The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces
at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The
"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
Martyr."
In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A
greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters
been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,
when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we
have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a
broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
eccentricity.
[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a
Photograph by Braun, Clément, & Cie_.]
In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind
already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the
Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_
might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of
Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a
renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the
Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but
by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named
the "Townley Venus" and the "Vénus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,
kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them
shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer
is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the
angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the
Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,
in touch with the South, as Albrecht Dürer, Mabuse, and Jacob
Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]
The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the
commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less
delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,
it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of
the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,
however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues
then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead
the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its
attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian's
lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or
Titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity
spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.
The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna
Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
now described, but rather before than after them.
What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumption
of the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but not
shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the
20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian
altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and
what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world.
Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of
Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_
Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, the
Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years
earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in
Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as
Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at
S. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in the
following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of
fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of these
masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by
Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be
derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had
any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one
altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might
possibly have obtained a hint. This was the _Assumption of the Virgin_
painted by Dürer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by Paul
Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the
Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and
the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its
fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising a
too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact
between this group and the corresponding one in the _Assunta_. But
Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller
altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it
remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _Assumption_ in the
_Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a
definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more
formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The
_Assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficult
to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he
visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most
terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently
restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the
Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.
[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]
Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of
Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it
undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of
Titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
with the mighty genius of the latter?
But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of
dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group
of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a
higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is
the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere
adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated
last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
in the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted
masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in the
same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
better self.
Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and
only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession
of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]
What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel,
showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari,
and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to
the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.
To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso,
the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits
the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the
foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely
ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the
beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to
the Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south of
the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of
the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the
Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic
_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear
dignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the
Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
known picture.
[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a
Photograph by Alinari_.]
Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--the
passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our
master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
are told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appears
to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part
of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus and
Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too
late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must be
deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_
of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described
our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has
not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the
golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has
been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naïveté remains, but not the
infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and
Ariadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as
will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the
_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we
descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna,
is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
times, with its exquisite naïveté and mitigated sensuousness.
[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph
published by the Autotype Company._]
The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum
of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master's
works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested
in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did
not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At
parte ex aliâ florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque
incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars
tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown of
stars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of the
poem--shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds
perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of
Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled in
its happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge au
Lapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did
the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,
however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights
of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
considered the supreme exponent.
The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre now known as
_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of
Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian's
Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The
exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most
consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, the
Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che è opera stupenda_. It is
upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the
popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward
with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_
personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's
picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost
universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his
son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the
Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the
"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A
comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_
of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a
hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the
recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something like
certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only
that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the
same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly
well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression
of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This
means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious
Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle
Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter
canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later
signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two
older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is,
or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater
Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority of
which it bears its present designation.
The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly in
San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "Titianus
Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the
later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it
cannot rank with the San Niccolò and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it
presents some special points of interest which make it easily
distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar
intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and
hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a
passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one
expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic
force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under
control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was
acquainted with Raphael's _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic and
real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still
Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness
and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the
humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento
altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a
master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portion
of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the
clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccolò altar-piece.
[Illustration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.
Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal
Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church
of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and
sentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, constituting
the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43]
and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of
Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the
much-talked-of piece for his master. Titian succumbed to an offer of
sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor
the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of
his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy
of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the
profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia
altar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the left
and right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depicts
the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,
Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] in
the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificent
academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to
bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his
splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the
beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting
the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the
mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful
charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or the
healthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccolò
altar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those who
admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,
its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,
must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a
conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face
with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and
against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and
richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and
painting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ and
the _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position of
the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and
the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,
notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon
in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made
by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was
kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY. CHATSWORTH. _From a photograph
by Braun, Clément & Cie_.]
[Illustration: _La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by
Neurdein._]
In the _Madonna di S. Niccolò_, which was painted or rather finished in
the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolò de'
Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is
suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance
of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before
the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the
circular top which it had in common with the _Assunta_, the Ancona, and
the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these
great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and
sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his
subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that
its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt
expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St.
Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian
loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.
Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if
anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto
dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a
sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del
Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with
St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.
The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the
infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the
Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we
know, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion,
twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.
As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in
fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject
is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant
Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town
Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.
[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the
Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than
altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular
subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious
patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of
that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este
Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a
"Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed
that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some
correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted
at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the
style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels
strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or
thereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely
following upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_
were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the
last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were
saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type
and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea
has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the _Assunta_,
the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such
as we meet with in the _Bacchanal_. The Magdalen, with her features
distorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differences
imposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-goddess
in the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand,
enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type
which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his
school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the
_Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.
What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and
enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is
perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of
informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of
the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--the
well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate
the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound
together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them
communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,
while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole,
each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own
splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the
Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the
embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of
Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white
of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the
Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial
magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
tragedy.
Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's
chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.
[Illustration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de'
Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.]
The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, after
having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the
Frari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages,
it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less
interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's
_Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in
their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of
Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the
sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to
impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a
condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a
decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme
or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so
many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this
occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro
is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic
pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the
main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the
divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking
cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the
two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of
the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is an
unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces the
spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian
went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion
note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer
is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virgin
and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliminary
sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original
sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the
Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a
like original study for the kneeling Baffo.
[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO. ALBERTINA, VIENNA.
_From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie_.]
[Illustration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving
by Henri Laurent.]
By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing
of Titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on the
altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.
Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of
the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On
the 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for
the lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the
Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of
Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with
Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused
the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and
prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression
may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single
startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the
composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of
the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on
through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to
consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_
and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the
sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the
reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.
Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the
attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on
nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for
the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_
of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense
effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.
Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic
of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously it
is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico
Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the original
would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The
best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware,
to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
hangs in the great hall of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even
through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially
in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism
notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la più compiuta, la
più celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la
quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.
[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a
Photograph by Anderson_.]
It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone,
instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the
end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either
by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink
sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the
victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titian
for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_,
which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the École des Beaux-Arts
of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
himself.[50]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu
Römischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen
Kunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, and
upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesque
of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius,
_Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted as
convincing for entitling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar
incident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas
contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious
explanation of Titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a
little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in
connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first
time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of
Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of
the Venetian idyll generally.
[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a
sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo
Lotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "Les
Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol.
i.
[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian, see
Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of Titian_ (second
edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general and
local authorities on the subject.
[4] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 29.
[5] _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_, p. 75.
[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of
art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states that
Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "_C' egli apprese
certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso
Tiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_).
[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_.
[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over
by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the
capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This
gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider
in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman.
A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly
sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the
basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fête Champêtre_ in the Salon
Carré of the Louvre!
[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895.
[10] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 111.
[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken
after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his
son_.
[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien_, 1887.
[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture,
"Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Sta
chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than the
work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with the
marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of the
background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely
repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form
"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.
"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earlier
time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms
overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.
[14] Kugler's _Italian Schools of Painting_, re-edited by Sir Henry
Layard.
[15] Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this _Baptism_ in the year 1531 in the
house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus describes it: "La
tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano, che è nel fiume
insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso M. Zuanne Ram ritratto
sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li spettatori, fu de man de
Tiziano" (_Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da J. Jacopo
Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).
[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima's
great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the
Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the
inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school
borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been
looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, in
the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two
altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental
and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, of
a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates
back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder
master is more passionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St.
Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more
perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful
_Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to
Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that
of an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of the
Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that
of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much
less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume. The idea of an
actual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that of
Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. The
earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to
that of Bartolommeo Montagna.
[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contact
with the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ by
Titian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S.
Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.
Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,
though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and
movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a
kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,
assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to
Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter
has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial
archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy
of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of
the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the
present monograph (p. 99).
[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara,
that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S.
Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed
una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."
[19] From an often-cited passage in the _Anonimo_, describing
Giorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525,
when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that
it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,
che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da
Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The
Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the
landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to
those which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and Profane
Love_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same
_Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a
_Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which,
according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be
pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in
common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supported
by Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Pietà of Treviso. The
engraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M.
Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du Titien_ as having possibly been derived
from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of Titian
as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the
extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of
Pordenone or to that of his imitators.
[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895.
[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Opere
di Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.
[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884.
[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_.
[24] The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is to
be found among those publicly exhibited at the École des Beaux Arts of
Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, and
curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie et
Oeuvre du Titien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the fresco
that it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is in
the style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque
phase, so assiduously imitates.
[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian
is to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco a
sedere in mezzo a certi santi."
[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to
the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be
mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known
_Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani,
bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed into the rich collection
of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purely
Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was
painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groups
therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni
Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely
_Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and with
the four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al
Rialto.
[27] _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_, p. 74.
[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour,
relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn
beauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. In
both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head of
the Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim
its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one
of Titian's loveliest.
[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal
Academy in 1895.
[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was last
publicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman of
the House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, Titian painted with
wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique of
the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's
description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of
eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's
"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey
sleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with
silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone
balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the
portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems
likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which
curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful
_Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such by
Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the
collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticianus"
occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first
period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear
to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription being
admittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the
"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional
argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari
(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good
many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the
_Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonna
with St. Anthony Abbot_ of the Uffizi; the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, the
_Assunta_, the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia (dated 1522). The _Virgin and
Child with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, and the _Christ with
the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ of the Louvre--neither of them early works--are
signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus F.,"
among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the
great _Madonna di San Niccolò_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. It
has been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brera
bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The
signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual
character.
[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not its
equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting in
North Italy_, vol. ii.).
[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, but
to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact place, are
the so-called _Titian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery;
the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _Pietro
Aretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called
_Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-named
portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force and
conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in the
characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yet
been discovered.
[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framed
with the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and far
inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called
_Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the
signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo.
[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remind
the beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in the
Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned to the
great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of his
late pupils or followers.
[35] The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of Ariosto
by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then made were
the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the greatest
painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna,
Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and Raffael (33rd
canto, 2nd ed.).
[36] [Greek: Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.]
[37] Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's
_Jardin à Amour_, made familiar by so many repetitions and
reproductions, and to Van Dyck's _Madone aux Perdrix_ at the Hermitage
(see Portfolio: _The Collections of Charles I._). Rubens copied, indeed,
both the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, some time between 1601
and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the
Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the _Bacchanal_ proved
particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one
instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic _Bacchus
seated on a Barrel_, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg,
contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's
picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic
figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from
that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.
[38] Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme,
tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."
[39] Moritz Thausing's _Albrecht Dürer_, Zweiter Band, p. 14.
[40] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 212.
[41] It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour and
reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise,
red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.,"
should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the _Madonna with St.
Catherine_, mentioned in a letter of that year written by Giacomo
Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last picture be
more properly identified with our own superb _Madonna and Child with St.
John and St. Catherine_, No. 635 in the National Gallery, the style of
which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of the girlish
Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a larger
generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed
"Tician."
[42] "Tizian und Alfons von Este," _Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen
Kunstsammlungen_, Fünfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.
[43] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
237-240.
[44] On the circular base of the column upon which the warrior-saint
rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat MDXXII." This, taken
in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on the Ancona altar-piece
painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of demarcation between the
two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.
[45] Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's
workshop, of the _St. Sebastian_, slightly smaller than the Brescia
original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort as
among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest
version of the _St. Sebastian_, preceding the definitive work, showed
the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of
St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers
shooting.
[46] Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
sees in the upturned face of the _St. Nicholas_ a reflection of that of
Laocoon in the Vatican group.
[47] It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the collection
of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the Commonwealth to
the banker and dealer Jabach for £120. By the latter it was made over to
Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the same
way.
[48] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
298, 299.
[49] The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by Baffo in
the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some twenty-three years
before. This gives a special significance to the position in the picture
of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet, stands midway between the
Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in one of Titian's earliest
works (_circa_ 1503) recommended to St. Peter by Alexander VI. just
before his departure for this same expedition.
[50] It has been impossible in the first section of these remarks upon
the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very important question
of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him. Some attempt will
be made in the second section, to be entitled _The Later Work of
Titian_, to deal summarily with this branch of the subject, which has
been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni Morelli disentangled
the genuine landscape drawings of the master from those of Domenico
Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further study.
INDEX
"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre)
Altar-piece at Brescia
"Annunciation, The" (Treviso)
"Annunciation, The" (Venice)
"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence)
"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall)
"Assumption of the Virgin, The,"
"Bacchanal, A,"
"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery),
"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome),
"Battle of Cadore, The"
"Bella, La" (Florence)
"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The" (Antwerp)
"Christ at Emmaus"
"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice)
"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice)
"Charles V. at Mühlberg" (Madrid)
"Concert, A" (Florence)
"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard)
"Cristo della Moneta, Il" (Dresden)
"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The"
"Diana and Actaeon"
"Diana and Calisto"
"Entombment, The" (Louvre)
"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle)
"Flora" (Florence)
Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace
Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua
Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice
"Herodias"
"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery)
"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery)
"Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre)
"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice)
"Madonna di San Niccolò, The" (Rome)
"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich)
"Man in Black, The" (Louvre)
"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice)
"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre)
"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'"
"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery)
"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna)
"Philip II., Portrait of"
"Pietà" (Milan)
"Rape of Europa, The"
"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome)
"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly)
"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence)
"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice)
"St. Sebastian": see _Altar-piece at Brescia_
"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna)
"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery)
"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice)
"Tribute-Money, The": see _Cristo della Moneta_
"Triumph of Faith, The"
"Vanitas" (Munich)
"Venere del Pardo": see _Jupiter and Antiope_
"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson)
"Virgin and Child" (Florence)
"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg)
"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see _Zingarella, La_
"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford)
"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden)
"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot"
(Florence)
"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National Gallery)
"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona)
"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice" (Louvre)
"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid)
"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna)
"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre)
"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid)
"Zingarella, La" (Vienna)