Confronted by a rival … Titian responded by engorging him
(Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 1987)
When Titian arrived in the metropolis of Venice from the remote mountain village of Cadore around 1500, painting was dominated by two local artists, the brothers Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. They were the sons of Jacopo Bellini, the leading master in Venice in the decades before his death in 1471, and had inherited his social status as cittadini originari, ‘original citizens’ of the city.1 Of the two, the younger brother Giovanni was the more self-effacing, and in this sense, at least, conformed more absolutely to the presiding cultural value of mediocritas, which promoted society and state over individual accomplishment. If Gentile had worked abroad for sultan Mehmed II in Constantinople and sometimes signed himself as ‘knight’ on his paintings, Giovanni remained quite comfortably in his brother’s shadow.2
He made his name producing modest half-length paintings of the Madonna and Child. These were relatively small-scale works intended primarily for devotional purposes within the home and were more usually associated with the less successful painters in Venice known as ‘Madonneri’.3 Giovanni quickly transformed the standing of the Madonna and Child as a subject and expanded his range into more high-profile and large-scale painting types, such as the altarpiece and the istoria, or ‘history’ painting. But his career remained relatively narrowly focussed on the needs of local patrons. Though Giovanni was exempted from paying dues to the Venetian painter’s guild in 1483, this was not necessarily an attempt to distance himself from the local community of painters. It reflected the Venetian state’s attempt to help him fulfil their constant demand for official portraits, votive paintings and histories.4 Like his brother, Giovanni’s later career was dominated by the production of large-scale paintings for major Venetian public buildings and institutions: that is, for the state, the lay religious brother hoods known as the Scuole, and the Church.
The narrow geographical parameters of Giovanni’s career may have owed more to his Venetian identity and ideology than to lack of opportunities for expansion. When Isabella d’Este, marchesa of the Gonzaga court, approached Giovanni for a contribution to her studiolo, or study, in the Ducal Palace at Mantua, the painter proved less than willing to supply a painting following her instructions.5 And it seems that even when Giovanni did provide a painting for a foreign court very late in his career, for Isabella’s brother Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, his work proved not to be to his patron’s taste (illus. 38).6 As we shall see, Titian’s career proves a sharp contrast: it developed around his ability to form congenial relationships with leading courtly rulers and their families, and his related capacity to anticipate their artistic tastes. But he often argued with local patrons. Giovanni, on the contrary, focussed his attention on the home market and seems to have felt that local commissions offered him more room for creative manoeuvre. In a letter of 1506, his friend, the poet Pietro Bembo, informed the irritated Isabella that he liked ‘to wander at will’ in his paintings rather than to follow detailed prescriptions from his patrons. Seen as an expression of Giovanni’s ‘Venetianness’, or venezianità, his assumption of a right to creative licence appears as an artistic analogue to a leading political virtue of Venice itself. Freedom was, after all, a key concept within the so-called ‘myth of Venice’ and was perhaps the primary way in which the Republic defined itself in ideological terms against the oppression or ‘tyranny’ of the courts.7
By the final decade of the fifteenth century Giovanni ran one of the largest and most successful workshops in Italy; his growing fame and professional prominence was, in part at least, dependent on the range and extent of his activity as a teacher with many pupils. Giovanni and his brother were particularly renowned among Italian artists and humanist intellectuals for their teaching of perspective in the workshop, which was understood as a quasi-scientific topic and therefore as a key element in the training of young artists.8 In 1506 the visiting German artist Albrecht Dürer, whose interest in the new ‘science’ of art is well documented, firmly identified Giovanni as the best painter in Venice.9 But as a portrait drawing by a devoted pupil, Vittore Belliniano, shows, the old master’s professional identity hardly changed in later life (illus. 7). Sensitive as the drawing is, it reveals relatively little about Giovanni as an individual, picturing him as a dutiful master and faithful civil servant rather than an inspired genius.10 Belliniano’s drawing contrasts a little with the portrait that Giovanni himself made of his older brother, which hints at Gentile’s more expansive international and personal profile (illus. 8). Yet even Gentile is shown in the traditional public dress of the cittadino originario.11 At his death in 1516, Giovanni was buried in simple fashion alongside his brother in the premises of a cittadini-dominated confraternity, the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, a building decorated by Gentile’s follower, Vittore Carpaccio. This was perhaps a final act of selfrepressing mediocritas, seeming to reassert his original role as the junior member of the family despite the fact that he was widely recognized as having outstripped his older brother in the field of painting.12
Among Titian’s early works there are surprisingly few that continue or develop the type of the half- or three-quarter-length Madonna and Child for which Giovanni Bellini had become renowned. Indeed, there is remarkably little reference to Bellini’s work per se, a striking fact given that the young painter was certainly a pupil in the old master’s workshop.13 The young Titian, who quickly became enamoured with the work of the elusive Giorgione, is never overtly ‘anti-Bellinesque’. But from the outset he makes clear his difference, resisting the expected formative impress of master on pupil. Titian’s immediate escape from his artistic ‘father’, his disavowal of the conventional bond between old and young formed in the workshop immediately limits the common idea that he simply inherited the values of the Venetian tradition through his training.14 Titian’s break with the past was enacted through the transitional figure of Giorgione, a slightly older contemporary in Bellini’s shop, much of whose work offered a kind of poetic withdrawal from the civic-minded culture of the older generation. The extent of Giorgione’s influence over the young painter has led some to argue that Titian was his pupil, though there is little evidence to support this idea.15 But Giorgione might nonetheless have acted as surrogate master or artistic father figure, perhaps mediating the antagonism between Bellini and Titian. Whatever the case, it seems that referencing the pictorial innovations of the ultra-modern Giorgione allowed Titian to distance himself with unusual rapidity from the predominant and established mode of Bellini, quickly setting this into the past and making it appear outdated and ‘traditional’.
Titian’s Virgin and Child, known as The Gypsy Madonna, is unusual among his early paintings in its clear derivation from the type that Bellini had made his own in Venice (illus. 9 and 10).16 The presence of an earlier version beneath the one now visible, which is closer still to Bellini’s painting (now in the Detroit Institute of Arts), indicates that the work of his master was Titian’s first point of reference. As Titian worked on the canvas, however, he remade Bellini’s work in accordance with his own very different artistic principles. Titian’s admission of sensuous elements into the traditionally separate and timeless space reserved for a Bellini Madonna is noticeable. In both paintings the drapery of the Virgin’s sleeve overlaps with the landscape beyond. But in Bellini a symbolic royal blue is used, the expensive pigment lapis lazuli conferring a kind of absolute value on the Queen of Heaven and maintaining a point of sacred distinction from the broken, worldly tones in the landscape. In Titian’s Gypsy Madonna, by contrast, the traditional blue is dramatically lightened so that it is very close to the tone of the mountains and sky beyond, suggesting a more immediate connection between the Madonna and the natural world.
9 Giovanni Bellini, Virgin and Child, 1509. Detroit Institute of Arts.
The billowing folds of the drapery of the sleeve in Titian’s work appear exaggerated, spreading out across the picture surface beyond the enclosure of the Cloth of Honour hanging behind the holy figures, to connect the sacred and secular sides of the painting while also recalling the expensive fabrics beloved of noblewomen in early sixteenth-century Venice but criticized by the authorities.17 New points of connection with the reality beyond the painting are, then, opened up by Titian’s painting of the Virgin’s sleeve, soon to be explored further in early portraits such as the Portrait of a Man (illus. 27). But the non-canonical lightening of this blue sleeve is also part of the new priority given to broad areas of light and dark within the composition. Great pools of shadow engulf certain areas of the composition (much of the landscape, the area around the Virgin’s right hand, the whole space to the right of Christ), taking the emphasis away from more literal details of surface or texture. Just as the sleeve is lightened, so the Virgin herself is darkened: Titian’s dark-eyed, dark-haired and dark-skinned Virgin would have been felt as a dramatic move away from Bellini’s pale brunettes that still suggest their heritage from Byzantine icons.18 Particularly noticeable is the way Titian enlarges the pupils and irises of his Virgin so that the whites of her eyes almost disappear. Her full face – which nonetheless does not run to the fleshiness of the matronly sitter in the portrait of the same year known as La Schiavona (illus. 29) – suggests a corporeal presence still undreamed of in Bellini’s austere Madonna.
10 Titian, Virgin and Child (The Gypsy Madonna), c. 1511. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. |
The same kind of worldly remaking of the Bellini model is evident in the posture of the Christ Child. In the Detroit painting Bellini makes a forward reference to another sacred iconography, as he had done many times before in his Madonnas: his confidently upright child is a forerunner of the Resurrected Christ, often pictured standing on his tomb. In Titian, on the other hand, there is a new measure of informality suggested by his apparent lack of awareness of the viewer. Christ does not raise his hand in the orthodox gesture of blessing, and there is instead a new emphasis on the soft and variable surfaces of his flesh, allowing for distinctions between hardness and softness in the toes, knees, thighs and belly. His gesture, touching the Virgin’s garment, is made slight and meaningless, the turning of his head a matter of momentary infantile distraction. Instead of referencing other paintings or iconographies, Christ’s slight movement – the outward sway of his hips caused by the contrasting relaxation and tension of the legs – recalls the naturalistic contrapposto of an antique putto. Released from the momentousness of his own future narrative, Titian’s Christ is, for the time being, part of this world. If Bellini enjoyed referencing future aspects of the Passion narrative in his half-length Madonnas, Titian shuts down such teleological links, liberating his divine figures into the fluid temporal continuum of the here and now. This new admission of the adventitious finally unravels the closed loop of textual and visual reference which, in Bellini, had held sacred and secular apart. The withholding reference here is to ‘nature’, though this is also an aesthetic punctum that opposes itself to what has come before: the studium of all traditional knowledge or meaning. And this in turn was an aspect of Titian’s immediate split with his master Bellini and the history of Venetian painting that he had come to represent.19
In the period of Titian’s youth the Bellini family held a powerful visual hegemony over the predominant largescale painting types in Venice: the altarpiece and the istoria.20 In these works the arrangement of the scene within a space of defined linear perspective had become central. In two surviving sketch books now in Paris and London respectively, Jacopo Bellini provided a series of brilliant models for this kind of spatially orientated composition, and many of the large-scale paintings by his sons reflect his approach.21 They feature expansive spatial domains defined through elaborately recessive architectural structures that appear to pre-exist the figures placed within them (illus. 13, 51). The Bellinis’ knowledge of Tuscan models for linear perspective, based on Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (1435), is apparent, though this was mediated through the experience of their father, who had spent time in Ferrara in 1441, when Alberti was also present at the court. A drawing from this earlier period, probably by Jacopo and which subsequently influenced those in his sketchbooks, demonstrates his precocious engagement with Alberti’s ideas and gives the lie to the later view that the Venetians were not at all interested in the more theoretical dimensions of art or in the role of disegno in painting (illus. 11, 12).22
In this Albertian model the spatial environment, with prompting orthogonal and transversal lines receding towards a vanishing point, exists independently of or ‘prior to bodies brought to the place’, as the Paduan theorist Pomponius Gauricus put it in 1504.23 This idea of perspective as an objective entity functioned not merely as a quasi-mathematical means of plotting the correct scale of individual forms in relation to the picture plane and to one another, but also as a semantic structure that defined and circumscribed the meaning of the actions or events that took place within it. It was this conception, with its implicit delimitation of subjective experience, that predominated in the large-scale Bellinesque altar-pieces and istorie which might have provided Titian with his immediate models. In these works the perspective construction is best seen in the terms of Panofsky or Damisch: as a mediated symbolic or cultural form rather than as a simple reflection of the biological givens of human vision.24 Recent studies of history paintings made for the Venetian Scuole in this period have established that they expressed locally derived meanings, which served the overlapping interests of the commissioning institution (in Gentile’s Procession in St Mark’s Square, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista) and of the Venetian state itself (illus. 13). Perspective ‘accuracy’ operated in the service of socio-religious meaning, lending the impression of objectivity to deeply acculturated works.25
11 Jacopo Bellini (attrib.), Perspective Drawing, c. 1440, pen and haematite on board. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
12 Jacopo Bellini, St John the Baptist Preaching, c. 1440–50. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Insofar as the perspective structure generates a sense of an overarching reality, this was impassive and unchanging, a holding template that finally determines the narrative actions that occur within the image. It contains or denies the possibility of sudden change or trans formation, making reality appear as fixed or preordained. Everything that is specific or individual is ultimately an expression of the ‘general’ reality proposed by the perspective structure itself. Thus the miraculous event in Gentile’s Procession does not disturb the overall picture of ongoing everyday life. In the foreground the pious Jacopo de’ Salis falls to his knees in veneration of the relic of St John the Evangelist carried by the Scuola, and his son is healed in faraway Brescia. But de’ Salis is very hard to spot in Bellini’s painting, submerged as he is within the depiction of a procession in St Mark’s Square, thus appearing to be a confirmation of the validity of the wider communal rituals performed at the centre of Venice.26
By contrast, in Titian’s fresco showing the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, painted for the Scuola del Santo in Padua in 1511, the miracle is isolated as the only relevant event, the specific occurrence that transforms the existing order (illus. 14).27 The lack of the usual reference to the unique urban topography of Venice must reflect the fact that Titian’s fresco was for a confraternity in Padua. The city was under Venetian control in 1511 but nonetheless harboured a semi-independent cultural life focussed on the university, and a distinct artistic tradition influenced heavily by Central Italian models. Titian’s frescos demonstrate his immediate interest in, and comfort with, the world of Italian art beyond Venice. The public spaces and buildings of Padua, the city of learned humanism, were dominated by the monumental pictorial and sculptural works of Giotto, Donatello and Mantegna rather than the Bellinis. Titian’s response to these predecessors, particularly to Giotto’s early fourteenth-century frescos in the nearby Scrovegni Chapel, is evident enough in the fresco under discussion (illus. 14, 15). As in Giotto’s works, the focus is on large and powerfully articulated figures that face each other across a narrow stage-like foreground space, with the main narrative event given pride of place.28
13 Gentile Bellini, Procession in St Mark’s Square, 1496. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
St Anthony of Padua holds up the baby whose miraculous words confirm his paternity by the jealous father and thus exonerate his mother from the charge of adultery.29 The arrangement of the figures on a single plane and the alignment of their heads on the same level depart from the Bellinesque tradition of istoria, in which the numerous actors are spread throughout the space (illus. 13). At the same time, the relation between figures and environment is transformed, such that the former now wholly predominates over the latter. Perspective no longer exists prior to or beyond the bodies and actions of the human figures themselves: it is merely referenced by the laying in of subtle wash-like tonal contrasts in a flattened architectural wall and landscape. The simple yet newly monumental figure-based manner of Titian’s frescos appears deliberately archaic. The return across two centuries to Giotto’s example is, like all archaisms, a form of polemic conducted with the present, a revival based on the persuasion that more recent art has decayed from the purity of its original. Yet the artistic language of the distant past is co-opted into an argument for the future. It is telling that the other comparably individualist Italian artist of the period, Michelangelo, also attempted to remake late fifteenth-century tradition by returning to Giotto early in his career.30
Titian’s frescos mark another stage in his wider separation from the predominant Bellinesque mode in Venice in his early career. As we have seen, this approach had been influenced by the Albertian model of linear perspective, albeit adapted to local cultural ideology. Titian’s fresco, on the other hand, was itself Albertian insofar as it followed the generic prescriptions for the istoria laid out in books Two and Three – rather than Book One – of De pictura regarding the achievement of narrative clarity through a reduction in the number of actors, the placement of relevant action in the foreground and the inclusion of a variety of human types, postures and expressions.31 Yet with regard to space Titian’s approach is post-Albertian, abandoning the ‘objectivizing’ structural-semantic coordinates of the later fifteenth-century painters who had responded to his theories. Titian’s newly subjective ‘psycho-physiological’ conception – of space as a function or issue of the sensuous body itself – emerges as a result of the priority allowed to individual figures and specific narrative actions over the containing frame of environment or cultural context.32
14 Titian, Miracle of the Speaking Babe, 1511, fresco. Scuola del Santo, Padua.
15 Giotto, Marriage of the Virgin, c. 1305–6, fresco. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. |
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In the Miracle of the Jealous Husband, this conception is taken to a new level, such that the landscape appears as an outward expression of the dramatic action, the dangerous and precipitous verticality of the rocky outcrop rising behind the murderous husband reflecting his shape and lending emphasis to his violent action (illus. 16). In the more contingent or adventitious world Titian introduces, the immediate action is not so easily displaced or absorbed, so that although we glimpse the future contrition of the husband in the background, this is made secondary. It is the savagery of the present that remains as defining, disrupting the older convention of continuous narrative implied by the future scene of repentance shown in the background. And even in this secondary scene, the miracle of the resuscitation is withheld. Through these disruptions to narrative closure the fresco announces itself as ‘modern’ – as moving decisively beyond the comforting communal framework that had subjected individual agency to the progression or completion of the story. Of course, we do not doubt that contrition will produce the requisite miracle, or that the husband’s wife will be returned. Yet the new drama of Titian’s narrative painting is dependent precisely on the visual displacement of that happy conclusion.33
Titian’s Jealous Husband is the most innovative among the frescos, perhaps encouraged by the restrictions of the narrow vertical field at the far left corner of the Scuola’s meeting room towards the altar wall.34 The combination of formal complexity and dramatic immediacy in the struggling interlocked figures was unprecedented in the art of northeast Italy. Not surprisingly, Titian returned to the group later in his career when called on to paint scenes of murder and rape (illus. 64, 65).35 As is often noted, the woman’s figure is a very early quotation from Michelangelo’s Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted no more than a year or two earlier (illus. 17). It may be that Titian had seen a drawing of the fresco by the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, who had recently been working for Raphael in the nearby Vatican stanze.36 However this may be, Titian’s visual reference was a first ‘reply’ to Michelangelo in an artistic rivalry that was destined to supersede and outlast that with local painters such as Bellini or Giorgione.37 The radical foreshortening of the wife’s figure breaks the usual lateral scansion of narrative painting across the plane of the picture, linking her form to that of her attacker in a shared moment of deadly intimacy.
16 Titian, The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, 1511, fresco. Scuola del Santo, Padua.
The quotation is, however, also a dramatic recasting of Michelangelo’s coldly impassive figure. Her desperation is visible in her facial expression despite the foreshortening of the head, while the weak raising of her right arm in a feeble attempt to ward off another stab of the knife contrasts with the powerful predestined reach of Michelangelo’s Eve to receive the forbidden fruit. The thorough reordering of the meaning of the form in Titian’s terms raises ‘quotation’ to the level of paragone: instead of a display of formal difficulty (difficoltà) or of theological and moral meaning, the woman’s twisted shape expresses nothing more than the exigencies of the murderous struggle itself. Her broken form engages emotional sympathy rather than intellectual understanding, and our identification with the victim is intensified by her dishevelled dress, indicating that she is a contemporary woman. As in the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, where the actors sport a variety of recognizably sixteenth-century shoes, hosiery, cloaks, headgear and hairstyles, Titian confidently reconfigures his istoria into an imagined present.
This was something he had learned from Giorgione, but Titian’s Padua frescos are nonetheless examples of his immediate engagement with the art of Central Italy, though even in these early works this is not a matter of passive absorption. The references to Giotto and Michelangelo noted above are in a sense supported by the medium itself: oil-painting had already become the norm in Bellinesque istorie at Venice, while fresco was increasingly considered ephemeral given its unsuitability to the saline climate, and was reserved for the painting of palace facades.38 On the mainland, however, and especially in Michelangelo’s circle, buon fresco continued to be seen as the leading medium for sacred painting. Titian’s early frescos were to this extent a kind of proof that a painter trained in Venice could work with this more ‘difficult’ medium. But although his figures are given firm outlines, the paintings do not look at all like sculptures, as many of Michelangelo’s Sistine frescos do.
17 Michelangelo, The Fall of Man, c. 1510, fresco. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. |
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In the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, the truncated and ‘mute’ pagan sculpture contrasts pointedly with the mobile and multicoloured talking figures, who both witness and understand the meaning of the miracle. Noting the placement of the sculpture in the background left and the way that the narrative is orientated away from it, we can interpret the symbolic patterning of the composition. The contrast between classical sculpture and architecture to the left, shrouded in shadow, and the offering of the baby across the divide into the light-filled landscape to the right reflects the victory of Christianity over the pagan world, as also that of youth over age, present over past and nature over art.39 The paragone, in Titian’s hands, engages not only the narrow argument regarding the superiority of painting over sculpture but also the wider dimensions of his practice, through which he was developing a new kind of narrative art.
Within two years of completing the Padua frescos, Titian offered to undertake a large battle painting between the windows on the south side of the main state room in the Doge’s Palace, Venice. Initially granted, his request for 300 ducats and the expectation of the next available sansaria at the Salt Office (an annual stipend of 120 ducats) evidently ruffled feathers among the Bellini circle. In 1516 the Venetian senate revoked the decision, noting that Titian was not the next painter in turn for a sansaria.40 The grant of the sansaria offered its recipient the status of quasi-official painter to the Venetian state and thus de facto leadership of the local tradition. Though it has been suggested that Vittore Carpaccio was behind the attempt to block Titian’s ambitious proposal, it is more likely that Titian’s master Giovanni Bellini, current holder of the sansaria, was the one attempting to halt his progress.41 But Bellini’s opposition is nonetheless another telling indication of the distance between master and pupil and of the fact that Titian’s succession to the leadership of Venetian painting was by no means understood as inevitable (or even as desirable) by the older generation of painters in Venice.
It is very likely that Bellini sensed that Titian was not like him, the self-repressing public servant of Venice, and the struggle that ensued over the promised battle painting proved his judgement to be correct. Many years were to pass before Titian finally completed the work first promised in 1513 (illus. 98).42 The contrast with the Bellinis’ unquestioning readiness to set aside all other projects and commissions in order to deliver paintings to their patrician masters at the palace is obvious enough, yet its wider implication has often been ignored. As Titian’s career developed he often delayed official commissions in favour of others, and seems to have prioritized those from leading foreign clients in particular. In so doing, he established a pattern of patronage that effectively reversed the precedence traditionally given to the pictorial needs of the Republic itself.
Given what has been said above, it should come as no surprise that Titian was particularly attracted to a painter whose short career developed through a withdrawal from the public and patriotic dimensions of Vene tian art served by the Bellinis. Giorgione’s paintings offered a retreat into a more private and sophisticated world, where reference to ‘nature’ won out over the debt to tradition or to the institutionalized public culture of the city. The setting of Titian’s Padua frescos in delicately painted pastoral landscapes, where the actors display a taste for rich sartorial elegance recalling contemporary fashions, reveals his early response to Giorgione. But it is also true that these works possess a monumentality and formal power that is distinct – an immediacy of narrative gesture or action that breaks away from the Giorgionesque dreamland. In other early works too, Titian’s adoption of the warm buff tonality and generalizing brushstroke of Giorgione is counteracted by areas of intense local colouration and the vibrant elaboration of surface texture. The predominance of large figures over settings already evident in the Padua frescos is another signal of Titian’s immediate difference from Giorgione.43
In works such as The Three Philosophers, The Tempest and Il Tramonto (The Sunset, illus. 19), Giorgione had set mysterious figures into landscapes that combine generic reference to the so-called terra firma (the area of Venetian territory inland from the city) with an element of idealism recalling the Arcadian settings of contemporary and classical pastoral poetry. In both The Tempest and Il Tramonto, the scale of the figures is reduced so that the landscape itself predominates.44 Even if these figures continue to provide clues to the meaning of the paintings, their small scale makes this ambiguous. This ‘veiling’ of the subject’ seems to have been quite intentional, perhaps feeding a new taste for open-ended or ‘poetic’ pictorial imagery among a sophisticated circle of patrician patrons in Venice.45
Even at his most Giorgionesque the young Titian gives his figures added visual prominence and threedimensionality, organizing his compositions around moments of intense interchange between the leading protagonists. In very early works such as Christ and the Adulterous Woman now in Glasgow, which probably dates from before 1510, passages of Giorgionesque intro spection and stillness compete uncomfortably with sudden figural movements and heightened emotional responses (illus. 18).46 Within four or five years, Titian had more thoroughly absorbed the older master’s prompt ings into his own idiom, such that in The Three Ages of Man and Noli me tangere the potential conflicts are smoothed away (illus. 20, 21). Titian’s figures occupy evocative Giorgionesque landscapes featuring rolling pastures interspersed with woody copses, openings to distant buildings and blue-and-gold horizons. But these settings are cast in a supportive role, offering symbolic or visual echoes of the wider meaning of the image as articulated in the powerful interaction between the main actors in the foreground.47
18 Titian, Christ and the Adulterous Woman, c. 1508–9. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. |
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19 Giorgione, The Sunset (Il Tramonto), c. 1506. National Gallery, London. |
20 Titian, The Three Ages of Man, c. 1513. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
21 Titian, Noli me tangere, c. 1513–14. National Gallery, London.
22 Aristotile da Sangallo, after Michelangelo’s fresco of The Battle of Cascina, 1542. Holkham Hall, Norfolk.
In The Three Ages of Man the enlarged and brightly lit figures of the young man and woman absorbed in each other’s desirous gaze provides the main visual focus, the intimations of their past and future given elsewhere in the picture finally made subject to the passionate sensual intensity of the present moment.48 The traditional title implies that this is a Giorgionesque allegory concerning the cycle of human life, as is partially confirmed by a sixteenth-century inventory in which the painting is described simply as ‘representing love and death’.49 But the careful depiction of the lovers makes them something more than mere personifications. The muscularity of the near-naked youth may again betray Titian’s study of Michelangelo, but translation of the idealizing source (a seated nude in the foreground of the Battle of Cascina cartoon, illus. 22) back into a naturalistic artistic language is as thorough as that noted in The Miracle of the Jealous Husband.50 And this is taken further still in the figure of the young woman who lies in his lap, her hairstyle and dress identifying her as a contemporary of early sixteenth-century Venice. The loose tumble of her blond hair on to the exposed flesh of her neck and shoulders, like her revealing décolletage and suggestive posture holding phallic pan pipes, introduces an intensity of erotic interaction not matched in Giorgione.51
In the Noli me tangere, Titian transfers the Giorgionesque mode to a devotional painting with ease, reabsorbing (with characteristic self-confidence) its secular aspects into a sacred schema. If in the Three Ages of Man specific objects with symbolic overtones (pipes, dead tree, skulls, church) are dotted through the composition to suggest a wider allegorical meaning, in the London painting the entire structure of the landscape is made dependent on the interrelationship of the foreground figures. There may still be a frisson of erotic tension between the two protagonists, yet as the kneeling Magdalene reaches out to touch Christ’s body he swings away from her, gathering his robes about him in a movement of pious retraction. Her crouching form and his swaying one are mirrored in the shapes of the low bushes and tree behind them, and it may be that the latter defines a more general boundary between sacred and secular within the painting. The contemporary-looking farm buildings on the Magdalene’s side of the work are contrasted with the grazing flocks and intense blues (both with heavenly associations) that predominate on Christ’s.
23 Giorgione, Portrait of an Old Woman (Col Tempo), c. 1508. Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice.
Giorgione was also an important figure in Titian’s liberation from the restricted corporate and documentary functions of the Venetian portrait in the Bellinesque tradition.52 In works such as the Portrait of an Old Woman (Col tempo) and Laura Giorgione had rendered the entire concept of the type problematic, for it remains unclear whether these really are ‘portraits’ in the conventional sense (illus. 23, 24). They are very unlikely to have been commissioned by the sitters or their families, and though they appear to represent specific people they were clearly intended to convey meanings beyond those of the merely descriptive. Despite (or perhaps because of) these ambiguities, these works are more freely expressive of the sitter’s individuality and personality than earlier Venetian portraits. In the case of Col tempo, the image of the old woman is presented as a perhaps less-than-sympathetic study of old age, with a moralizing memento mori held up by the sitter for the viewer’s edification. In Laura, the erotic intimacy of the sitter’s revealing gesture, with fur lifted to expose the analogous softness of breast and nipple, challenges her more abstract identity as poetic muse or the personification of poetry.53
The Giorgionesque habit of allowing ‘portraits’ to carry wider allegorical, erotic or esoteric meanings showed well enough that this picture type could function as a vehicle for creative invention. Presented as original and suggestive ‘works of art’ these paintings acquire a new cultural value quite independent of their outward commitment to recording a likeness. The new subjectivity suggested in these works is developed precisely through the obscuring of the sitter’s identity, at least insofar as this was traditionally defined through outward position in the social order of Venice. It is no coincidence that Giorgione’s most groundbreaking works of this type feature women, who played a role strictly circumscribed in public and official culture.54 But a similarly private domain is implied for his male sitters, who take on a delicate, feminized appearance that gives notice of a departure from the conventionally masculine space of Venetian portraiture (illus. 25).55
This earlier conception had, once again, been defined primarily by the Bellini family. Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini painted very few portraits of women, but they had developed a popular type for Venetian men that owed a discernible debt to the group portraits featured in their large-scale istorie for the Doge’s Palace and the meeting houses of the Scuole. Giovanni Bellini in particular made a number of portraits of young patricians, who probably sat for him at the time of their admission to the ruling Great Council of Venice at the age of 25 (illus. 26).56 These works represent the point of passage into public life rather than defining the possibility of withdrawal from it. They show the young sitters in bust length, proudly dressed in their official regalia – senatorial robes, stole and cap. Their distant gaze directed beyond the viewer, like the setting against a blue backdrop with heavenly associations, suggests inspired yet muscular readiness to take up the patriotic and divinely sanctioned cause of the Republic. In Giorgione’s Portrait of a Young Man, on the other hand, the sitter glances directly at us; the turn of his eyes away from the direction of his head, like the delicate shadows modelling his sensitive face, suggests a febrile awareness.57 The penetrating directness of the gaze, the informality of his pose and the loosely fitting silk shirt, unbuttoned to reveal the white underclothes beneath, suggest the everyday, but do not make the sitter any less elusive. Though the quattrocento device of the parapet is maintained, this now appears as a barrier rather than a point of illusionistic connection, a dividing structure behind which the sitter retreats into his own inner world.58
24 Giorgione, Laura, 1506. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
25 Giorgione, Portrait of a Man, c. 1505. Gemäldegalerei, Berlin.
26 Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Young Senator, c. 1485–7. Museo Civico, Padua. |
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27 Titian, Portrait of a Man (Gerolamo Barbarigo?), c. 1513. National Gallery, London.
In the years following Giorgione’s premature death in 1510, Titian quickly developed the expressive possibilities of such works. A number of his portraits feature elegantly dressed young men who share a similar measure of independence from the demands of Republican patriotic duty, and whose lavish dress appears to flout the strict sumptuary laws enacted in Venice in the early decades of the sixteenth century.59 Though their precise identities are typically unknown, many of these sitters must have been young patricians who had not yet taken up their public duties of state and were temporarily free to express themselves through the cultivation of poetic and artistic tastes and fashionably expensive dress. The young Titian, himself distanced from Venetian officialdom and uninterested in the traditional culture of selfsuppressing mediocritas, proved particularly suited to the creation of a new kind of portraiture expressing the values of this young patrician elite.60
The best-known example is the Portrait of a Young Man, in which the powerful emphasis on the sitter’s blue sleeve appears like a direct challenge to the contemporary anxieties of the Venetian government with regard to such sartorial excesses (illus. 27).61 Titian’s handling of this luxuriant fabric is an early example of his ability to suggest the specific textural qualities of a given surface, even as the quantity of visual information given in the brushstroke is radically reduced. The puffed yet yielding quality and soft surface of the silk/satin fabric is supplied not by minute detailing but by a series of brushstrokes boldly detached from a ground that is subtly differentiated between different tones of blue. As the sleeve meets the front of the ledge its soft material yields to an invisible surface, appearing flattened or crushed. But Titian’s surfaces are never static, and in this case formal dynamism is equally important to the visual effect and is supplied by the directional indications of the quilting that pulls the eye across the surface and around the sitter’s form. The painting of the sleeve offsets the sitter’s foreshortened position, with the head turned outwards against the direction of the body. This arrangement was a sharp departure from all earlier Venetian models, freeing the sitter from the traditional unidirectional alignment of head and shoulders to suggest a more mobile posture (illus. 8, 26, 66).62 At the same time, Titian resolved the potentially destabilizing effect of this by modelling his portrait in broad areas of light and shade, such that the sharp formal recession of the torso and right forearm are masked and the visual emphasis falls on the sleeve and the head at the centre.
GIORGIONE’S PORTRAITS opened up possibilities for the expression of independent and individual consciousness in his sitters, beyond the circumscribed sphere of Venetian public life. But if Giorgione proposed this in terms of cultural withdrawal or retreat – as a delicately poetic subsidiary to the cultural mainstream – then Titian quickly reinterpreted it as a condition of nature or individual presence. Pictorial space in his early portraits is treated in similar fashion to his contemporary istorie for Padua insofar as it appears centred in, and generated by, the human body itself, a necessary product of its existence in three dimensions. The posture taken up by the Portrait of a Man defines the entire space of the picture but is also implied as momentary, or at least as susceptible to alteration, such that with his change of position the sitter would generate a new spatial configuration. This more fluid, subject-based conception is distinct from the stable and fixed position of the figure in earlier portraits, in which the alignment of head and body still pointedly recalls the sculptural portrait bust. The idea of space as a function or issue of the individual sitter was, it could be argued, always a special potential of the portrait type. Yet it was only with Titian that the body was understood as generating its own dynamic – as an essentially free entity enjoying independence from the immutable laws of perspective, and by extension from the control of the social order that these had come to express.
Titian’s Portrait of a Woman (also known as La Schiavona) reinterprets Giorgione’s recent female portraits, the assertive physicality of the sitter and directness of approach contradicting the older master’s hints that his sitters personify abstract or moral ideas (illus. 29).63 The unknown woman’s space-creating presence is to the fore, indicated as a function of her own evident rotundity and emphasized by the strong lighting that hugs her form. Her position, square to the viewer, contrasts with the Portrait of a Man, but her off-centre placement introduces a similar impression of informality and freedom, as if she had only recently arrived in the picture space and will just as soon move beyond it. The implication of the temporality of Titian’s portrait sitters is a correlate of their independent spatial dynamism and is equally important to his re-conception of the picture type as a vehicle for the elevation of the individual.64
Spatiality is also at issue in La Schiavona regarding the painter’s apparently late decision to raise the parapet to the right and to include the shallow sculptural relief of the same sitter (though with different hairstyle and dress) in profile. It is usual to note the relevance of this to the favoured Renaissance debate over the relative merits of painting and sculpture: the paragone mentioned earlier.65 The simultaneous inclusion of frontal and profile views of the sitter in a single image answers one charge commonly made against painting – that it is necessarily limited to a single viewpoint – while the superior realism of the standing woman over her more limited representation in monochromatic sculptural profile reinforces the argument for painting again. At the same time, the all’antica style of the fictive sculpture and its presentation as a portrait bust extends the paragone to an argument for the victory of Titian’s new approach to portraiture over the familiar models of antiquity and the more recent Bellinesque past (a victory reiterated by the extension of the sitter’s image beyond the conventional bust length). All this reveals the young Titian’s astonishing artistic self-confidence: his conviction that his early portraits are original artistic inventions that demonstrate not only the generic superiority of painting over sculpture, but also that of his own work over all existing visual models.
In the 1510s Titian continued to exploit the expressive overlaps between portraiture and other genres of painting that Giorgione had suggested. In response to Giorgione’s example, the historical protagonists in Titian’s Padua frescos are given a measure of individuation more familiar to portraits. The women to the right of the Miracle of the Speaking Babe (illus. 28), (including the accused mother), for example, appear like improvisations on the near-contemporary La Schiavona.66 Static portrait groups had often been included in Venetian istoria but were typically isolated from the narrative action in the manner of donor imagery, standing passively by as if to confirm the validity of the given history from a contemporary perspective (illus. 13). In his frescos, on the other hand, Titian followed Giorgione insofar as each figure is treated as if he or she might be a contemporary portrait, even though it is very unlikely that any can be identified as such. Giorgione rarely worked on large-scale multi-figured paintings, and it was the younger painter who boldly extended his portrait manner into the public domain of the istoria. But this overlap could also work in the opposite direction: if individuation along the lines of a portrait taken from nature could enliven an imaginary scene from history, classical mythology or the Bible, then the larger conceptual ideas underpinning that type could also inform the commissioned portrait. As Titian’s career as a portraitist developed, he increasingly conceived of his works of this kind in terms of free and monumentalized pictorial inventions, in the manner of an istoria.67
28 Detail of Titian’s Miracle of the Speaking Babe, 1511 (illus. 14).
29 Titian, Portrait of a Lady (La Schiavona), c. 1511. National Gallery, London.
30 Titian, Flora, c. 1515–16. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
31 Venus Genetrix, late 1st or early 2nd century CE, marble, height 164 cm. Roman copy after Greek original of 5th century BCE. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Even when a more generalized type is developed, as in the sequence of earlier paintings showing beautiful young women, the portrait is Titian’s first point of reference.68 Juxtaposing hair and flesh in the erotic manner first used in Giorgione’s Laura, Titian continued to suggest that these works are ‘portraits’ of specific individuals, even as their status as images of generic beauty or their literary identity as the types or followers of Venus becomes increasingly apparent. In Flora Titian more definitely recreates an antique type, even if the fashionable sixteenth-century camicia smock, the dyed blonde hair and euphemistic offering of flowers might suggest that the ‘sitter’ is a courtesan (illus. 30). However, such nods in the direction of contemporary reality are not allowed to disturb the overall sense that the image is an ideal artistic invention, the beauty of the sitter functioning as a figure for the perfect work of art. Neither do they disturb our sense of the painting’s generic classicism. Perhaps because Flora, goddess of flowers, does not occur in the usual antique literary or visual sources, she was often identified as a ‘real’ or contemporary woman.69
The painting is, in any case, an indication of Titian’s gathering interest in classical art and, in particular, the opportunities that were opening up, beyond the narrow orbit of Venetian official patronage, for the invention of new forms of all’antica painting based on ancient descriptions of lost works or well-known formal models. The exposed breast first introduced in Giorgione’s Laura is ‘classicized’ still further in Titian’s Flora, such that it now references the antique type of the Venus Genetrix (illus. 31), even if the fall of the chemise off the shoulder does not quite reveal the nipple as in the earlier examples.70 If Titian’s painting is not yet an ekphrasis like the Venus Anadyomene or two of the Bacchanals for Ferrara, its ready accommodation to the elevating associations of the mythological subject is evident enough (illus. 39, 43).71 Flora was, of course, a follower and type of Venus and this kind of reference to the goddess of love probably underlies all Titian’s depictions of beautiful women in his early period.
Titian had, in fact, already worked on a groundbreaking image of Venus immediately following Giorgione’s death in 1510, when he completed an unfinished painting of the reclining goddess (illus. 32).72 The impact of this work on Titian is evident from the similarity of the mountains and farm buildings to those featured in his early paintings (illus. 10, 21), and he himself appears to have added a Cupid (removed by a restorer in 1843) along with the red pillows and swathe of satin drapery on which the nude reclines.73 The vibrant surface texture of this drapery, enlivened by sharp contrasts of light and shade, contradicts the impassive tonalism of the rest of the painting. As in other early works, the drapery shows Titian’s wilful animation of an inanimate surface (illus. 10, 27, 30). The exaggeration of its silken sheen along the lower edge pushes the fabric forward so that it appears to lie along the picture surface, at the point closest to the viewer. Its position at the front margins of the space suggests that it is intended as a proxy for the viewer’s excited reaction to the nude. Its assertive materiality, like its cold, silvery tones and sharp-edged folds, makes a visual counterpoint to the delicate generalization of Giorgione’s flesh painting.74 But counter point necessarily thrives on interplay, and accordingly the drapery apes the contours and horizontal arrangement of the woman’s limbs. Our eyes are guided upward to the fingers of her left hand disappearing between her legs by the converging folds of fabric. It is likely that the original ambiguity of the woman’s action – between the modest covering of the Venus Pudica type, and self-pleasuring – was part of Giorgione’s original conception. But Titian highlights this action by making the drapery near it twist and turn back on itself into depth and towards the area of the hand and pubis (illus. 33).75 This euphemistically imitates not only the action of the fingers themselves but also the erotic stimulus that the viewer’s discovery of this detail generates. A similarly ‘meaningful’ use of drapery as the index of the viewer’s desire can be found in other early Titians: in the Flora, the apparently arbitrary folds of the drapery conspire to form a similarly directional pointer above her left hand, as if to anticipate the search of the viewer’s eye in that erogenous zone for a glimpse of her nipple (illus. 34).
32 Giorgione and Titian, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510–12. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.
Titian’s additions to the Sleeping Venus dramatize the response beyond the frame of the picture, allowing the viewer’s reaction to play a constitutive role in the image. This method of making the painting ‘responsive’ was to become central to Titian’s approach. Just as Titian personalizes his painting manner, so he does the same to the viewer, constructing him as a sensuous and individualized participant.76 To this extent, too, the painting is necessarily ‘incomplete’ until the anticipated onlooker responds. In his mature and late periods, Titian increasingly recognized this in the domain of technique, the abbreviated non-finito of the brushwork promoting the viewer’s share in the realization and completion of the image. But the examples under discussion suggest that this kind of embodied engagement was also anticipated from an early point in his career. The drapery in the Sleeping Venus suggests his early experimentation with a kind of painting that did not admit of a clean distinction between the thing seen and the act of seeing it. In this sense, at least, Titian’s paintings conform to what Heinrich Wölfflin described as a ‘painterly’ rather than ‘linear’ mode; or to Adrian Stokes’s related concept of ‘modelling’ rather than ‘carving’.77 However we theorize this, it is evident that Titian sought to close the gap between image and viewer, using a pictorial approach that aims to envelop or merge with the world of the spectator.
33 Giorgione and Titian, Sleeping Venus (detail).
These additions to the painting give notice of the way in which his earliest responses to the antique were simultaneous with an imaginative leap beyond its more archaeological, arcane or intellectual aspects to the opportunities it offered for exploration of the present excitements of sensual life. But it also reveals the twin motives of appropriation and suppression of the artistic past that characterize Titian’s strained relations with the older generation of Venetian painters in his early career. The eroticized drapery contradicts and (in the final effect) flattens Giorgione’s delicate tonal harmonies, its directional insistence undermining the older master’s more relaxed and lyrical manner. Titian’s completion of ‘unfinished’ works by his elders is often taken as evidence of his veneration of them or as evidence that his style is a mere extension of their established ways of painting. But it is equally possible to read this activity in less traditionalist terms, as a reflection of Titian’s wider attempt to redefine Venetian painting in his own image.
34 Titian, Flora (detail of illus. 30).
The boldness of the additions to the Sleeping Venus, the extent to which it disrupts and transforms the original mood of the painting, indicates that it was not undertaken in a spirit of deferential respect to Giorgione’s original conception. The degree to which Titian felt his additions gave him ownership over the entire pictorial invention may be reflected in his confident redeployment of the older master’s original reclining figure in the so-called Venus of Urbino, painted some 25 years later probably for Guidobaldo della Rovere, son of the Duke of Urbino (illus. 35).78 The thoroughness of the reworking in this painting sees through to its logical conclusion the kind of radical reconception implied by Titian’s addition to the original picture. In place of Giorgione’s dreamy and otherworldly goddess lying in a sunlit afternoon landscape, Titian pictures an alert woman of the here and now, placing her in a sixteenth-century palace bedroom replete with fashionable marble floor, wall hangings and classicized fenestration, and servants who put her clothes away in a cassone chest.79 She is, as is always noticed, awake rather than sleeping, a departure from the antique sources that allows Titian to develop further the viewer-orientated qualities hinted at in the drapery of the Dresden painting (illus. 36).80 The appraising woman on the bed, who may or may not be Venus, behaves as if in response to a living individual (in this case surely a man) in front of her, acknowledging his gaze, the still ambiguous movement of her hand over her pubic region a reaction to his presence. And the idea of visual euphemism Titian had introduced in the earlier painting is now reworked in the implied relationship between one hand and the other as the woman dips her fingers into a posy of purple-red roses.81 The conception of Venus in connection with an excited masculine viewer was, in fact, made explicit in one of Giorgione’s original sources for his painting: a woodcut in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) in which she is approached in her grotto by an aroused satyr (illus. 37).82 In Titian’s courtly reworking the sexual excitement of a male viewer is carefully displaced from the field of the image, but is nonetheless implied by the outward turn of the woman on the bed and by the now overriding sense that she knowingly presents herself to his gaze.
35 Titian, Venus of Urbino, c. 1536–8. Galleria degli Uffzi, Florence.
36 Sleeping Ariadne, 2nd century CE, marble. Vatican Museum, Rome. |
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37 ‘Fountain of Venus’, wood-cut illustration from Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), artist unknown.
The Venus of Urbino strengthened Titian’s claim to have invented the reclining Venus as a pictorial type – or her contemporary surrogate – that was destined to become an iconic image in the canon of sensual classicizing art of the Italian Renaissance. But insofar as this has involved crediting Titian with Giorgione’s original invention this was always a form of art-historical appropriation, through which a work of the older generation was made over to Titian.83 This kind of thing was not, in fact, a one-off event in Titian’s earlier career: he also made ‘improvements’ to a late mythological work by his master, Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods (illus. 38). Bellini’s original painting was commissioned by a powerful patron from a north Italian court, Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, and in 1514 was installed as a finished work in the Ducal Palace there, in the gallery known as the Camerino d’Alabastro. This prestigious commission is another indication of Bellini’s status as the leading painter in Venice in the final years of his life. His was the first contribution to what Alfonso envisaged as a pan-Italian display of works by leading painters and sculptors from Venice, Rome and Florence, including Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo. The idea was probably based on the pictorial decorations in the studiolo at Mantua of his sister Isabella d’Este, the courtly patron who in the previous decade had such difficulty extracting a painting from Bellini.84
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38 Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514–29. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. |
On this occasion, however, Bellini completed his painting promptly, perhaps indicating his growing confidence with classically inspired subjects in the final years of his career.85 Technical examination of The Feast of the Gods has revealed that he changed his composition in the course of execution, adding attributes to the gathering of the classical gods to make their identities clearer and lowering the hemlines of the dresses of the standing nymphs towards the right of the painting to further classicize and eroticize his work.86 But X-radiography has also confirmed that Bellini’s original screen of trees extended across the painting behind the figures and that the landscape to the left was painted over twice, first by a Ferrarese court artist (probably Dosso Dossi) and then again by Titian.
Titian’s critique of Bellini’s style in The Feast of the Gods is already implicit in the first of his own contributions to Alfonso’s cycle, begun just two years after his master’s death. It was an established convention that later contributors to a shared pictorial enterprise should follow the lead given in earlier works, but in The Worship of Venus Titian immediately jettisoned the static and non-dramatic arrangement of Bellini’s painting (illus. 39).87 The unpremeditated movements and intimate sensual engagement of the cupids harvesting apples and of the two young nymphs who dash into the scene at the right contradict the stillness and reserve of The Feast. Titian’s landscape, in which the trees are placed behind one another as if to measure the spatial recession of the cupids beneath them, is also very distinct. This approach is not, however, similar to the externalized linear perspective favoured in the Bellinesque space discussed earlier in this chapter. It functions merely to suggest overall spatiality, and the viewer’s eye is quickly returned to the foreground figures.88 A similarly provisional or referential plunge towards a distant blue horizon features in Titian’s subsequent paintings for the Camerino d’Alabastro even as these develop a frieze-like planarity (illus. 43, 44). Titian’s ‘keyhole’ or localized spatial recessions in these works, achieved through broad tonal contrasts and the suppression of the mid-ground, serve primarily to provide contrasts of scale that increase the monumentality of the foreground figures. When Titian returned to Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, his ‘correction’ was, tellingly, made along these lines: he replaced his master’s flattening screen of trees with a dramatic view to a far-distant mountain.
39 Titian, The Worship of Venus, 1518–19. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Titian’s newly confident and persistent emphasis on the cupids’ naked flesh also serves to mark the contrast with Bellini’s initial painting, even if the elder master had himself attempted to ‘improve’ his painting in this respect. Bellini drew on contemporary secular prints – perhaps including the woodcut from Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia mentioned above – in presenting his dramatic moment from Ovid’s Fasti.89 The aroused Priapus approaches the sleeping nymph Lotis, who is awakened by the braying of Silenus’ ass, to the general laughter of the gods. But this narrative occurring at the right of the painting is not immediately obvious from the actions and reactions of the figures, and the eroticism and spontaneous hilarity of the event loses out to an otherworldly stillness and solemnity familiar from Bellini’s sacred paintings. The horizontal screen of trees would in fact have directly recalled recent religious works of his, such as The Assassination of St Peter Martyr (illus. 40).
Titian’s approach, on the other hand, was to steer clear of references to earlier sacred paintings in favour of direct association with antique texts and visual models. Towards the end of 1517, Alfonso asked him to recreate a lost painting described in Philostratus’ Imagines, though the Italian translation of this provided for him could not in itself have generated the overall appearance of the painting.90 But the idea that the work was ekphrastic, modelled not on ‘modern’ Renaissance precursors but on a long-lost painting from first-century Naples, must have actively discouraged Titian from referencing the local visual tradition in Venice. Titian was, however, influenced in formal terms by Fra Bartolommeo’s preparatory drawing for the painting, made shortly before his death in the autumn of 1517. So much is clear from Titian’s adaptation of the statue of Venus and one of the nymphs from Bartolommeo’s drawing (illus. 41).91 Like Bellini, however, Bartolommeo turned instinctively to his own sacred painting and to the local tradition this reflected; indeed, this may have been an implicit requirement of the patron, given the plan for a pluralistic cycle featuring different artistic styles. The drawing features a composition built around a centralized, raised figure similar to that Bartolommeo had often used in works featuring the Virgin, Christ and the saints.92 The Florentine imagined a pyramidal conception along the lines of a High Renaissance altarpiece, with conventional priority given to significant ‘adults’ (statue and nymphs) over ‘children’ (cupids). Titian, on the other hand, displaced the former to the right edge of the composition, allowing the myriad spontaneous wriggling babies to take an unlikely centre stage. These playful beings bring to mind the putti familiar from antique sculpture and poetry, even as their naturalistic treatment releases them from the distancing monumentality of sacred painting.93
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40 Giovanni Bellini, The Assassination of St Peter Martyr, c. 1507. National Gallery, London. |
41 Fra Bartolommeo, Study for the Feast of Venus, c. 1517, black chalk. Galleria degli Uffzi, Florence. |
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Titian’s secularizing correction of the approaches of his two immediate predecessors in The Worship of Venus paved the way for the groundbreaking contributions to the cycle that quickly followed (illus. 43, 44).94 In these works of his early maturity, Titian arrived at a new conception of modern all’antica painting primarily by clarifying its formal and semantic difference from existing traditions of Christian art. There is, accordingly, a new emphasis on enlarged groups of nude or halfdressed figures shown in vigorous interlocking movement and placed close to the picture surface. In their unshrinking and unapologetic emphasis on fleshy corporeality, these works contrast not only with religious art but also with earlier Renaissance mythologies, such as the obtuse allegories in Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in Mantua by Pietro Perugino and Andrea Mantegna or the dreamy pastoralism of Giorgione’s ‘classicizing’ paintings in Venice.95 The generic association with antique relief sculpture is evident enough from the dispersal of the dynamic figures across the plane of the picture, though the young painter’s precocious awareness of the paragone is once again in play. The rich colouration of the two works suggests in itself an assertion of the inherent superiority of painting over sculpture, while the inclusion of a Bacchic snake charmer, modelled on the recently discovered Laocoön in Bacchus and Ariadne may reflect a more specific attempt to outdo the sculptor Antonio Lombardo, who had included a similar quotation in one of his marble reliefs placed in the Camerino d’Alabastro (illus. 42).96
The assertive secularity of these works, undoubtedly inspired by their conception as ‘accurate’ recreations of the appearance of classical paintings, opened up a new pictorial world devoted to sensual pleasure and desire. In these paintings Titian imagined an exclusive present, cut free from past or future and perhaps from all wider meaning, at least insofar as this was conventionally constructed around social ideals of public duty and Christian morality. This focus afforded the corporeality of the body an expressive priority that it had not enjoyed since antiquity, its heightened beauty and formal integrity (exemplified in the leaping god of the Bacchus and Ariadne and the reclining nymph to the right of the The Andrians) reserving it from the depredations of temporal flux or ethical consequence. As we have already noted in this chapter, the valorization of the present moment had been important to Titian’s reconceptualization of istoria and of portrait painting.
42 Antonio Lombardo, The Forge of Vulcan, c. 1510–15, marble. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
43 Titian, The Andrians, 1519–21. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
In the Bacchanals, the primacy of the present moment is also dramatized on a thematic level. Ariadne was mourning the loss of her lover Theseus, who disappears out of sight in the tiny boat on the horizon (illus. 44). Bacchus’s extraordinary mid-air leap symbolizes the heroine’s sudden psychological change, appearing as the outward figure of her inward move from past to present. The other Bacchanal is set on the island of Andros, where the god has turned the river to wine and the inhabitants are released into the delirious here and now of physical pleasure as they succumb to the powers of drink (illus. 43). Though autumnal tones are present in the trees in both works, and the outlandish aspects of Bacchic frenzy and less-than-edifying physical consequences of drinking are made evident enough, these elements do not, finally, call into question the validity of the world described. Music, dancing, urination, inflated bellies, stupor and dismembered animal parts are all validated as a natural part of a fulsome Bacchic life presented as a viable alternative to the displacement or deferral of pleasure under the regime of Christian morality. In this new world of the present moment there is no place for memory or apprehension, responsibility or the intimation of painful consequences, let alone the violent bodily desecrations that were the stock-in-trade of religious art.
44 Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–23. National Gallery, London.
The self-conscious revival of an ancient style in Titian’s Bacchanals does not mean that these works are ‘antiquarian’ or nostalgic istorie set in some lost golden age. Paradoxically, Titian’s invention of a classical past affords a more confident return to the immediate present of the Ferrara court. Titian probably intended Alfonso d’Este to identify himself with Bacchus. The duke was famed for his fine wines, and the two Bacchanals can be taken as a metaphor for the perfection of his rule in Ferrara.97 The paintings are in fact littered with references to Alfonso’s court, whether one notes the fine array of early sixteenth-century drinking vessels featured in The Andrians or the exoticism of the leopards in Bacchus and Ariadne, a reference to Alfonso’s possession of these precious and exotic animals in his famous menagerie. The ‘new world’ projected in Titian’s mythologies is in fact an idealized surrogate for the life of the social elite at Alfonso’s court, an imaginative fantasy which engages its presiding values and pleasures. Titian’s seemingly intuitive sensitivity to these courtly preoccupations is reflected in the immediate success of these works with the Duke and his courtiers. They set a new benchmark for mythological painting in Italy and across Europe, which at the same time exposed the limitations of Bellini’s initial contribution. The failure and success of master and pupil at Ferrara, which ultimately resulted in the repainting of The Feast of the Gods in January 1529, reflects the two painters’ very different artistic identities. If the expressive boundaries of Bellini’s painting inadvertently reveal his lifelong attachment to republican Venice and its predominantly public and communal culture focussed on age-old sacred and patriotic values, then the Bacchanals indicate Titian’s early distance from the world of his master and consequent responsiveness to the opportunities for more elite and individualized forms of painting that were emerging in the courts of the early sixteenth century.
CONSIDERATION OF Titian’s alteration to The Feast of the Gods has brought us back to the wider question of the pupil’s problematic relationship to his master with which this chapter began. Giorgio Vasari neatly concealed this tension by claiming that Titian had respectfully finished the painting under Bellini’s direction, the young master sensitively compensating for his teacher’s infirmity in old age.98 But we now know that the alterations were made many years after Bellini’s death and certainly without his knowledge or consent. Alfonso undoubtedly requested the change once the limitations of Bellini’s work had been exposed by Titian’s new paintings. But Alfonso’s taste was itself altered and developed by Titian’s intervention, conforming now to the new aesthetic standards and values imposed by the younger artist.
The jagged irregularity of the mountain that Titian added to The Feast, with its sudden opening to a far distance modelled through generalized and dramatic masses of light and shade, appears as a visual polemic against Bellini’s planar and non-dramatic conception (illus. 45). Titian might have gone much further, but the retention of the right side of the painting is also significant, given that it encourages the viewer to make a visual paragone between old and new, Bellini and Titian. As if to give visual expression to the familiar Renaissance literary topos in which the master is outdone by the pupil in the name of artistic progress, the partial survival of the original conception was necessary to establish the final superiority of Titian’s own manner. And this was a device he had already used in The Andrians, where the nude at the foreground right is both a quotation of and a correction to Bellini’s Lotis in The Feast, the similarity and difference of pose and position actively inviting comparison. The repainting of the Bellini in the Camerino d’Alabastro was to be Titian’s very last contribution to Alfonso’s painting cycle. But its appropriative dimension was broadly in keeping with the more general progress of the commission. What had been planned as a representative display of the contrasting artistic styles of leading masters from across Italy finally submitted to the predominance of Titian alone, who featured less as an example of the local tradition of Venice than as an independent creator of unprecedented all’antica works of ultra-modernity.
45 Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods (detail of illus. 38). |
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In perhaps the same year that Titian added a new landscape to Bellini’s painting in Ferrara he also completed a painting by Palma Vecchio, who had died in 1528 (illus. 46). On this occasion Titian seems to have made extensive alterations to the painting.99 If the Holy Family to the right is the work of Palma, then the St Catherine and the face, mantle and feet of St John were painted by Titian. The landscape behind the saints is also Titian’s work, opening to a dramatic mountain of rocks and trees hugged by billowing clouds quite similar to the one he added to The Feast of the Gods (illus. 45). Palma was another of the older generation of painters in Venice, probably a decade or so older than Titian and a recent contender with him in the competition to paint an altarpiece for the Scuola di San Pietro Martire (illus. 64, 65). Titian defeated Palma to win the commission despite the fact that the latter was on the ruling board of the confraternity, but it is nonetheless true that the older master was working with increasing success, particularly in the field of devotional paintings with a horizontal format featuring the Holy Family or depicting a sacra conversazione with saints or donors in a landscape setting.
Titian’s work on Palma’s Holy Family is usually understood as another example of the traditional Venetian practice of completing unfinished paintings by deceased colleagues. This may not have been a requirement of the painters’ guild, but it is tempting to understand it in terms of a communally minded action which would help the dead painter’s family and maintain his reputation for posterity. That Titian was actively involved in the affairs of the local guild in this period is confirmed by his role as one of twelve comessari appointed in 1531 to oversee a bequest left to the Arte dei Depentori by the painter Vincenzo Catena.100 But his approach to works by Giorgione and Bellini noted above suggests that the reworking of Palma’s painting represents something other than a humble professional duty undertaken on behalf of the local community of painters. In this case Titian himself had a formative role in the invention of the picture type in question: his depictions of the Holy Family, with or without saints and donors, placed in verdant landscapes had a discernible impact on Palma.101 With his completion of a series of outstanding monumentalized examples in the course of the 1520s, Palma had in fact moved ahead of Titian in works of this type and had won particular renown with a distinguished group of leading patrician patrons.102
46 Palma Vecchio and Titian, The Holy Family with SS. Catherine and John the Baptist, c. 1528–9. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
Admittedly, in The Holy Family there is less of a sense that Titian actively remakes the work of an older master in his own image or that he moves determinedly beyond its original appearance or meanings. If this work can be allowed to stand as a further makeover into the Titian idiom, the intervention is certainly more subtle in kind, initiating what we might describe as a rhetoric of traditionalism – an approach that bears analogy, in fact, with certain other works of his maturity, such as the Presentation of the Virgin (illus. 97). The viewer is initially struck more by the continuities between the parts of the painting: by the way in which the manners of the two artists integrate and overlap, the saints of Titian to the left in harmony with those of Palma to the right. Yet the thoroughness of Titian’s reworking has only recently become apparent. The revelation that he himself painted in the column to the right may be of particular significance, given that this is a clear quotation from his own recent Pesaro Madonna (illus. 53).103 This point has to be made with particular care, since Palma’s figures were already modelled closely on this altarpiece, the Christ Child’s turn away from the Virgin towards Joseph on the right, a closely dependent variation on Titian’s arrangement to the right of the altarpiece. But Titian’s subsequent addition of the column supporting this group made this original borrowing more explicit still, as if to make his overall responsibility for the conception appear more absolute.
The very deliberate placement of Titian’s St Catherine next to Palma’s Madonna encourages a kind of visual paragone between the two painters that recalls his near-contemporary revision to The Feast of the Gods, although this is now conducted in terms of a contrast of old and new techniques. Though the same pigments were employed by both painters – lead white, vermilion and red lake – Titian’s dense working of his colours with resultant sonorous effect contrasts with the thinner and more delicate technique of the older master. Recent scholars have emphasized the materiality of Titian’s paintings in terms of the exposure of brushwork on the picture surface, with particular reference to his late style after 1550.104 But in this work of his mature period the modernity of his manner is already asserted in these terms, even if the thick and complexly overlapping layers of paint are harmonized into an overall illusionistic effect. And this difference is arranged in the manner of a visual polemic against the more traditional technique of Palma, who laid in the cheek of his ‘blonde’ Madonna with a single layer of lead white, and finished her draperies with no more than two or three.
TECHNICAL EXAMINATION of an increasing number of Titian’s paintings has revealed what was already apparent enough to the non-scientific observer: namely that in developing his new style he exploited the expressive possibilities of slow-drying and semi-translucent oil paint brilliantly. The discovery of extensive underdrawings beneath his paint surfaces that bear little resemblance to the appearance of the finished work, or that even occur over the top of paint layers, is further indicative of the extreme openness of Titian’s approach.105 The master’s ready exploitation of the potential for reworking in the course of execution in the oil medium would in itself have suggested, encouraged and facilitated the alteration and completion of extant paintings by the recently dead masters under discussion. But Titian’s activity in this regard was notably distinct from the traditional Venetian practice of restoring large-scale history paintings commissioned by the state and Scuole.106 This long-established process of pictorial renewal, known locally as ristauro, apparently sanctioned artists not simply to ‘restore’ earlier works that were damaged or incomplete but also to make entirely new works in their place. On the other hand, ristauro was used to maintain continuity within the local tradition of representation: it carefully preserved a memory of the work that was ‘restored’ and thus limited the scope for more radical alteration.
It is very likely that Titian’s ristauro of Giovanni Bellini’s lost Submission of Frederick Barbarossa in the Doge’s Palace in 1523 (the work which finally won him his salary as Venice’s official painter) was made under these conditions.107 But in the alterations and completions discussed in this chapter, Titian worked in more private, professional or ‘artistic’ contexts, in which the aesthetic limitations prescribed by the Venetian concept of ristauro were not operative. Here there was decidedly greater opportunity for the more aggressive kind of intervention against the ways of the past that we have been analysing. Ristauro was one means by which the Republic maintained overall continuity in, and the predominance of, the visual tradition in Venice. In this process, as has been noted, ‘an earlier rendition would … serve as a model or restraint for a later one’.108 Titian’s interventions, on the other hand, contradicted this communal ethos, expressing instead his personal supremacy over leading painters of the older generation in Venice. They are better understood in the light of his wider departure from the established mode of Venetian painting in his early career: as another manifestation of his individualistic absorption of the collective culture of his adopted city into his own capacious artistic personality.
47 Giovanni Bellini, Pietà, c. 1467–70, tempera on panel. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
