Titian Read online

  He had had a good start working with his father, a fine draughtsman of original subjects but not an overshadowing genius as a painter, who must have recognized and encouraged his son’s superior talent. But Giovanni’s life had not been entirely untroubled. Since he was not mentioned in his parents’ will, we can guess that he was illegitimate. A more serious stigma, if we are to believe the evidence of a Latin poem composed by a friend around 1507, would have been that he was apparently bisexual, although if the authorities knew about his homoerotic inclinations it would not have been the only time they chose to ignore that most heinous crime, as they saw it, in the case of a prominent and valuable Venetian. The poem, which was suppressed by a shocked librarian of the Marciana library in the early nineteenth century, was rediscovered and published in 1990 by an English scholar.23 It describes him in bed with a boy whose body is compared to the marble of Greek sculptures, and was evidently not intended as a criticism, let alone an exposé or for circulation. Whatever the truth about his sexuality it had not prevented him from marrying well. His wife Ginevra Bocheta, a relative of the Zorzi family of dyers, had brought him the substantial dowry, for an artist at that time, of 500 ducats. They had one son, Alvise. Since the poem was written after his wife’s death it is possible that he turned to boys only as an aged widower.

  Some time around 1502 Giovanni bought a house on the mainland. But he was not a traveller and rarely left the Veneto unless tempted by irresistible commissions. The last of these came from Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, for whom in 1514, two years before his death, he painted the Feast of the Gods, his first and last major mythological painting, parts of which would later be repainted by Titian. Giovanni’s last work, the Young Woman with a Mirror,24 was completed in 1515. It was the year before his death when he was well into his eighties. He signed it ‘Joannes bellinus faciebat M.D.X.V.’ Signing a painting as though it were still in progress was a trope, used by other artists including Michelangelo and, later, by Titian, referring to Pliny who had written in the preface to his Natural History that great art was never finished and that the greatest artists did not claim that a painting was finished to their satisfaction.

  The subject of a young woman seated at her dressing table with a mirror was, like the reclining nude, a Venetian invention. Giovanni may have seen Titian’s Young Woman with a Mirror (Paris, Louvre).25 The underdrawings of the woman’s contours, which are unusually spare for Giovanni, suggest that he was experimenting with Titian’s technique of painting with only summary guidelines, but his use of a textured layer of underpaint in the background was his own innovation. This beautiful painting has been described as an ‘apotheosis of seeing’ and as one of the purest expressions in Venetian art of idealized nudity.26 The woman’s expensive headdress probably indicates that she was married. Her torso, which is usually thought to have been conceived after a statue or fragment, lacks the erotic appeal of Titian’s clothed beauty, who wrings her long, loose golden blonde hair like a Venus rising from the sea.

  Giovanni, supreme master though he was, lacked Titian’s genius for drama and his penetrating understanding of human nature. His feasting gods for the Duke of Ferrara appear to be acting out rather than taking part in Ovid’s story of an orgy and attempted rape. (Either on his own initiative or at his patron’s request he lowered the necklines of the women in an attempt to make them more desirable.) His landscapes, enlivened though they are by charming naturalistic detail, have none of the poetry that Titian saw in distant mountains and lost horizons. Giovanni was essentially a religious painter, and the range of his subject matter, and of the emotions he conveyed, was narrower than those of his greatest pupil. And so it happened that Giovanni Bellini’s reputation was eclipsed soon after his death by Titian’s more sophisticated, dynamic and protean oeuvre. Vasari, whose sharp eye for quality was sometimes clouded by his commitment to Florentine painting and the Aristotelian theory of art as progressive, dismissed Giovanni for his ‘arid, crude and laboured manner’. Titian’s friend Pietro Aretino likened him to a poet who puts ‘perfumes in his inks and miniatures in his letters’. He was not rediscovered until the late nineteenth century when Ruskin pronounced the Frari and San Zaccaria altarpieces to be the two best pictures in the world,27 a judgement that encouraged Henry James’s rapturous description of the Frari altarpiece:

  Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this. It is one of those things that sum up the genius of a painter, the experience of life, the teaching of a school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been clarified by time, and it is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as it is deep.28

  But Ruskin loved Giovanni for the wrong reasons, seeing him as the last of the pure, godly masters ‘who did nothing but what was lovely, and taught only what was right’, rather than as the founding father of the golden age of Venetian painting. If Giovanni Bellini struggled to keep pace with Titian, Titian could hardly have liberated himself immediately from such a master, whose example continued to haunt his early works; and to whom he would pay homage in his last painting, the Pietà, in which the Virgin cradles her dead Son beneath a mosaic semi-dome, which deliberately refers to the – by then archaic – neo-Byzantine settings of Giovanni’s many depictions of the Virgin and Her Son.

  Although the absence of documentation makes the chronology of Titian’s earliest paintings notoriously impossible to establish – dating of the undocumented paintings was not even attempted until the late nineteenth century, when the invention of photography made stylistic comparisons feasible – Titian’s votive picture of Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St Peter by Pope Alexander VI (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum) is traditionally supposed to be his first surviving work, possibly painted while he was still in Giovanni Bellini’s studio or shortly after he left it. Jacopo Pesaro was a Venetian patrician and papal legate, who adopted the nickname Baffo after he was appointed Bishop of Paphos in Cyprus. The simulated all’antica reliefs on the podium of St Peter’s throne seem to depict a story about Venus, to whom Paphos was sacred because after her birth from the sea she was blown on to its shore in the half-shell. The naval battle in the background refers to Pesaro’s role as commander of the papal fleet in the recapture of the Greek island of Santa Maura (modern Lefkas) from the Turks in August 1502. He posed for Titian grasping a banner that bears the Borgia coat of arms while kneeling before St Peter – who resembles some of Giovanni Bellini’s figures – to whom he is presented by the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who wears full papal regalia painted in an archaic manner that Titian would soon abandon.

  Although the earliest record of the existence of this painting is a drawing of it by Van Dyck made in Venice in 1623 – and the inscription bearing Titian’s name is later than the picture – no one has ever doubted that it is by his hand. The problem is not whether but when he painted it. It is unlikely to be earlier than 1503, when Alexander VI died. It could have been painted in or shortly after 1506, when Jacopo Pesaro is first known to have returned to Venice. Pesaro was born in 1460, and this portrait looks like a man in his mid-forties, which fits a date around 1506.29 There are some awkward passages – the perspective of the floor and sea doesn’t quite work – that are understandable in an artist not yet twenty trying his hand at a complex and ambitious composition. But, for all its faults, it is a remarkable painting. Evidently it satisfied its patron who years later would commission from Titian another altogether more masterly celebration of the same victory over the Turks.30

  Another candidate for Titian’s earliest painting is now, after a thorough restoration, the Flight into Egypt, which came to the Hermitage palace in the late eighteenth century, when it was subjected to one of the destructive treatments that were characteristic of the period. Although mentioned by Vasari as a commission from Andrea Loredan for his palace on the Grand Canal (now the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi), the picture was dismissed by some modern scholars31 on account of the muddy colouring of its landscape and procession of awkward figures. The restoration32 in the Hermitage labora
tory, which was completed in 2011, removed layers of discoloured varnish and insertions by other hands, reattached the paint layer where it had come loose from the primer and closed horizontal seams that had opened where the three pieces of the canvas support had been stitched together. The picture is now much easier to read, and many, but not all, scholars are convinced that it is a very early work by Titian, possibly painted even before he entered Giovanni Bellini’s studio.

  Exhibitions of Titian’s paintings often begin with the Gypsy Madonna (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), so called because of the young Virgin’s dusky complexion, as the most striking example of Titian’s debt to and liberation from the example of Giovanni Bellini. Technical investigations show that it started as an attempt to understand by imitation Giovanni’s later way of treating the subject. Beneath the finished painting is a different Madonna, which is very close to Bellini’s Virgin and Child of 1509 in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Titian cancelled that homage to his great master. His Virgin and Child are set against a landscape with a soldier and fortress in the far distance and a brand-new cloth of honour, its crisp folds indicating that it has just that minute been shaken out. Their faces are plump, as though modelled in low relief, while their lowered eyelids invite us to meditate on the humanity of the two central figures of the Christian story. Whereas Giovanni’s Madonnas were usually carefully underdrawn, Titian in this painting used as his guidelines only summary strokes made with a fairly wide brush with thin wash shading applied at the underdrawing stage. He made changes as he painted: his first Madonna seems to have had a different face, and her hair was tied with a ribbon; the fingers of the Christ child were first stretched, then covered with the Madonna’s red robe and repainted. The result looks like nothing that had been painted by the hand or studio of Giovanni Bellini. With the Gypsy Madonna Titian proved to himself that he had learned everything he needed from that source. By then he had fallen under the spell of a different Venetian painter, who became for a while his alter ego. Giorgione (the name means ‘Big George’) of Castelfranco, who was closer to Titian’s age than Giovanni Bellini, introduced Titian to what Vasari called ‘the modern manner’, the style that, for want of a better adjective, art historians to this day call Giorgionesque.

  FOUR

  Myths of Venice

  The order with which this holy Republic is governed is a wonder to behold; there is no sedition from the non-nobles, no discord among the patricians, but all work together to [the Republic’s] increase. Moreover, according to what wise men say, it will last for ever …

  MARIN SANUDO, THE CITY OF VENICE, 1493–15301

  As Titian explored the incomparably beautiful city that would nurture his genius he came upon allegorical images in stone and paint of beautiful women representing peace, harmonious administration, prudence and justice. His uncle would have told him that these were the political virtues that set Venice apart from all other cities at a time when the rest of Italy was plagued by upheaval and foreign intervention, and that many great writers and thinkers, foreign as well as Venetian, extolled the unique stability and independence of the Most Serene Republic. As the first republic to govern a large empire on land and overseas since the fall of republican Rome, Venice saw itself as a new, Christian Rome, founded by God in the fifth century AD so that a Christian empire would rise from the ruins of the pagan civilization. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror in 1453, and the subsequent immigration of exiled Greek scholars, Venice styled itself also as the New Byzantium and the New Athens. Venice, as one historian has put it, ‘claimed the bones, the blood, and the culture of ancient Greece and Rome’.2 But it did so in the name of God and its own special patron saints. The Republic enjoyed the protection and favour of many saints, of whom St Mark was the most important. The Evangelist, whose body, smuggled from his tomb in Alexandria by two Venetian merchants, reached Venice in 828 – an event known as the translatio, the transfer – was the alibi and protector in whose name the Republic conquered and defended its religious integrity, and whose symbol of a winged lion was emblazoned on banners carried into battle and installed all over the city and throughout the empire. Marin Sanudo, on an official tour of the mainland empire, noted an inscription on the walls of Pirano in Istria that read: ‘Behold the winged lion! I pluck down earth, sea, and stars.’

  Venice was governed as a republic by an oligarchy of some 2,500 patricians, about 5 per cent of the male population, who ruled according to an unwritten constitution designed to prevent the rise to power of any individual or faction.3 Membership of the patrician class was strictly by inheritance. Until long after 1381, when some new men were admitted to the patriciate in recognition of their contribution to the Venetian war against Genoa, no amount of money or service to the state could buy entrée. Regime-change in Republican Venice was made impossible by a unique system of checks and balances. No equivalent of the Florentine Medici family was able to take control of a hermetically sealed governing caste defined by lineage. No Savonarola, however charismatic, could influence the structure or policies of government.

  Thanks to the survival of government records and to Venetian patrician chroniclers, whose shared identity was defined by their hereditary right and obligation to rule, we know in some considerable detail about the day-to-day business of the Venetian government and the events, both trivial and important, that coloured life in Titian’s adopted city.4 The two most informative of the patrician diarists in the first decades of the sixteenth century were Girolamo Priuli and Marin Sanudo, neither of whom had especially brilliant political careers. Priuli, head of one of the great Venetian banking houses, was the gloomy conscience of his class. His diaries are full of threnodies about the sinful and luxurious habits that in his view were responsible for all the natural disasters and defeats in war that afflicted Venice in his lifetime. Sanudo, Priuli’s temperamental opposite, enjoyed the pleasures and display of wealth that Priuli condemned. Garrulous and sociable, he kept a collection of objects of interest from all over the world and a library of 6,500 books and manuscripts which made his house in the Calle Spezier behind the Turkish warehouse one of the essential sights of Venice, along with the arsenal and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, for VIPs in Venice.

  Sanudo was an obsessive recorder of minutiae. He wrote poetry, plays, a history of the doges and an account of the invasion of Italy by the French king Charles VIII, which led to decades of war on Italian soil between the French and the Habsburg empire. Today he is best known for his panegyric Of the Origins, Site and Government of the City of Venice,5 and above all for his diaries,6 which were notes for an official history of the Republic that he was to his great disappointment never called upon to write. Too much of a prattler for his own political good, he was forever pacing the corridors of the ducal palace, eavesdropping at the Rialto on news from abroad, continually in the public squares investigating every occurrence, no matter how minimal, how unimportant it was. He jotted down the incessant recordings that were for him ‘both wife and magistrate’ in a vernacular style that he himself described as ‘coarse, unadorned and low’; but it is precisely because he never polished or edited them that they are the richest and most reliable source we have for the political and social history of Venice and of the European powers with which Venice was involved in the first third of the sixteenth century. In the City of Venice, which he wrote in parallel with the diaries, he noted the prices of commodities: oil and candles both fixed by law at four soldi a pound; mutton at three soldi a pound; a cartload of wood at twenty-eight soldi; fresh water imported during times of drought eight buckets for one soldo. He gave the location of brothels and made a list of the varieties of fish sold at the Rialto. He couldn’t resist informing posterity that his family owned an inn at the Rialto called The Bell, with shops on the ground floor, which brought in 800 ducats a year in rent, ‘which is a marvellous thing and a huge rent’.

  Once they reached the age of twenty-five, all men of noble birth were requir
ed when not away on business to sit on the Great Council, the sovereign body of government, which met on Sundays to deliberate and vote. The Great Council, which existed primarily as a check on the power of individual members of government, had to pass all constitutional changes and new laws. It elected the members of the most important government offices, and the governors and administrators of the dominions on the terraferma and overseas. Members of the higher government councils and magistracies served for short periods, between three months and two years, although in practice the same men were often re-elected, especially during wars and other emergencies. Virtually all decision-making committees, as well as military commands and ambassadorial posts, were filled by experienced politicians in their middle age or older. Venetian ambassadors, trained by obligatory participation in government for the whole of their adult lives, acquired political and diplomatic skills that set them apart from the representatives of other Italian and European states. They were everywhere, and their preserved reports, which were confidential newssheets that ran to many pages, enrich our understanding of the political atmosphere of sixteenth-century Europe with details about the character and demeanour, as well as the policies and motives, of the rulers of the Renaissance world.

  But when Titian was growing up in Venice a government that was in effect a gerontocracy – the average age of doges in the sixteenth century was seventy-five – was beginning to cause some resentment among the younger noblemen. The young men wearing parti-coloured tights and dashing short jackets who can be seen in the ‘eyewitness’ paintings by Carpaccio, Mansueti and Gentile Bellini are patricians not yet old enough to sit on the Great Council. They are wearing the uniform of one of the compagnie delle calze, the companies of the hose, which, in the absence of a princely court, were responsible for organizing and providing the decorations for parties, weddings, festivals and theatrical entertainments. There were twenty or so of these companies, whose membership was predominantly restricted to the patrician class. They were chartered and supervised by the Council of Ten, who kept them well away from unmarried young women.