Titian (_continued_)
While Titian was executing portraits of the Doges, of Aretino and of
Isabella of Portugal, and of himself and his daughter Lavinia, he was
also striking out a new line in the ceiling pictures for the Church of
San Spirito, which have since been transferred to the Salute. Though
painted before his journey to Rome, it may be suspected that he had
Michelangelo's work in the Sixtine Chapel in mind, and that he was
setting himself the task of bold foreshortening and technical problems.
The daring of the conception is great, yet we feel sure that this is not
Titian's element; his figures in violent movement give a vivid idea of
strength and muscular force, but fail both in grace and drawing, and
though the colour and light and shade distract our attention from
defects of form, he does not possess that mastery over the flowing
silhouette which Tintoretto attained.
It was in 1543 that his relations with the Farnese, whose young cardinal
he had been painting, drew him at last to Rome. Leo X. had tried to
attract him there without success, but now at sixty-eight he found
himself as far on the road as Urbino. His son Orazio was with him, and
Duke Guidobaldo was himself his escort, and sent him on with a band of
men-at-arms from Pesaro. He was received in Rome by Cardinal Bembo; Paul
III. gave him a cordial welcome and Vasari was appointed his cicerone.
It is interesting to inquire what impression Rome, with its treasures of
antique statuary and contemporary painting, made upon Titian. "He is
filled with wonder and glad that he came," writes Bembo. In a letter to
Aretino he regrets that he had not come before. He stayed eight months
in Rome, and was made a Roman citizen. He visits the Stanze of Raphael
in company with Sebastian del Piombo, and Michelangelo comes to see him
at his lodgings, and he receives a long letter from Aretino advising him
to compare Michelangelo with Raphael, and Sansovino and Bramante with
the sculptors and architects of antiquity. Titian was well established
in his own style, and was received as the creator of acknowledged
masterpieces, and he never painted a more magnificent portrait-piece
than that of Paul III., the peevish old Pope, ailing and humorous,
suspicious of the two nephews who are painted with him, and who he
guessed to be conspiring against him. The characteristic attitude of the
old man of eighty, bent down in his chair, his quick, irritable glance,
the steady, determined gaze of the cardinal, the obsequious attitude and
weak, wily face of Ottavio Farnese are all immortalised in a broader,
more careless technique than Titian has hitherto used. Though he does
not seem to have been directly influenced by all he saw in Rome, we
undoubtedly find a change coming over his work between 1540 and 1550,
which may be in part ascribed to a widening of his artistic horizon and
a consciousness of what others were doing, both around him and abroad.
In its whole handling and character his late is different from his early
manner. It begins at this time to take on a blurred, soft, impressionist
character. His delight in rich colouring seems to wane, and he aims at
intensifying the power of light. He reaches that point in the Venetian
School of painting which we may regard as its climax, when there is
little strong local colour, but the canvas seems illumined from within.
There are no clear-cut lines, but the shapes are suggested by sombre
enveloping shades in which the radiant brightness is embedded. His
landscapes alter too; they are no longer blue and smiling, filled with
loving detail, but grander, more mysterious. In the "St. Jerome" in
Paris the old Saint kneels in wild and lonely surroundings, and the
moon, slowly rising behind the dark trees, sends a sharp, silver ray
across the crucifix. The "Supper at Emmaus" has the grandiose effect
that is given by avoidance of detail and simplification of method.
Titian painted several portraits of himself, and we know what sort of
stately figure was presented by the old man of seventy who, at Christmas
in 1547, set forth to ride across the Alps in the depths of winter to
obey Charles V.'s call to Augsburg. The excitement of the public was
great at his departure, and Aretino describes how his house was besieged
for the sketches and designs he left behind him. For nearly forty years
Titian was employed by the House of Hapsburg. He had been working for
Charles since 1530, and when the Emperor abdicated, his employment by
Philip II. lasted till his death. The palace inventory of 1686 contained
seventy-six Titians, and though probably not all were genuine, yet an
immense number were really by him, and the gallery, even now, is richer
in his works than any other.
The great hall of the Pardo must have been a wonderful sight, with
Titian's finest portrait of himself in the midst, and the magnificent
portraits and sacred and allegorical pieces which he continued from this
time forward to contribute to it. In this year, which was the last
before Charles's abdication, and during this visit to South Germany, he
painted the great equestrian portrait of the Emperor on the field of
Mühlberg, and two years later came the first of his many portraits of
Philip II. The face, in the first sketch, is laid in with a sort of
fury of impressionism, and in the parade portrait the sitter is
realised as a man of great distinction. Ugly and sensual as he is,
we never tire of looking at Titian's conception--a full length of
distinguished mien rendered attractive by magnificent colour. Everything
in it lives, and the slender, aristocratic hands are, as Morelli says, a
whole biography in themselves.
The splendid series of allegorical subjects which Titian contributed to
the Pardo, while he was still supplying sacred pictures and altarpieces
to Venice and the neighbouring mainland, are among his most mature and
important works. Never has his gamut of tones been fuller and stronger
than in the "Jupiter and Antiope," or the "Venus of the Pardo" as it is
sometimes called. The Venus herself has the attitude of Giorgione's
dreaming goddess, with her arm flung up above her head. It is, perhaps,
the only time that Titian succeeds in giving anything ideal to one of
his Venuses. The famous nudes of the Uffizi and the Louvre are splendid
courtesans, far removed from Giorgione's idyllic vision; but Antiope,
slumbering on her couch of skins, and her woodland lover, gazing with
adoring eyes on her beautiful face, have a whole world of sweet and
joyful fancy. The whole scene is full of a _joie de vivre_, which
carries us back to the Bacchanals painted so many years before, and in
these Titian gives King Philip his most perfect work, every touch of
which is his own. This picture, now in the Louvre, was given to Charles
I. by the King of Spain, and bought for Cardinal Mazarin in 1650.
"Danaë," "Venus and Adonis," "Europa and the Bull," and a "Last Supper"
followed in quick succession, but Titian was now employing many
assistants, and great parts of the canvases issuing from his workshop
show weak, imitative hands, while replicas were made of other works.
His later feeling for the religious in art is expressed in the now
bedimmed paintings in San Salvatore in Venice. Vasari describes
these in 1566. Painted when Titian was nearly ninety years old, the
"Transfiguration" is remarkable for forcible, majestic movement, while
in the "Annunciation" he invents quite a new treatment. Mary turns round
and raises her veil, while she grasps the book as if she depended on it
for stay and support. The four angels are full of life and gaiety, and
the whole has much grace and colour, though it is dashed in, in the
painter's later style, in broad and sweeping planes without patience
of detail. The old man has signed it "Titianus, fecit, fecit," a
contemptuous reply to some critics who complained of its want of finish.
He knew well what it was in composition and execution, and that all that
he had ever known or done lay within the careless strength of his last
manner.
A letter written to the King of Spain's secretary in 1574 gives
a list "in part" of fourteen pictures sent to Madrid during the last
twenty-five years, "with many others which I do not remember." On every
hand we hear of lost pictures from the master's brush, and the number
produced even during the last ten years of his life must have been
enormous, for till the end he was full of great undertakings and
achievements. Very late in life he painted a "Shepherd and Nymph"
(Vienna), which in its idyllic feeling, its slumberous delight, its
mingling of clothed and nude figures, recalls the early days with
Giorgione, yet the blurred and smouldering richness, the absolute
negation of all sharp lines and lights is in his very latest style, and
he has gone past Giorgione on his own ground. Then in strange contrast
is the "Christ Crowned with Thorns," at Vienna, a tragic figure
stupefied with suffering. His last great work was the "Pietà" in
the Academy, which, though unfinished, is nobly designed and very
impressive. He places the Virgin supporting the Body in a great
dome-shaped niche, which gives elevation. It is flanked by two calm,
antique, stone figures, whose impassive air contrasts with the wild pain
and grief below. The Magdalen steps out towards the spectator with the
wailing cry of a Greek tragedy. It perhaps hardly moves us like the
concentrated feeling of Bellini's Madonna, or the hurried, trembling
grief of Tintoretto's Magdalen, but it is monumental in the sweeping
grace of its line, and full of nobility of feeling. It is sadly rubbed
and darkened and has lost much of Titian's colour, but is still
beautiful in its deep greys mingled with a sombre golden glow, as
of half-extinguished fires. These late paintings are of the true
impressionist order; looked at closely they present a mass of scumbled
touches, of incoherent dashes, but if we step farther away, to the
right focus, light and dark arrange themselves, order shines through the
whole, and we see what the great master meant us to see. "Titian's later
creations," says Vasari, "are struck off rapidly, so that when close you
cannot see them, but afar they look perfect, and this is the style which
so many tried to imitate, to show that they were practised hands, but
only produced absurdities." Titian was preparing the picture for the
Frari, in payment for the grant of a tomb for himself, when in August
1576 the plague broke out in Venice, and on the 27th the great painter
died of it in his own house. The stringent regulations concerning
infection were relaxed to do honour to one of the greatest sons of
Venice, and he was laid to rest in the Frari, borne there in solemn
procession, through a city stricken by terror and panic, and buried
in the Chapel of the Crucified Saviour, for which his last work was
ordered. The "Assumption" of his prime looked down upon him, and close
at hand was the "Madonna of Casa Pesaro." His son Orazio caught the
plague and died immediately after, and the painter's house was sacked
by thieves and many precious things stolen.
The great personality of Titian stands out as that which of all others
established and consolidated the school of Venice. He is its central
figure. The century of life, of which eighty years were passed in
ceaseless industry of production, left its deep impression on the art of
every civilised country of Europe. Every great man of the day who was a
lover of art and culture fell under Titian's spell. His influence on his
contemporaries was enormous, and he had everything: genius, industry,
personal distinction, character, social charm. He is, perhaps, of too
intellectual a cast of mind to be quite typical of the Venetian spirit,
in the way that Tintoretto is; it is conceivable that in another
environment Titian might have developed on rather different lines,
but this temper gave him greater domination. He was free from the
eccentricities which beset genius. He possessed the saving salt of
practical common sense, so that the golden mean of sanity and healthful
joy in his works commended them to all men, and they are not difficult
to understand. Yet while all can see the beauty of his poetic instinct
for colour, his interesting and original technique, his grasp and
scope, his mastery and certainty have gained for him the title of "the
painter's painter." There is no one from whom men feel that they can so
safely learn so much, and the grand breadth and power of elimination of
his later years is justified by the way in which in his earlier work he
has carried exquisite finish and rich impasto to perfection.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Ancona. Crucifixion (L.).
S. Domenico: Madonna with Saints and Donor, 1520.
Antwerp. Pope Alexander VI. presenting Jacopo Pesaro.
Berlin. Infant Daughter of Strozzi, 1542; Portrait of Himself (L.);
Lavinia bearing Charges.
Brescia. SS. Nazaro e Celso: Altarpiece, 1522.
Dresden. Madonna with Saints (E.); Tribute Money (E.); Lavinia as Bride,
1555; Lavinia as Matron (L.); Portrait, 1561; Lady with
Vase (L.); Lady in Red Dress.
Florence. Pitti: La Bella; Aretino, 1545; Magdalen; The Young Englishman;
The Concert (E.); Philip II.; Ippolito de Medici, 1533;
Tomaso Mosti.
Uffizi: Eleanora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, 1537; Francesco
della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1537; Flora; Venus, the head
a portrait of Lavinia; Venus, the head a portrait of Eleanora
Gonzaga; Madonna with S. Anthony Abbot.
London. Holy Family and Shepherd; Bacchus and Ariadne (E.); Noli me
tangere (E.); Madonna with SS. John and Catherine.
Bridgewater House: Holy Family (E.); Venus of the Shell; Three
Ages of Man; Diana and Actaeon, 1559; Callisto, 1559.
Earl Brownlow: Diana and Actaeon (L.).
Sir F. Cook: Portrait of Laura de Dianti.
Madrid. Madonna with SS. Ulfus and Bridget (E.); Bacchanal; The Garden
of Loves; Danaë, 1554; Venus and Youth playing Organ (L.);
Salome (portrait of Lavinia); Trinity, 1554; Entombment,
1559; Prometheus; Religion succoured by Spain (L.);
Sisyphus (L.); Alfonso of Ferrara; Charles V. at the Battle
of Mühlberg, 1548; Charles V. and his Dog, 1533; Philip II.,
1550; Philip II.; The Infant; Don Fernando and Victory;
Portrait; Portrait of Himself; Duke of Alva; Venus and
Adonis; Fall of Man; Empress Isabella.
Medole (near Brescia). Christ appearing to His Mother.
Munich. Vanitas; Portrait of Charles V., 1548; Madonna and Saints; Man
with Baton.
Naples. Paul III. and Cardinals, 1545; Danaë.
Padua. Scuola del Santo: Frescoes; S. Anthony granting Speech to an
Infant; The Youth who cut off his Leg; The Jealous Husband,
1511.
Paris. Madonna with Saints (E.); La Vierge au Lapin; Madonna with
S. Agnes; Christ at Emmaus (L.); Crowning with Thorns (L.);
Entombment; S. Jerome (L.); Jupiter and Antiope (L.);
Francis I.; Allegory; Marquis da Valos and Mary of Arragon;
Alfonso of Ferrara and Laura Dianti; L'Homme au Gant (E.);
Portraits.
Rome. Villa Borghese: Sacred and Profane Love (E.); St. Dominio (L.);
Education of Cupid (L.).
Capitol: Baptism (E.).
Doria: Daughter of Herodias.
Vatican: Madonna in Glory and six Saints, 1523.
Treviso. Duomo: Annunciation.
Urbino. Resurrection (L.); Last Supper (L.).
Venice. Academy: Presentation of Virgin, 1540; S. John in the Desert;
Assumption, 1518; Pietà, 1573.
Palazzo Ducale Staircase: S. Christopher, 1523.
Sala di Quattro Porte: Doge Giovanni before Faith, 1555.
Frari: Pesaro Madonna, 1526.
S. Giovanni Elemosinario: S. John the Almsgiver, 1523.
Scuola di San Rocco: Annunciation (E.).
Salute Sacristy: Descent of the Holy Spirit; St. Mark enthroned
with Saints; David and Goliath; Sacrifice of Isaac; Cain
and Abel.
S. Salvatore: Annunciation (L.); Transfiguration (L.).
Verona. Duomo: Assumption.
Vienna. Gipsy Madonna (E.); Madonna of the Cherries (E.); Ecce Homo,
1543; Isabela d'Este, 1534; The Tambourine Player; Girl in
Fur Cloak; Dr. Parma (E.); Shepherd and Nymph (L.);
Portraits; Doge Andrea Gritti; Jacopo Strada; Diana and
Callisto; Madonna and Saints.
Wallace Collection. Perseus and Andromeda. (In collaboration
with his nephew, Francesco Vecellio.)
Louvre. Madonna and Saints. (The same by Francesco alone.)
Glasgow. Madonna and Saints.