Dedication
In memory of John
Epigraph
Titian was the sun amid small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world.
–Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio della Pittura, 1590
A work of art is an act of cooperation, often of reluctant cooperation like an awkward marriage, between the author and the kind of society he lives in. When we know something of the character of this aggravating partner, that which was once stiff and monumental becomes fluid and alive.
–V. S. Pritchett, In My Good Books, 1942
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
A Note on Money
List of Illustrations
Titian’s Family Tree
PART I: 1488/90–1518
ONE - Mountains
TWO - The Most Triumphant City
THREE - The Painter’s Venice
FOUR - Myths of Venice
FIVE - The Fondaco, Giorgione and the Modern Manner
SIX - Miracles and Disasters
SEVEN - ‘Some Little Bit of Fame’
EIGHT - ‘His Industrious Brush’: Pentimenti and Portraits
NINE - Sacred and Profane
PART II: 1518–1530
ONE - Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara
TWO - Bacchus and Ariadne
THREE - A New Doge, a River of Wine and Marriage
FOUR - The Fall of a World
FIVE - The Triumvirate of Taste
SIX - Caesar in Italy
SEVEN - The Most Beautiful Thing in Italy
PART III: 1530–1542
ONE - The Portrait of Cornelia
TWO - The House in Biri Grande
THREE - The Most Powerful Ruler in the World
FOUR - The Venus of Urbino
FIVE - The Roman Emperors
SIX - The Writers’ Venice
SEVEN - An Old Battle and a New War
EIGHT - Titian in his Fifties
PART IV: 1543–1562
ONE - Aretino Plays Pontius Pilate
TWO - The Last Great Pope of the Renaissance
THREE - A Miracle of Nature
FOUR - Rome
FIVE - A Matter of Religion
SIX - Augsburg
SEVEN - The Prince and the Painter
EIGHT - Venus and Adonis
NINE - The Passing of the Leviathans
TEN - The Diana Poems
ELEVEN - The Rape of Europa
PART V: 1562–1576
ONE - A Factory of Images
TWO - The Spider King
THREE - The Biographer, the Art Dealer and the King’s Annus Horribilis
FOUR - Wars
FIVE - ‘In This my Old Age’
SIX - Another Way of Using Colour
SEVEN - The Plague and the Pity
Titian’s Legacy
Notes
Bibliography
Appendix: Locations of Paintings
Index
Acknowledgements
Inserts
About the Author
Also by Sheila Hale
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Any style involves first of all the artist’s connection to his or her own time, or historical period, society, and antecedents: the aesthetic work, for all its irreducible individuality, is nevertheless a part – or, paradoxically, not a part – of the era in which it was produced and appeared.
EDWARD S. SAID, ON LATE STYLE, 2006
Titian lived and painted in tremendous times. In the decades before he was born, in a remote province of the Venetian Empire, the invention of movable type in Germany had unleashed an unprecedented and unstoppable spread of ideas and information across Europe and beyond. Columbus’ maiden voyage from Spain to the new world in 1492, when Titian was a small child, changed the European consciousness of the size and shape of the planet; and the bullion imported from the Americas brought with it massive inflation and eventually shifted the balance of trade and wealth from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. In 1513, when Machiavelli published The Prince, the first modern work of political philosophy, Michelangelo had recently completed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Raphael was at work on the four Stanze in the Vatican, and Leonardo da Vinci was an old man living in Rome. Four years later in the German town of Wittenberg Martin Luther, reacting against the sale of indulgences by Pope Leo X, posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the castle door. Few at the time predicted the consequences. Luther himself had not envisaged a split with the Catholic Church, and the word Protestant was not used until 1529. But by 1563 when Titian was in his early seventies and the Council of Trent sat for the last of the three sittings that set the agenda for the Catholic Reformation, northern Europe was irredeemably divided between Catholics and Protestants; and Venice, which had been the most independent of all the Italian city states and the least prescriptive about matters of religion, began to pay heed to the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church.
When Titian died in Venice in 1576 he was in his late eighties, and the Most Serene Republic had begun its long slow decline as a great trading power and artistic centre. He had spent the whole of his working life there, travelling as little as possible and only twice outside the Italian peninsula for two short visits to Germany. He had produced some 500 or 600 paintings of which about half survive.1 They are now scattered around the globe, most of them in public galleries from New York to California and Brazil; and across Europe from St Petersburg to Vienna, Berlin, Florence, London and Madrid, to mention only the largest collections. Despite frequent temporary exhibitions of his pictures it would be difficult for any one person to see all the originals and follow the extraordinary transformation of Titian’s style from the radiant, minutely realized masterpieces of his youth to the more freely painted works of his middle years, to the dark, tragic, sometimes terrifying visions of his last years.
More has been written about Titian than about any other Renaissance artist apart from Michelangelo. There were two biographies of him in his own lifetime: the Venetian writer Lodovico Dolce’s L’Aretino published in 1557 and Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Life of Titian’ in the second, 1568, edition of his Lives of the Artists; two more in the next century by an anonymous writer who may have been a distant relative (1622) and by Carlo Ridolfi in his Marvels of Art (1648), as well as numerous letters written to, by and about him. Over successive centuries writers and artists have explored and described his paintings and the spell they cast. This book, however, is the first documented attempt since the pioneering Anglo-Italian art historians J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle published their Titian: His Life and Times as long ago as 18772 to chart Titian’s stylistic development through the story of his life and of the century in which he became the most famous artist in Europe, painter to its most powerful rulers.
Since Crowe and Cavalcaselle, art history has been taught in schools and universities as a specialized subject, and Titian Studies have become something of an academic industry. Archives in Venice and elsewhere have yielded much more evidence than was available in the nineteenth century, so that we now know more about Titian’s personality, family, friends, finances and relationships with his patrons than we do about most other Renaissance artists. Modern scientific techniques, furthermore, have enabled painting conservators to follow Titian’s working methods by looking beneath the surface of his paintings.3 Nevertheless, since no one person can do justice to an artist as great, protean and complex as Titian, I have allowed some of the many voices that have explored, praised – and very occasionally doubted – his genius to have their say.
I have tried where possible to correct errors of fact about Titian that have been repeated so often that t
hey’ve become almost canonical. There are, however, still blanks in our knowledge. Perhaps some will be filled as new evidence and paintings thought to have been lost are discovered. Nothing, however, will diminish the sheer visceral pleasure, the shock of recognition that we are looking at a kind of truth that few other painters have communicated, that has fascinated Titian’s admirers and followers for more than five centuries.
A NOTE ON MONEY
Most European currencies after Charlemagne’s reform of the monetary system were accounted in pounds, shillings and pence: £ s d, or 1 lira = 20 soldi = 240 denari, like the British pound sterling before it was decimalized in 1971. Every country, and every one of the numerous Italian states, used its own silver-based coins for everyday transactions such as buying food or paying wages. Different countries also issued gold coins, which were the currency of international trade and were used for reckoning wealth on paper. During Titian’s lifetime the Venetian gold ducat and the Spanish gold scudo were of equal value, each worth six lire and four soldi.
It is not possible to give modern equivalents of purchasing power in the sixteenth century for reasons that may be apparent from the following examples. A standard tip given by grandees for small services was one ducat, which was approximately the weekly wage of a master carpenter, but in the 1530s could buy twenty-eight chickens, ten geese or fifty kilos of flour. A university professor earned something between 100 and 140 ducats a year, a senior civil servant about 250. A Venetian with an income of 1,000 ducats would have been considered prosperous.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Jacopo de’Barbari: Bird’s-eye view of Venice from the south © The Trustees of the British Museum
Madonna della Misericordia, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence © The Bridgeman Art Library
Plate sections
Tribute Money, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden/The Bridgeman Art Library
Gypsy Madonna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna © Artothek/The Bridgeman Art Library
Man with a Blue Sleeve, The National Gallery, London © The Bridgeman Art Library
Miracle of the Speaking Babe, Scuola del Santo, Padua © The Bridgeman Art Library
Flora, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence © The Bridgeman Art Library
Pesaro Altarpiece, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice © Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library
Three Ages of Man, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery (Bridgewater Loan, 1945)
Sacred and Profane Love, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
Assumption of the Virgin, Venice, Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari © Universal Images Group/Photoservice Electa/Getty Images
Noli me tangere © The National Gallery, London/akg-images
Portrait of Federico Gonzaga, Prado, Madrid © The Bridgeman Art Library
Man with a Glove, Louvre, Paris © The Bridgeman Art Library
Presentation of the Virgin, Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice © Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library
Ranuccio Farnese, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection (1952.2.11). Image courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Pietro Aretino, Palazzo Pitti, Florence © The Bridgeman Art Library
Equestrian Portrait of Charles V at Muehlberg, 1548. Madrid, Prado © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence
Portrait of Prince Philip, Prado, Madrid © The Bridgeman Art Library
Rape of Europa © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston © The Bridgeman Art Library
Entombment, Prado, Madrid © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
Diana and Actaeon © The National Gallery, London/akg-images
Diana and Callisto. Purchased jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery, London, with contributions from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, The Monument Trust and through private appeal and bequests, 2012
Danaë receiving the Shower of Gold, Prado, Madrid © Bridgeman Art Library
Reclining Venus, Lutenist, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge © The Bridgeman Art Library
Wisdom, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice © The Bridgeman Art Library
Portrait of Jacopo Strada, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna © 2012. Photo Austrian Archives/Scala, Florence
St Sebastian, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence
Death of Actaeon, National Gallery, London © The Bridgeman Art Library
Flaying of Marsyas, Archbishop’s Gallery, Kromeritz, Czech Republic © Mondadori Electa/The Bridgeman Art Library
Crowning with Thorns, Alte Pinakothek, Munich © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
St Jerome in Penitence, Monasterio de El Escorial, Spain © The Bridgeman Art Library
Pietà, Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice © The Bridgeman Art Library
Self-Portrait, Madrid © Imagno/Austrian Archives/Getty Images
PART I
1488/90–1518
Titian may be said to have remodelled the language of painting, just as Dante established the language of Italy; there remains also the richness of emotion which expresses the man behind the work.
CHARLES RICKETTS, TITIAN, 1910
ONE
Mountains
Might not this ‘mountain man’ have been something of a ‘canny Scot’ or a ‘shrewd Swiss’?
JOSIAH GILBERT, TITIAN’S COUNTRY, 1869
On a clear day in Venice when the wind blows the mist from the lagoon, you can see the distant mountains 110 kilometres to the north where Titian Vecellio was born into a large and locally prominent family in the little township of Pieve di Cadore, close to the border with Habsburg Germany. It was remote, sparsely populated country whose inhabitants were necessarily tough, hard working and used to rationing and penny-pinching. In summer and autumn there was plenty of milk, cheese, butter and fruit from the lush pastures and orchards. But the thin mountain soil did not produce enough grain to last through the long winters, when supplies had to be hauled up through snow-covered valleys on sleds drawn by horses either from Germany or from the fertile Venetian plain. The communal grain stores were closely supervised by the local authorities, who controlled prices for the poor.
A loyal outpost of the Venetian land empire since 1420, the region of Cadore was divided for administrative purposes into centurie or ‘centuries’. And the location of Pieve, where an escarpment rises sharply above the then navigable River Piave, was important to Venice as a control point for one of the trading routes between its overseas dominions in the Levant and transalpine Europe. Convoys of pack animals and carts drawn by oxen or horses, one behind to act as a break when descending steep hills, criss-crossed the surrounding valleys. Merchants from the Habsburg Empire, the German kingdoms, Poland, Hungary and Bohemia carried silver, gold, copper, iron, sheets of tin, metal products, hides, worked leather, furs, coarse cloth and minerals to Venice, where the German exchange house, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, ‘would by itself’, so it seemed to one Jerusalem pilgrim in Venice at the turn of the fifteenth century, ‘suffice to supply all Italy with the goods that come and go’.1 Produce from the north was traded at the Fondaco for luxury goods made in Venice – glass and mirrors from Murano, refined soaps, richly worked and dyed silks and satins – or imported into Venice from the Levant: preserved fruits, molasses, wine and olive oil; seed pearls, ivory; and the products known as spices, a term that covered a wide range of goods from peacock feathers, fine-spun Egyptian cottons and the ingredients of pigments used by artists and dyers to flavourings (cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, saffron, frankincense, myrrh) that were also essentials as the bases of the only drugs available in Renaissance Europe.
Timber and to a lesser extent iron mining were the principal local industries. Wood in this densely forested area was a preci
ous export commodity, not to be wasted unnecessarily on domestic fires. Venice depended for its very survival on a steady and copious supply of wood from its hinterland, which was imported in vast quantities for building and fitting out the war and trading galleys; for the small boats that plied its waterways; for dykes, palisades and the pilings on which the foundations of its buildings rested; for stoking industrial furnaces and for the unusually numerous domestic fires. Venetians, as we can see from the multitude of conical chimneys in contemporary paintings, liked to keep their houses warmer than those in other northern cities.
Timber was in Titian’s blood. He inherited ancestral sawmills near Perarolo, where the River Boite joins the Piave, and later in life ran a timber business in partnership with his brother Francesco and his son Orazio. Rough-cut trunks of larch, red and white fir, beech, birch and alder from the forests of Cadore were floated downriver to Perarolo. Here they were sorted, milled, lashed together as rafts, sometimes loaded with iron ore, wool and hides, and transported downriver to Venice where they were parked along the Zattere – the ‘rafts’ as the quays along the Giudecca Canal are still called – before the wood was sent on for unloading and storage in the timber yard on the northern lagoon, next to the church of San Francesco della Vigna, which the Venetian government, in recognition of the importance of its wood, had granted to Cadore in 1420. It was a privilege that would cause Titian to fall out with the local government later in his life. Cadore supplied Venice with wood into the early twentieth century; and even today you can occasionally hear the buzz of saws in Cadore, in the Parco Rocciolo – the park of rough-cut timber – at the base of the castle hill, just above a little piazza, then as now called Piazza Arsenale after an antique arsenal.
Titian was born in this piazza, probably some time between 1488 and 1490 in a house facing a spectacularly jagged fringe of mountains known as the Marmarole, and he spent his early childhood here with his father Gregorio Vecellio, his mother Lucia and their three younger children: Dorotea, born around 1490, Francesco, born not long after 1490,2 and Orsa, the youngest born around 1500. A modest cottage of a kind that has now mostly disappeared, it was rediscovered behind a later extension in the early nineteenth century by scholar detectives who identified it from its description in a sale document of 1580.3 The ground floor, now a little museum, was originally used for storage and in winter for stabling farm animals, whose bodies acted as under-floor heating for the rooms above. The living space on the first floor consists of four small rooms including a kitchen with a flagstone floor and a stove for cooking and heating which would have been kept lit at all times. The other three rooms are wooden boxes, entirely lined with pine for insulation – some of the original ceiling panels cut from giant pine trees are as much as one and a half metres wide. All the windows are small, and the only staircase is external to save space indoors and to act as a fire escape.