_Francesco Maria della Rovere--Titian and Eleonora Gonzaga--The "Venus
with the Shell"--Titian's later ideals--The "Venus of Urbino"--The
"Bella di Tiziano"--The "Twelve Cæsars"--Titian and Pordenone--The
"Battle of Cadore"--Portraits of the Master by himself--The
"Presentation in the Temple"--The "Allocation" of Madrid--The Ceiling
Pictures of Santo Spirito--First Meeting with Pope Paul III.--The "Ecce
Homo" of Vienna--"Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus_."
Within the years 1532 and 1538, or thereabouts, would appear to fall
Titian's relations with another princely patron, Francesco Maria della
Rovere, Duke of Urbino, the nephew of the redoubtable Pope Julius II.,
whose qualities of martial ardour and unbridled passion he reproduced in
an exaggerated form. By his mother, Giovanna da Montefeltro, he
descended also from the rightful dynasty of Urbino, to which he
succeeded in virtue of adoption. His life of perpetual strife, of
warfare in defence of his more than once lost and reconquered duchy, and
as the captain first of the army of the Church, afterwards of the
Venetian forces, came to an abrupt end in 1538. With his own hand he
had, in the ardent days of his youth, slain in the open streets of
Ravenna the handsome, sinister Cardinal Alidosi, thereby bringing down
upon himself the anathemas of his uncle, Julius II., and furnishing to
his successor, the Medici pope Leo X., the best possible excuse for the
sequestration of the duchy of Urbino in favour of his own house. He
himself died by poison, suspicion resting upon the infamous Pier Luigi
Farnese, the son of Paul III.
Francesco Maria had espoused Eleonora Gonzaga, the sister of Titian's
protector, Federigo, and it is probably through the latter that the
relations with our master sprang up to which we owe a small group of
his very finest works, including the so-called _Venus of Urbino_ of the
Tribuna, the _Girl in a Fur Cloak_ of the Vienna Gallery, and the
companion portraits of Francesco Maria and Eleonora which are now in the
Venetian Gallery at the Uffizi. The fiery leader of armies had, it
should be remembered, been brought up by Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, one
of the most amiable and enlightened princes of his time, and, moreover,
his consort Eleonora was the daughter of Isabella d'Este Gonzaga, than
whom the Renaissance knew no more enthusiastic or more discriminating
patron of art.
[Illustration: _The Girl in the Fur Cloak. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
From a Photograph by Löwy._]
A curious problem meets us at the outset. We may assume with some degree
of certainty that the portraits of the duke and duchess belong to the
year 1537. Stylistic characteristics point to the conclusion that the
great _Venus_ of the Tribuna, the so-called _Bella di Tiziano_, and the
_Girl in the Fur Cloak_--to take only undoubted originals--belong to
much the same stage of Titian's practice as the companion portraits at
the Uffizi. Eleonora Gonzaga, a princess of the highest culture, the
daughter of an admirable mother, the friend of Pietro Bembo, Sadolet,
and Baldassarre Castiglione, was at this time a matron of some twenty
years' standing; at the date when her avowed portrait was painted she
must have been at the very least forty. By what magic did Titian manage
to suggest her type and physiognomy in the famous pictures just now
mentioned, and yet to plunge the duchess into a kind of _Fontaine de
Jouvence_, realising in the divine freshness of youth and beauty beings
who nevertheless appear to have with her some kind of mystic and
unsolved connection? If this was what he really intended--and the
results attained may lead us without temerity to assume as much--no
subtler or more exquisite form of flattery could be conceived. It is
curious to note that at the same time he signally failed with the
portrait of her mother, Isabella d'Este, painted in 1534, but showing
the Marchioness of Mantua as a young woman of some twenty-five years,
though she was then sixty. Here youth and a semblance of beauty are
called up by the magic of the artist, but the personality, both physical
and mental, is lost in the effort. But then in this last case Titian was
working from an early portrait, and without the living original to refer
to.
But, before approaching the discussion of the _Venus of Urbino_, it is
necessary to say a word about another _Venus_ which must have been
painted some years before this time, revealing, as it does, a
completely different and, it must be owned, a higher ideal. This is the
terribly ruined, yet still beautiful, _Venus Anadyomene_, or _Venus of
the Shell_, of the Bridgewater Gallery, painted perhaps at the
instigation of some humanist, to realise a description of the
world-famous painting of Apelles. It is not at present possible to place
this picture with anything approaching to chronological exactitude. It
must have been painted some years after the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the
National Gallery, some years before the _Venus_ of the Tribuna, and that
is about as near as surmise can get. The type of the goddess in the
Ellesmere picture recalls somewhat the _Ariadne_ in our masterpiece at
the National Gallery, but also, albeit in a less material form, the
_Magdalens_ of a later time. Titian's conception of perfect womanhood is
here midway between his earlier Giorgionesque ideal and the frankly
sensuous yet grand luxuriance of his maturity and old age. He never,
even in the days of youth and Giorgionesque enchantment, penetrated so
far below the surface as did his master and friend Barbarelli. He could
not equal him in giving, with the undisguised physical allurement which
belongs to the true woman, as distinguished from the ideal conception
compounded of womanhood's finest attributes, that sovereignty of amorous
yet of spiritual charm which is its complement and its corrective.[16]
Still with Titian, too, in the earlier years, woman, as presented in the
perfection of mature youth, had, accompanying and elevating her bodily
loveliness, a measure of that higher and nobler feminine attractiveness
which would enable her to meet man on equal terms, nay, actively to
exercise a dominating influence of fascination. In illustration of this
assertion it is only necessary to refer to the draped and the undraped
figure in the _Medea and Venus (Sacred and Profane Love)_ of the
Borghese Gallery, to the _Herodias_ of the Doria Gallery, to the _Flora_
of the Uffizi. Here, even when the beautiful Venetian courtesan is
represented or suggested, what the master gives is less the mere votary
than the priestess of love. Of this power of domination, this feminine
royalty, the _Venus Anadyomene_ still retains a measure, but the _Venus
of Urbino_ and the splendid succession of Venuses and Danaës, goddesses,
nymphs, and heroines belonging to the period of the fullest maturity,
show woman in the phase in which, renouncing her power to enslave, she
is herself reduced to slavery.
These glowing presentments of physical attractiveness embody a lower
ideal--that of woman as the plaything of man, his precious possession,
his delight in the lower sense. And yet Titian expresses this by no
means exalted conception with a grand candour, an absence of
_arrière-pensée_ such as almost purges it of offence. It is Giovanni
Morelli who, in tracing the gradual descent from his recovered treasure,
the _Venus_ of Giorgione in the Dresden Gallery,[17] through the various
Venuses of Titian down to those of the latest manner, so finely
expresses the essential difference between Giorgione's divinity and her
sister in the Tribuna. The former sleeping, and protected only by her
sovereign loveliness, is safer from offence than the waking goddess--or
shall we not rather say woman?--who in Titian's canvas passively waits
in her rich Venetian bower, tended by her handmaidens. It is again
Morelli[18] who points out that, as compared with Correggio, even
Giorgione--to say nothing of Titian--is when he renders the beauty of
woman or goddess a realist. And this is true in a sense, yet not
altogether. Correggio's _Danaë_, his _Io_, his _Leda_, his _Venus_, are
in their exquisite grace of form and movement farther removed from the
mere fleshly beauty of the undraped model than are the goddesses and
women of Giorgione. The passion and throb of humanity are replaced by a
subtler and less easily explicable charm; beauty becomes a perfectly
balanced and finely modulated harmony. Still the allurement is there,
and it is more consciously and more provocatively exercised than with
Giorgione, though the fascination of Correggio's divinities asserts
itself less directly, less candidly. Showing through the frankly human
loveliness of Giorgione's women there is after all a higher
spirituality, a deeper intimation of that true, that clear-burning
passion, enveloping body and soul, which transcends all exterior grace
and harmony, however exquisite it may be in refinement of
voluptuousness.[19]
It is not, indeed, by any means certain that we are justified in
seriously criticising as a _Venus_ the great picture of the Tribuna.
Titian himself has given no indication that the beautiful Venetian woman
who lies undraped after the bath, while in a sumptuous chamber,
furnished according to the mode of the time, her handmaidens are seeking
for the robes with which she will adorn herself, is intended to present
the love-goddess, or even a beauty masquerading with her attributes.
Vasari, who saw it in the picture-closet of the Duke of Urbino,
describes it, no doubt, as "une Venere giovanetta a giacere, con fieri e
certi panni sottili attorno." It is manifestly borrowed, too--as is now
universally acknowledged--from Giorgione's _Venus_ in the Dresden
Gallery, with the significant alteration, however, that Titian's fair
one voluptuously dreams awake, while Giorgione's goddess more divinely
reposes, and sleeping dreams loftier dreams. The motive is in the
borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised
in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would
have brought it to the verge of triviality. Still as an example of his
unrivalled mastery in rendering the glow and semi-transparency of flesh,
enhanced by the contrast with white linen--itself slightly golden in
tinge; in suggesting the appropriate atmospheric environment; in giving
the full splendour of Venetian colour, duly subordinated nevertheless to
the main motive, which is the glorification of a beautiful human body as
it is; in all these respects the picture is of superlative excellence, a
representative example of the master and of Venetian art, a piece which
it would not be easy to match even among his own works.
More and more, as the supreme artist matures, do we find him disdaining
the showier and more evident forms of virtuosity. His colour is more and
more marked in its luminous beauty by reticence and concentration, by
the search after such a main colour-chord as shall not only be beautiful
and satisfying in itself, but expressive of the motive which is at the
root of the picture. Play of light over the surfaces and round the
contours of the human form; the breaking-up and modulation of masses of
colour by that play of light; strength, and beauty of general
tone--these are now Titian's main preoccupations. To this point his
perfected technical art has legitimately developed itself from the
Giorgionesque ideal of colour and tone-harmony, which was essentially
the same in principle, though necessarily in a less advanced stage, and
more diversified by exceptions. Our master became, as time went on, less
and less interested in the mere dexterous juxtaposition of brilliantly
harmonising and brilliantly contrasting tints, in piquancy, gaiety, and
sparkle of colour, to be achieved for its own sake. Indeed this phase of
Venetian sixteenth-century colour belongs rather to those artists who
issued from Verona--to the Bonifazi, and to Paolo Veronese--who in this
respect, as generally in artistic temperament, proved themselves the
natural successors of Domenico and Francesco Morone, of Girolamo dai
Libri, of Cavazzola.
Yet when Titian takes colour itself as his chief motive, he can vie with
the most sumptuous of them in splendour, and eclipse them all by the
sureness of his taste. A good example of this is the celebrated _Bella
di Tiziano_ of the Pitti Gallery, another work which, like the _Venus of
Urbino_, recalls the features without giving the precise personality of
Eleonora Gonzaga. The beautiful but somewhat expressionless head with
its crowning glory of bright hair, a waving mass of Venetian gold, has
been so much injured by rubbing down and restoration that we regret what
has been lost even more than we enjoy what is left. But the surfaces of
the fair and exquisitely modelled neck and bosom have been less cruelly
treated; the superb costume retains much of its pristine splendour. With
its combination of brownish-purple velvet, peacock-blue brocade, and
white lawn, its delicate trimmings of gold, and its further adornment
with small knots, having in them, now at any rate, but an effaced note
of red, the gown of _La Bella_ has remained the type of what is most
beautiful in Venetian costume as it was in the earlier half of the
sixteenth century. In richness and ingenious elaboration, chastened by
taste, it far transcends the over-splendid and ponderous dresses in
which later on the patrician dames portrayed by Veronese and his school
loved to array themselves. A bright note of red in the upper jewel of
one earring, now, no doubt, cruder than was originally intended, gives a
fillip to the whole, after a fashion peculiar to Titian.
[Illustration: _La Bella di Tiziano. From a photograph by Aplinari.
Walter L. Cells. Ph._]
The _Girl in the Fur Cloak_, No 197 in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna,
shows once more in a youthful and blooming woman the features of
Eleonora. The model is nude under a mantle of black satin lined with
fur, which leaves uncovered the right breast and both arms. The picture
is undoubtedly Titian's own, and fine in quality, but it reveals less
than his usual graciousness and charm. It is probably identical with the
canvas described in the often-quoted catalogue of Charles I.'s pictures
as "A naked woman putting on her smock, which the king changed with the
Duchess of Buckingham for one of His Majesty's Mantua pieces." It may
well have suggested to Rubens, who must have seen it among the King's
possessions on the occasion of his visit to London, his superb, yet
singularly unrefined, _Hélène Fourment in a Fur Mantle_, now also in the
Vienna Gallery.
The great portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi
belong, as has already been noted, to 1537. Francesco Maria, here
represented in the penultimate year of his stormy life, assumes
deliberately the truculent warrior, and has beyond reasonable doubt made
his own pose in a portrait destined to show the leader of armies, and
not the amorous spouse or the patron of art and artists. Praise
enthusiastic, but not excessive, has ever been and ever will be lavished
on the breadth and splendid decision of the painting; on the magnificent
rendering of the suit of plain but finely fashioned steel armour, with
its wonderful reflections; on the energy of the virile countenance, and
the appropriate concentration and simplicity of the whole. The superb
head has, it must be confessed, more grandeur and energy than true
individuality or life. The companion picture represents Eleonora Gonzaga
seated near an open window, wearing a sombre but magnificent costume,
and, completing it, one of those turbans with which the patrician ladies
of North Italy, other than those of Venice, habitually crowned their
locks. It has suffered in loss of freshness and touch more than its
companion. Fine and accurate as the portrait is, much as it surpasses
its pendant in subtle truth of characterisation, it has in the opinion
of the writer been somewhat overpraised. For once, Titian approaches
very nearly to the northern ideal in portraiture, underlining the truth
with singular accuracy, yet with some sacrifice of graciousness and
charm. The daughter of the learned and brilliant Isabella looks here as
if, in the decline of her beauty, she had become something of a
_précieuse_ and a prude, though it would be imprudent to assert that she
was either the one or the other. Perhaps the most attractive feature of
the whole composition is the beautiful landscape so characteristically
stretching away into the far blue distance, suggested rather than
revealed through the open window. This is such a picture as might have
inspired the Netherlander Antonio Moro, just because it is Italian art
of the Cinquecento with a difference, that is, with a certain admixture
of northern downrightness and literalness of statement.
About this same time Titian received from the brother of this princess,
his patron and admirer Federigo Gonzaga, the commission for the famous
series of the _Twelve Cæsars_, now only known to the world by stray
copies here and there, and by the grotesquely exaggerated engravings of
Ægidius Sadeler. Giulio Romano having in 1536[20] completed the Sala di
Troja in the Castello of Mantua, and made considerable progress with the
apartments round about it, Federigo Gonzaga conceived the idea of
devoting one whole room to the painted effigies of the _Twelve Cæsars_
to be undertaken by Titian. The exact date when the _Cæsars_ were
delivered is not known, but it may legitimately be inferred that this
was in the course of 1537 or the earlier half of 1538. Our master's
pictures were, according to Vasari, placed in an _anticamera_ of the
Mantuan Palace, below them being hung twelve _storie a olio_--histories
in oils--by Giulio Romano.[21] The _Cæsars_ were all half-lengths,
eleven out of the twelve being done by the Venetian master and the
twelfth by Giulio Romano himself.[22] Brought to England with the rest
of the Mantua pieces purchased by Daniel Nys for Charles I., they
suffered injury, and Van Dyck is said to have repainted the _Vitellius_,
which was one of several canvases irretrievably ruined by the
quicksilver of the frames during the transit from Italy.[23] On the
disposal of the royal collection after Charles Stuart's execution the
_Twelve Cæsars_ were sold by the State--not presented, as is usually
asserted--to the Spanish Ambassador Cardenas, who gave £1200 for them.
On their arrival in Spain with the other treasures secured on behalf of
Philip IV., they were placed in the Alcazar of Madrid, where in one of
the numerous fires which successively devastated the royal palace they
must have perished, since no trace of them is to be found after the end
of the seventeenth century. The popularity of Titian's decorative
canvases is proved by the fact that Bernardino Campi of Cremona made
five successive sets of copies from them--for Charles V., d'Avalos, the
Duke of Alva, Rangone, and another Spanish grandee. Agostino Caracci
subsequently copied them for the palace of Parma, and traces of yet
other copies exist. Numerous versions are shown in private collections,
both in England and abroad, purporting to be from the hand of Titian,
but of these none--at any rate none of those seen by the writer--are
originals or even Venetian copies. Among the best are the examples in
the collection of Earl Brownlow and at the royal palace of Munich
respectively, and these may possibly be from the hand of Campi. Although
we are expressly told in Dolce's _Dialogo_ that Titian "painted the
_Twelve Cæsars_, taking them in part from medals, in part from antique
marbles," it is perfectly clear that of the exact copying of
antiques--such as is to be noted, for instance, in those marble
medallions by Donatello which adorn the courtyard of the Medici Palace
at Florence--there can have been no question. The attitudes of the
_Cæsars_, as shown in the engravings and the extant copies, exclude any
such supposition. Those who have judged them from those copies and the
hideous grotesques of Sadeler have wondered at the popularity of the
originals, somewhat hastily deeming Titian to have been here inferior to
himself. Strange to say, a better idea of what he intended, and what he
may have realised in the originals, is to be obtained from a series of
small copies now in the Provincial Museum of Hanover, than from anything
else that has survived.[24] The little pictures in question, being on
copper, cannot well be anterior to the first part of the seventeenth
century, and they are not in themselves wonders. All the same they have
a unique interest as proving that, while adopting the pompous attitudes
and the purely decorative standpoint which the position of the pictures
in the Castello may have rendered obligatory, Titian managed to make of
his Emperors creatures of flesh and blood; the splendid Venetian warrior
and patrician appearing in all the glory of manhood behind the
conventional dignity, the self-consciousness of the Roman type and
attitude.
[Illustration: _Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Uffizi
Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by E. Alinari_.]
These last years had been to Titian as fruitful in material gain as in
honour. He had, as has been seen, established permanent and intimate
relations not only with the art-loving rulers of the North Italian
principalities, but now with Charles V. himself, mightiest of European
sovereigns, and, as a natural consequence, with the all-powerful
captains and grandees of the Hispano-Austrian court. Meanwhile a serious
danger to his supremacy had arisen. At home in Venice his unique
position was threatened by Pordenone, that masterly and wonderfully
facile _frescante_ and painter of monumental decorations, who had on
more than one occasion in the past been found in competition with him.
The Friulan, after many wanderings and much labour in North Italy, had
settled in Venice in 1535, and there acquired an immense reputation by
the grandeur and consummate ease with which he had carried out great
mural decorations, such as the façade of Martin d'Anna's house on the
Grand Canal, comprising in its scheme of decoration a Curtius on
horse-back and a flying Mercury which according to Vasari became the
talk of the town.[25] Here, at any rate, was a field in which even
Titian himself, seeing that he had only at long intervals practised in
fresco painting, could not hope to rival Pordenone. The Friulan, indeed,
in this his special branch, stood entirely alone among the painters of
North Italy.
The Council of Ten in June 1537 issued a decree recording that Titian
had since 1516 been in possession of his _senseria_, or broker's patent,
and its accompanying salary, on condition that he should paint "the
canvas of the land fight on the side of the Hall of the Great Council
looking out on the Grand Canal," but that he had drawn his salary
without performing his promise. He was therefore called upon to refund
all that he had received for the time during which he had done no work.
This sharp reminder operated as it was intended to do. We see from
Aretino's correspondence that in November 1537 Titian was busily engaged
on the great canvas for the Doges' Palace. This tardy recognition of an
old obligation did not prevent the Council from issuing an order in
November 1538 directing Pordenone to paint a picture for the Sala del
Gran Consiglio, to occupy the space next to that reserved for Titian's
long-delayed battle-piece.
That this can never have been executed is clear, since Pordenone, on
receipt of an urgent summons from Ercole II., Duke of Ferrara, departed
from Venice in the month of December of the same year, and falling sick
at Ferrara, died so suddenly as to give rise to the suspicion of foul
play, which too easily sprang up in those days when ambition or private
vengeance found ready to hand weapons so many and so convenient. Crowe
and Cavalcaselle give good grounds for the assumption that, in order to
save appearances, Titian was supposed--replacing and covering the
battle-piece which already existed in the Great Hall--to be presenting
the Battle of Spoleto in Umbria, whereas it was clear to all Venetians,
from the costumes, the banners, and the landscape, that he meant to
depict the Battle of Cadore fought in 1508. The latter was a Venetian
victory and an Imperial defeat, the former a Papal defeat and an
Imperial victory. The all-devouring fire of 1577 annihilated the _Battle
of Cadore_ with too many other works of capital importance in the
history both of the primitive and the mature Venetian schools. We have
nothing now to show what it may have been, save the print of Fontana,
and the oil painting in the Venetian Gallery of the Uffizi, reproducing
on a reduced scale part only of the big canvas. This last is of Venetian
origin, and more or less contemporary, but it need hardly be pointed out
that it is a copy from, not a sketch for, the picture.
[Illustration: _The Battle of Cadore (from a reduced copy of part only).
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by G. Brogi._]
To us who know the vast battle-piece only in the feeble echo of the
print and the picture just now mentioned, it is a little difficult to
account for the enthusiasm that it excited, and the prominent place
accorded to it among the most famous of the Cadorine's works. Though the
whole has abundant movement and passion, and the _mise-en-scène_ is
undoubtedly imposing, the combat is not raised above reality into the
region of the higher and more representative truth by any element of
tragic vastness and significance. Even though the Imperialists are armed
more or less in the antique Roman fashion, to distinguish them from the
Venetians, who appear in the accoutrements of their own day, it is still
that minor and local combat the _Battle of Cadore_ that we have before
us, and not, above and beyond this battle, War, as some masters of the
century, gifted with a higher power of evocation, might have shown it.
Even as the fragment of Leonardo da Vinci's _Battle of Anghiari_
survives in the free translation of Rubens's well-known drawing in the
Louvre, we see how he has made out of the unimportant cavalry combat,
yet without conventionality or undue transposition, a representation
unequalled in art of the frenzy generated in man and beast by the clash
of arms and the scent of blood. And Rubens, too, how incomparably in the
_Battle of the Amazons_ of the Pinakothek at Munich, he evokes the
terrors, not only of one mortal encounter, but of War--the hideous din,
the horror of man let loose and become beast once more, the pitiless
yell of the victors, the despairing cry of the vanquished, the
irremediable overthrow! It would, however, be foolhardy in those who can
only guess at what the picture may have been to arrogate to themselves
the right of sitting in judgment on Vasari and those contemporaries who,
actually seeing, enthusiastically admired it. What excited their delight
must surely have been Titian's magic power of brush as displayed in
individual figures and episodes, such as that famous one of the knight
armed by his page in the immediate foreground.
Into this period of our master's career there fit very well the two
portraits in which he appears, painted by himself, on the confines of
old age, vigorous and ardent still, fully conscious, moreover, though
without affectation, of pre-eminent genius and supreme artistic rank.
The portraits referred to are those very similar ones, both of them
undoubtedly originals, which are respectively in the Berlin Gallery and
the Painters' Gallery of the Uffizi. It is strange that there should
exist no certain likeness of the master of Cadore done in youth or
earlier manhood, if there be excepted the injured and more than doubtful
production in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, which has pretty generally
been supposed to be an original auto-portrait belonging to this period.
In the Uffizi and Berlin pictures Titian looks about sixty years old,
but may be a little more or a little less. The latter is a half-length,
showing him seated and gazing obliquely out of the picture with a
majestic air, but also with something of combativeness and disquietude,
an element, this last, which is traceable even in some of the earlier
portraits, but not in the mythological _poesie_ or any sacred work. More
and more as we advance through the final period of old age do we find
this element of disquietude and misgiving asserting itself in male
portraiture, as, for instance, in the _Maltese Knight_ of the Prado, the
_Dominican Monk_ of the Borghese, the _Portrait of a Man with a Palm
Branch_ of the Dresden Gallery. The atmosphere of sadness and foreboding
enveloping man is traceable back to Giorgione; but with him it comes
from the plenitude of inner life, from the gaze turned inwards upon the
mystery of the human individuality rather than outwards upon the
inevitable tragedies of the exterior life common to all. This same
atmosphere of passionate contemplativeness enwraps, indeed, all that
Giorgione did, and is the cause that he sees the world and himself
lyrically, not dramatically; the flame of aspiration burning steadily at
the heart's core and leaving the surface not indeed unruffled, but
outwardly calm in its glow. Titian's is the more dramatic temperament in
outward things, but also the more superficial. It must be remembered,
too, that arriving rapidly at the maturity of his art, and painting all
through the period of the full Renaissance, he was able with far less
hindrance from technical limitations to express his conceptions to the
full. His portraiture, however, especially his male portraiture, was and
remained in its essence a splendid and full-blown development of the
Giorgionesque ideal. It was grander, more accomplished, and for obvious
reasons more satisfying, yet far less penetrating, less expressive of
the inner fibre, whether of the painter or of his subject.
But to return to the portrait of Berlin. It is in parts unfinished, and
therefore the more interesting as revealing something of the methods
employed by the master in this period of absolute mastery, when his
palette was as sober in its strength as it was rich and harmonious;
when, as ever, execution was a way to an end, and therefore not to be
vain-gloriously displayed merely for its own sake. The picture came,
with very many other masterpieces of the Italian and Netherlandish
schools, from the Solly collection, which formed the nucleus of the
Berlin Gallery. The Uffizi portrait emerges noble still, in its
semi-ruined state, from a haze of restoration and injury, which has not
succeeded in destroying the exceptional fineness and sensitiveness of
the modelling. Although the pose and treatment of the head are
practically identical with that in the Berlin picture, the conception
seems a less dramatic one. It includes, unless the writer has misread
it, an element of greater mansuetude and a less perturbed
reflectiveness.
The double portrait in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at
Windsor Castle, styled _Titian and Franceschini_[26] has no pretensions
whatever to be even discussed as a Titian. The figure of the Venetian
senator designated as Franceschini is the better performance of the two;
the lifeless head of Titian, which looks very like an afterthought, has
been copied, without reference to the relation of the two figures the
one to the other, from the Uffizi picture, or some portrait identical
with it in character. A far finer likeness of Titian than any of these
is the much later one, now in the Prado Gallery; but this it will be
best to deal with in its proper chronological order.
We come now to one of the most popular of all Titian's great canvases
based on a sacred subject, the _Presentation in the Temple_ in the
Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice. This, as Vasari expressly states,
was painted for the Scuola di S. Maria della Carità, that is, for the
confraternity which owned the very building where now the Accademia
displays its treasures. It is the magnificent scenic rendering of a
subject lending itself easily to exterior pomp and display, not so
easily to a more mystic and less obvious mode of conception. At the root
of Titian's design lies in all probability the very similar picture on a
comparatively small scale by Cima da Conegliano, now No. 63 in the
Dresden Gallery, and this last may well have been inspired by
Carpaccio's _Presentation of the Virgin_, now in the Brera at Milan.[27]
The imposing canvases belonging to this particular period of Titian's
activity, and this one in particular, with its splendid architectural
framing, its wealth of life and movement, its richness and variety in
type and costume, its fair prospect of Venetian landscape in the
distance, must have largely contributed to form the transcendent
decorative talent of Paolo Veronese. Only in the exquisitely fresh and
beautiful figure of the childlike Virgin, who ascends the mighty flight
of stone steps, clad all in shimmering blue, her head crowned with a
halo of yellow light, does the artist prove that he has penetrated to
the innermost significance of his subject. Here, at any rate, he
touches the heart as well as feasts the eye. The thoughts of all who are
familiar with Venetian art will involuntarily turn to Tintoretto's
rendering of the same moving, yet in its symbolical character not
naturally ultra-dramatic, scene. The younger master lends to it a
significance so vast that he may be said to go as far beyond and above
the requirements of the theme as Titian, with all his legitimate
splendour and serene dignity, remains below it. With Tintoretto as
interpreter we are made to see the beautiful episode as an event of the
most tremendous import--one that must shake the earth to its centre. The
reason of the onlooker may rebel against this portentous version, yet he
is dominated all the same, is overwhelmed with something of the
indefinable awe that has seized upon the bystanders who are witnesses of
the scene.
[Illustration: _The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. Accademia
delle Belle Arti, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya._]
But now to discuss a very curious point in connection with the actual
state of Titian's important canvas. It has been very generally
assumed--and Crowe and Cavalcaselle have set their seal on the
assumption--that Titian painted his picture for a special place in the
Albergo (now Accademia), and that this place is now architecturally as
it was in Titian's time. Let them speak for themselves. "In this room
(in the Albergo), which is contiguous to the modern hall in which
Titian's _Assunta_ is displayed, there were two doors for which
allowance was made in Titian's canvas; twenty-five feet--the length of
the wall--is now the length of the picture. When this vast canvas was
removed from its place, the gaps of the doors were filled in with new
linen, and painted up to the tone of the original...."
That the pieces of canvas to which reference is here made were new, and
not Titian's original work from the brush, was of course well known to
those who saw the work as it used to hang in the Accademia. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle give indeed the name of a painter of this century who is
responsible for them. Within the last three years the new and
enterprising director of the Venice Academy, as part of a comprehensive
scheme of rearrangement of the whole collection, caused these pieces of
new canvas to be removed and then proceeded to replace the picture in
the room for which it is believed to have been executed, fitting it into
the space above the two doors just referred to. Many people have
declared themselves delighted with the alteration, looking upon it as a
tardy act of justice done to Titian, whose work, it is assumed, is now
again seen just as he designed it for the Albergo. The writer must own
that he has, from an examination of the canvas where it is now placed,
or replaced, derived an absolutely contrary impression. First, is it
conceivable that Titian in the heyday of his glory should have been
asked to paint such a picture--not a mere mural decoration--for such a
place? There is no instance of anything of the kind having been done
with the canvases painted by Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, Mansueti, and
others for the various _Scuole_ of Venice. There is no instance of a
great decorative canvas by a sixteenth century master of the first
rank,[28] other than a ceiling decoration, being degraded in the first
instance to such a use. And then Vasari, who saw the picture in Venice,
and correctly characterises it, would surely have noticed such an
extraordinary peculiarity as the abnormal shape necessitated by the two
doors. It is incredible that Titian, if so unpalatable a task had indeed
been originally imposed upon him, should not have designed his canvas
otherwise. The hole for the right door coming in the midst of the
monumental steps is just possible, though not very probable. Not so that
for the left door, which, according to the present arrangement, cuts the
very vitals out of one of the main groups in the foreground. Is it not
to insult one of the greatest masters of all time thus to assume that he
would have designed what we now see? It is much more likely that Titian
executed his _Presentation_ in the first place in the normal shape, and
that vandals of a later time, deciding to pierce the room in the Scuola
in which the picture is now once more placed with one, or probably two,
additional doors, partially sacrificed it to the structural requirements
of the moment. Monstrous as such barbarism may appear, we have already
seen, and shall again see later on, that it was by no means uncommon in
those great ages of painting, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
When the untimely death of Pordenone, at the close of 1538, had
extinguished the hopes of the Council that the grandiose facility of
this master of monumental decoration might be made available for the
purposes of the State, Titian having, as has been seen, made good his
gravest default, was reinstated in his lucrative and by no means onerous
office. He regained the _senseria_ by decree of August 28, 1539. The
potent d'Avalos, Marqués del Vasto, had in 1539 conferred upon Titian's
eldest son Pomponio, the scapegrace and spendthrift that was to be, a
canonry. Both to father and son the gift was in the future to be
productive of more evil than good. At or about the same time he had
commissioned of Titian a picture of himself haranguing his soldiers in
the pompous Roman fashion; this was not, however, completed until 1541.
Exhibited by d'Avalos to admiring crowds at Milan, it made a sensation
for which there is absolutely nothing in the picture, as we now see it
in the gallery of the Prado, to account; but then it would appear that
it was irreparably injured in a fire which devastated the Alcazar of
Madrid in 1621, and was afterwards extensively repainted. The Marquis
and his son Francesco, both of them full-length figures, are placed on a
low plinth, to the left, and from this point of vantage the Spanish
leader addresses a company of foot-soldiers who with fine effect raise
their halberds high into the air.[29] Among these last tradition places
a portrait of Aretino, which is not now to be recognised with any
certainty. Were the pedigree of the canvas a less well-authenticated
one, one might be tempted to deny Titian's authorship altogether, so
extraordinary are, apart from other considerations, the disproportions
in the figure of the youth Francesco. Restoration must in this instance
have amounted to entire repainting. Del Vasto appears more robust, more
martial, and slightly younger than the armed leader in the _Allegory_ of
the Louvre. If this last picture is to be accepted as a semi-idealised
presentment of the Spanish captain, it must, as has already been pointed
out, have been painted nearer to the time of his death, which took place
in 1546. The often-cited biographers of our master are clearly in error
in their conclusion that the painting described in the collection of
Charles I. as "done by Titian, the picture of the Marquis Guasto,
containing five half-figures so big as the life, which the king bought
out of an Almonedo," is identical with the large sketch made by Titian
as a preparation for the _Allocution_ of Madrid. This description, on
the contrary, applies perfectly to the _Allegory_ of the Louvre, which
was, as we know, included in the collection of Charles, and subsequently
found its way into that of Louis Quatorze.
[Illustration: _The Magdalen. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph
by Anderson._]
It was in 1542 that Vasari, summoned to Venice at the suggestion of
Aretino, paid his first visit to the city of the Lagoons in order to
paint the scenery and _apparato_ in connection with a carnival
performance, which included the representation of his fellow-townsman's
_Talanta.[30]_ It was on this occasion, no doubt, that Sansovino, in
agreement with Titian, obtained for the Florentine the commission to
paint the ceilings of Santo Spirito in Isola--a commission which was
afterwards, as a consequence of his departure, undertaken and performed
by Titian himself, with whose grandiose canvases we shall have to deal a
little later on. In weighing the value of Vasari's testimony with
reference to the works of Vecellio and other Venetian painters more or
less of his own time, it should be borne in mind that he paid two
successive visits to Venice, enjoying there the company of the great
painter and the most eminent artists of the day, and that on the
occasion of Titian's memorable visit to Rome he was his close friend,
cicerone, and companion. Allowing for the Aretine biographer's
well-known inaccuracies in matters of detail and for his royal disregard
of chronological order--faults for which it is manifestly absurd to
blame him over-severely--it would be unwise lightly to disregard or
overrule his testimony with regard to matters which he may have learned
from the lips of Titian himself and his immediate _entourage_.
To the year 1542 belongs, as the authentic signature and date on the
picture affirm, that celebrated portrait, _The Daughter of Roberto
Strozzi_, once in the splendid palace of the family at Florence, but
now, with some other priceless treasures having the same origin, in the
Berlin Museum. Technically, the picture is one of the most brilliant,
one of the most subtly exquisite, among the works of the great
Cadorine's maturity. It well serves to show what Titian's ideal of
colour was at this time. The canvas is all silvery gleam, all splendour
and sober strength of colour--yet not of colours. These in all their
plentitude and richness, as in the crimson drapery and the distant
landscape, are duly subordinated to the main effect; they but set off
discreetly the figure of the child, dressed all in white satin with hair
of reddish gold, and contribute without fanfare to the fine and
harmonious balance of the whole. Here, as elsewhere, more particularly
in the work of Titian's maturity, one does not in the first place pause
to pick out this or the other tint, this or the other combination of
colours as particularly exquisite; and that is what one is so easily
led to do in the contemplation of the Bonifazi and of Paolo Veronese.
[Illustration: _The Infant Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Royal Gallery,
Berlin. From a Photograph by F. Hanfstängl._]
As the portrait of a child, though in conception it reveals a marked
progress towards the _intimité_ of later times, the Berlin picture lacks
something of charm and that quality which, for want of a better word,
must be called loveableness. Or is it perhaps that the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries have spoilt us in this respect? For it is only in
these latter days that to the child, in deliberate and avowed
portraiture, is allowed that freakishness, that natural _espièglerie_
and freedom from artificial control which has its climax in the
unapproached portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is the more curious
when it is remembered how tenderly, with what observant and sympathetic
truth the relation of child to mother, of child to child, was noted in
the innumerable "Madonnas" and "Holy Families" of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; how both the Italians, and following them the
Netherlanders, relieved the severity of their sacred works by the
delightful roguishness, the romping impudence of their little angels,
their _putti_.
It has already been recorded that Titian, taking up the commission
abandoned by Vasari, undertook a great scheme of pictorial decoration
for the Brothers of Santo Spirito in Isola. All that he carried out for
that church has now found its way into that of the Salute. The three
ceiling pictures, _The Sacrifice of Isaac, Cain and Abel_, and _David
victorious over Goliath_, are in the great sacristy of the church; the
_Four Evangelists_ and _Four Doctors_ are in the ceiling of the choir
behind the altar; the altar-piece, _The Descent of the Holy Spirit_, is
in one of the chapels which completely girdle the circular church
itself. The ceiling pictures, depicting three of the most dramatic
moments in sacred history, have received the most enthusiastic praise
from the master's successive biographers. They were indeed at the time
of their inception a new thing in Venetian art. Nothing so daring as
these foreshortenings, as these scenes of dramatic violence, of physical
force triumphant, had been seen in Venice. The turbulent spirit was an
exaggeration of that revealed by Titian in the _St. Peter Martyr_; the
problem of the foreshortening for the purposes of ceiling decoration was
superadded. It must be remembered, too, that even in Rome, the
headquarters of the grand style, nothing precisely of the same kind
could be said to exist. Raphael and his pupils either disdained, or it
may be feared to approach, the problem. Neither in the ceiling
decorations of the Farnesina nor in the Stanze is there any attempt on a
large scale to _faire plafonner_ the figures, that is, to paint them so
that they might appear as they would actually be seen from below.
Michelangelo himself, in the stupendous decoration of the ceiling to the
Sixtine Chapel, had elected to treat the subjects of the flat surface
which constitutes the centre and climax of the whole, as a series of
pictures designed under ordinary conditions. It can hardly be doubted
that Titian, in attempting these _tours de force_, though not
necessarily or even probably in any other way, was inspired by
Correggio. It would not be easy, indeed, to exaggerate the Venetian
master's achievement from this point of view, even though in two at
least of the groups--the _Cain and Abel_ and the _David and
Goliath_--the modern professor might be justified in criticising with
considerable severity his draughtsmanship and many salient points in his
design. The effect produced is tremendous of its kind. The power
suggested is, however, brutal, unreasoning, not nobly dominating force;
and this not alone in the _Cain and Abel_, where such an impression is
rightly conveyed, but also in the other pieces. It is as if Titian, in
striving to go beyond anything that had hitherto been done of the same
kind, had also gone beyond his own artistic convictions, and thus, while
compassing a remarkable pictorial achievement, lost his true balance.
Tintoretto, creating his own atmosphere, as far outside and above mere
physical realities as that of Michelangelo himself, might have succeeded
in mitigating this impression, which is, on the whole, a painful one.
Take for instance the _Martyrdom of St. Christopher_ of the younger
painter--not a ceiling picture by the way--in the apse of S. Maria del
Orto. Here, too, is depicted, with sweeping and altogether irresistible
power, an act of hideous violence. And yet it is not this element of the
subject which makes upon the spectator the most profound effect, but the
impression of saintly submission, of voluntary self-sacrifice, which is
the dominant note of the whole.
It may be convenient to mention here _The Descent of the Holy Spirit_,
although in its definitive form, as we see it in its place in the Church
of the Salute, it appears markedly more advanced in style than the works
of the period at which we have now arrived, giving, both in manner and
feeling, a distinct suggestion of the methods and standpoint which mark
the later phase of old age. Vasari tells us that the picture, originally
painted in 1541, was seriously damaged and subsequently repainted; Crowe
and Cavalcaselle state that the work now seen at the Salute was painted
to replace an altar-piece which the Brothers of Santo Spirito had
declined to accept. Even as the picture now appears, somewhat faded, and
moreover seen at a disadvantage amid its cold surroundings of polished
white marble, it is a composition of wonderful, of almost febrile
animation, and a painting saturated with light, pierced through
everywhere with its rays. The effect produced is absolutely that which
the mystical subject requires.[31] Abandoning the passionless serenity
which has been the rule in sacred subjects of the middle time, Titian
shows himself more stimulated, more moved by his subject.
It was in the spring of 1543 that the master first came into personal
contact with Pope Paul III. and the Farnese family. The meeting took
place at Ferrara, and our painter then accompanied the papal court to
Busseto, and subsequently proceeded to Bologna. Aretino's correspondence
proves that Titian must at that time have painted the Pope, and that he
must also have refused the sovereign pontiff's offer of the _Piombo_,
which was then still, as it had been for years past, in the possession
of Sebastiano Luciani. That Titian, with all his eagerness for wealth
and position, could not find it in his heart to displace his
fellow-countryman, a friend no doubt of the early time, may legitimately
excite admiration and sympathy now, as according to Aretino it actually
did at the time. The portraits of the Farnese family included that of
the Pope, repeated subsequently for Cardinal Santafiore, that of Pier
Luigi, then that of Paul III. and this monstrous yet well-loved son
together,[32] and a likeness of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Upon the
three-quarter length portrait of Paul III. in the Naples Museum, Crowe
and Cavalcaselle have lavished their most enthusiastic praise, placing
it, indeed, among his masterpieces. All the same--interesting as the
picture undoubtedly is, remarkable in finish, and of undoubtedly
Titianesque origin--the writer finds it difficult, nay impossible, to
accept this _Paul III._ as a work from the hand of Titian himself.
Careful to excess, and for such an original too much wanting in
brilliancy and vitality, it is the best of many repetitions and
variations; of this particular type the original is not at present
forthcoming. Very different is the "Paul III." of the Hermitage, which
even in a reproduction loudly proclaims its originality.[33] This is by
no means identical in design with the Naples picture, but appears much
less studied, much more directly taken from the life. The astute Farnese
Pope has here the same simiesque type, the same furtive distrustful
look, as in the great unfinished group now to be described.[34] This
Titian, which doubtless passed into the Hermitage with the rest of the
Barbarigo pictures, may have been the first foundation for the series of
portraits of the Farnese Pope, and as such would naturally have been
retained by the master for his own use. The portrait-group in the Naples
Museum, showing, with Paul III., Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese (afterwards Duke of Parma), is, apart from its extraordinary
directness and swift technical mastery, of exceptional interest as being
unfinished, and thus doubly instructive. The composition, lacking in its
unusual momentariness the repose and dignity of Raphael's _Leo X. with
Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and de' Rossi_ at the Pitti, is not wholly
happy. Especially is the action of Ottavio Farnese, as in reverence he
bends down to reply to the supreme Pontiff, forced and unconvincing; but
the unflattered portrait of the pontiff himself is of a bold and quite
unconventional truth, and in movement much happier. The picture may
possibly, by reason of this unconventional conception less than
perfectly realised, have failed to please the sitters, and thus have
been left in its present state.[35]
Few of Titian's canvases of vast dimensions have enjoyed a higher degree
of popularity than the large _Ecce Homo_ to which the Viennese proudly
point as one of the crowning ornaments of the great Imperial Gallery of
their city. Completed in 1543[36] for Giovanni d'Anna, a son of the
Flemish merchant Martin van der Hanna, who had established himself in
Venice, it was vainly coveted by Henri III. on the occasion of his
memorable visit in 1574, but was in 1620 purchased for the splendid
favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by the English envoy Sir
Henry Wotton. From him the noblest and most accomplished of English
collectors, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, sought to obtain the prize with the
unparalleled offer of £7000, yet even thus failed. At the time of the
great _débâcle_, in 1648, the guardians and advisers of his youthful son
and successor were glad enough to get the splendid gallery over to the
Low Countries, and to sell with the rest the _Ecce Homo_, which brought
under these circumstances but a tenth part of what Lord Arundel would
have given for it. Passing into the collection of the Archduke Leopold
William, it was later on finally incorporated with that of the Imperial
House of Austria. From the point of view of scenic and decorative
magnificence combined with dramatic propriety, though not with any depth
or intensity of dramatic passion, the work is undoubtedly imposing. Yet
it suffers somewhat, even in this respect, from the fact that the
figures are not more than small life-size. With passages of Titianesque
splendour there are to be noted others, approaching to the acrid and
inharmonious, which one would rather attribute to the master's
assistants than to himself. So it is, too, with certain exaggerations of
design characteristic rather of the period than the man--notably with
the two figures to the left of the foreground. The Christ in His
meekness is too little divine, too heavy and inert;[37] the Pontius
Pilate not inappropriately reproduces the features of the worldling and
_viveur_ Aretino. The mounted warrior to the extreme right, who has been
supposed to represent Alfonso d'Este, shows the genial physiognomy made
familiar by the Madrid picture so long deemed to be his portrait, but
which, as has already been pointed out, represents much more probably
his successor Ercole II. d'Este, whom we find again in that superb piece
by the master, the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_ of Castle Howard. The
_Ecce Homo_ of Vienna is another of the works of which both the
general _ordonnance_ and the truly Venetian splendour must have
profoundly influenced Paolo Veronese.
[Illustration: _Ecce Homo. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph
by Löwy_.]
[Illustration: _Aretino. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by E.
Alinari_.]
To this period belongs also the _Annunciation of the Virgin_ now in the
Cathedral of Verona--a rich, harmonious, and appropriate altar-piece,
but not one of any special significance in the life-work of the painter.
Shall we not, pretty much in agreement with Vasari, place here, just
before the long-delayed visit to Rome, the _Christ with the Pilgrims at
Emmaus_ of the Louvre? A strong reason for dating this, one of the
noblest, one of the most deeply felt of all Titian's works, before
rather than after the stay in the Eternal City, is that in its
_naïveté_, in its realistic episodes, in its fulness of life, it is so
entirely and delightfully Venetian. Here again the colour-harmony in its
subdued richness and solemnity has a completeness such as induces the
beholder to accept it in its unity rather than to analyse those infinite
subtleties of juxtaposition and handling which, avoiding bravura,
disdain to show themselves on the surface. The sublime beauty of the
landscape, in which, as often elsewhere, the golden radiance of the
setting sun is seen battling with masses of azure cloud, has not been
exceeded by Titian himself. With all the daring yet perfectly
unobtrusive and unconscious realism of certain details, the conception
is one of the loftiest, one of the most penetrating in its very
simplicity, of Venetian art at its apogee. The divine mansuetude, the
human and brotherly sympathy of the Christ, have not been equalled since
the early days of the _Cristo della Moneta_. Altogether the _Pilgrims at
Emmaus_ well marks that higher and more far-reaching conception of
sacred art which reveals itself in the productions of Titian's old age,
when we compare them with the untroubled serenity and the conventional
assumptions of the middle time.[38]
To the year 1545 belongs the supremely fine _Portrait of Aretino_, which
is one of the glories of the Pitti Gallery. This was destined to
propitiate the Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, the son of his passionately
attached friend of earlier days, Giovanni delle Bande Nere. Aretino,
who had particular reasons for desiring to appear before the obdurate
Cosimo in all the pomp and opulence of his later years, was obviously
wounded that Titian, true to his genius, and to his method at this
moment, should have made the keynote of his masterpiece a dignified
simplicity. For once unfaithful to his brother Triumvir and friend, he
attacks him in the accompanying letter to the Tuscan ruler with the
withering sarcasm that "the satins, velvets, and brocades would perhaps
have been better if Titian had received a few more scudi for working
them out." If Aretino's pique had not caused the momentary clouding over
of his artistic vision, he would have owned that the canvas now in the
Pitti was one of the happiest achievements of Titian and one of the
greatest things in portraiture. There is no flattery here of the "Divine
Aretino," as with heroic impudence the notorious publicist styles
himself. The sensual type is preserved, but rendered acceptable, and in
a sense attractive, by a certain assurance and even dignity of bearing,
such as success and a position impregnable of its unique and unenviable
kind may well have lent to the adventurer in his maturity. Even Titian's
brush has not worked with greater richness and freedom, with an effect
broader or more entirely legitimate than in the head with its softly
flowing beard and the magnificent yet not too ornate robe and vest of
plum-coloured velvet and satin.