Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice

TWO

The Most Triumphant City

The city is about 7 miles in circumference; it has no surrounding walls, no gates which are locked at night, no sentry keeping watch as other cities have for fear of enemies; it is so very safe at present, that no one can attack or frighten it. As another writer has said its name has achieved such dignity and renown that it is fair to say Venice merits the title ‘Pillar of Italy’, ‘deservedly it may be called the bosom of all Christendom’. For it takes pride of place before all others, if I may say so, in prudence, fortitude, magnificence, benignity and clemency; everyone throughout the world testifies to this. To conclude, this city was built more by divine than human will.

MARIN SANUDO, THE CITY OF VENICE, 1493–15301

Great men built Rome, but Venice was built by gods.

JACOPO SANNAZARO, FROM THE OPERA LATINA, 15352

Titian had often heard about Venice from the men in his family who travelled back and forth on government business. Nothing, however, can have prepared a boy of only nine or ten3 who had never seen any city for the one that even today out-dazzles all others. He was met off the boat at the Rialto by an uncle4 who had agreed to care for him while he served his apprenticeship. We can imagine a lanky boy, from a cramped house in a small village in the mountains, his provincial clothes creased from the long journey, taking it all in with that disarmingly hawkish gaze: the massive doorways to the Gothic buildings, the towering masts of ships, the women teetering by on their platformed shoes. And we can assume that the uncle was kind to him – it was a close family – and that when Conte was in Venice a year or two later he saw to it that his grandson lacked for nothing.

Venice in 1500 was the wealthiest, most glamorous, most sophisticated, most cosmopolitan, most admired – and most hated – metropolis in Europe, centre of the only empire since ancient Rome to be named after a city rather than a dynasty. After a century of successful conquests on the mainland, or terraferma, the Venetian land empire stretched nearly as far Milan to the west, across Friuli and the Istrian Peninsula, while the sea empire extended as far as Cyprus on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. Copies of the bell tower in the Piazza San Marco, and images of St Mark, are still to be seen throughout the far-flung Venetian domains. The Venetian arsenal, the greatest industrial complex in the world, pioneered methods of prefabricated construction that, at its peak, could assemble galleys at the rate of one every few hours. The round-bottomed trading ships of the Most Serene Republic sailed to and from ports in the Levant, in the western Mediterranean, and through the straits of Gibraltar to Portugal, England and Flanders.

All commodities that passed through the Adriatic had to pass through Venice: pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, sugar; drugs, dyes, pigments; wheat, fortified wines, raisins, dates, oil, meat, caviar, cheeses; slaves as well as falcons, leopards and other exotic animals; wax, linen, leather, wool, raw and finished silk; iron, gold, silver, jewels; precious marbles and antique sculptures. Venetian long-haul trade, according to a late fifteenth-century estimate, brought in on average a 40 per cent return on investment. Since the middle of the fourteenth century the Venetian gold ducat had been the most stable, in value and weight, and most welcome currency in the Mediterranean basin. Imitated all over the world from Europe to India, its appearance remained unchanged until the fall of the Republic; and the treasury of San Marco in the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi at the foot of the Rialto Bridge was so famous that it was a priority for visiting VIPs on sightseeing tours. Venice, floating in its protective ring of shallow water at the head of the Adriatic, was the entrepot of the world.

A French diplomat, Philippe de Commynes, who was in Venice in 1494 as the envoy of the French king, left us with one of the most famous of the many descriptions of the city as Titian first saw it. The worldly Commynes was as amazed as any modern tourist to see ‘so many steeples, so many religious houses, and so much building, and all in the water … it is a strange sight to behold so many great and goodly Churches built in the sea’. He added:

I was conducted through the principal street, which they call the Grand Canal … It is the fairest and best-built street, I think, in the world, and goes quite through the city. The buildings are high and stately, and all of fine stone. The ancient houses are all painted, but the rest that have been built within these hundred years, have their front all of white marble … and are beautified with many great pieces of Porphire and Serpentine … In short, it is the most triumphant City that I ever saw … governed with the greatest wisdom, and serving God with the greatest solemnity.

Although encomiums of great cities were standard Renaissance rhetoric, Venice was the most described and praised of all, not least by its own propagandists. And no Renaissance city was portrayed in such detail or on such an enormous scale as Venice in a map published in 1500, which invites us to explore the streets and waterways of the city that Titian knew as a boy. The map was made by a Venetian painter and printmaker known as Jacopo de’ Barbari, ‘of the barbarians’, a name he seems to have adopted even before he started working for patrons north of the Alps. The publisher of his map, a German merchant by the name of Antonio Kolb, was not exaggerating when he boasted, in his application to the government for permission to print, of ‘the almost unattainable and incredible skill required to make such an accurate drawing’ on this enormous scale, ‘the like of which was never made before … and of the mental subtlety involved’. Printed from six blocks, which are preserved in the Correr Museum in Venice, the de’ Barbari map measures some 2.75 metres by 1.20. It is inevitably used to illustrate books about Venice, and you can buy scaled-down facsimiles in Venetian bookshops. But to enjoy this remarkable portrait of Venice on the eve of the most artistically dynamic period of its history you have to examine it in its original proportions.

The de’ Barbari map of Venice.

De’ Barbari imagined himself floating above the city from a fixed point to the south and several hundred metres into the sky. Nearly every building that could be seen from this perspective is recorded: houses large and small complete with windows, timber roof terraces and conical chimney pots designed to catch sparks from domestic fires; well heads in private courtyards and public campi;5 the square bricks that paved some of the larger campi; many churches facing every which way and their bell towers. It is still primarily a Gothic city, although some of the newest buildings have rounded windows, and some brick bridges have already replaced the old wooden fire hazards (although the wooden Rialto Bridge, which had been rebuilt in 1458, was not replaced with the stone bridge until after Titian’s lifetime). Around the perimeters of the city there are orchards, vineyards, long open-sided sheds for drying dyed cloth, and large monastic houses with their herb gardens.

De’ Barbari took special care with the details of the two great preaching churches, the largest in Venice and, as usual in Italian cities, at opposite ends of the city. The Franciscan Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, for which Titian would paint two of his most innovative altarpieces, stands to the west of the Rialto; the Dominican Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where his Death of St Peter Martyr was his most admired and famous work before it was destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century, is on the edge of the north lagoon, with some timber yards just to the east. De’ Barbari even managed to squeeze into his drawing of the campo the equestrian monument to the mercenary soldier Bartolomeo Colleoni and the illusionist façade of the Scuola di San Marco, both completed only a few years before his map was published.

The focal point of the map is of course Piazza San Marco, the religious and political hub of the empire and the only open space in Venice that was and is called a piazza rather than a campo. The bell tower, which had been struck by lightning in 1489, has a flat top in the first edition, but a second state printed in 1514 shows the restored spire. The west end of the piazza is closed by the church of San Geminiano, replaced in the early nineteenth century by the neoclassical Napoleonic wing that now houses the Correr Museum. The clock tower framing the entrance to the Mercerie had been completed just in time for the mid-millennium, but the Procuratie Vecchie, the arcaded terrace that extends along the north side of the piazza, which was let out by the procurators as shops and offices, was rebuilt in a similar style after a fire in 1514. On the south side you can make out the jumbled roofs of the procurators’ old residences and of some hostelries of dubious reputation, which were gradually replaced by the present Procuratie Nuove from the 1540s and not completed until after Titian’s death.

Meanwhile de’ Barbari did his best to dignify the moneychangers’ booths and bakers’ shops and the web of narrow alleys that hemmed in the base of the bell tower. He cleared away from his bowdlerized portrait of the Piazza and the adjoining Piazzetta a notoriously disgusting latrine, the cheese and salami shops on the lagoon side of the old mint, the gambling tables and food stalls between the great granite columns facing the harbour, a stone-cutter’s yard, the stalls of the notaries and barber-surgeons who conducted their business under the portico of the doge’s palace; and the last of the trees and bushes, vestiges of an old monastic garden, which were cut down a few years later to make way for the three bronze flag stands in front of the basilica. Rowing boats and sailing boats of all sizes and shapes make their way up and down the Grand Canal. In the distance, towards Torcello, men in small boats are out fishing or hunting duck. On the outlying islands of Murano and Giudecca you can see the façades of the delizie, summer residences where wealthy Venetians escaped from the heat of the city centre to enjoy themselves on warm evenings. A regatta just disappearing from view on its way to the Lido ruffles the water.

Although you could still find your way around Venice with de’ Barbari’s neat black and white map, his perspective inevitably distorts the scale of some areas of the city. Nor could any map convey the strange beauty, the pungent odours and the sounds – the footsteps, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the shouts of merchants and gondoliers – echoing in the narrow streets, that assaulted the senses of new arrivals. The façades of palaces, frescoed in bright colours like stage sets or inlaid with precious marbles, were reflected in canals that served as open sewers – and sometimes for the disposal of human and animal corpses – their stench mixing in the humid air with the fragrant odours of spices in the markets and the musky perfumes of inviting women. The palaces had glazed windows – a luxury more common in Venice than anywhere else in Europe – which were lit up during the late-night parties for which Venice was famous by torches and by Murano chandeliers hung from gilded ceilings.

The patrician diarist Marin Sanudo tells us that house prices were 20,000 ducats downwards on the Grand Canal, but most cost between 3,000 and 10,000. Elsewhere in the city:

there is an infinite number of houses valued at upwards of 800 ducats, with rooms having gilded ceilings, staircases of white marble, balconies and windows all fitted with glass. There are so many glass windows that the glaziers are continually fitting and making them (they are manufactured at Murano as I will tell below); in every district there is a glaziers shop. Many of these houses are rented out to whoever wants them … some for 100, some for 120 and more ducats a year.6

The wealthy rode around the city on horseback or by boat, the most fashionable means of transport being the gondola, recently made comfortable and private with the addition of the covered cabin, or felze, that you see in paintings by Canaletto but were then a novelty. Gondolas, Sanudo tells us,

are made pitch black and beautiful in shape; they are rowed by Saracen negroes or other servants who know how to row them … There is such an infinite number of them that they cannot be counted; no one knows the total … And there is no gentleman or citizen who does not have one or two or even more boats in the family …7

The sky was periodically darkened by smoke from fires and industrial explosions. Fires set off by an overturned lamp, a spark from a chimney, a foundry or baker’s oven skipped from roof to roof, floated on oil slicks down the canals, feeding on wooden beams, bridges and timber stores. Visitors commented on the night skies lit by fireworks, torches, bonfires on church towers: beautiful fire hazards. The worn-out sails of boats were set on fire. And in the arsenal it took nothing more than the spark from a hammer or the iron shoe of a horse to ignite a store of gunpowder. Titian did not invent his dramatic, fiery skies, but he was the first artist to paint skies that Turner would describe as ‘rent by rockets’.8

In an age at least as obsessed by material consumption as our own, visitors to Venice were most astonished by the shopping. Titian’s Venice was the ‘Renaissance emporium of things’.9 If you wanted to buy the finest damasks, velvets, satins, coloured silk sewing threads, the sweetest-smelling beeswax candles, the best-quality white soap, or choose from the largest selection in Europe of printed books, dyes and artists’ pigments, you went or sent for them to Venice. It was worth the cost of the trip because once such luxury items were re-exported the price rose. Over 75 per cent of the population were artisans or shopkeepers, and no neighbourhood was without its warehouses, shops and markets – one of the biggest markets was held on Wednesdays in Campo San Polo near the house where Titian lived in the 1520s. Even boats tied up at quays were rented out as shops. And Venice was a major art market, especially for ancient Greek sculptures, which were collected by the very rich or imported from the overseas dominions for resale. A Milanese priest stopping in Venice in 1494 on his way to a pilgrimage in the Holy Land was nearly at a loss for words:

And who could count the many shops so well furnished that they also seem warehouses, with so many cloths of every make – tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax! These things stupefy the beholder, and cannot be fully described to those who have not seen them.10

The goods were weighed, passed through customs, sold in the markets or stored in great warehouses and hangars. Iron, wine and coal – ferro, vino, carbon – had their own dedicated wharves, and are still named after them. Merchants from all over the world congregated at the Rialto – ‘the richest spot in the world’ according to Marin Sanudo – where passengers and goods from the mainland and continental Europe were disembarked and unloaded, where the trade banking houses were located, and where anything from slaves (price 40–50 ducats for females) to exotic animals and trading galleys was bought and sold at auction. The food halls further upstream were like gardens where caged birds, a Venetian delicacy then as now, sang among the fruit and vegetables, while an abundance of silvery fish fresh from the lagoon glittered on marble slabs in the pescheria. Across the bridge the Merceria, the shortest pedestrian route to the Piazza San Marco, was lined with drapers’ shops, high-fashion boutiques selling women’s clothes and accessories, picture galleries, shops selling books and prints. ‘Here’, Sanudo exclaimed, ‘is all the merchandise that you can think of, and whatever you ask for is there.’

The basin of San Marco was the harbour for goods and passengers from overseas. Bales, sacks and crates were loaded on to wharves in front of the doge’s palace. There was another customs house here, and more warehouses. The mint, where the gold and silver coins of the Republic were struck, was in the Piazza, as were the banks that managed long-term deposits of state and private capital. It was also the venue of a regular Saturday market and an annual trade fair in May that attracted shoppers and merchants from all over Europe and the Levant. Bewildered visitors from overseas alighting on what Petrarch had called ‘San Marco’s marble shore’ were greeted by pimps, cardsharps waiting at gambling tables, and tourist guides offering a boat trip up the Grand Canal, a tour of saints’ relics and body parts stolen from the Holy Land, or a visit to the glass factories on Murano. Other amusements on offer included brothels to satisfy all sexual tastes, jousting, bull baiting, musical entertainments of all kinds. Venice – itself ‘the most splendid theatre in all Italy’, as Erasmus wrote in 1533 – was famous for its theatrical productions and pageants, which, like its prostitutes, outclassed and outnumbered those to be seen in any other city. The vibrant theatricality of Titian’s paintings must have been encouraged by the spectacular performances he saw as a boy in Venice.

Some 100,000 residents, nearly twice as many as today, were crammed into the water-bound city where domestic accommodation competed for space with industrial and mercantile buildings. Many, perhaps as many as half of the population at any one time, were foreigners. Some came from Europe – Germany, England, France, Flanders, Spain, and other parts of the Italian peninsula. Greeks formed the largest immigrant community in the sixteenth century, but there were also large numbers of Turks, Slavs, Armenians and Jews. Some black slaves were imported from Africa, as we can see, for example, from the smartly dressed black gondolier in Vittore Carpaccio’s delightful painting of the Rialto Bridge (1494). But most immigrants came of their own free will to find jobs, to seek fortunes or to take refuge from less tolerant regimes. Early sixteenth-century Venice, like nineteenth-century New York, another great port city floating on islands free from the mainland, welcomed into what was something akin to a globalized economy foreigners whose primary allegiance if they had one was often to their homeland. The state was generous to them in the interests of maintaining public order and because immigrants provided useful labour. Those who came as refugees were often successful in petitions to the Senate for public offices or military commissions, licences to trade or compensation for lost goods or property. But refugee women, who had fewer opportunities for work, were often left destitute by the system.

Some well-born and wealthy immigrants from the imperial domains married into patrician families. For the less privileged, manual labour, although not well paid – a master shipwright in the arsenal, which employed some 4,000 specialized workers, earned no more than fifty ducats a year11 – was easy to find, and food was usually inexpensive, although prices could spiral out of control in wartime. Foreign workers were needed for domestic and hard labour, to serve in the army and navy, to assemble the galleys and build new buildings. The more talented brought with them useful skills and improved technologies for the manufacture of everything from wool and silk to gun carriages and printing presses. Mauro Codussi, the great idiosyncratic architect of the first Venetian Renaissance, was born near Bergamo. The architect and sculptor Pietro Lombardo, who introduced the Tuscan Renaissance style to Venice and Padua, came, as his name suggests, from Lombardy. Later, the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, as choirmaster of San Marco’s, would make Venice the European centre of polyphonic music. Without the Flemish painters who introduced oil paint to Venice in the 1460s, without Giorgione of Castelfranco, Titian of Cadore, his two great Tuscan friends the architect Jacopo Sansovino and the writer Pietro Aretino, his younger contemporary Paolo Veronese – and many other foreign artists and artisans who have never been identified – there might not have been a ‘golden age’ of Venetian art.

And the government never made the mistake of expelling Jews for long. Jews, as Sanudo put it, were ‘as necessary as bakers’. After 1516, when refugees from wars in northern Italy had inflated the Jewish population, they were confined in the first of all ghettos (named after an abandoned iron foundry on the site). Nevertheless, Jews continued to arrive from all over Europe and the Levant. Some, who did not wish to be recognized as Jewish, were successful in petitions to release them from the obligation to wear the Jewish hat. Many of the most illustrious Venetian doctors, philosophers and printers were Jews; and some German Jews made small fortunes in the antiques and second-hand trade after they were granted the exclusive privilege of furnishing all ambassadorial apartments. Those who converted to Christianity were nevertheless regarded with suspicion, less because of their race than because being polyglot their identities were difficult to fix. But, in a city whose wealth depended on trade with the Muslim Levant and which accommodated so many non-Christian inhabitants, attitudes to religious practice were on the whole more relaxed than elsewhere in Europe. The journey between Venice and Constantinople was the most described of all voyages in the Renaissance, and many Venetians who made it recorded their admiration for the cleanliness, order and beauty they found in the Ottoman Empire. Some converted to Islam and occupied high positions in the sultanate.

The art of printing was introduced to Venice by German, French and Syrian immigrants, some of them Jews, who built presses in the late 1460s, only two decades or so after the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg, and soon produced the first printed editions of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and of the erotic love poems of Catullus, making them widely available to those who could read Latin and afford the price of a book. By 1500 about half of the books produced in Italy, and a sixth of those in Europe, were printed in Venice, perhaps as many as 1,125,000 volumes.12 With something between one and two hundred print shops in early sixteenth-century Venice13 the prices went down while the quality of woodcuts and engravings improved. The educated classes from all over Europe came to Venice to buy their books and prints, while the printing trade enriched the population mix by creating a demand for literate workers who could edit, commission, proofread, translate or plagiarize. Some were inevitably hacks, but others were intellectuals who encouraged the development of a high humanistic culture of the kind that had flourished in central Italy and the university town of Padua for more than half a century.

The Venetian presses produced the first printed editions of everything from musical scores, an exposition of double-entry bookkeeping, manuals about sewing and lace making to the Koran, while Venetian woodcuts of mythological subjects provided artists and craftsmen north and south of the Alps with ideas for the design of every kind of object, from hatbands and wedding chests to garden statues and easel paintings. Entrepreneurial publishers also commissioned single woodcuts, impressions of which were sold in large editions on the international market as decorative objects, to be mounted on canvas or pasted directly on the walls of houses. (It is likely that Jacopo de’ Barbari’s enormous map, which is far too large to be carried round the city as a guide, was intended for display in this way.) The young Titian was more widely known for his woodcuts14 than for his oil paintings.

Italian translations of classical texts, some of them free interpretations or conflations of more than one original story, made them accessible to people who could not read Greek or Latin. Ovid’s enjoyable tales of lustful gods and goddesses and terrible punishments had been told and depicted since the Middle Ages, but it was not until 1497 that the first Italian translation of the Metamorphoses, published in Venice as a prose paraphrase and illustrated with fifty-three woodcuts, enabled artists with no classical languages to read the stories for themselves. Contemporary writers evoked their own idealized versions of a pastoral antiquity.15