_Titian_ (Venetian: 1477-1576).
Tiziano Vecellio--"il divino Tiziano," as his countrymen called
him--is one of the greatest names in the history of painting:
"There is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about
his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that
he is greater than they" (_Two Paths_, § 57). Titian's works
"are not art," said one of his contemporaries, "but miracles;
they make upon me the impression of something divine, and as
heaven is the soul's paradise, so God has transfused into
Titian's colours the paradise of our bodies." It is not easy,
however, to point out the special characteristics of Titian,
for it is his glory to offer nothing over-prominent and to
keep "in all things the middle path of perfection." Titian's
mind was "wholly realist, universal, and manly. He saw that
sensual passion in man was not only a fact, but a Divine fact;
the human creature, though the highest of the animals, was,
nevertheless, a perfect animal, and his happiness, health, and
nobleness depended on the due power of every animal passion,
as well as the cultivation of every spiritual tendency"
(_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 30). As a youth
Titian worked under the influence of Giorgione, of whom (says
Vasari), "they who were excellent confessed that he was born
to put the breath of life into painted figures and to imitate
the elasticity and colour of flesh." The so-called "Sacred
and Profane Love" of Titian marks the culmination of his
"Giorgionesque" style, in which sensuous delight and spiritual
yearning are mixed in subtle harmony. The "Bacchus and Ariadne"
of our own Gallery belongs to a somewhat later date, and is a
combination of poetry and painting almost unique in the world
of art. "One object," says Sir Frederick Burton,[42] "Titian
kept steadily before him from the beginning--the rendering
of the lustre of the skin in its warmth, its pearliness, and
its light, such as it is found in the European races, and
nowhere perhaps in such perfection as in the blended northern
and southern blood of Venetia. He presents to us humanity in
its noblest and most beautiful forms, and so profoundly had
he studied it that the ideal personages introduced in his
pictures have an intense individuality. Naturally, therefore,
he stands supreme amongst the great portrait-painters. In the
department of landscape he was, if not the first to perceive,
at least the first to render, nature in her sublimer aspects.
When dealing with classical themes he thoroughly translated
the spirit, without idly imitating the forms, of antiquity."
And as the range of his intellectual sympathy was wide, so
was that of his executive skill. He is, indeed, especially
supreme as a colourist; but for the rest, the very greatness
of the master lies in there being no one quality predominant
in him. Raphael's power is properly called "Raphaelesque," but
"Titian's power is simply the power of doing right. Whatever
came before Titian, he did wholly as it _ought_ to be done"
(_Two Paths_, §§ 57, 58, 69).
This universality of Titian's art is reflected in his life--a
life prolonged far beyond the ordinary human spell, and full
to the end of "superhuman toil." He was sent from his country
home at Cadore to Venice to begin his studies when quite a
boy: he was only nine, it is said, when he entered Gentile
Bellini's studio. He lived to be ninety-nine, and his life
was one long education. He was nearly threescore years and
ten when he visited Rome and saw Michael Angelo, but he "had
greatly improved," he said in later years, "after he had been
at Rome." He painted until his dying hour, and is said to have
exclaimed at the last that he was "only then beginning to
understand what painting was." This continual striving after
perfection, this consciousness of falling short, is in striking
contrast to the honour and glory paid to him by others. He was
painter in ordinary to the Venetian State (a post in which he
succeeded Giovanni Bellini). He was an honoured guest at the
court of Alphonso I., Duke of Ferrara, for whom he painted
the "Bacchus and Ariadne" (35). To the Emperor Charles V. he
"stood as Apelles to Alexander the Great, the only man worthy
to paint his royal master," and he was made Count Palatine and
Knight of the Golden Spur, with precedence for his children as
nobles of the Empire. The emperor's son, Philip II. (of Spain),
was an equally generous patron; the Pope Paul III. tried hard
to induce Titian to settle in Rome; and Henry III. of France,
who visited him at his own house, wished the picture on which
the painter was then at work to be placed over his tomb. In
his house at Venice Titian lived in great style, attracting
kings and nobles and men of letters to him. There is all the
keenness of a city of merchants in Titian's business relations,
and many of the extant documents about him are petitions for
further favours and for arrears of pensions. But if he gathered
like a beggar, he spent like a prince. There is a story of two
cardinals coming to dine at his house. He flung his purse to
the steward, and bade him make ready, for "all the world was
coming to dine with him." Certain too it is that if he knocked
too much at the doors of princes, it was for the sake of his
children rather than of himself. At the loss of his wife (when
he was fifty-seven) he was "utterly disconsolate," says the
letter of a friend. His sister Orsa afterwards kept house for
him--"sister, daughter, mother, companion, and steward of his
household," so Aretino described her; and it was his daughter
Lavinia whom he oftenest loved to paint. She was "the person
dearest to him in all the world," and many years after she
had died (1560) in childbirth, he described her to Philip II.
as "absolute mistress of his soul." A less pleasant light is
thrown upon the great painter by his friendship and close
association with the infamous Aretino. This curious product
of the Renaissance came to Venice in 1527, and with Titian
and Jacopo del Sansovino formed "the so-called Triumvirate,
which was a kind of Council of Three, having as its _raison
d'être_ the mutual furtherance of material interests, and the
pursuit of art, love, and pleasure." To Titian's association
with Aretino some critics have ascribed the stronger vein of
sensuality which is discernible in some of his later works. To
the extreme limit, however, of his long life his hand never
lost its cunning, nor was the force of imagination abated. He
was carried off by the plague, and received even in that time
of panic the honour of solemn obsequies in the church of the
Frari--"the man as highly favoured," says Vasari, "by fortune
as any of his kind had ever been before him." His house at
Venice is still shown. It looks across the lagoons to the
distant mountains of his early home.
One of the pictures which mark the advance made by Titian in the art
of landscape. Look at the background of some earlier Holy Family--at
the "purist" landscape, for instance, of Perugino (288),--and the
change will be seen at once--a change from the conventional or ideal to
the real and the actual. Titian was one of the first to "relieve the
foreground of his landscapes from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded
formalism of the early painters, and give a close approximation to the
forms of nature in all things; retaining, however, this much of the
old system, that the distances were for the most part painted in deep
ultramarine blue, the foregrounds in rich green and brown" (_Lectures
on Architecture and Painting_, p. 158). In particular he was the
first[43] to "apprehend the subduing pathos that comes with eventide"
(see Gilbert's _Cadore_ or _Titian's Country_, p. 33). Titian, says
Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ii. § 1, ch. vii. § 15), "hardly
ever paints sunshine, but a certain opalescent twilight which has as
much of human emotion as of imitative truth in it:
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."