Cardinal de’ Medici how ‘due to a sudden aberration he has fallen in love with a female cook and temporarily switched from boys to girls’. Aretino’s complex, combative, outrageous personality was driven as much by the conflicts of his bisexuality as by inborn resentment resulting from his illegitimacy.

  When Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici followed in his cousin’s footsteps to become Pope Clement VII, Aretino returned to Rome. However, his days of being ‘the Rabelais of Rome’, as Burckhardt called him, were by now numbered. Although he dutifully continued to satirise and ridicule Julian VII’s enemies and those who had voted against him in the papal elections, the intimidation against him became more serious. After a series of death-threats, he once more fled Rome, ending up in Venice in 1527.

  Venice remained a staunchly anti-papal city, and under its protection Aretino continued to pillory the hypocrisy of the mighty figures of Rome, as well as turning his attention to the leading lights of Venetian society. Although Rome had succeeded Florence as the centre of the Renaissance, mainly owing to the massive spending on art and architecture by successive popes, Venice had become very much the cosmopolitan capital of Italy, one that would attract such eminent northern European intellectuals as Dürer, Erasmus and Montaigne. It was the city of this era that Shakespeare would use as the setting for Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and it was here that Aretino was to spend his glory years.

  In Venice he was once again drawn into the company of a great artist, this time Titian. Aretino thrived amidst the sophisticated, intellectual, well-connected circle that centred around Titian’s studio. Besides Titian, he also became a close friend of the architect Jacopo Sansovino, who was at the height of his fame. Sansovino would commemorate this triumvirate of friendship by depicting their three heads on the fine bronze door he was commissioned to create for the Sacristy of San Marco. At the same time Titian would paint a superb portrait of Aretino, depicting a lean, energetic, surprisingly youthful figure in pensive pose, as if quietly contemplating some further enormity. Such was the man who would boast in a letter ‘the doge is my father’.

  Despite Aretino’s irreverence, and the atmosphere of scandal surrounding his works, he was now regarded as a leading literary figure. Although he could write in neither Latin nor Greek, his use of vernacular Italian did much to encourage popular reading in this language. The output of this ‘secretary to the entire world’ (his own self-description) was prodigious, including comedies, dialogues and satires, which came hot off the thriving Venetian presses to find avid audiences throughout Italy and beyond. Of similar merit to his literary output, and similar in popularity to his racy pamphlets, was his prodigious output of letters – several volumes of which, despite their personal nature, were published in Venice during his lifetime. These missives are filled with all manner of gossip, outrageous observations concerning well-known figures and unorthodox comments. Writing to congratulate a well-known Venetian physician who claimed to have found a remedy for the pox, he could not help but ask, ‘Yet what will happen now? Those who previously abstained from coupling out of fear will surely lose all their inhibitions, and then where will we be?’ In one letter he even boasted, ‘kings and emperors now reply to my letters’. And amazingly, this was true. Such was the delight his letters caused that his list of correspondents ranged from Pope Clement VII to King Henry VIII of England, from King Francis I of France to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the latter pair of rivals being the most powerful rulers in Europe (each of whom rejoiced in Aretino’s observations concerning the other). His letters were by turn satire, libel, blackmail and dripping unctuous flattery – for which his aristocratic correspondents often richly rewarded him (perhaps in part through relief at not being pilloried themselves). These letters also provide a vivid picture of his age, including a timeless image of the city in which Aretino lived. In one he describes a scene such as would be painted by Canaletto some two centuries later:

  With my arms resting on my window sill I began to gaze out over the marvellous spectacle of the Grand Canal lined with innumerable barges, all packed with spectators delighting in the regatta as two competing gondolas manned by brave oarsmen raced past the cheering humanity cramming the banks, the Rialto Bridge and the Ca’ da Mosto.

  And he even goes on to anticipate J.M.W. Turner’s depiction of misty Venetian light, describing:

  buildings which at first seemed as insubstantial as stage sets, though they were made of real stone … the very air which in some places appeared so limpid and pure, at others dissolved into murky dullness … looming clouds stretching from the rooftops to the horizon, buildings which flared with flames in the sun’s fire, while others glowed like semi-molten lead … I cried out, ‘Where art thou, Titian?’ If only you could have painted the scene I am describing, you would have stupefied all who witnessed your art.

  During Aretino’s later years, Titian would paint another portrait of his beloved friend. This shows the mature Aretino in all his glory – the glory to which he had perhaps always aspired, though it took the insight of a great artist to realise this in all its fullness. Titian depicts the considerable bulk of a heavily bearded middle-aged figure dressed up in a resplendent scarlet robe and gold chain – here is Aretino in excelsis. The bastard from Arezzo now regards himself as the equal of any man – and with some justification. Yet despite his renown he was never a rich man, and his presence was little better than tolerated by the authorities of the city in which he spent his maturity (or what little of this quality he acquired over the years). In Venice, writers and artists still remained confined to the demimonde. They might on occasion have mixed with the nobility, even have been commissioned by them, but they were not admitted to the social rank of such exalted company. And Aretino was not one to forget this. Indeed, it probably sharpened the quill of the man who claimed that he lived ‘by the sweat of his ink’. At the same time, he was not one to forget those less fortunate than himself. He was renowned for his generosity, and it was said that he never sat down to his Easter dinner without entertaining eighteen street urchins at his table. Aretino finally died in 1556, at the age of sixty-four. According to one report, ‘his death was caused by his falling off his chair when convulsed with laughter at an abominable story’. Even if apocryphal, this would seem to be apt.

  * It has been pointed out that this quote from The Prince (Chapter 12) is of course a wild exaggeration where Venice’s mainland territories are concerned. As we have seen, the larger part of these territories constituted a comparatively recent acquisition. It is usually understood that Machiavelli was in fact identifying the European territory as the significant part of the Venetian Empire, whose overall territories had in fact been acquired over the city’s 800-year history.

  * These can be seen to this day at the Topkapi Palace, the former residence of the Ottoman sultans, in Istanbul.

  11

  Discoveries of the Mind

  AS WELL AS being a cultural centre, the Venetian Republic would now also begin to attract attention as one of the great European centres of learning and research. This was largely due to the University of Padua on the nearby mainland. The university here was one of the oldest in Europe, having been founded as early as 1222. Its subsequent list
of students and faculty would include a roll call of great scientific figures – ranging from Copernicus to Galileo, from the Englishman William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, to the Flemish-born Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy. The medical school at Padua was particularly renowned, and it was here that the twenty-year-old Polish canon Nicolaus Copernicus came to study in 1501. Copernicus had long been fascinated by the night sky, and had attended extracurricular lectures on mathematical astronomy at the University of Cracow, where he first studied in detail the complex movement of the planets around the Earth as described by the Ptolemaic view of the universe. When he came to Italy as a student, he witnessed a lunar eclipse in Bologna in 1500.

  It has been claimed, with some justification, that Copernicus’ first ideas concerning a solar system, with the Earth and the other planets revolving around the sun, crystallised during his medical studies at Padua. As part of his course he was expected to attend lectures on astrology, for it was believed that the movement of the stars had a direct effect on the overall health and ‘humours’ of a patient. The leading authorities on this subject remained the Arabic astrologers, who were among the first in recent history to cast serious doubts on the Ptolemaic system. Copernicus’ interest in humanism also led him to study the ancient Greek philosophers, translations of whose works were now becoming much more widely available through the printing presses of Venice. In particular, he seems to have learned of the works of Aristarchus of Samos, who used the sun’s shadow to calculate a remarkably accurate figure for the distance of the sun from the Earth. Aristarchus was also known to have speculated that the Earth revolved around the sun. Copernicus would take his ideas back to his homeland when he returned in 1503 to take up his clerical posting in the remote province of Warmia in eastern Poland. Here his misgivings concerning the Ptolemaic system continued to deepen, despite the fact that this was the orthodox teaching of the Church and the questioning of such matters was heresy. In correspondence with former student friends in Italy, he began speaking of ‘defects’ in the Ptolemaic system, admitting, ‘I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement … in which everything would move uniformly about its proper center [sic], as the rule of absolute motion requires.’