What provoked this doubt in him? I suspect it was intimately connected with Venice, with the city’s special kind of wealth and commerce and power. All of which … had to do with the flesh.
(John and Katya Berger, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd, 1996)
Titian’s paintings have long been seen as fulfilling the underlying goal or destiny of Venetian Renaissance painting. The idea that he perfects and completes the tradition is typically attended by the sense that its wider future is doomed: that nothing more of value can come afterwards. As of now, Dolce opined in 1557, ‘painting might be losing its way once more. For one does not see among the young anyone newly coming up who offers hope of duly achieving some level of excellence.’1 This grim prognostication is the inevitable darker shadow of the encomium to Titian; the end of the tradition is inscribed within the discourse that makes him its sole embodiment. But this paradox is something more than a mere literary trope. Even if the evaluative terms of Dolce’s analysis are questionable, his prediction of an art historical malaise after Titian turned out to be not too far from the truth. Many modern writers have agreed that Titian was the leading figure within Venetian Renaissance painting, but they also see him as its ‘final act’. On the other hand, they have not cared to dwell on the contradiction this identity indicates. The many achievements of the great painter are lauded, but the more destructive side of his activity is downplayed. In many accounts the rapid decline of Venetian art after Titian is simply part of the paean of praise offered to him. The end of the tradition is a kind of narrative necessity: after the high point comes the inevitable decline. But so absolute was the desertion of local artistic identity in the period after Titian that many have found it ‘impossible to speak of a Venetian school of the Seicento’.2
The ‘traditional’ Titian featured in this account is separated from what happened next, for his image would otherwise be tarnished or polluted by association with the ‘crisis’ in Venetian painting that followed his death.3 The rapid demise of art in the city by 1600, its sharp dip in quality and inability to define itself as distinctive is always noted, but it is not seen as Titian’s legacy. It is usual to note the biological fact of Titian’s death as sufficient to explain the hiatus: the tradition had come to its ‘natural’ conclusion with the disappearance of its leading figure. Given that Titian was a uniquely talented and irreplaceable genius, the simple fact of his death delivered a kind of artistic hammer blow. When Titianthe-painter stopped, so did the tradition he embodied.
Some exaggeration of the ‘crisis’ afflicting painting in Venice in Titian’s wake is integral to this familiar art historical story. Painting in the city clearly did not cease around 1600, even if it is hard enough to equate the works of a Marco Vecellio or a Palma Giovane with those of the late Titian. We certainly need also to take account of other deaths in Venice to help explain the demise of the Renaissance tradition of painting. Those of Veronese (1588) and Tintoretto (1594) certainly had an impact. But Titian had achieved a unique kind of dominance in Venetian painting as early as 1520, and his prestige was wholly unmatched by these rivals: his disappearance was accordingly much more significant than theirs. Nonetheless, the demise of leading figures within other artistic traditions has not always been so cataclysmic. Death and the memories and aspirations it stimulates can just as easily activate creativity. Our entire sense of ‘artistic tradition’ is based, after all, on the perception that it can (even exists to) absorb the inevitable passing of its leading proponents; that it possesses the vitality to outlive those who work within its parameters, to survive or transcend their individual contributions. The ‘conclusion’ with which Titian is associated was not, to this extent, so inevitable. It has been argued in this book that Titian was more deeply implicated than is usually allowed. His mighty career may have been followed by an artistic black hole, but was also a major factor in its emergence. Titian and the all-powerful cultural icon he became in later life was, in a complex yet central way, the prime cause of the end of Venetian Renaissance painting.
Titian’s destruction of the older conception of painting in Venice, which we can broadly describe as ‘Republican’, was not, of course, an issue of his death alone. It was, as we have seen, a final by-product of a career spanning seven decades of artistic activity in the city. Making Titian responsible in this way might appear as a kind of posthumous judgement from on high, and the naive personalization of history it suggests stands in need of defence. It must be acknowledged that his dynamic progressivism was itself a reflection of a wider moment of change or redefinition in the culture of early modern Europe. Titian’s internationalism coincided with Venetian attempts to integrate with the mainstream of western European society, and to this degree the direction of the painter’s career was more representative of a geopolitical redirection in his adoptive city. Even if the Venetian ‘turn westward’ in the sixteenth century did not contribute to a long-term decline of the Republic, as many have assumed, it may nevertheless have militated against the survival of a definably local culture.4 And Venice was not alone in its loss of a local artistic identity in this period, as the values of an eclectic academic classicism spread rapidly throughout Italy and Europe.
The tensions between individual and tradition that characterize Titian’s career reflect those present within the more ‘progressive’ aspirations of the Renaissance more widely, tensions that had always threatened more stable and sustainable models of society and culture. The sense of an ending in the late sixteenth century was not, in fact, confined to Titian and Venetian panting, but was registered across many parts of Italy and Europe.5 The boldly goal-orientated and individualistic aspects of Titian’s age had established a fragile cultural situation in which dominant personalities might, or perhaps had, to undermine the medieval sociopolitical and artistic ethos of shared culture. But these broader contextual considerations should not lead us away from what is at stake here. Rather than a continuator of the ideas of artistic naturalism established in earlier centuries, and thus a representative of ongoing tradition, Titian was an uncompromising innovator. His painting expressed itself, from the outset, in terms of departure and difference, constructing the immediate artistic past of Venetian art as something alien, to be conquered or quashed rather than followed or venerated. His rapid rise to dominance in Venice had a disintegrative impact on local conditions for painters and painting. The ultra-progressive trajectory of his career towards self-expression precipitated the demise of the older approach to picture making that had promoted the Venetian value of communitas, or collectivism, enshrined in the cultural and artistic traditions, as in the political institutions, of the Republic.
Titian’s late style is paradigmatic in this regard. It was suggested in chapter Four that it was to some extent rhetorically ‘traditional’: a calculated attempt to appear as the defining expression of colorito in Venetian art and thus as an expression of the city’s central aesthetic principle. The late style should be understood as a visual parallel to Dolce’s Dialogo that confirmed Titian’s identity as the very embodiment or telos of the venerable tradition of Venetian painting. But it was also argued that the late style was self-consciously individualistic and was intended to be a quite literally inimitable pictorial invention. In this sense its claim to Venetianness, or venezianità, cannot be taken at face value, and is better understood as a final, restless kind of self-assertion rather than as a return to, or summation of, local artistic values. It was epitomized by Titian’s untranslatable mark on the picture surface. However notional or performative this declaration of personal ‘presence’ in the arena of the canvas was, it was certainly a measure of Titian’s move beyond the framework of a specifically Venetian artistic culture.6 Titian’s loose manner opened the way for the unstable, individualistic painterly techniques and formal approach of the international Baroque. It has always been said that his work provided a constant point of reference for artists as diverse as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Poussin and Reynolds. But in its immediate local context, it proved much more difficult to accommodate. Titian’s late style only seemed to fulfil the goals of the Venetian Renaissance. In reality, it undermined the local conventions of painting by reinventing it as a wholly individuated form of expression.
160 Detail of Titian’s Pietà, c. 1570–76 (illus. 159).
At the extreme lower right of the late religious painting with which this study began, we glimpse a final image of old Titian as the pious donor in black (illus. 161). He kneels with hands raised in prayer, his loyal son and heir Orazio at his shoulder. This time he appears in a small ex-voto image, propped against the altar. The two leading members of the Vecellio family pray for salvation before a second miniature image of the pieta, which appears in the heavens before them. The reduced significance of this self-imagery is, however, evident from the tiny scale of the figures and by their consignment to the fictive realm of an archaic ‘painting-within-a-painting’ – one that contrasts in many ways with the complex, ‘living’ drama enacted elsewhere in the image even as it references Titian’s donation of the entire altarpiece. Just to the left a second, much larger and more animated figure creeps forward to touch Christ’s hand and stare into his face (illus. 160). As we saw in the Introduction, this is very probably St Jerome, but has also long been recognized as a disguised self-portrait of Titian himself.7 If this double identification is accepted, questions inevitably follow: why would Jerome be present in a pietà? And why would the old Titian want to identify himself with that saint?
161 Detail of Titian’s Pietà, c. 1570–76 (illus. 159). |
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Traditionally, Jerome did not have any role to play in this subject-matter, but in Titian’s painting he is made the first point of visual contact for a viewer imagined as approaching the work from the right.8 As in the Pesaro Madonna (illus. 53), Titian seems to have taken careful account of the intended position of his painting in the church of the Frari. His Pietà was intended to stand on the right-hand wall of the nave, and accordingly anticipates a viewer approaching the work from the right, after entering through the main portal of the church. The figure of Jerome forms the viewer’s initial point of connection with the imagery beyond, and perhaps functions as his or her proxy within the painting. Jerome’s forward-leaning figure and intense stare bring the viewer’s gaze directly up to the dead body of Christ. But his figure also aligns itself with the others in the painting, forming a vital link in the parabolic curve that leads in an upward and gently receding arc across the painting to end with the imposing statue of Moses at the upper left (illus. 1). Moses twists his head away from the scene at hand, and towards the High Altar of the Frari.
The turn of Moses’s head towards the left may, as noted earlier, initiate another kind of redemptive schema with reference to the presiding figure of the Virgin Mary featured in the High Altarpiece (illus. 50).9 But his figural connection with Jerome within the internal space of the Pietà is equally significant and might also be thematically freighted. Moses holds the tablet of the Law in his right hand. Its enormous stone surface points towards Christ’s dead body as if to explain the necessity of his death, although the Hebrew inscriptions upon it are, significantly, not visible. It was Jerome, after all, who translated the Bible from the original Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew into the Latin of the Vulgate, and thus opened up the scriptures to the wider religious understanding of Christian worshippers within the Western Church. Jerome is shown as much closer to us than Moses, as if to express his greater significance within the progressive schema of redemptive history. He is a sensate, living figure rather than a dead, ‘mute’ sculpture, and encounters the reality of Christ’s dead body directly. Unlike Moses with his blank tablet, Jerome experiences the immediate reality of Christ’s sacrifice, the intensity – or, better, intimacy – of his response in itself a kind of expressive translation of its possible meaning, or at least a humanized exemplum of what might be needed to understand it. It was noted in the Introduction that Titian’s particular identification with a pious old saint in close contact with God served the familiar topos of the divino artista well enough. But Jerome’s more specific role as translator of the Bible must also have encouraged Titian’s identification with him. The mediating or facilitating role of the Christian painter, picturing the words of the Vulgate for pious worshippers in still more immediate terms, could be understood as analogous.
162 Titian, St Jerome, c. 1570–75. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Titian had, in fact, already identified himself with St Jerome in a near-contemporary painting, now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, suggesting that it allowed him to reflect on his role as a painter of Christian subjects in a cultural climate of deepening piety and faith (illus. 162).10 But, at the same time, this imagery is hardly self-validating in the manner of his undisguised self-portraiture. In the Madrid painting, Jerome/Titian is a harrowed figure in the wilderness rather than a fur-clad intellectual artist, and holds a rock rather than a brush in his right hand with which to flagellate himself (illus. 128). And it is this emotional version of the suffering Jerome, rather than his rational counterpart, as a purposive scholar in the study, who reappears in the Pietà, his aged, semi-naked figure bent with the horror of what he witnesses at the shrine. What the frail old man sees is unclear. The need to get close to Christ’s dead flesh, to reach out and touch the wound on the lifeless hand, might refer to something quite literal in addition to the effort to understand. Taking the figure as Titian for a moment, we might ask if the craning of his neck is also a reference to the old painter’s blindness, which had been noted by some as the cause of the blurry approximations of his brushwork in the late works and that has often been favoured by the more literal-minded as a theory to explain their supposed artistic failure.11 Certainly this is an image of physical decrepitude, the aged, scrawny old man crawling on his knees as if unable to walk. It was the disguising of the self-portrait in the Pietà, we must assume, that encouraged the artist to show himself as lame and blind, stretching forward half-naked in the quest to find the meaning of his own upcoming death through that of Christ.
Around 1560, Leone Leoni cast a medal for Michelangelo that features on its verso an analogous image of the elderly artist in the guise of a blind and lame old man stumbling along the path of life with his dog and stick (illus. 162).12 It would probably be an exaggeration to claim that Titian, showing himself in a similarly debilitated state in the Pietà, intentionally recalled Leoni’s medal to construct a final paragone with Michelangelo. Yet the broad equivalence between the late, ‘spiritualized’ self-projections of the two leading artists of sixteenth-century Italy in old age is clear enough, revealing the way in which they both ‘performed’ adopted identities in the public arena of their art.13 In Titian’s case we must notice the contrast between the outlandish wilderness figure blundering towards Christ, and the self-contained, ‘respectable’ self-portraits through which he had constructed his public identity over the preceding decades. In the undisguised images of Titian the painter appears as the epitome of the successful, high-status individual, whose acuity of vision and strength of body are not in question and are perhaps even slightly exaggerated for expressive effect (see especially illus. 127, 128). In the disguised self-images, on the other hand, it is the weakness and age of Titian’s body that is emphasized, as well as its closeness to Christ.14 The semi-nakedness of the Titian body in the Jerome imagery is an ambiguous symbol of vulnerability and truthfulness that expresses the spiritual doubts and aspirations of the old painter.15
163 Leone Leoni, Michelangelo as a Blind Beggar, c. 1560, bronze medal, verso. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
The above examples indicate that in his final years Titian used disguised self-portraiture to suggest alternatives to the tyranny of the public image of confident old age that he and his followers so assiduously developed. Of course, these figures only ever half represent ‘Titian’, floating the possibility that he is the sacred figure represented, but finally withholding the confirmation of identity that is the raison d’être of the self-portraits proper.16 More importantly still, there is a simultaneous suggestion of spiritual elevation involved in the very assumption of such disguises. As a wilderness saint, an intimate at Christ’s burial or a witness at his death, the piety of ‘Titian’ cannot be doubted. He mortifies his flesh, carries the Saviour’s body or reaches out to touch it, his repentance appearing as a veritable model for the Christian approach to death. Titian’s self-depiction in such close proximity to Christ was a privilege granted to very few, and was one that evoked again, in the broadest sense, the familiar sixteenth-century idea of the divino artista.
But there is one final example of disguised self-representation that is less obviously open to such a reading, or which seems to penetrate further and in a less self-justifying way the questions raised by Titian’s unprecedented success in painting at Venice. In the horrifying late depiction of The Flaying of Marsyas, ‘Titian’ seems to appear in the guise of King Midas, who looks on helplessly at the scene of skin-stripping torture before him (illus. 122, 164). The theme of Apollo’s righteous victory over the presumptuous satyr Marsyas following a musical contest was widely understood as an allegory of the superiority of God over the sensual efforts of Man but, as is usual with Titian, his painting resists interpretation in terms of an abstract concetto.17 Titian’s identification with King Midas is suggested not only by the familiar high forehead and long, hooked nose but also by his adoption of a figural pose sometimes used in Renaissance art to reference the frustrations of the Saturnian artist. Midas/Titian’s anxious inactivity in the face of Apollo’s dispassionately meticulous torture expresses a commonly acknowledged trait of the melancholic temperament of the artist.18 Midas does not yet sport the ass’s ears (punishment for his mistaken advocacy of Marsyas) that reveal his lack of judgement, but he does wear a jewel-spangled crown, perhaps establishing an analogy between the king’s golden touch and the old painter’s own accrual of enormous wealth. But in this context of helpless inaction in the face of divine retribution, the Midas touch appears only as a horrible irony. Was this the old painter’s final admission that his professional success laid him open to a similar fate to that of Marsyas as he approached death and God’s final judgement? His image seems to acknowledge the truth of the charge of avarice that had often been made against him. Perhaps the identification goes a step further again, to suggest that Titian’s competition with ‘nature’ in his art was analogous in its essential hubris to that of Marsyas with Apollo.
164 Detail of Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (illus. 122).
Details such as Apollo’s use of a palette knife to remove Marsyas’ skin suggest that some such self-lacerating reflection on Titian’s own practice as a painter is in play. Perhaps, too, the presence of an autograph ‘Titian’ lapdog, an accessory familiar from many of the painter’s erotic mythologies, is indicative (see illus. 35, 112). Here, however, the usual civilizing associations of such pedigree pets are undermined by the dog’s disturbingly carefree busyness in lapping up the blood draining from Marsyas’ body. This action may even refer, in a further act of self-repudiation, to the imagery of the painter’s impresa of 1562 that had so proudly proclaimed Titian’s art to be ‘more powerful than nature’ through an equivalent metaphor of licking (illus. 96). In The Flaying, nature’s power reasserts itself in the contrast between the lively action of the animal and the watching artist’s inertia. This apparent reversal may indicate again that Titian sought a kind of repentance through his painting. It is the Midas/Titian’s redeeming sorrow for what occurs, his ‘foolish’ though touching humanity in the face of Apollo’s mercilessly rationalistic judgement, that is at stake. And to this extent at least, the self-representation in The Flaying of Marsyas is no different from that we have seen in Titian’s penitential sacred paintings from his final years. Yet in this example alone the old Titian seems finally to confront the wider questions raised by his own extraordinary career: to acknowledge the more destructive aspects of his unswerving pursuit of power through painting, as also the questionably large material reward which his success in this project had generated. It is only in the subtext of this strange, late work that Titian acknowledges the darker consequences of his voracious, all-consuming career, as if so absolute a victory on the worldly stage of painting must always be a pyrrhic one. It is equally telling, however, that in the very process of framing this self-humiliating question, he was inevitably compelled to deploy the uniquely powerful language of visual projection and persuasion that had always served him so well. Despite its tragic meaning, Titian’s production of one last illusionary identity stands as final proof of his mastery in the ambiguous world of painting.
