_The Visit to Rome--Titian and Michelangelo--The "Danaë" of Naples--"St.
John the Baptist in the Desert"--Journey to Augsburg--"Venus and Cupid"
of the Tribuna--"Venus with the Organ Player" of Madrid--The Altar-piece
of Serravalle--"Charles V. at the Battle of Mühlberg"--"Prometheus
Bound" and companion pictures--Second Journey to Augsburg--Portraits of
Philip of Spain--The so-called "Marqués del Vasto" at Cassel--The "St.
Margaret"--"Danaë" of Madrid--The "Trinity"--"Venus and Adonis"--"La
Fede."_
At last, in the autumn of 1545, the master of Cadore, at the age of
sixty-eight years, was to see Rome, its ruins, its statues, its
antiquities, and what to the painter of the Renaissance must have meant
infinitely more, the Sixtine Chapel and the Stanze of the Vatican. Upon
nothing in the history of Venetian art have its lovers, and the many
who, with profound interest, trace Titian's noble and perfectly
consistent career from its commencement to its close, more reason to
congratulate themselves than on this circumstance, that in youth and
earlier manhood fortune and his own success kept him from visiting Rome.
Though his was not the eclectic tendency, the easily impressionable
artistic temperament of a Sebastiano Luciani--the only eclectic,
perhaps, who managed all the same to prove and to maintain himself an
artist of the very first rank--if Titian had in earlier life been lured
to the Eternal City, and had there settled, the glamour of the grand
style might have permanently and fatally disturbed his balance. Now it
was too late for the splendid and gracious master, who even at
sixty-eight had still before him nearly thirty fruitful years, to
receive any impressions sufficiently deep to penetrate to the root of
his art. There is some evidence to show that Titian, deeply impressed
with the highest manifestations of the Florentine and Umbro-Florentine
art transplanted to Rome, considered that his work had improved after
the visit of 1545-1546. If there was such improvement--and certainly in
the ultimate phases of his practice there will be evident in some ways
a wider view, a higher grasp of essentials, a more responsive
sensitiveness in the conceiving anew of the great sacred subjects--it
must have come, not from any effort to assimilate the manner or to
assume the standpoint which had obtained in Rome, but from the closer
contact with a world which at its centre was beginning to take a deeper,
a more solemn and gloomy view of religion and life. It should not be
forgotten that this was the year when the great Council of Trent first
met, and that during the next twenty years or more the whole of Italy,
nay, the whole of the Catholic world, was overshadowed by its
deliberations.
Titian's friend and patron of that time, Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino,
had at first opposed Titian's visit to the Roman court, striving to
reserve to himself the services of the Venetian master until such time
as he should have carried out for him the commissions with which he was
charged. Yielding, however, to the inevitable, and yielding, too, with a
good grace, he himself escorted his favourite with his son Orazio from
Venice through Ferrara to Pesaro, and having detained him a short while
there, granted him an escort through the Papal States to Rome. There he
was well received by the Farnese Pope, and with much cordiality by
Cardinal Bembo. Rooms were accorded to him in the Belvedere section of
the Vatican Palace, and there no doubt he painted the unfinished
portrait-group _Paul III. with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese_, which has been already described, and with it other pieces of
the same type, and portraits of the Farnese family and circle now no
longer to be traced. Vasari, well pleased no doubt to renew his
acquaintance with the acknowledged head of the contemporary Venetian
painters, acted as his cicerone in the visits to the antiquities of
Rome, to the statues and art-treasures of the Vatican, while Titian's
fellow-citizen Sebastiano del Piombo was in his company when he studied
the Stanze of Raphael.
It was but three years since Michelangelo's _Last Judgment_ had been
uncovered in the Sixtine, and it would have been in the highest degree
interesting to read his comments on this gigantic performance, towards
which it was so little likely that his sympathies would spontaneously go
out. Memorable is the visit paid by Buonarroti, with an unwonted regard
for ceremonious courtesy, to Titian in his apartments at the Belvedere,
as it is recalled by Vasari with that naïve touch, that power of
suggestion, which gives such delightful colour to his unstudied prose.
No _Imaginary Conversation_ among those that Walter Savage Landor has
devised equals in significance this meeting of the two greatest masters
then living, simply as it is sketched in by the Aretine biographer. The
noble Venetian representing the alternating radiance and gloom of earth,
its fairest pages as they unfold themselves, the joys and sorrows, the
teeming life of humanity; the mighty Florentine disdainful of the world,
its colours, its pulsations, its pomps and vanities, incurious of
mankind save in its great symbolical figures, soaring like the solitary
eagle into an atmosphere of his own where the dejected beholder can
scarce breathe, and, sick at heart, oppressed with awe, lags far behind!
[Illustration: _Pope Paul III. with Cardinal Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese. Naples Gallery. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]
Titian the gracious, the serene, who throughout a long life of splendid
and by comparison effortless achievement has openly and candidly drunk
deep of all the joys of life, a man even as others are! Michelangelo the
austere, the scornful, to whom the pleasures of the world, the company
in well-earned leisure of his fellow-man, suggest but the loss of
precious hours which might be devoted to the shaping in solitude of
masterpieces; in the very depths of whose nature lurk nevertheless, even
in old age, the strangest ardours, the fiercest and most insatiate
longings for love and friendship!
Let Vasari himself be heard as to this meeting. "Michelangelo and Vasari
going one day to pay a visit to Titian in the Belvedere, saw, in a
picture which he had then advanced towards completion, a nude female
figure representing _Danaë_ as she receives the embrace of Jove
transformed into a rain of gold, and, as the fashion is in people's
presence, praised it much to him. When they had taken leave, and the
discussion was as to the art of Titian, Buonarroti praised it highly,
saying that the colour and handling pleased him much, but that it was a
subject for regret that at Venice they did not learn from the very
beginning to design correctly, and that its painters did not follow a
better method in their study of art." It is the battle that will so
often be renewed between the artist who looks upon colour as merely a
complement and adjunct to design, and the painter who regards it as not
only the outer covering, but the body and soul of art. We remember how
the stiff-necked Ingres, the greatest Raphaelesque of this century,
hurled at Delacroix's head the famous dictum, "Le dessin c'est la
probité de l'art," and how his illustrious rival, the chief of a
romanticism which he would hardly acknowledge, vindicated by works
rather than by words his contention that, if design was indeed art's
conscience, colour was its life-blood, its very being.
The _Danaë_, seen and admired with reservations by Buonarroti in the
painting-room of Titian at the Belvedere, is now, with its beauty
diminished in important particulars, to be found with the rest of the
Farnese pictures in the gallery of the Naples Museum. It serves to show
that if the artist was far beyond the stage of imitation or even of
assimilation on the larger scale, he was, at any rate, affected by the
Roman atmosphere in art. For once he here comes nearer to the
realisation of Tintoretto's ideal--the colour of Titian and the design
of Michelangelo--than his impetuous pupil and rival ever did. While
preserving in the _Danaë_ his own true warmth and transparency of
Venetian colour--now somewhat obscured yet not effaced--he combines
unusual weightiness and majesty with voluptuousness in the nude, and
successfully strives after a more studied rhythm in the harmony of the
composition generally than the art of Venice usually affected.
[Illustration: _Danaë and the Golden Rain. Naples Gallery. From a
Photograph by E. Alinari._]
Titian, in his return from Rome, which he was never to revisit, made a
stay at Florence with an eye, as we may guess, both to business and
pleasure. There, as Vasari takes care to record, our master visited the
artistic sights, and _rimase stupefatto_--remained in breathless
astonishment--as he had done when he made himself acquainted with the
artistic glories of Rome. This is but vague, and a little too much
smacks of self-flattery and adulation of the brother Tuscans. Titian was
received by Duke Cosimo at Poggio a Caiano, but his offer to paint the
portrait of the Medici ruler was not well received. It may be, as Vasari
surmises, that this attitude was taken up by the duke in order not to do
wrong to the "many noble craftsmen" then practising in his city and
dominion. More probably, however, Cosimo's hatred and contempt of his
father's minion Aretino, whose portrait by Titian he had condescended to
retain, yet declined to acknowledge, impelled him to show something less
than favour to the man who was known to be the closest friend and
intimate of this self-styled "Scourge of Princes."
Crowe and Cavalcaselle have placed about the year 1555 the extravagantly
lauded _St. John the Baptist in the Desert_, once in the church of S.M.
Maria Maggiore at Venice, and now in the Accademia there. To the writer
it appears that it would best come in at this stage--that is to say in
or about 1545--not only because the firm close handling in the nude
would be less explicable ten years later on, but because the conception
of the majestic St. John is for once not pictorial but purely
sculptural. Leaving Rome, and immediately afterwards coming into contact
for the first time with the wonders of the earlier Florentine art,
Titian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus. Strange
to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the
writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose noble ascetic type
of the _Precursor_ is here modernised, and in the process deprived of
some of its austerity. The glorious mountain landscape, with its
brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael's, is
all Titian. It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all its
majesty, appear not a little artificial.
The little town of Serravalle, still so captivatingly Venetian in its
general aspect, holds one of the most magnificent works of Titian's late
time, a vast _Virgin and Child with St. Peter and St. Andrew_. This
hangs--or did when last seen by the writer--in the choir of the Church
of St. Andrew; there is evidence in Titian's correspondence that it was
finished in 1547, so that it must have been undertaken soon after the
return from Rome. In the distance between the two majestic figures of
the saints is a prospect of landscape with a lake, upon which Titian has
shown on a reduced scale Christ calling Peter and Andrew from their
nets; an undisguised adaptation this, by the veteran master, of the
divine Urbinate's _Miraculous Draught of Fishes_, but one which made of
the borrowed motive a new thing, no excrescence but an integral part of
the conception. In this great work, which to be more universally
celebrated requires only to be better known to those who do not come
within the narrow circle of students, there is evidence that while
Titian, after his stay at the Papal court, remained firm as a rock in
his style and general principles--luckily a Venetian and no
pseudo-Roman,--his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier
but grander, than it had been in middle age--his horizon altogether
vaster. To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a
physical and psychical perturbation which belonged both to the man in
advanced years and to the particular moment in the century. Even in his
treatment of classic myth, of the nude in goddess and woman, there was,
as we shall see presently, a greater unrest and a more poignant
sensuality--there was evidence of a mind and temperament troubled anew
instead of being tranquillised by the oncoming of old age.
Are we to place here, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle do, the _Venus and
Cupid_ of the Tribuna and the _Venus with the Organ Player_ of the
Prado? The technical execution of these canvases, the treatment of
landscape in the former, would lead the writer to place them some years
farther on still in the _oeuvre_ of the master. There are, however,
certain reasons for following them in this chronological arrangement.
The _Venus and Cupid_ which hangs in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, as the
pendant to the more resplendent but more realistic _Venus of Urbino_, is
a darker and less well-preserved picture than its present companion, but
a grander if a more audacious presentment of the love-goddess. Yet even
here she is not so much the Cytherean as an embodiment of the Venetian
ideal of the later time, an exemplification of the undisguised worship
of fleshly loveliness which then existed in Venice. It has been pointed
out that the later Venus has the features of Titian's fair daughter
Lavinia, and this is no doubt to a certain extent true. The goddesses,
nymphs, and women of this time bear a sort of general family resemblance
to her and to each other. This piece illustrates the preferred type of
Titian's old age, as the _Vanitas, Herodias_, and _Flora_ illustrate the
preferred type of his youth; as the paintings which we have learnt to
associate with the Duchess of Urbino illustrate that of his middle time.
The dignity and rhythmic outline of Eros in the _Danaë_ of Naples have
been given up in favour of a more naturalistic conception of the
insinuating urchin, who is in this _Venus and Cupid_ the successor of
those much earlier _amorini_ in the _Worship of Venus_ at Madrid. The
landscape in its sweeping breadth is very characteristic of the late
time, and would give good reason for placing the picture later than it
here appears. The difficulty is this. The _Venus with the Organ
Player_[39] of Madrid, which in many essential points is an inferior
repetition of the later _Venus_ of the Tribuna, contains the portrait of
Ottavio Farnese, much as we see him in the unfinished group painted, as
has been recorded, at Rome in 1546. This being the case, it is not easy
to place the _Venus and Cupid_, or its subsequent adaptation, much later
than just before the journey to Augsburg. The _Venus with the Organ
Player_ has been overrated; there are things in this canvas which we
cannot without offence to Titian ascribe to his own brush. Among these
are the tiresome, formal landscape, the wooden little dog petted by
Venus, and perhaps some other passages. The goddess herself and the
amorous Ottavio, though this last is not a very striking or successful
portrait, may perhaps be left to the master. He vindicates himself more
completely than in any other passage of the work when he depicts the
youthful, supple form of the Venetian courtesan, as in a merely passive
pose she personates the goddess whose insignificant votary she really
is. It cannot be denied that he touches here the lowest level reached by
him in such delineations. What offends in this _Venus with the Organ
Player_, or rather _Ottavio Farnese with his Beloved_, is that its
informing sentiment is not love, or indeed any community of sentiment,
but an ostentatious pride in the possession of covetable beauty subdued
like that of Danaë herself by gold.
If we are to assume with Crowe and Cavalcaselle that the single figure
_Ecce Homo_ of the Prado Gallery was the piece taken by the master to
Charles V. when, at the bidding of the Emperor, he journeyed to
Augsburg, we can only conclude that his design was carried out by pupils
or assistants. The execution is not such as we can ascribe to the brush
which is so shortly to realise for the monarch a group of masterpieces.
It was in January 1548 that Titian set forth to obey the command of the
Emperor, "per far qualche opera," as Count Girolamo della Torre has it
in a letter of recommendation given to Titian for the Cardinal of Trent
at Augsburg. It is significant to find the writer mentioning the
painter, not by any of the styles and titles which he had a right to
bear, especially at the court of Charles V., but extolling him as
"Messer Titiano Pittore et il primo huomo della Christianita."[40]
It might be imagined that it would be a terrible wrench for Titian, at
the age of seventy, to transplant himself suddenly, and for the first
time, into a foreign land. But then he was not as other men of seventy
are. The final years of his unexampled career will conclusively show
that he preserved his mental and physical vigour to the end. Further,
the imperial court with its Spanish etiquette, its Spanish language and
manners, was much the same at Augsburg as he had known it on previous
occasions at Bologna. Moreover, Augsburg and Nuremberg[41] had, during
the last fifty years, been in close touch with Venice in all matters
appertaining to art and commerce. Especially the great banking house of
the Fuggers had the most intimate relations with the queen-city of the
Adriatic. Yet art of the two great German cities would doubtless appeal
less to the Venetian who had arrived at the zenith of his development
than it would and did to the Bellinis and their school at the beginning
of the century. The gulf had become a far wider one, and the points of
contact were fewer.
The trusted Orazio had been left behind, notwithstanding the success
which he had achieved during the Roman tour, and it may be assumed that
he presided over the studio and workshop at Biri Grande during his
father's absence. Titian was accompanied to Augsburg by his second
cousin, Cesare Vecellio,[42] who no doubt had a minor share in very many
of the canvases belonging to the period of residence at Augsburg. Our
master's first and most grateful task must have been the painting of the
great equestrian portrait of the Emperor at the Battle of Mühlberg,
which now hangs in the Long Gallery of the Prado at Madrid. It suffered
much injury in the fire of the Pardo Palace, which annihilated so many
masterpieces, but is yet very far from being the "wreck" which, with an
exaggeration not easily pardonable under the circumstances, Crowe and
Cavalcaselle have described it. In the presence of one of the world's
masterpieces criticism may for once remain silent, willingly renouncing
all its rights. No purpose would be served here by recording how much
paint has been abraded in one corner, how much added in another. A deep
sense of thankfulness should possess us that the highest manifestation
of Titian's genius has been preserved, even though it be shorn of some
of its original beauty. Splendidly armed in steel from head to foot, and
holding firmly grasped in his hand the spear, emblem of command in this
instance rather than of combat, Cæsar advances with a mien impassive yet
of irresistible domination. He bestrides with ease his splendid
dark-brown charger, caparisoned in crimson, and heavily weighted like
himself with the full panoply of battle, a perfect harmony being here
subtly suggested between man and beast. The rich landscape, with a gleam
of the Elbe in the distance, is still in the half gloom of earliest day;
but on the horizon, and in the clouds overhead, glows the red ominous
light of sunrise, colouring the veils of the morning mist. The Emperor
is alone--alone as he must be in life and in death--a man, yet lifted so
high above other men that the world stretches far below at his feet,
while above him this ruler knows no power but that of God. It is not
even the sneer of cold command, but a majesty far higher and more
absolutely convinced of its divine origin, that awes the beholder as he
gazes. In comparison with the supreme dignity of this ugly, pallid
Hapsburger, upon whom disease and death have already laid a shadowy
finger, how artificial appear the divine assumptions of an Alexander,
how theatrical the Olympian airs of an Augustus, how merely vulgar and
ill-worn the imperial poses of a Napoleon.
[Illustration: _Charles V. at the Battle of Mühlberg. Gallery of the
Prado, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie._]
No veracious biographer of Titian could pretend that he is always thus
imaginative, that coming in contact with a commanding human
individuality he always thus unfolds the outer wrappings to reveal the
soul within. Indeed, especially in the middle time just past, he not
infrequently contents himself with the splendid outsides of splendid
things. To interpret this masterpiece as the writer has ventured to do,
it is not necessary to assume that Titian reasoned out the poetic
vision, which was at the same time an absolutely veracious presentment,
argumentatively with himself, as the painter of such a portrait in words
might have done. Pictorial genius of the creative order does not proceed
by such methods, but sees its subject as a whole, leaving to others the
task of probing and unravelling. It should be borne in mind, too, that
this is the first in order, as it is infinitely the greatest and the
most significant among the vast equestrian portraits of monarchs by
court painters. Velazquez on the one hand, and Van Dyck on the other,
have worked wonders in the same field. Yet their finest productions,
even the _Philip IV._, the _Conde Duque Olivarez_, the _Don Balthasar
Carlos_ of the Spaniard, even the two equestrian portraits of Charles
I., the _Francisco de Moncada_, the _Prince Thomas of Savoy_ of the
Fleming, are in comparison but magnificent show pieces aiming above all
at decorative pomp and an imposing general effect.
We come to earth and every-day weariness again with the full-length of
Charles V., which is now in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. Here the
monarch, dressed in black and seated in a well-worn crimson velvet
chair, shows without disguise how profoundly he is ravaged by ill-health
and _ennui_. Fine as the portrait still appears notwithstanding its bad
condition, one feels somehow that Titian is not in this instance, as he
is in most others, perfect master of his material, of the main elements
of his picture. The problem of relieving the legs cased in black against
a relatively light background, and yet allowing to them their full
plastic form, is not perfectly solved. Neither is it, by the way, as a
rule in the canvases of those admirable painters of men, the
quasi-Venetians, Moretto of Brescia and Moroni of Bergamo. The
Northerners--among them Holbein and Lucidel--came nearer to perfect
success in this particular matter. The splendidly brushed-in prospect of
cloudy sky and far-stretching country recalls, as Morelli has observed,
the landscapes of Rubens, and suggests that he underwent the influence
of the Cadorine in this respect as in many others, especially after his
journey as ambassador to Madrid.
Another portrait, dating from the first visit to Augsburg, is the
half-length of the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, now in the Imperial
Gallery at Vienna. He sits obese and stolid, yet not without the dignity
that belongs to absolute simplicity, showing on his left cheek the wound
received at the battle of Mühlberg. The picture has, as a portrait by
Titian, no very commanding merit, no seduction of technique, and it is
easy to imagine that Cesare Vecellio may have had a share in it.
Singular is the absence of all pose, of all attempt to harmonise the
main lines of the design or give pictorial elegance to the naïve
directness of the presentment. This mode of conception may well have
been dictated to the courtly Venetian by sturdy John Frederick himself.
The master painted for Mary, Queen Dowager of Hungary, four canvases
specially mentioned by Vasari, _Prometheus Bound to the Rock, Ixion,
Tantalus_, and _Sisyphus_, which were taken to Spain at the moment of
the definitive migration of the court in 1556. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
state that the whole four perished in the all-devouring conflagration of
the Pardo Palace, and put down the _Prometheus_ and _Sisyphus_ of the
Prado Gallery as copies by Sanchez Coello. It is difficult to form a
definite judgment on canvases so badly hung, so darkened and injured.
They certainly look much more like Venetian originals than Spanish
copies. These mythological subjects may very properly be classed with
the all too energetic ceiling-pictures now in the Sacristy of the
Salute. Here again the master, in the effort to be grandiose in a style
not properly his, overreaches himself and becomes artificial. He must
have left Augsburg this time in the autumn of 1548, since in the month
of October of that year we find him at Innsbruck making a family picture
of the children of King Ferdinand, the Emperor's brother. That monarch
himself, his two sons and five daughters, he had already portrayed.
Much feasting, much rejoicing, in the brilliant and jovial circle
presided over by Aretino and the brother Triumvirs, followed upon our
master's return to Venice. Aretino, who after all was not so much the
scourge as the screw of princes, would be sure to think the more highly
of the friend whom he really cherished in all sincerity, when he
returned from close and confidential intercourse with the mightiest
ruler of the age, the source not only of honour but of advantages which
the Aretine, like Falstaff, held more covetable because more
substantial. To the year 1549 belongs the gigantic woodcut _The
Destruction of Pharaoh's Host_, designed, according to the inscription
on the print, by "the great and immortal Titian," and engraved by
Domenico delle Greche, who, notwithstanding his name, calls himself
"depentore Venetiano." He is not, as need hardly be pointed out, to be
confounded with the famous Veneto-Spanish painter, Domenico
Theotocopuli, Il Greco, whose date of birth is just about this time
(1548).
Titian, specially summoned by the Emperor, travelled back to Augsburg in
November 1550. Charles had returned thither with Prince Philip, the
heir-presumptive of the Spanish throne, and it can hardly be open to
question that one of the main objects for which the court painter was
made to undertake once more the arduous journey across the Alps was to
depict the son upon whom all the monarch's hopes and plans were centred.
Charles, whose health had still further declined, was now, under an
accumulation of political misfortune, gloomier than ever before, more
completely detached from the things of the world. Barely over fifty at
this moment, he seemed already, and, in truth, was an old man, while the
master of Cadore at seventy-three shone in the splendid autumn of his
genius, which even then had not reached its final period of expansion.
Titian enjoyed the confidence of his imperial master during this second
visit in a degree which excited surprise at the time; the intercourse
with Charles at this tragic moment of his career, when, sick and
disappointed, he aspired only to the consolations of faith, seeing his
sovereign remedy in the soothing balm of utter peace, may have worked to
deepen the gloom which was overspreading the painter's art if not his
soul. It is not to be believed, all the same, that this atmosphere of
unrest and misgiving, of faith coloured by an element of terror, in
itself operated so strongly as unaided to give a final form to Titian's
sacred works. There was in this respect kinship of spirit between the
mighty ruler and his servant; Titian's art had already become sadder and
more solemn, had already shown a more sombre passion. The tragic gloom
is now to become more and more intense, until we come to the climax in
the astonishing _Pietà_ left unfinished when the end comes a quarter of
a century later still.
And with this change in the whole atmosphere of the sacred art comes
another in the inverse sense, which, being an essential trait, must be
described, though to do so is not quite easy. Titian becomes more and
more merely sensuous in his conception of the beauty of women. He
betrays in his loss of serenity that he is less than heretofore
impervious to the stings of an invading sensuality, which serves to make
of his mythological and erotic scenes belonging to this late time a
tribute to the glories of the flesh unennobled by the gilding touch of
the purer flame. And the painter who, when Charles V. retired into his
solitude, had suffered the feeble flame of his life to die slowly out,
was to go on working for King Philip, as fierce in the intensity of his
physical passion as in the fervour of his faith, would receive
encouragement to develop to the full these seemingly conflicting
tendencies of sacred and amorous passion.
The Spanish prince whom it was the master's most important task on this
occasion to portray was then but twenty-four years of age, and youth
served not indeed to hide, but in a slight measure to attenuate, some of
his most characteristic physical defects. His unattractive person even
then, however, showed some of the most repellent peculiarities of his
father and his race. He had the supreme distinction of Charles but not
his majesty, more than his haughty reserve, even less than his power of
enlisting sympathy. In this most difficult of tasks--the portrayal that
should be at one and the same time true in its essence, distinguished,
and as sympathetic as might be under the circumstances, of so unlovable
a personage--Titian won a new victory. His _Prince Philip of Austria in
Armour_ at the Prado is one of his most complete and satisfying
achievements, from every point of view. A veritable triumph of art, but
as usual a triumph to which the master himself disdains to call
attention, is the rendering of the damascened armour, the puffed hose,
and the white silk stockings and shoes. The two most important
variations executed by the master, or under his immediate direction, are
the full-lengths of the Pitti Palace and the Naples Museum, in both of
which sumptuous court-dress replaces the gala military costume. They are
practically identical, both in the design and the working out, save that
in the Florence example Philip stands on a grass plot in front of a
colonnade, while in that of Naples the background is featureless. As the
pictures are now seen, that in the Pitti is marked by greater subtlety
in the characterisation of the head, while the Naples canvas appears the
more brilliant as regards the working out of the costume and
accessories.
To the period of Titian's return from the second visit to Augsburg
belongs a very remarkable portrait which of late years there has been
some disinclination to admit as his own work. This is the imposing
full-length portrait which stands forth as the crowning decoration of
the beautiful and well-ordered gallery at Cassel. In the days when it
was sought to obtain _quand même_ a striking designation for a great
picture, it was christened _Alfonso d'Avalos, Marqués del Vasto_.
More recently, with some greater show of probability, it has
been called _Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino_. In the _Jahrbuch der
königlich-preussischen Kunstsammlungen_,[43] Herr Carl Justi, ever bold
and ingenious in hypothesis, strives, with the support of a mass of
corroborative evidence that cannot be here quoted, to prove that the
splendid personage presented is a Neapolitan nobleman of the highest
rank, Giovan Francesco Acquaviva, Duke of Atri. There is the more reason
to accept his conjecture since it helps us to cope with certain
difficulties presented by the picture itself. It may be conceded at the
outset that there are disturbing elements in it, well calculated to give
pause to the student of Titian. The handsome patrician, a little too
proud of his rank, his magnificent garments and accoutrements, his
virile beauty, stands fronting the spectator in a dress of crimson and
gold, wearing a plumed and jewelled hat, which in its elaboration
closely borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear. Still
more astonishing in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in
portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on
the left of the canvas, Cupid himself supports. To the right, a rival
even of Love in the affections of our enigmatical personage, a noble
hound rubs himself affectionately against the stalwart legs of his
master. Far back stretches a prospect singularly unlike those rich-toned
studies of sub-Alpine regions in which Titian as a rule revels. It has
an august but more colourless beauty recalling the middle Apennines; one
might almost say that it prefigures those prospects of inhospitable
Sierra which, with their light, delicate tonality, so admirably relieve
and support the portraits of Velazquez. All this is unusual, and still
more so is the want of that aristocratic gravity, of that subordination
of mere outward splendour to inborn dignity, which mark Titian's
greatest portraits throughout his career. The splendid materials for the
picture are not as absolutely digested, as absolutely welded into one
consistent and harmonious whole, as with such authorship one would
expect. But then, on the other hand, take the magnificent execution in
the most important passages: the distinguished silvery tone obtained
notwithstanding the complete red-and-gold costume and the portentous
crimson helmet; the masterly brush-work in these last particulars, in
the handsome virile head of the model and the delicate flesh of the
_amorino_. The dog might without exaggeration be pronounced the best,
the truest in movement, to be found in Venetian art--indeed, in art
generally, until Velazquez appears. Herr Carl Justi's happy conjecture
helps us, if we accept it, to get over some of these difficulties and
seeming contradictions. The Duke of Atri belonged to a great Neapolitan
family, exiled and living at the French court under royal countenance
and protection. The portrait was painted to be sent back to France, to
which, indeed, its whole subsequent history belongs. Under such
circumstances the young nobleman would naturally desire to affirm his
rank and pretensions as emphatically as might be; to outdo in splendour
and _prestance_ all previous sitters to Titian; to record himself apt in
war, in the chase, in love, and more choice in the fashion of his
appointments than any of his compeers in France or Italy.
An importance to which it is surely not entitled in the life-work of the
master is given to the portrait of the Legate Beccadelli, executed in
the month of July 1552, and included among the real and fancied
masterpieces of the Tribuna in the Uffizi. To the writer it has always
appeared the most nearly tiresome and perfunctory of Titian's more
important works belonging to the same class. Perhaps the elaborate
legend inscribed on the paper held by the prelate, including the unusual
form of signature "Titianus Vecellius faciebat Venetiis MDLII, mense
Julii," may have been the cause that the canvas has attracted an undue
share of attention.[45] At p. 218 of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's second
volume we get, under date the 11th of October 1552, Titian's first
letter to Philip of Spain. There is mention in it of a _Queen of
Persia_, which the artist does not expressly declare to be his own work,
and of a _Landscape_ and _St. Margaret_ previously sent by Ambassador
Vargas ("... il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta. Margarita mandatovi per
avanti"). The comment of the biographers on this is that "for the first
time in the annals of Italian painting we hear of a picture which claims
to be nothing more than a landscape, etc." Remembering, however, that
when in 1574, at the end of his life, our master sent in to Philip's
secretary, Antonio Perez, a list of paintings delivered from time to
time, but not paid for, he described the _Venere del Pardo_, or _Jupiter
and Antiope_, as "La nuda con il paese con el satiro," would it not be
fair to assume that the description _Il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta.
Margarita_ means one and the same canvas--_The Figure of St. Margaret in
a Landscape_? Thus should we be relieved from the duty of searching
among the authentic works of the master of Cadore for a landscape pure
and simple, and in the process stumbling across a number of spurious and
doubtful things. The _St. Margaret_ is evidently the picture which,
having been many years at the Escorial, now hangs in the Prado Gallery.
Obscured and darkened though it is by the irreparable outrages of time,
it may be taken as a very characteristic example of Titian's late but
not latest manner in sacred art. In the most striking fashion does it
exhibit that peculiar gloom and agitation of the artist face to face
with religious subjects which at an earlier period would have left his
serenity undisturbed. The saint, uncertain of her triumph, armed though
she is with the Cross, flees in affright from the monster whose huge
bulk looms, terrible even in overthrow, in the darkness of the
foreground. To the impression of terror communicated by the whole
conception the distance of the lurid landscape--a city in
flames--contributes much.
[Illustration: _Venus with the Mirror._ _Gallery of the Hermitage, St.
Petersburg. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie._]
In the spring and summer of 1554 were finished for Philip of Spain the
_Danaë_ of Madrid; for Mary, Queen of Hungary, a _Madonna Addolorata_;
for Charles V. the _Trinity_, to which he had with Titian devoted so
much anxious thought. The _Danaë_ of the Prado, less grandiose, less
careful in finish than the Naples picture, is painted with greater
spontaneity and _élan_ than its predecessor, and vibrates with an
undisguisedly fleshly passion. Is it to the taste of Philip or to a
momentary touch of cynicism in Titian himself that we owe the deliberate
dragging down of the conception until it becomes symbolical of the
lowest and most venal form of love? In the Naples version Amor, a
fairly-fashioned divinity of more or less classic aspect, presides; in
the Madrid and subsequent interpretations of the legend, a grasping hag,
the attendant of Danaë, holds out a cloth, eager to catch her share of
the golden rain. In the St. Petersburg version, which cannot be
accounted more than an atelier piece, there is, with some slight yet
appreciable variations, a substantial agreement with the Madrid picture.
Of this Hermitage _Danaë_ there is a replica in the collection of the
Duke of Wellington at Apsley House. In yet another version (also a
contemporary atelier piece), which is in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna,
and has for that reason acquired a certain celebrity, the greedy duenna
is depicted in full face, and holds aloft a chased metal dish.
Satisfaction of a very different kind was afforded to Queen Mary of
Hungary and Charles V. The lady obtained a _Christ appearing to the
Magdalen_, which was for a long time preserved at the Escorial, where
there is still to be found a bad copy of it. A mere fragment of the
original, showing a head and bust of Christ holding a hoe in his left
hand, has been preserved, and is now No. 489 in the gallery of the
Prado. Even this does not convince the student that Titian's own brush
had a predominant share in the performance. The letter to Charles V.,
dated from Venice the 10th of September 1554, records the sending of a
_Madonna Addolorata_ and the great _Trinity_. These, together with
another _Virgen de los Dolores_ ostensibly by Titian, and the _Ecce
Homo_ already mentioned, formed afterwards part of the small collection
of devotional paintings taken by Charles to his monastic retreat at
Yuste, and appropriated after his death by Philip. If the picture styled
_La Dolorosa_, and now No. 468 in the gallery of the Prado, is indeed
the one painted for the great monarch who was so sick in body and
spirit, so fast declining to his end, the suspicion is aroused that the
courtly Venetian must have acted with something less than fairness
towards his great patron, since the _Addolorata_ cannot be acknowledged
as his own work. Still less can we accept as his own that other _Virgen
de los Dolores_, now No. 475 in the same gallery.
[Illustration: Landscape drawing in pen and bistre by Titian.]
It is very different with the _Trinity_, called in Spain _La Gloria_,
and now No. 462 in the same gallery. Though the master must have been
hampered by the express command that the Emperor should be portrayed as
newly arisen from the grave and adoring the _Trinity_ in an agony of
prayer, and with him the deceased Empress Isabel, Queen Mary of Hungary,
and Prince Philip, also as suppliants, he succeeded in bringing forth
not indeed a complete masterpiece, but a picture all aspiration and
fervent prayer--just the work to satisfy the yearnings of the man who,
once the mightiest, was then the loneliest and saddest of mortals on
earth. The crown and climax of the whole is the group of the Trinity
itself, awful in majesty, dazzling in the golden radiance of its
environment, and, beautifully linking it with mortality, the blue-robed
figure of the Virgin, who stands on a lower eminence of cloud as she
intercedes for the human race, towards whom her pitying gaze is
directed. It would be absurd to pretend that we have here a work
entitled, in virtue of the perfect achievement of all that has been
sought for, to rank with such earlier masterpieces as the _Assunta_ or
the _St. Peter Martyr_. Yet it represents in one way sacred art of a
higher, a more inspired order, and contains some pictorial
beauties--such as the great central group--of which Titian would not in
those earlier days have been equally capable.
There is another descent, though not so marked a one as in the case of
the _Danaë_, with the _Venus and Adonis_ painted for Philip, the new
King-Consort of England, and forwarded by the artist to London in the
autumn of 1554. That the picture now in the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_
at Madrid is this original is proved, in the first place, by the quality
of the flesh-painting, the silvery shimmer, the vibration of the whole,
the subordination of local colour to general tone, yet by no means to
the point of extinction--all these being distinctive qualities of this
late time. It is further proved by the fact that it still shows traces
of the injury of which Philip complained when he received the picture in
London. A long horizontal furrow is clearly to be seen running right
across the canvas. Apart from the consideration that pupils no doubt had
a hand in the work, it lacks, with all its decorative elegance and
felicity of movement, the charm with which Titian, both much earlier in
his career and later on towards the end, could invest such mythological
subjects.[46] That the aim of the artist was not a very high one, or
this _poesia_ very near to his heart, is demonstrated by the amusingly
material fashion in which he recommends it to his royal patron. He says
that "if in the _Danaë_ the forms were to be seen front-wise, here was
occasion to look at them from a contrary direction--a pleasant variety
for the ornament of a _Camerino_." Our worldly-wise painter evidently
knew that material allurements as well as supreme art were necessary to
captivate Philip. It cannot be alleged, all the same, that this purely
sensuous mode of conception was not perfectly in consonance with his own
temperament, with his own point of view, at this particular stage in his
life and practice.
The new Doge Francesco Venier had, upon his accession in 1554, called
upon Titian to paint, besides his own portrait, the orthodox votive
picture of his predecessor Marcantonio Trevisan, and this official
performance was duly completed in January 1555, and hung in the Sala de'
Pregadi. At the same time Venier determined that thus tardily the memory
of a long--deceased Doge, Antonio Grimani, should be rehabilitated by
the dedication to him of a similar but more dramatic and allusive
composition. The commission for this piece also was given to Titian, who
made good progress with it, yet for reasons unexplained never carried
the important undertaking to completion. It remained in the workshop at
the time of his death, and was completed--with what divergence from the
original design we cannot authoritatively say--by assistants. Antonio
Grimani, supported by members of his house, or officers attached to his
person, kneels in adoration before an emblematic figure of Faith which
appears in the clouds holding the cross and chalice, which winged
child-angels help to support, and haloed round with an oval glory of
cherubim--a conception, by the way, quite new and not at all orthodox.
To the left appears a majestic figure of St. Mark, while the clouds upon
which Faith is upborne, rise just sufficiently to show a very realistic
prospect of Venice. There is not to be found in the whole life-work of
Titian a clumsier or more disjointed composition as a whole, even making
the necessary allowances for alterations, additions, and restorations.
Though the figure of Faith is a sufficiently noble conception in itself,
the group which it makes with the attendant angels is inexplicably heavy
and awkward in arrangement; the flying _pulli_ have none of the
audacious grace and buoyancy that Lotto or Correggio would have imparted
to them, none of the rush of Tintoretto. The noble figure of St. Mark
must be of Titian's designing, but is certainly not of his painting,
while the corresponding figure on the other side is neither the one nor
the other. Some consolation is afforded by the figure of the kneeling
Doge himself, which is a masterpiece--not less in the happy expression
of naïve adoration than in the rendering, with matchless breadth and
certainty of brush, of burnished armour in which is mirrored the glow of
the Doge's magnificent state robes.