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Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice

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Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice

Titian

His Life and the Golden Age of Venice

SHEILA HALE

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

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

A Note on Money

List of Illustrations

Titian’s Family Tree

Maps

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

Picture Section

Notes

Bibliography

Appendix: Locations of Paintings

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Also by Sheila Hale

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 they’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

Three Ages of Man, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery (Bridgewater Loan, 1945)

Assumption of the Virgin, Venice, Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari © Universal Images Group/Photoservice Electa/Getty Images

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

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

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 precious 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.

Surrounded by dense forests, and guardian to one of the gateways into Italy, the province of Cadore was inevitably subject to frequent fires and to skirmishes with the German and Turkish armies that threatened the borders of the Venetian state. It must have been during one of the sieges by the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I in the years between 1508 and 1513 that the parish register of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths was lost, leaving posterity with no certain evidence of the date of birth of Titian, his siblings or indeed anyone else born in Cadore in the previous decades. Titian scholars have been searching without success for this book for at least two centuries. Unfortunately, since Titian in his later life exaggerated, or perhaps forgot, his age, it is unlikely that we will ever have certain evidence of his exact date of birth. Like many people at the time Titian may not have known or cared exactly when he had been born (neither did Giovanni Bellini or Giorgione, or if they did they left no record of their ages). It would have suited him to exaggerate his age when he was a young artist seeking work in Venice, and again later in life when extreme old age was a rare achievement that commanded great respect. His two earliest biographers, Lodovico Dolce and Giorgio Vasari, both of whom knew him personally, imply that he was born in the late 1480s, and something between 1488 and 1490 is the date that is now, after long and heated controversy, accepted by most authorities. However, his seventeenth-century biographers – an anonymous writer commissioned by a distant relative of Titian4 and Carlo Ridolfi – gave 1477, a date which, like so much misinformation about Titian’s life, remains to this day in some of the literature.5

Apart from the dramatic mountain scenery and the house where he was born, there isn’t much left of Titian’s Cadore. The parish church of Santa Maria Nascente where he hoped to be buried and for which he designed a set of frescos towards the end of his life was torn down in 1813 when remains of the old castle were used to build the bulky neo-Renaissance replacement you see today. The life-sized bronze statue of Titian in the main square, Piazza Tiziano, was erected in the late nineteenth century after Pieve had become part of the newly united Italy. He glares down from his pedestal displaying the gold chain presented to him by the emperor as the insignia of his knighthood, the cap that probably concealed a bald spot6 and the fiercely down-turned mouth,7 and wielding palette and brushes like a protective shield against inquisitive posterity. He looks about fifty, still lean and tough, although one can imagine that the rough mountain edges of his voice and manners have been smoothed away. Titian by this time has painted most people of consequence in the Europe of his day. He has a kind of Olympian wisdom, a detached view of the world unencumbered by any particular political or religious agenda (unlike his hero and rival Michelangelo) and a profound understanding of people and how they work. He is regarded almost as a demi-god, an Atlantis, or a reincarnation of Apelles, painter to Alexander the Great. It’s hard to imagine him smiling, but on the rare occasions when he does turn up the corners of his mouth it must seem like a gift to the men, and of course the women, he charms with his wit and his self-assured good manners.

If the emperor Charles V really did pick up Titian’s paintbrush as Ridolfi tells us,8 perhaps he was being rewarded for one of those smiles. Both of his contemporary biographers described his charm. ‘In the first place,’ says Dolce:

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