Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice

Aldo Manuzio, a publishing genius who came to Venice in the 1490s from a small village near Rome, set up shop in Campo San Agostino in 1502 and made his Aldine Press the most commercially successful as well as the most scholarly of some 500 editorial houses in the city. Venetians – despite the elite taste for collecting ancient Greek sculptures and the presence in the city of educated Greek refugees after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 – had until then shown little interest in the Greek literature, science and philosophy that made one of the most significant contributions to the mindset of the European Renaissance. Humanists read the work of the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who had discovered that the intervals in the Greek musical system could be measured in space, and the account by his follower Plato16 of the rational order of a divinely created universe. Both of these influenced not just architects but also, it has been suggested,17 the compelling intervals and rhythms of some of Titian’s paintings. Nevertheless, the fate of a great library of ancient Greek manuscripts left to the Venetian state in 1468 by the Greek cardinal John Bessarion testifies to the intellectual provincialism of the Republic at a time when Roman and Florentine scholars had been reading Greek texts for at least two decades. Although one of the conditions of Bessarion’s bequest was that the library should be open to the public, the codices were left in crates in a hall in the doge’s palace where some were damaged and some ‘borrowed’ and sold without anybody noticing. It was not until 1530 that Pietro Bembo, the newly appointed librarian of St Mark, began promoting the idea of a purpose-built library, which was begun seven years later but not finished until the end of the century. Meanwhile Aldo, who launched his press with a Greek grammar, published some of the Bessarion manuscripts, and soon became the leading European publisher of Greek texts. Aristotle and Plato had been available in Latin translations since the early fifteenth century, but Aldo was the first to publish them in the original Greek. By the time he died in 1515 he had printed twenty-eight editions of Greek classics, including the complete works of Aristotle in five volumes, and the first complete editions of the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, as well Erasmus’ translation into Latin of Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis. Although Titian was unable to read Greek or Latin, Manutius stimulated a new interest in Greek tragedy, and staged performances in Italian would exercise a profound influence on his treatment of mythological subjects.

The Aldine classics were printed in beautiful deluxe or affordable pocket editions – the pocket classic was Aldo’s invention. His contemporary list was no less impressive. Some of the ablest humanist scholars of the day came to Venice to see their books through the Aldine Press. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most brilliant and later most influential leader of northern European humanism and Catholic reform, was in Venice in 1508 supervising the Aldine publication of his Adagia, the book that made him famous. He became a family friend – although he complained about the food in the Manutio household – and a friend, too, of the patrician Venetian writers and humanists Andrea Navagero and Pietro Bembo. Bembo was the greatest Venetian writer of his day and the only one who is still read outside academic circles. His use of Tuscan, the language of Dante, which he claimed made a sweeter sound than his native Venetian, established the norm for literary Italian for centuries to come. He also edited famous editions of Dante and Petrarch for the Aldine Press. Petrarch, who celebrated the ideal of a woman who is both chaste and an object of male desire, was especially popular, and Bembo, who greatly admired him but who was a relentless womanizer, resolved the paradox of chaste desire with a Neoplatonic interpretation that excuses carnal love as a first step on the ladder to the sexless Platonic ideal. His Asolani, published by the Aldine Press in 1505 at a time when he was suffering from disappointment in love, is set in Asolo, the hill town north of Venice, at the court of Caterina Cornaro, the deposed Queen of Cyprus. Its protagonists, six fictitious young Venetians, three men and three women, enjoy the dolce far niente – the sweetness of doing nothing – while they discuss the philosophy of love.

Bembo and the Latin poet and patrician Andrea Navagero were among the founding members of the Aldine Academy, where meetings conducted in Greek were attended by learned members of the ducal chancery, some of whom worked part time for the press. But Aldo took his logo, an anchor intertwined with a dolphin, from an illustration in his first book in Italian, which he hoped would be a bestseller. The Hypnerotomachia Polifili (The Dream of Polifilo) is a coffee-table-sized book by Francesco Colonna, a Dominican monk from Treviso, which was published in 1499. Set in the Veneto in the 1460s and illustrated with 174 superb woodcuts, some explicitly erotic, the Hypnerotomachia is a weird stream-of-consciousness novel revolving around a passionate love story between Polifilus and Polia. Full of digressions, codes, riddles, bizarre episodes and passages in obscure ancient languages, it may have been intended, or partly intended, as a satire of pedantic humanism. (A favourite joke of one Venetian senator was to dismiss long-winded verbiage as ‘words of Polifilo’.) Although the first edition seems not to have been a commercial success the author’s obsessions with architecture, gardens and above all sex (in one episode Polifilo makes love to a building, to their mutual satisfaction) had an impact on Renaissance thinking,18 and the woodcut of the naked, reclining Venus, who blesses the love of Polifilo and Polia, anticipates the naked Venuses that became familiar subjects of Venetian painting.19

Venus, the incomparably beautiful goddess of sex and the third brightest planet in the night sky after the sun and the moon, was inextricably interwoven with the legendary foundation of Venice. Like Venice she had been born from the sea, and, so the poets liked to say, she gave her name to the city. She was usually portrayed naked – and never more enticingly than by Titian – or was used as an excuse for paintings of naked women that bore none of her attributes. The classical sources are confused about whether to condemn her nudity as that of a serial adulteress and founding mother of prostitution or to approve of it as representing the unadorned truth, either about the joys of uninhibited sexual love or about the higher, purer and more enduring love that follows marriage. Plato, in the Symposium, had resolved the dilemma by positing two Venuses, one heavenly and chaste, the other earthly and lustful. So she became, as well as the patron goddess of virginal Venice, the patroness of both whores and brides. The dualism, well suited to the Venetian predilection for having things both ways, reflected an ambivalent attitude to sex. Physical beauty was celebrated and its sexual consequences condoned by the intellectual elite. According to the medical wisdom of the day passionate sex leading to simultaneous orgasm produced the best babies. But the science, as it was thought to be, clashed with a deep-seated fear of sex outside marriage, which upsets the order of society, and with the teaching of the Church, which dictated that passion should be reserved for the worship of God.

Nevertheless, in a port city frequented by tourists, foreign merchants and pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, who often had to wait for a month or more for the tide to carry their galleys on their ongoing journeys, prostitution flourished. From the middle of the fourteenth century the government had decreed that prostitutes were entirely necessary to the state and founded a public brothel near the Rialto. Prostitution soon employed a significant proportion of the population – if we include pimps, innkeepers and servants as well as the whores themselves.20 Most street prostitutes were poor young working-class women for whom the oldest profession was more profitable than domestic service or making sails for the arsenal for a salary of twelve ducats a year. But some went about so well dressed that they were confused with respectable ladies. Occasional legislation to force them to wear distinguishing marks, to ban soliciting on the streets or from gondolas and to forbid cross-dressing, a favourite technique of seduction, was half-heartedly enforced by a government that was concerned less with moral questions than with protecting its own members from syphilis, the ‘French disease’ that had invaded Italy with the armies of Charles VIII. ‘Our praiseworthy prostitutes’,21 as a frank official called them, were recognized as a necessary outlet for bachelors, good for the tourist trade and a douceur that could be offered to visiting dignitaries. Red-light districts were under the control of the state, and there was no move towards suppressing a – possibly tongue-in-cheek – tariff of whores printed in 1535 that gave the names, addresses, prices and specialities of 110 prostitutes. Prostitution, however, is always a dangerous job, and women who took money for sex had no recourse to the law if they were hurt or maimed. Angela Zaffeta, the most beautiful courtesan in Venice, was, according to a pornographic fantasy written in the early 1530s,22 taken to an island in the lagoon and raped by a succession of patricians in order of their social position.

The distinction between common whores and high-class courtesans – some of the latter educated and talented women kept by rich men – was first established at about the time Titian was making his name as a young painter. The most successful courtesans dressed and decorated their houses in the same fashion as wealthy married women. Some had been brought to Venice by their fading prostitute mothers from less sexually tolerant cities. Some were talented singers, actresses or poets. A few came from respectable Venetian families. Some courtesans became the long-standing mistresses of married noblemen. Marin Sanudo recorded a wedding between a widowed nobleman and a certain Cornelia Grifo, ‘a most beautiful and sumptuous widowed prostitute’:

She is rich and has been publicly kept by Ser Ziprian Malipiero, and for a while she belonged to Ser Piero da Molin dal Banco, and to others, who have given her a dowry of [blank] thousand ducats. The wedding was held at the monastery of San Zuan on Torcello and has cast great shame on the Venetian patriciate.23

Shortly after that the Council of Ten, one of the most powerful of the government committees, clamped down on such intrusions into the patrician bloodline with a law requiring the registration of all noble marriages within one month of the ceremony.

Prostitutes and courtesans nevertheless continued to serve the needs of the large percentage of Venetian men who remained unmarried. The population, which had tripled in the previous hundred years, was also proportionately younger, but competition for wives was intense, and men rarely married until they had inherited from their parents or established careers, by which time they were likely to be at least in their forties. Until the Counter-Reformation marriage was a secular arrangement, not celebrated in church but established by contract between families whose only considerations were financial and social. Those able to provide a daughter with a large dowry could be selective about the social status and wealth of the groom. But dowry inflation, which was rampant throughout the sixteenth century, meant that even well-off families could not necessarily afford to marry more than one daughter. It was a problem for all Venetian fathers who hoped to marry their daughters well, one that the Senate tried to control in the case of patrician families because it transferred a high proportion of their wealth, which might otherwise have been spent on investment and mercantile activity, to daughters, who were sometimes left so dowry-rich after the deaths of their husbands that they were in a position to lend back to their brothers and fathers.

Unmarried girls, who were on the shelf by twenty-five at most, were often placed in convents, some of which had reputations as high-class bordellos. Titian’s friend Pietro Aretino, who occasionally wrote pornography, described a convent24 where the abbess presided over group orgies, the walls were frescoed with erotic scenes, and the nuns were pleasured by lusty young friars and supplied with baskets of dildos made of the finest Murano glass. Although this was, of course, another fantasy (and was deliberately set not in Venice but in Rome), young nuns, often with the support of their families, did resist attempts to curtail their freedom of behaviour. One disapproving member of government identified more than fifteen convent-brothels, and recommended burning them to the ground along with the nuns, ‘for the sake of the Venetian State’.25

In the oriental tradition passed down from the city’s Byzantine past, respectable women were supposed to be kept at home or closely chaperoned on permissible outings. Some of the sequestered women must have led very boring lives. The two sulky ladies on a terrace in Carpaccio’s famous painting, which is now thought to portray a bride and her companion, might have looked less miserable had they been the courtesans they were once thought to be. In the upper panel their men are enjoying a day out duck hunting in the lagoon. Even the shopping for groceries was done by the men of the household, who could be seen strolling or riding on horseback through the markets, judging value for money with the trained eyes of professional merchants, while their housebound women supervised the cleaning or did it themselves; although there were fewer domestic servants than one might expect in a wealthy city, foreigners commented on the sparkling cleanliness of Venetian houses. When they did go out, perhaps to church or to attend a wedding or to shop for clothes and accessories in the boutiques on and off the Merceria, they teetered along on their zoccoli, the ridiculously high-platformed clogs that restricted their pace and emphasized their vulnerability, making them look like dwarfs on stilts and requiring the support of servant chaperones: the longer the train of servants the higher the status of the woman.26

Venetian women’s addiction to the latest bizarre fashions may in some cases have been a compensation for otherwise dull lives, but it would be anachronistic to infer that the displays of breasts and jewels were primarily intended to brand women as their husband’s sexual property. Their dowries, the larger part of which was returned to them as pensions on the death of their husbands, meant that wives and widows enjoyed a high degree of economic independence. It says something about their literacy and the respect accorded them by their husbands that women were increasingly designated as executors of their husbands’ estates; and since their husbands were usually at least twenty years older, there were a good many rich Venetian widows. Some women discovered along with their freedom a talent for investing in property and made money on their own account. Venetian women of all classes, although certainly not ‘liberated’ in our sense of that condition, were more active in business than women in other cities. Despite a dictate issued by the Council of Ten in 1506 imposing penalties on husbands who permitted their wives to dine out and attend theatrical entertainments alone, there were at least some independent-minded wives who defied the sanctions against appearing unchaperoned in public. Foreigners were surprised to see women dining out alone. And as early as 1487 a German guest at the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo was astonished to observe elegantly dressed young women moving openly in and out of the dormitories and cells of the monks.

The Milanese priest who had described the shopping opportunities, and who evidently had a practical mind, wondered how the women kept their dresses from falling off their shoulders. But if the older generation of Venetian patricians disapproved of the bizarre fashion for veiled faces and bosom-revealing bodices worn by women whose bodies, perfumed with amber, musk and civet, could be scented from a distance, sumptuary legislation failed to make much difference to their showy dress sense, and there was no law against décolletage until 1562. Sanudo was impressed by the size and value of women’s jewellery:

The women are truly very beautiful; they go about with great pomp, adorned with big jewels and finery. And … adorned with jewels of enormous value and cost, necklaces worth from 300 up to 1000 ducats, and rings on their fingers set with large rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds and other jewels of great value. There are very few patrician women (and none, shall I say, so wretched and poor) who do not have 500 ducats worth of rings on their fingers, not counting the enormous pearls, which have to be seen to be believed.27

The erotically charged atmosphere in early sixteenth-century Venice is almost palpable in the paintings by Giorgione, Giovanni Cariani, Palma Vecchio, Titian and others of women whom we can no longer identify but whose inviting eyes and bared breasts leave no room for doubt about their availability. Titian was not the first artist to paint naked women, but he was the first to use live models, and to paint them lying down. Lightly draped or naked, Titian’s anonymous women, as real to us today as when his contemporaries thought they saw the blood pulsing beneath their trembling flesh, display an overt sexuality that had never been seen before in painting.

On his map of Venice Jacopo de’ Barbari enlarged the scale of the arsenal to emphasize its importance. But there are fewer warships than would have been present at a time when Venice was at war with the Ottoman Turks. At the top of the map Mercury, god of communications and commerce, emerges from a cloud. Neptune, god of the sea, rides on his sea monster among trading galleys that are coming and going, riding at anchor, preparing to unload passengers and goods on to lighters. But a third tutelary deity of Venice, Mars, god of the wars fought in order to expand and maintain its trading empire, is absent. De’ Barbari’s black and white dolls’ city is at peace with itself and the world, serene, silent and inhabited only by a few stick people to indicate the scale of the buildings.

The true situation was very different. The mid-millennium, when soothsayers all over Europe were predicting the end of the world, was actually a troubled time for the Most Serene Republic. In 1498 reports had reached the Rialto of Vasco da Gama’s exploratory voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, and three years later the worst fears were confirmed by news that twelve Portuguese ships had been spotted in Aden and Calicut. The threat to the Venetian monopoly of the spice trade, which had already been disturbed for several years by the disruption of overland routes during wars in northern Italy and Turkish wars in Persia, had been followed in 1499 by a series of bank failures, which ruined some of the wealthiest patrician owners of the trading galleys.

It was in that same annus horribilis that one of the largest war fleets ever prepared in the Venetian arsenal suffered a catastrophic defeat by the Turks. Two Venetian gunships were blown up and the Turkish cavalry invaded the Friuli as far as the River Isonzo (where Titian’s grandfather Conte took part in the defence). ‘Tell your government that they have done with wedding the sea,’ the Turkish vizir gloated to the Venetian ambassador in February 1500, adding that it was the sultan’s turn now to be the bridegroom in the annual symbolic ceremony of the doge’s marriage to the sea. The Turk – ‘signor tremendo’ as Marin Sanudo dubbed the increasingly militant Ottoman Empire – had been harassing Venetian trading convoys since the Turkish conquest of Constantinople half a century earlier. It had been mostly a cold war, but now flared up into four years of fighting, during which the Venetians lost more essential naval bases in Greece and Albania, and it led to a temporary halt of Venetian trading in the Levant.

The setback to overseas trade was not the mortal blow that some historians have made out. Revenues from the terraferma – ‘the most delightful, populous, and fertile part of Europe … the flower of the world’, as it was described by a Vicentine nobleman in 150928 – were about twice those from the sea empire. Nevertheless, taxation and customs duties on the oriental spices that passed through the mainland accounted for a large proportion of the state income, and the interruptions to overseas trade were at the time cause for deep concern. The reaction was swift and dramatic. All but the most profitable of the shipping lanes – those that went to and from Beirut and Alexandria – were abandoned. The ruling class relinquished its long-cherished exclusive right to own and profit from the trading galleys, and more of the merchant noblemen who had formerly spent much of their lives at sea stayed at home and spread their risks by investing in manufacturing, and in agriculture, property, mining and other industrial enterprises on the mainland. Venetians made new fortunes from expanded industries: the weaving and dyeing of silk and wool, the manufacture of fine soaps, leather working and sugar refining, all profitable commodities in the home and export markets. The fine-spun Venetian glass produced by forty or so furnaces on Murano was increasingly exported to the rest of Italy and the Levant and as far as Portugal, Spain and the Indies. Nevertheless, the diarist Girolamo Priuli was pessimistic about the shift from overseas trade to agriculture and industrial production: ‘In losing their shipping and their overseas Empire, the Venetians will also lose their reputation and renown and gradually, but within a very few years, will be consumed altogether.’29

But the economy recovered. The seriously rich indulged themselves in ways that rivalled the behaviour of our most outrageously ostentatious twenty-first-century hedge-fund managers. At a wedding in 1507, a total of 4,000 ducats, which was only part of the bride’s dowry, the bulk of which was in property, decorated the banqueting table in six basins, one containing gold coins, the rest silver.30 By the 1560s more pepper and cotton was being re-exported from Venice than in the early fifteenth century.31 And in 1605, a little more than a century after the wide-eyed Milanese priest had marvelled at the goods on offer in the greatest of all emporia, the political commentator Giovanni Botero wrote a nearly identical account in which he described Venice as ‘a summary of the universe, because there is nothing originating in any far-off country but it is found in abundance in this city’.

Titian arrived in a Venice that was enjoying what has been called its first Renaissance.32 There was an awakening appetite for learning and art. A small elite of connoisseurs began to collect cabinet paintings from avant-garde artists – almost all of Giorgione’s paintings and Titian’s earliest portraits were private commissions. Oak piles were being driven into the bed of the lagoon to make the foundations for new buildings that would gradually obliterate inner-city fields, orchards, vineyards and gardens recorded by de’ Barbari’s map. Sanudo described the building materials piled up in campi and on quays: bricks, terracotta and mortar from Padua, Treviso and Ferrara; sand from the Brenta or the Lido; wood from Cadore and around Treviso; hard white stone for foundations and façades from the Istrian Peninsula; fine marbles from Verona, Greece, Egypt and India.

The population was rejuvenated thanks to milder than usual plagues in the late fifteenth century, which had spared the babies and young children who were the usual first victims. The old certainties were called into question by new men facing up to new economic, political and religious challenges, new patterns of trade, new ways of thinking about a world that had grown larger after the discovery of the Americas, the rounding of the Horn of Africa, and invasions of Italy by other European powers. The younger generation, which had a different perspective of its place in the world, thumbed its nose more often at the values of the old, seafaring empire-builders, whose philistinism and puritanical ideas about moderation clashed with a growing tendency to enjoy life, display wealth and collect works of art.