It is in Titian alone … that one sees gathered together to perfection all of the excellent features which had individually been present in many cases.
(Ludovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura, 1557)
Certain paintings by Titian appear to confirm the common assumption that he was the main representative of artistic tradition in Venice and that his works were intimately linked to those of earlier generations of painters in the city. A prime example is the Presentation of the Virgin, painted between 1534 and 1538 for a Venetian lay confraternity, the Scuola Grande della Caritá (illus. 97).1 This was a very local kind of commission and the painting is often understood as simply a respectful continuation of the tradition of the Bellinesque istoria established in the previous century (illus. 13). With its conventional planarity, its varied crowds of picturesque onlookers – including the usual group portrait of the leading brothers of the confraternity – its easy combination of figures and architecture, and its rich and warm colouration, the Presentation appears as the epitome of Venetian Renaissance narrative painting. From a sociopolitical point of view, it is significant that no one individual (except, of course, the diminutive figure of the young Virgin ascending the steps) is allowed priority within the composition.2
The spatiality and mobility of Titian’s figure types in the Presentation and his provision of a ‘modern’ architecture with all’antica elements such as marble columns with Corinthian capitals indicate Titian’s move beyond the conventions of late-quattrocento Venetian narrative painting. The substitution of a fantasy capriccio for the more usual view of Venice itself might also be taken as more typical of Titian’s progressive, ‘non-local’ approach to the painted istoria.3 But the Presentation is nonetheless governed by a careful deference to established Venetian conventions for a work of this type. Drawing on earlier examples by Michele Giambono and Vittore Carpaccio (illus. 99), Titian’s work appears calculated to accommodate the conservative artistic tastes of his citizen (cittadini) patrons within the confraternity. The work is presented as if it were the final link within a gently progressive, fundamentally unified and ongoing, chain of local painting. In this way Titian seems to have intentionally promoted himself as the beloved leader of a continuing ‘school’ of Venetian painting, as both its living embodiment and perfected telos – a theme soon to be reiterated in literary form in Dolce’s Dialogo, and in visual terms by the colorito of his late style.
As in these other contexts, however, Titian’s traditionalism was to some extent a matter of rhetoric rather than reality. The Presentation of the Virgin is characterized by a very deliberate kind of ‘retrospectivity’: a self-conscious venezianità that suggests Titian’s continuity with the earlier Bellinesque style that had, in fact, always been anathema to his own manner of panting. The Presentation is to this extent a work ‘out of time’, a knowing mockup or simulacrum of an older and simpler local approach to the narrative istoria, whose authority Titian had himself undermined.4 It is symptomatic that Titian’s return to local values in this painting was a one-off, contradicted by other works such as The Death of St Peter Martyr, in which local models for the altarpiece had been ignored (illus. 64, 65). His other major large-scale narrative istoria from the 1530s, the lost Battle of Spoleto for the Doge’s Palace, had precious little in common with the Presentation (illus. 98).5 The fierce dramatic action in the battle painting, with violently foreshortened figures, horses and soldiers tumbling into a ditch and staring terror-struck, or agonized faces, was very unlike the calm processional approach adopted in his near-contemporary Scuola painting, and owes more to Leonardo than to Venetian precedents. In the following decades Titian did not revisit the ‘Venetian’ mode of the Presentation.6
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99 Vittore Carpaccio, The Presentation of the Virgin, c. 1505–10. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. |
More typical of Titian’s mature and later period was a return to his own earlier works, even if this meant reprising a composition invented decades before.7 This habit of self-reference occluded to some extent the usual practice among Venetian painters of referencing existing models by other artists. It suggests again the degree to which Titian asserted his independence from the past, as also his particularly intense professional self-reflexivity. The recent scholarly emphasis on Titian’s workshop practices and collaborations runs the risk of obscuring the internalizing or even solipsistic aspects of the master’s frequent reuse of his own pictures.8 It is evident enough that in his later period this tendency was encouraged by burgeoning demand among an ever-increasing number of patrons across Europe, and to this extent reflects a productive strategy calculated to meet the expanding international market for his paintings. But while this may be sufficient to explain the large number of near-contemporary replicas, variants and copies, it does not finally account for Titian’s insistent return to his own invenzioni from much earlier phases of his career.
Self-referencing is, of course, evident in the work of many leading Renaissance artists and naturally becomes more apparent in a career that spans a long period. Titian’s extraordinary success and reputation must also have been an important factor, granting certain of his earlier works a canonical status within even his own lifetime.9 The return to earlier paintings must too have been stimulated by Titian’s retention of so-called ricordi in the workshop at Biri Grande and was certainly dictated by specific subject-matters: a commission for a Venus (illus. 32, 35, 112), a Mary Magdalene (illus. 111, 99) or a Danaë (illus. 101, 102) would mean a return to a previous painting of the theme. An example of this, which also effectively highlights the differences and similarities between the painter’s early and late styles, is the Entombment of Christ, a subject first painted by Titian around 1520 and then again in two much later works (illus. 100, 101, 102).10 In the initial version, now in the Louvre, a ‘classical’ restraint is maintained (illus. 100). The figure group is arranged into a single spatial plane parallel to the picture surface and the composition is based around the formal symmetry of the two bending figures, whose mirror movements create a protective human arch around Christ’s body.11 The emotion of Titian’s early painting is rendered elegiac by the internal resolution and harmony of the figure group, who appear to respond as one to Christ’s death and whose movements support one another. This settled effect is also emphasized by the muted tonalism of the sombre colours, which bind the group to the delicately painted landscape and sky beyond. Figure types and expressions (especially in the centralized figure of St John) must still remind us of Titian’s early infatuation with Giorgione, though the monumentality of the figures modelled against areas of deep shadow, and the nocturne quality of the whole, is closer to near-contemporary paintings such as the altarpieces for Brescia and Ancona (illus. 56, 61).
The second version of 1559, by contrast, moves the narrative moment ahead in time, to show the harrowing scene of Christ being lowered into the tomb (illus. 101). Its edge obtrudes forward, setting the entire composition at an ambiguous angle to the picture surface and breaking up the inward harmony of the figure group. The ‘ugly’ foreshortening of Christ’s body contradicts the smoothly contained quality of the Louvre painting while at the same time drawing the viewer’s attention to it. The details of his broken form, with jutting, collapsed knees, lifeless arm hanging over the edge of the tomb and lolling head is given new emphasis.12 The actions, gestures and expressions of those around Christ have become more urgent but also more disintegrated from one another, creating a disturbing emotional effect that is supported by the exposed brushwork.13 Passages of intense and relatively unworked colour – especially the contrasting blue and red on the Virgin and foreground figure with his back turned – contradict the darkening penumbra around them and cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms, generating another kind of visual instability. The Virgin herself, liberated from her strictly secondary role in the first painting, moves forward to grasp his body and stare into his dead face. The whitened pallor of Christ’s flesh and the more bloody wounds of his stigmata take on a new kind of visual and emotional centrality: his head and upper body, decorously concealed in shadow in the Louvre version, now loom out of the surrounding darkness to establish a dramatic focal point. In the final version (illus. 102), the grisly drama of Christ’s unsup ported head is given a new twist: it falls back away from his torso rather than towards the earth, as if to confirm his broken neck. As a consequence, the face is exposed to us more fully, its slack open mouth and a glimpse of teeth offering a measure of physical horror that finds echoes in many other of Titian’s late works.14
100 Titian, The Entombment, c. 1520. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
102 Titian and workshop, The Entombment, c. 1562–72. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
The newly insistent emphasis on Christ and the Virgin in Titian’s later religious paintings reflects the gathering impact of Counter-Reformation doctrine, and it is no accident that the second painting, of 1559, was a commission from Philip II, the great protector of the Catholic Church. The painting that followed was probably painted with Philip’s chief minister Antonio Pérez in mind.15 Deliberate replication of Philip’s painting is likely to reflect the minster’s direct knowledge of, and special admiration for, the king’s version. Pérez, however, was not Philip himself, and had to make do with a painting that owes something, at least, to Titian’s workshop. But if such religious and patronal considerations explain the similarity of the two Madrid paintings, they do not ultimately account for Titian’s insistent reach back to his own original invention of almost four decades earlier. The two late paintings studiously maintain a number of key elements from the original work. Thus the figure at Christ’s feet is still very close to that carrying his upper body in the Louvre painting. And although Christ’s stigmata is now offered to the viewer’s inspection by the Virgin herself, the motif intensifies rather than overturns the idea in the early painting, where St John holds Christ’s wound up to his mother’s gaze. At the same time, the original contrast between the inert arm falling to earth and the other offered up to view is retained in the two later works.
103 Titian, Man of Sorrows, c. 1546. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
This much tells us that Titian’s approach, especially in his late career and despite the apparently contrary example of the Presentation, was unusually self-generating. The return to his own paintings was another aspect of his detachment from the more common practice of Renaissance emulatio, which underpinned and secured the transmission of a visual tradition through time.16 In his treatment of certain sacred subjects the habit of selfquotation is more insistent still, such that the difference or progression between ‘early’ and ‘late’ styles noticeable in the entombment paintings is partially obscured. Over the course of his career Titian painted a long sequence of bust-length devotional works featuring Christ and the Virgin. Paintings of subjects such as the Carrying of the Cross, the Tribute Money, the Temptation of Christ, Christ Blessing, the Man of Sorrows and the Mater Dolorosa form a discernible subgroup within his oeuvre (illus. 103–109).17 Each work appears as a subtle variation on earlier examples and the ‘series’ as a whole does not readily conform to a diachronic model of the painter’s stylistic development. Often traceable back to the earliest period of his career, these works are assertively Titian’s own, and appear to owe something at least to the mode of his portraiture. Yet a connection with traditions of devotional painting, discussed in chapter Two, is also part of Titian’s visual rhetoric. With their simplified and isolating focus on a brightly lit sacred figure seen in a vivid close-up, they engage the viewer in a way that partially recreates the mode of pre-Renaissance religious icon painting.18
104 Titian, Mater Dolorosa with Hands Clasped, 1553–4. Museo del Prado, Madrid. |
105 Titian, Mater Dolorosa with Hands Apart, 1555. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
As with the Presentation of the Virgin, Titian’s traditionalism in these works must in part reflect his response to the conservative tastes of his patrons. The Habsburgs repeatedly commissioned works of this type from the 1540s onward, a sign of their continuing taste for such traditional paintings. Just as Charles V sent Flemish portrait models to Venice, so too he sent devotional works for Titian to imitate. The Habsburg commissions for pairings of the Man of Sorrows and the Mater Dolorosa, presented in the manner of portrait diptychs, also have clear precedents in Flemish art.19 Seen in the wider context of Titian’s later religious art these works appear less isolated or contradictory. The entire subset sits comfortably enough within the orthodox range of sacred subjects Titian was commissioned to paint in his later career. As with the two Entombments for the Spanish court, the later devotional paintings reflect the intensifying Catholic piety of the period as well as the painter’s very special professional attachment to the royal family, widely understood as champions of the traditional faith.20 The pairing of Christ and the Virgin, placing the mother in an intimate relation to her son that pointedly reasserted her traditional theological importance, reflected the imperatives of reformed Catholic doctrine, while the deliberately simplified or explicit style adopted fulfilled, to some extent at least, the growing demand for orthodoxy, directness and legibility in religious art.21 It is also true that painters in Venice had long made a special connection with Flemish models, especially with simple devotional half-length images.22 But by the time of Titian’s later career the appeal to such northern models would nonetheless have begun to appear as distinctly anachronistic, at least from the perspective of contemporary Italian taste. These paintings, from a leading Italian master who had often departed from the established models, must have appeared a deliberate return to an older and simpler form of art. The ageing master’s revival of a Flemish type that was the very antithesis of the complex sophistications of ultra-classical maniera painting in mid-sixteenth-century Florence or Rome may even have had a polemical edge within the artistic profession.23 ‘Michelangelo’ is a speaker in a treatise by Francisco de Holanda published in the late 1540s, in which he makes a scathing criticism of the exaggerated devotional piety in Flemish art, as too of its unfocussed naturalism. The great artist is reputed to have said that the work of Flemish painters was suitable only for women, monks and nuns, the very young and the very old, while their penchant for landscape (copying the ‘stuffs, masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees’) revealed a naive misunderstanding of the true principles of selective imitation.24
106 Titian, Mater Dolorosa, c. 1555–60. Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York.
Titian probably knew little about the attack in Holanda’s text, and it would be an exaggeration to suggest that his re-engagement with Flemish models was an aspect of his ongoing professional paragone with Michelangelo. Yet the charges brought against Flemish painting were not so very different from those that Michelangelo had reputedly laid at Titian’s door after seeing his painting of Danaë in Rome in 1546 (illus. 113). According to Vasari’s account of this occasion, quoted in the previous chapter, Michelangelo considered Titian’s work too naturalistic and not properly informed by the key creative principle of design (disegno).25 It appears from the ‘Flemishness’ of Titian’s mature and late devotional works that he championed a type of northern painting considered execrable by progressive Italian standards of the mid-sixteenth century. At the same time, these paintings announced an unlikely alliance between the old ‘devout’ manner and his newly broad and unfinished painterly technique – one that equally contradicted the intellectualizing value of artistic disegno.
The reports of followers such as Holanda and Vasari may not give a very accurate account of Michelangelo’s aesthetic attitudes, and the evidence of the Tuscan’s own later works suggest that we should beware of making too simple a binary opposition between the two leading artists of Italy. Like Titian, Michelangelo also made a sophis ticated return to unsophisticated forms in his later period, offering a painfully self-conscious reversion to the more ‘truthful’ art of the distant past.26 Michelangelo’s anxious, spidery lines or marks, struggling to define or bound the sacred figures in his late drawings, or the tortured non-finito of his late sculptural groups (illus 3), may appear to parallel the revealed brushwork, broken bodies and tragic tone of Titian’s late paintings (illus. 101, 102).27 But if such works trace Michelangelo’s loss of artistic identity under the overwhelming force of his sacred subject-matter, the freedom of Titian late technique must, finally, tell another story, one that proclaims the old artist’s supreme creative authority over his work. If Michelangelo’s tentative late style disavows the temptations of visual art, Titian’s pronounces its ultimate transformative power. So much is evident enough from the impresa and motto he adopted in 1562, confidently proclaiming the victory of his painting over the raw materials of nature (illus. 96).28 The late Titian does not undergo an equivalent reaction against his own work under the impact of spiritual reform. However ‘simple’ his later devotional works may appear, they are at the same time revealed as knowing and sophisticated works by an established master who was in a position to ignore or even challenge the classiciz ing or protoacademic values taking shape in the Michelangelesque tradition.
A closer look at Titian’s later devotional works reveals that his by-now-familiar combination of old and new is once again in play, the elision of difference exacted in a particularly absolute way. From this point of view the ultra-orthodox appearance of these paintings cannot quite be taken at face value, and may ultimately be understood as appropriative in relation to the models referred to, in a way analogous to the self-consciously traditional ‘Venetian’ painting for the Scuola Grande della Caritá (illus. 97). After 1550, Titian’s seemingly most conservative works were typically painted in an unusual way, either using a radically fluid technique throughout, as in the Man of Sorrows in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (illus. 107), or juxtaposing this with areas of more traditional high finish.29 This odd combination is evident, for example, in one of the two versions of the Carrying of the Cross that Titian painted in the 1560s (illus. 108). The precise relationship between this work, held in the Museo del Prado, and the very loosely handled version now in the Hermitage (with its unresolved pentimento on Simon of Cyrene’s index finger) is unclear, though it may be that this latter painting was kept in the studio as a ricordo of the Madrid version (illus. 109).30 Its rough handling and brackish tonality is closer to works such as The Death of Actaeon (illus. 121) or the Man of Sorrows just mentioned (illus. 107), which both feature prominent pentimenti. Titian rapidly worked up a composition that is handled fluidly throughout, and it which all local colour is broken down by the sheer force of the brushwork. In the Prado painting, on the other hand, the sonorous purple of Christ’s robe retains its integrity even if the broad slashes of Titian’s brush are still visible. This passage of painting, with its whirlwind of approximate and opaque paint marks (macchie) is, how ever, contrasted more definitely with the tighter handling of Christ’s face, forearm and hand.
At the centre of both paintings is the head of Christ, whose conventionalized features still reference the ageold type of the Imago Christi.31 The stilling of the ferocious welter of exposed brushstrokes around the sacred visage in the Madrid painting establishes an element of fixity that confirms the traditional isolation and intensity of our engagement with it. Perhaps, too, the careful use of impasto for tears and flecks of blood resurrects much older pictorial techniques for the material embodiment of Christ within the image.32 The contrasting degrees of finish combine to suggest an expressive combination of iconic and narrative elements, and are made the means of establishing Christ’s intimate psychological connection with the viewer – a depth or vertical spatial relation that contradicts the otherwise self-enclosed horizontal movement of the composition, detaching the sacred protagon-ist from the historical or temporal exigencies of his own immediate narrative.
107 Titian, Man of Sorrows, c. 1560. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
108 Titian, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1565. Museo del Prado, Madrid. |
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109 Titian, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1565–70. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. |
In these works, as in many of Titian’s late paintings, technical variation is employed to intensify rather than disturb the meaning of the work. To this extent we should beware of assuming that the exposed brushwork of the painter’s mature style limited expression of the given subject-matter. Titian’s late non-finito increases the sense of narrative rather than counteracting it in an abstracting way. At the same time, it is a kind of visual shorthand that acknowledges the spectator’s sophisticated ability to take for granted its non-literal approach to the less thematically important areas of the painting. Once again, Titian’s mode does not admit of a fissure between old and new, subject and technique or image and spectator. The way in which a more conventional technique is brought into alliance with experimental non-finito is further indicative of Titian’s synthetic and absorptive response to tradition. Ultra-orthodox iconographies are freely co-opted into the service of Titian’s creative present, as if to deny the very possibility of inalienable difference or historical incompatibility. Titian-as-tradition is not the same as Titian-as-traditional, and we should notice once again the more rhetorical aspect of the orthodoxy that these works proclaim.
These two versions of Christ bearing his Cross knowingly recall Titian’s very early version of the subject, discussed in chapter Two, that had enjoyed local fame as a miracle-working icon in Venice and which was reattributed to him by Vasari in just this period (see illus. 48).33 Pointed return to an early prototype was, as we have seen, typical enough of Titian. But as is the case with the later Entombments and devotional paintings, self-quotation is not self-criticism. Rather than arguing against himself or his own early artistic principles, as Michelangelo might have done, Titian’s return is also a reconfirmation. The reworking of a composition invented decades earlier is deferential rather than iconoclastic, self-validating rather than self-lacerating. These two late paintings may have been intended to recall the famous work in the Scuola di San Rocco and to support Vasari’s reattribution of it to Titian. The changes made to the original were to be taken as further proof of the old painter’s boundless inventiveness, offering a flattering kind of self-paragone. Titian’s later reference to his own early works was a means of suggesting an essential continuity or coherence across his entire oeuvre. And a similarly powerful sense of connectivity is expressed in his allusions to the work of other artists and pictorial types. By intimating such links in his late style, Titian also masked his own earlier iconoclastic tendencies, proclaiming himself as the natural heir to all artistic traditions.
Alongside the apparently ‘simple’ religious works sent by Titian to the Habsburgs were the so-called poesie, a set of six mythologies based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and loosely conceived in pairs, now widely considered as among the most sophisticated paintings of the sixteenth century (illus. 114–120).34 The very fact that the poesie were consigned to Philip II in Spain alongside religious works may be significant: neither artist nor patron understood these works as contradictory. The more orthodox religious paintings sat comfortably enough alongside the complex and erotically charged mythologies, and Philip might even have enjoyed the overlaps between them.35 All these later paintings demanded an intensely emotional and sensually embodied response from their viewer. Acknowledgement of this original connection may facilitate a better understanding of Titian’s elusive late mythologies, paradoxically infused as they are with formal and expressive values drawn from Christian visual tradition.
The closeness of Titian’s poesie to his late religious works represented a departure from his more typical tendency to use different pictorial modes to distinguish Christian and mythological subjects. One need only recall examples such as the Sleeping Venus and its reworking in the Venus of Urbino, or the expansive, carefree physicality of his multi-figured Bacchanals, to establish this point (illus. 32, 35, 39, 43, 44). These mythologies lay an uncomplicated emphasis on the immediate pleasures of the life of the senses, emphasizing the corporeality of attractive nude or semi-nude figures placed close to the picture surface. Many either recall specific antique sculptures or make more generic reference to classical relief composition in their planar, relief-like arrangement of forms.36 Titian’s works of this kind assert a generic association with the nostalgic sensuality of classical and Renaissance pastoral love poetry, in spite of the fact that the literary sources are not typically drawn from this genre.37
110 Titian, St Mary Magdalene, c. 1560–65. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
111 Titian, St Mary Magdalene, c. 1530–35. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.
The classical forms and meanings Titian recovered in his mythologies were quickly fed back into his sacred art, and certain of his early religious paintings have been aptly described as akin to ‘Christian pastorals’ (see, for example, illus. 21).38 But influence did not flow so readily in the other direction. It is true that Titian occasionally flirted with eroticism in his Christian subjects, co-opting the expression of physical desire as a metaphor for spiritual unity with Christ. In a painting of the Mary Magdalene now in the Palazzo Pitti the penitent is shown in the manner of an inviting fleshy classical nude (illus. 111). But when Titian returned to this subject in his late period, any such crossover is very carefully excised, with the saint shown fully clothed and with her purity emphasized by her reddened eyes and copious tears (illus. 110).39
The distinction pertained, too, in other later mythologies by Titian, such as the long sequence of paintings showing the reclining Venus with musicians, in which the pictorial mode remains essentially impervious to that developed in his religious art (illus 112).40 These self-consciously all’antica pieces still pointedly recall Titian’s earlier reclining Venus, maintaining something of the indoor bedroom eroticism introduced in that work (illus. 35). Their relatively static presentation and allegorical flavour are very different to the darkening dramatic tone, with its intimations of worldly change and corporeal violence that features in Titian’s religious works (see illus. 64, 65, 101, 102). Titian’s distinction in this regard may have been more widely representative, given that mythological imagery in the Renaissance was to some extent defined and delimited by its separateness from the dominant sacred tradition of art that it grew up within. The relative artificiality of its presentation, featuring a constrained kind of naturalism, was an implicit acknowledgement of its ‘falsity’ as seen from the dominant Christian perspective.41
It is, on the other hand, the extent to which mythological painting is penetrated by the formal and semantic modes of Christian art that marks out Titian’s new cycle as distinctive. Titian’s description of the paintings as ‘poesie’ in a letter sent to Philip in September 1554 suggests that they were linked in the artist’s mind to earlier mythological works, given that this word had been used to describe Venetian paintings of this kind since the beginning of the sixteenth century.42 The idea that his works were ‘poems’ implied an equivalence between painting and poetry that was a sixteenth-century commonplace – based on Horace’s famous analogy ut pictura poesis – and may provide an important clue about how to understand them.43 Rather than searching after singular or apparent meanings, we should approach the poesie as we would poetry, that is, as open-ended evocations whose associative power is more significant than a singular or overarching ‘message’.44 All this would have already been familiar in works of this kind, and it is clear Titian carefully maintained identifying links to the established pictorial mode for mythological imagery.
The erotic female nude remains a fundamental marker in each poesia, operating as a kind of core condition (notably, the male figures Adonis, Perseus and Actaeon remain clothed). Many of these nudes are based on well-known antique sculptures, again an established practice in Renaissance mythological painting and one that Titian himself had developed in his depictions of Venus and in the Bacchanals.45 Such insistent quotation must have suggested that Titian’s new inventions were authentic recreations of the antique paintings often described in classical texts, even if they were not (like certain of the Bacchanals) intended as more literal ekphrases.46 They also engaged the still fashionable paragone debate in a manner that has precedents in earlier mythologies. The female protagonists in Venus and Adonis, Diana and Actaeon and The Rape of Europa take up positions of extreme physical torsion, extending to the very limits of plausibility the view of the given body and thereby offering a kind of visual riposte to the common criticism (in favour of sculpture) that painting is limited by its necessary depiction of a single view, or its assumption of a static observer (illus. 115, 117, 120).47
112 Titian, Venus with an Organist and Dog, c. 1550–55. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
113 Titian, Danaë, 1544–5. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.
114 Titian, Danaë, c. 1551–3. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
115 Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1553–4. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Nonetheless, the new paintings looked increasingly different to other Renaissance mythologies, including Titian’s own. The Danaë now in the Museo del Prado (probably the first in the series, illus. 114) closely reprised the earlier painting criticized by Michelangelo in Rome (illus. 113), and still reveals its debt to the earlier sixteenth-century type of the reclining Venus, albeit modified with reference to Michelangelesque models.48 But the paintings that followed departed more definitely from both Titian’s own earlier examples and from established expectations. The influence of Christian art in these paintings can be understood only in general terms and is not a matter of borrowing from specific formal or iconographic sources. It is realized in a formal and compositional sense by the enlargement in scale of the main protagonists, which generates the possibility of a new focus on their psychological state or interaction, as well as by the opening of pictorial space away from the more typical relief- or frieze-like composition.
116 Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, 1554–6. Wallace Collection, London.
The distinction between plane and depth is increasingly felt as a tension in the poesie. If the first pair (illus. 114 and 115) conform to the horizontality typical of sixteenth-century mythological paintings, then those that followed are characterized by a new kind of spatial instability, their fast-moving and often sharply foreshortened forms placed in an ambiguously angled relation to the picture surface (illus. 116–120). In this regard, at least, they have more in common with Titian’s altarpieces (illus. 53, 64, 65) or with his contemporary religious works (illus. 101, 102). The intervention of Titian’s radically loose brushwork means that the bodies depicted are not allowed the defined outline characteristic of much classicizing art of the sixteenth century. This is particularly noticeable in the Madrid Danaë, which reworks in the direction of painterly freedom the earlier, more linear version painted for Alessandro Farnese in Rome (illus. 113, 114). Characteristic in this regard is the abandonment of the anchoring outline and three-dimensional volume provided by the column base, in favour of a structurally amorphous explosion of broken colour. If the coins in the Farnese painting maintain something of their individual identity, in the poesia their independent shape is more compromised. The same kind of contrast between tight and loose handling is evident in the depiction of the sheets and the heroine’s body in the two paintings. With the exception of the Venus and Adonis, it is true to say that in the mythologies painted for Philip, Titian’s newly fluid technique supports a radically free approach to figure scale, proportion and perspective that departs pointedly from the more objective measurements usually indicated in the all’antica mode of the sixteenth century.49
In support of this interpretation it should be noted that the integrity of the body is paradigmatic in classicizing Renaissance art, while in the Christian tradition corporeal violation is thematically central. The frequent intimation of bodily desecration in Titian’s cycle is to this extent more typical of the presentation of sacred subjects. The poesie persistently suggest the sudden transformation of the body, or intimate an upcoming physical assault on it. Titian took his lead in this regard from Ovid’s text. But while an emphasis on such disturbing elements was familiar enough in Christian art, it represented a clear departure from the stable or timeless quality granted to mythological paintings of the Renaissance.50 Violence in the poesie, it must be acknowledged, is sublimated, made a matter of suggestion rather than a central focus, as it was in sacred paintings such as The Death of St Peter Martyr (see illus. 64 and 65) or the more contemporary Martyrdom of St Lawrence. But it is nonetheless clear that Titian’s manner in these works fed into subsequent Ovidian mythologies, such as The Death of Actaeon (illus. 121), a work that was probably originally intended as a further addition to the cycle and which features the hideous moment when the hapless Actaeon is ripped apart by his own dogs. The late Flaying of Marsyas, a scene of skin-stripping torture, is also, as we shall shortly see, a natural heir to the darkening mode of the poesie (illus. 122).51
In works such as Perseus and Andromeda an air of the favola or of fairy tale relieves the sense of menace (illus. 116). But even here the situation of the heroine is made perilous, and she does not quite occupy the more familiar cosseted realm of freely taken sensual pleasure usually reserved for such subjects.52 In Titian’s other poesie the main protagonists are shown in a fragile moment that is radically contingent and non-discrete, its meaning made dependent on the wider temporal continuum, with frequent suggestions of loss and the bleak consequences of present actions. In Venus and Adonis a shaft of light already illuminates the place where the hero will shortly meet his doom (illus. 115). Cupid is asleep, his inertia expressing the sudden evaporation of love as Adonis morphes into a hunter before our eyes.53 Forgetting his previous identity, Adonis is at the same time blind to his future, an attitude expressed not only by the turn of his head away from the highlighted fateful spot beyond but also by the unseeing quality of his expression as he pulls clear of Venus. His vacancy means that he only appears to meet her eyes, a telling contrast to the passionate intensity of the mutual gaze in earlier paintings by Titian featuring lovers (illus. 20, 44). In a further ironic inversion of the usual distinction between divine and mortal actors, Adonis’ expression takes on something of the fixed blankness of the heads of the gods in classical statuary, while the face of the goddess is humanized through animating emotion, her cheeks glowing puce in her despairing effort to restrain him.54
117 Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–69. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and National Gallery, London.
In the pair of paintings featuring Diana and her innocent victims, the violence is brought still nearer to the surface. In Diana and Actaeon a dead stag’s head adorns the pillar above the nymphs and the bow, which the hunter has dropped in surprise, points back in his direction, referencing the fact that he will soon be transformed into a stag and hunted down by his own hounds (illus. 117). In the background right, between the column and the leftmost tree, the two protagonists are depicted again: the future scene of Actaeon pursued by the goddess is suggested in a ghostly visual shorthand of lead white that bears some resemblance to Titian’s later depiction of the scene in the painting now in the National Gallery, London (illus. 121). The inclusion of this forward reference should remind us of older traditions of simultaneous or continuous narrative in religious painting, in which the present moment is always contingent, or teleologically burdened, at least insofar as it derives meaning from its place within a progressive sequence of events.55 Many other elements in Titian’s composition seem to imply a consciousness of Actaeon’s grim future: quite apart from Diana’s arrow-like glance across at him, the broken browns and olive greens of the autumnal palette suggest the dark times to come as, more arguably, do the entwining tree trunks and the dilapidation and instability of the classical grotto, with its tilting pillar and relief sculpture sinking into the stream.56
118 Background detail of Actaeon pursued by Diana in Diana and Actaeon (illus. 117).
In Diana and Callisto, the hard fate of the goddess’s victim is once again a matter of intimation. A vicious hunting dog slathers in the foreground, the analogies of shape between its head and that of the pointing hand of the goddess beyond suggesting the animal is her counterpart, while the physical terror of the pregnant nymph (soon to be turned into a bear for the hunt) is emphasized in naturalistic terms by the spasm of her stiffening limbs and the twist of her head away from Diana’s judgemental glare and accusatory gesture (illus. 119).57 As in the pendant, the narrative ‘consciousness’ of all the forms depicted – whether human, animal or natural – undermines the kind of stability or settled order that was the hallmark of much classicizing painting in the Western tradition.58 The sensual world Titian describes is one of flux, in which individual forms struggle to maintain discrete identity – one radically susceptible to deceptive appearances and sudden transformations. The insubstantial, watery surfaces of the landscape dissolve and subside into one another, as if too fluid to achieve lasting separation or consistency: the all’antica pillar tilts off vertical such that the cascade tumbling from the sculptural putto’s upturned amphora falls haphazardly down one side.59 The seeming hunger for metamorphosis that Titian depicts here symbolizes the overarching power of nature over man, a radical inversion of the rationalizing, anthropocentric commonplaces of Renaissance culture.
The Rape of Europa (illus. 120) manipulates deep pools of shadow, denying any possibility of spatial (or psychological) continuity between the god and his victim in the foreground, and the minuscule, earthbound world of the heroine’s grieving friends in the background left.60 Dark shadow falls across, but only partially obscures, the illogical and already non-traversable space between these companions and Europa, as if to cut off past from present, old from new, with terrifying finality; and shadow obtrudes itself again in the amorphous space into which the protagonists plunge. The princess’s sprawling body – wholly unprecedented in earlier depictions of the subject – is insistently sexualized, her opened limbs a barely euphemistic suggestion of a common sexual position.61 But given that it is shown as precariously positioned rather than stable or impassive, as violently overthrown by the power of the adulterous Jupiter, this cannot quite be taken for the usual kind of display of the erotic female nude in mythological painting (see, for example, illus. 35 and 112). As Europa twists her head back to catch one last glimpse of the world she knew, so the impassioned bull-god shows the whites of his eyes, his display of animal passion connecting him with the appalling goggle-eyes of the fishy sea monsters, who have usurped the more typical dolphins to guide the couple into the future.62 The instability of the whole – its knife-edge between eroticism and violation, pleasure and pain – is again realized by the smudgy blending of Titian’s mixed pigment, the fluidity of the brushwork figuring the radical uncertainty of the world depicted.
119 Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556–9. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and National Gallery, London.
The tone of these paintings shares much with the fervent drama of religious works such as The Entombment, consigned to Philip in the same package as the Diana pair in 1559 (illus. 101). All three operate through the heightening of narrative intensity and immediacy, employ a similar palette and feature the same prismatic blending of pigments to create a mosaic-like colouristic effect. They share an ambiguous non-planar spatial arrangement featuring complex, fast-moving forms that defy planarity or logical perspectival recession, and that operate as the outward markers of immediate sensate experience and high emotion. Worldly transience is their common theme. Noticing such technical, formal and thematic overlaps does not entail a reading of the poesie as Christian allegories, intended for the edification of the young Philip in the manner of an Ovide moralisé, as has been proposed by some.63 It does, however, allow that the pictures possess qualities that are not fully explained by the more usual secular-erotic mode of Renaissance mythological art.64 The interpretation developed here suggests that the poesie maintain a kind of visual and semantic ‘doubleness’ based on the conjoining of pictorial modes that were usually held apart in Renaissance painting.
There is a further way in which the poesie reflect this kind of free amalgam of Christian and classicizing modes of expression. This particular point needs to be carefully nuanced, because it is dependent on Titian’s maintenance of both aspects, even if it appears to further define the paintings as secular. In each work, the elaboration of narrative does not end with a meaning that conforms to the Christian redemptive schema of moral cause and effect.65 In other Renaissance mythological paintings, such as Titian own Bacchanals, the pagan protagonists are also released from the contingencies of moral consequence or relationship. But if, in these works, such randomness is imagined as a kind of freedom or pleasure, then in the poesie it is typically registered in more negative terms: as engendering a sometimes terrifying fragility. This is most clearly the case in the two Diana paintings, in which the actions of the two victims do not merit the harsh retributive justice meted out by the goddess. But Titian’s emphasis on the rough, overpowering and isolating treatment of the princess in The Rape of Europa – the possibility that we witness a rape of a more literal physical kind – tells a similar story.66
The often precarious and unprotected situation of Titian’s pagan protagonists is truer to the dark spirit of Ovid’s Metamorphoses than the more common Renaissance treatment of the myths as if they were a form of benign pastoral poetry. Recently Titian’s new conception in the poesie has been linked to the sixteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics. Noting the non-redemptive schema of classical tragic drama defined in this text, and the popularity of Seneca and others in Italian Renaissance theatre, one recent commentator has argued that the poesie should be regarded as ‘painted tragedies’ in which the Christian hope of a final redemption through God’s justice does not appear.67 Actaeon and Callisto pay the ultimate price, not for sins that they have committed but because of the arbitrary intervention of accident or chance, and it is this that Titian emphasizes to generate his mythological tragedies.68 According to this view, it is the sense that actions and consequences do not match up that is central to the poesie: fortuna dominates over order such that even a goddess falls victim (Venus’ unrequited passion for Adonis was the result of her being accidentally grazed by a Cupid arrow), and the propitious outcome of the union of Jupiter and Europa, the formation of Europe, is shown to have originated in a violent physical encounter.
But even if this all’antica tragic element is admitted, the poesie achieve their unique visual effect by incorporating expressive elements primarily found in Christian art. It is no accident that the appearance of these works is so very different from that of authentic antique paintings such as those discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century. The understanding of Titian’s paintings simply in terms of concepts derived from classical tragedy must also seem like an interpretative straightjacket when their fluid open-endedness is acknowledged. And it is much more likely that Titian, the master painter, approached this commission with something other than literary categories in mind. What remains exceptional about the poesie is the way in which distinct visual conventions for the treatment of pagan and Christian subject-matters are allowed to collide, with destabilizing results. Titian’s poesie combine a naturalistic approach emphasizing worldly transience and associated physical and psychological suffering, rooted in the long tradition of Christian art, with the relatively static, tableau-like presentation of mythological art, which foregrounds figural beauty and the eternal present of physical desire. Characteristic of the cycle is the way in which these two apparently contradictory modes contend without cancelling one another out. To this extent the poesie are remarkable for the essential lack of resolution they provide, rather than for the unity and closure more usual in Renaissance art.
Given the loose way the paintings relate to each other, it is likely that they did not have an overarching iconographic theme. Neither do they refer to a singular literary genre or set of visual conventions. Admission of their essential plurality would help to explain the differences between the more orthodox and impassive presentation of the reclining nude in the Madrid Danaë and the discomforting physical energies of the equivalent figure in The Rape of Europa; between the poetic anti-realism of Perseus and Andromeda and the naturalistic pathos of the Diana pair. If there are tragic elements in certain of these paintings, then these are typically offset by others that emphasize the presentation of the nude in formal terms or that sexualize the young female body.69 These contradictions are admitted into (or even emphasized in) the paintings, becoming central to their paradoxical mode of pictorial expression. The female nude is pictured as a problematic site of both ideal and natural meanings: as the locus of beauty or a figure of Titian’s perfected art, and as a vulnerable, ‘real’ body subject to spontaneous passions and painful transformations. Viewer responses to these bodies must also be unstable or ambiguous: the beauty of the heroines generates desire but the result can be punishment or death – though Titian does not teach a moral lesson in this regard. Semantic ambivalence is, in fact, more widely characteristic of the cycle, generating a complex hybrid effect that does not conform with the more general move towards orthodox forms of artistic expression in later sixteenth-century Italy. It is likely to have been Titian’s lack of clear genre definition or taxonomic transparency that discouraged his younger contemporaries from attempting to follow his manner in the cycle.70 The pictorial mode of the poesie is an ultimate expression of the individualistic trajectory of Titian’s career. The complex manner of these paintings challenges the visual categories and associated meanings it refers to, while at the same time pronouncing itself as both unique and inimitable.
120 Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–62. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Titian’s odd combination of all’antica and Christian modes in his later approach to mythological painting was not confined to Philip’s poesie. The darkening dramatic tone noted in these works was also developed further in Titian’s final decades, often with a more explicit show of violence. This is the case with the Death of Actaeon, a painting showing the half-transformed protagonist ripped to pieces by his own hounds (illus. 121). Titian’s decision over how to show Actaeon might always have been problematic and perhaps was one reason he did not send the painting to Philip as a further poesia. The painting was in preparation as early as June 1559, but in the paintings he did send to the king he had scrupulously avoided the zoomorphic representations suggested in Ovid’s text in favour of a naturalistic treatment.71 The depiction of Actaeon sporting sixteenth-century breeches and with a stag’s head does not quite avoid the absurd. But many other aspects of the composition are more successful. Though the painting is clearly unfinished (Diana’s bow has no string or arrow), it was evidently densely worked, perhaps over the course of many years, and certain passages probably appear as they were finally meant to be seen. The consistency of the pictorial treatment suggests as much, whether one considers the flaming highlights of the foreground bush, picked up again in the preternatural glow of the vegetation elsewhere in the composition, or the rough detached brushmarks indicating foaming water, glimpsed behind Diana both to left and right, and again in the area beneath Actaeon’s hounds. Such sketchy passages clearly contrast with the tighter handling of the goddess’s limbs and head, but these variations do not mean that the work is in a radically unfinished state, given what we have seen of Titian’s habit of varying the degree of finish within a single work in his later period (see especially illus. 108).
The way in which fluid and transparent natural forms (water), or thin and delicate ones (leaves), take on an oppressively dense opacity, pushing forward to lie as opaque blobs, or macchie, along the picture surface, bears analogy with passages in The Flaying of Marsyas, probably painted in the last half-decade or so of Titian’s life, in which he used a similarly reduced and brackish palette (illus. 122).72 Given the radicalism of the version of the late style in both these works, it is possible that Titian finally baulked at sending them out to his patrons.73 But further evidence for the intentionality of Titian’s handling lies in the fact that his rough technique supports rather than contradicts his expressive approach to the subject-matter. The painter’s hesitation is just as likely to have reflected the way in which these paintings deny their viewers the usual pleasurable and comforting associations of Renaissance mythological painting. Both formal beauty and erotic sensuality, and perhaps also arcane learning, are banished from this grim new vision of pagan antiquity. The monochromatic effect of overmixed pigments, like the coarse exposure and disintegration of Titian’s brushwork, expresses perfectly the visceral violence and fleshly disintegration that is now the central concern.
Both works can be taken as extrapolations of the already troubled mode of the poesie, as developing further their fundamentally ambiguous mode of expression, even if Titian now goes much further in his emphasis on the physical horrors and intellectual ironies of the pagan world. In The Flaying of Marsyas in particular, the contradictory secular and sacred associations introduced in the poesie are once more put to work, this time to particularly disturbing effect. The association with compositional prototypes of Christian art is now more insistent, such that many have found direct analogies between the suspended figure of Marsyas, the hapless satyr who had challenged Apollo to a musical contest and has his skin stripped off for his hubris, and depictions of St Peter crucified upside down, or St Bartholomew flayed alive. The more general conception of a centralized and static suffering body surrounded by mourners insistently recalls imagery devoted to Christ and his saints.74 Just as the poesie bear analogy with Titian’s religious works of the 1550s, so too there are evident overlaps in terms of thematic conception, pictorial handling and compositional presentation between The Flaying and very late sacred works, such as the Pietà (illus. 1).75
121 Titian, The Death of Actaeon, c. 1559–76. National Gallery, London.
122 Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, c. 1570–76. Archbishop’s Palace, Kroměříž. |
But in noting these connections it would be easy to overlook the ‘doubleness’ still at play: both The Death of Actaeon and The Flaying of Marsyas continue to reference and engage the established modalities of mythological imagery. We might note, in The Death of Actaeon, the setting in the woods of Arcadia, and Diana’s figure with well-defined all’antica profile, coiffure and sandals, and baring one breast in the manner of an ancient sculpture of Venus Genetrix. In The Flaying the figures of the two satyrs, and of Apollo and his follower to the left, still reveal their inheritance from classical art. In both works, too, a planarity more typical of mythological painting is maintained, although this is admittedly undermined in The Death of Actaeon by the unexplained (in naturalistic terms) disparity in scale between the goddess and her victim.76 In The Flaying of Marsyas the flattened composition perhaps still recalls an antique relief, rather than traditions of devotional painting as has recently been suggested.77 Titian’s main formal source was, after all, a damaged painting of the same subject by Giulio Romano in Mantua, now known primarily through a preparatory drawing (illus. 123). In adapting his source Titian notably reasserted a ‘classical’ planarity against the obliquely angled view in Giulio’s fresco, although this also significantly heightened the explicit horror of the scene beyond the typical parameters of Renaissance mythological painting.
123 Giulio Romano, The Flaying of Marsyas, c. 1525–35, pen, ink and wash drawing. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Noting Titian’s careful maintenance of all’antica elements is not to deny that the seriousness of tone achieved in The Flaying insistently recalls the core traditions of Christian art rather than the light-hearted, decorativeerotic pastoral mode typically reserved for such subjects. Yet the formal adjustment just noted serves to create an effect of claustrophobic spacelessness that cannot be ultimately ascribed to either Christian or mythological visual precedents, but is Titian’s alone. In this work, more than in any discussed so far, it is the painter’s obsessive reworking of the picture surface itself that has final authority. In this most radical version of his so-called ‘late style’, the picture surface itself takes on a magnetic power, drawing all the bodies depicted towards it and in the process granting areas of formless space or inanimate landscape an equivalent kind of opacity. Every inch of Titian’s canvas is subjected to the fierce activity of his brush or hand, losing its independent integrity as it is remade in accordance with the old master’s pictorial language. But Titian’s desecration or disfigurement of bodies through this process is also a pictorial equivalent or figure for the given subject-matter. For all its formal and technical extraordinariness, The Flaying of Marsyas is still at every point ‘about’ the dark themes of revenge, torture and physical agony that it depicts.78
With the notable exception of the Venus and Adonis (illus. 115), Titian’s poesie are painted using the fluid and exposed brushwork that is often characterized as Titian’s ‘late style’.79 The rough manner of other late mythologies, such as The Flaying of Marsyas or the mysterious Nymph and Shepherd, tells us that this particular commission from Philip II did not circumscribe Titian’s deployment of a looser technique. But it is nonetheless significant that the style was associated in the first instance with works intended for a leading patron from a foreign court. This connection sets a limit on the common idea that Titian’s later style was ‘Venetian’ or a development of a specifically local aesthetic. Evidence that the manner was understood not only as a new pictorial invention but also as ‘courtly’ in character is provided by the first literary appreciation of it: the often-quoted passage in Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Life of Titian’, published in 1568:
It is certainly true that the method used by Titian for painting these last pictures is very different from the way he worked in his youth. For the early works are executed with incredible delicacy and diligence, and they may be viewed either at a distance or close at hand; on the other hand, these last works are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance. This method of painting is the reason for the clumsy pictures painted by the many artists who have tried to imitate Titian and show themselves practised masters; for although Titian’s works seem to many to have been created without much effort, this is far from the truth and those who think so are deceiving themselves. In fact, it is clear that Titian has retouched his pictures, going over them with his colours several times, so that he must obviously have taken great pains. The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.80
This passage directly follows Vasari’s coverage of the series of The Damned Men that Titian painted (1548–9) for Queen Mary of Hungary and of the poesie for her nephew Philip II, indicating that the writer understood the new style of painting in ‘patches of colour’ as a pictorial modification made with the very highest ranking of royal patrons in mind.81 Much of Vasari’s description is, in fact, coloured by this interpretation of the style as being an ultra-aristocratic manner. Titian’s exposed brush marks on the surfaces of his canvases give an impression of casualness that matches the effect of ease or nonchalance (sprezzatura) identified as essential to the ideal courtier in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. As we saw in chapter Three, this was a value that had long influenced Titian’s portraits for the courts.82 Vasari under stood Titian’s new loose style of painting as a further intensification of pictorial ‘courtliness’, in which the timeconsuming labour of creation is concealed gracefully beneath an appearance of effortlessness.
A related aspect of Vasari’s appreciation of Titian’s new style was its apparent fulfilment of a key tenet of classical and Renaissance aesthetics: that the handling in a given work should be modified in relation to the distance from which it is to be viewed. This principle provided, in fact, the immediate context for Horace’s famous analogy between painting and poetry mentioned earlier in this chapter. ‘Poetry is like painting’, Horace tells us, ‘there is a kind that appeals to you more when you stand near and others when you step back further’. Reference to this odd but commonplace idea allows Vasari to endorse Titian’s way of painting ‘with bold, sweeping strokes’ as a variation of an established approach within classical and Renaissance illusionism, while the implied connection to poetry must have seemed particularly apt, given that the new style was developed for works that the painter himself repeatedly described as ‘poesie’.83
But Vasari’s interpretation of Titian’s approach as an extension of traditional aesthetic categories is open to question insofar as it ignores the fact that the poesie are private paintings, of medium rather than large size, and that they were probably intended to be looked at from nearby as well as from a distance. Indeed, it may have been that Titian’s departure from the norm in this regard was encouraged by the unusual non-site-specific nature of Philip’s commission. Since Titian apparently did not know where his paintings were destined to hang, he could not be expected to accurately determine the position from which they were to be viewed. This was a very different situation indeed from his earlier cycle of mythologies for Alfonso d’Este’s Camerino, where very careful account was taken of the position of the paintings on the wall and their precise relation to one another, necessitating repeated visits to the room by the artist himself to oversee matters. It has been suggested that the anomalies in handling between the relatively finished technique in the Venus and Adonis and the loosely painted Danaë (illus. 114, 115) was a defensive reaction to Philip’s dislike of the brushwork in a recent portrait (illus. 80).84 But it is more likely that this contrast was caused by the painter’s uncertainty as to the intended location of his poesie – his inability to determine whether they would be seen from distance or up close may have encouraged him to anticipate both eventualities.
Viewing position cannot, in the end, account for the subsequent loose handling of the mythologies for Philip. Following his dispatch of the first pair of contrasting paintings, Titian developed a manner that could accommodate an altogether more mobile kind of viewer, one who would observe his paintings from a distance as well as from nearby. This novel approach was something he had attempted before, when leaving a portrait of his friend Pietro Aretino relatively unfinished in the area of the torso (illus. 86). In response, the sitter sent a letter to accompany his gift of the painting to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici of Florence noting that this approach was due simply to Titian’s desire to save time in execution and thus to earn more money.85 The charge that Titian’s loose technique was the result of an avaricious concern to shorten the usual process of pictorial production was carefully answered in Vasari’s account, which lays particular emphasis on the extended time the artist spent when working in the new manner.
Vasari was probably dependent on Titian himself for his understanding of the new style. His emphasis on Titian’s laborious working process is, in fact, very similar to that to be found in the painter’s letter of 22 September 1559 to Philip, explaining his belated delivery of the two Diana paintings and the Entombment:
so much time has been spent on finishing them … I confess that three years and more have gone by since I began them … the cause was simply the quantity of time required, and my fervent wish to produce something worthy of your Majesty, which made me forget fatigue, and put all my industry into polishing and completing them.86
The correlation between Titian’s words and Vasari’s subsequent published account indicates that the latter drew closely on the current explanation of the style on offer in Titian’s workshop at Biri Grande, which he had visited in 1566 in order to gather information. The source of the description, in Titian’s own circle at Venice, indicates not only that the artist did indeed change his style but also that his new manner was a very deliberate kind of artistic invention, calculated to display unique mastery in the art of painting. Its development was, in part at least, born of a context of professional rivalry, as is strongly indicated in Vasari’s passage where it is noted that other painters have tried in vain to follow it, but that this has led only to ‘clumsy pictures’.87 Its stand-alone, inimitable quality was to this extent central to Titian’s original intention. His exposed brushwork stood as proof of, and as a kind of monument to, his own artistic individuality and superiority, rather than as a working model for others to follow. It was to be understood as a public demonstration of mastery in oil painting that could be admired but not emulated.
This was, indeed, how the late style was understood over the next century or so. In an often-quoted passage from Marco Boschini’s Brevi Istruzione (1660), the enthusiastic author likens Titian to a ‘good surgeon’ who tirelessly works to improve the bodies he works on, while moving ceaselessly between his different paintings in hand as a doctor might move between patients:
The final stage … involved moderating here and there the brightest highlights by rubbing them with his fingers, reducing the contrast with the middle tones and harmonizing one tone with another; at other times, using his finger he would place a dark stroke in a corner to strengthen it, or a smear of bright red, almost like a drop of blood, which would enliven some subtle refinement; and so he would proceed, bringing his figures to a state of perfection … it is true to say that in the last stages he painted more with his fingers than his brushes.88
If Boschini’s initial metaphor promotes the painter as a brilliant medical practitioner, in the sentences quoted here he revivifies the old topos of the divino artista. Titian lays his brushes aside as if his painting has become a godlike act of creation. The repeated emphasis on Titian’s use of his fingers recalls the favoured Old Testament metaphor describing the tablets of the Commandments that Moses receives on Mount Sinai as ‘written with the finger of God’, or the same prophetic words uttered by Christ as he performs miracles.89 At the same time, Boschini suggests, Titian’s paintings are as unique and personal as his fingerprints, each one bearing the impress not only of the painter’s mind but also of his body on its surface. Boschini’s description of Titian’s ‘finger painting’ emphasizes above all the individuation of the late style, with its boldly polemical abandonment of the traditional craftsmanlike concealment of the means of manufacture in the finished work.
In all this, Boschini extends the older, Platonic idea of the artist as ‘genius’, whose frenzied and idiosyncratic working pattern defies the logical, orderly procedures of the quotidian artisan compelled to follow a pre-established model.90 But the connection with such classical literary topoi does not mean that Boschini’s words are inaccurate or irrelevant to a wider historical understanding of Titian’s proceeding. Recent technical examinations have indicated that Titian did indeed turn to his fingers for certain passages in his later paintings. And there is evidence from this period of his career that his way of working was erratic and individualized. For the passage quoted above, Boschini may have drawn on an anecdote in Nicolò Massa’s Facile est inventis addere (Venice, 1566) recording a conversation with Titian regarding his irregular working methods. In Boschini’s mind the artist himself becomes the surgeon, but in the original report the anatomist Massa is allowed to correct Titian as to the causes of his varying appetite for his work, ascribing it to his indulgent lifestyle rather than to planetary conjunctions, as the painter himself had suggested.91
Other early reports, supposedly based on Titian’s own words, indicate again that his late style was a stand-alone creation, expressly intended to distinguish him from other painters. Antonio Pérez reported that when asked by Francisco de Vargas, the Spanish ambassador in Venice, why he had developed such a rough manner of painting, Titian replied that he sought to define his work against ‘the beauty and delicacy of the brushwork of Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio and Parmigianino’, and that if he had followed their example he would be ‘judged with them, or else be considered an imitator’.92 The anecdote was embellished further by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico in the early eighteenth century:
Vargas asked him ‘why he used a style of painting so fat, that it seemed as if his paint brushes resembled brooms’. Titian replied that ‘each individual must, in the art that he professes, seek praise for some excellence; and the reputation of an imitator is less than insignificant’.93
These reports take us close to Titian’s immediate circle of Spanish courtly patrons in the 1550s and ’60s: Pérez owned the very loosely painted Entombment of Christ (Museo del Prado, illus. 102), while Titian painted Vargas’s portrait in the early 1550s. The conversation they record is no doubt a highly conventionalized and formal literary set piece.94 It does, though, contribute usefully to an understanding of how Titian’s late style was interpreted within the broader field of early modern ideas about art, one characterized by a fundamental tension between the debt owed to ‘tradition’ or to existing artistic models, and that owed to ‘nature’ or to the creation of wholly new artistic invenzioni. In this context, imitation of nature was rhetorically opposed to the emulation of artistic models, as in the credo ‘naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non artificem’, recorded in Pliny’s Natural History.95 The immediate concerns of Titian’s busy workshop at Biri Grande were certainly distant enough from these theoretical debates, and it may be that the conversations recorded by Massa, Pérez and Vico never took place. But Titian, when asked to explain his new style, is likely to have employed just these standard topoi. In a broad sense, then, these anecdotes give expression to the historical reality of the painter’s late style, or at least to his aspirations for it. Following ‘nature’ rather than the art of earlier painters, Titian developed a new manner of painting that was his alone and that self-consciously departed from the established models. ‘Ambition,’ Titian reputedly went on to tell Vargas, ‘which is as natural in my art as any other, urges me to choose a new path to make myself famous.’96
Consideration of the early accounts of Titian’s late style has indicated that it was originally conceived and understood as a personalized pictorial invention, intended to distinguish the painter from all others. It has also suggested that style functioned as an equivalent to signature in this regard: as a special indicative mark of individual authorship.97 Although Vasari attempted to justify the new manner as a variation on established illusionistic practice, other contemporaries understood it as an example of a far more original and radical imitatio, which defied not only the ways of the past but also any attempt to follow it in the future. This, in particular, was how Vico understood it. Developing the indications in Vasari’s account that Titian’s invention had already had a deleterious effect on other painters, he co-opted the late style into a wider argument against Renaissance emulatio:
In most cases the inventors are foremost in time and importance and have remained alone in their eminence … those who left us masterpieces of the arts had before their eyes no model to imitate except the best that is in nature. But those who take as their model, in order to imitate them, the highest masterpieces in art … are usually unable to create better ones.98
It is no accident that within Titian’s intimate circle at Venice this emphasis on present over past, imitation over emulation and individuality over tradition was already well established. The iconoclastic Aretino evoked the ancient painter Eupompos, featured in Pliny in defining the originality of his poetry, restating the Sicyonian’s claim that he took the people of his time as models rather than the works of his predecessors. Although Apelles was the ancient painter on whom Titian most clearly modelled his identity, Eupompos was more eligible still as a classical model. As a famous portrait painter Titian, like his naturalistic forebear in Greek antiquity, had to concentrate on the appearances of ‘a motley assortment of people’ rather than on ‘the manner of some other artist’.99
It is worth rehearsing the main lines of argument regarding Titian’s late style that have developed over the past two centuries or so in order to clarify the issues at stake here. For a long time the later works were understood simply in terms of a decline in quality, at least in comparison with the very high standard set by the artist’s early and mature paintings. On its arrival in Britain in 1798, for example, the fluidly painted Death of Actaeon (illus. 121) sold for a relatively low price; and in their pioneering scholarly monograph of 1877, Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle remained singularly unimpressed with the poesie.100 Doubts about the late paintings, with their rough and approximate brushmarks, opaque paint patches and frequent unresolved pentimenti, their oddly proportioned forms and ‘inaccurate’ perspective, have never quite disappeared. It is still sometimes argued that the artistic value of these works has been exaggerated and the very existence of the ‘latest style’ of Titian has been questioned.101 It has been noted that important works from the last six or seven years of his life, painted in the most radically abbreviated style, may have been quite literally unfinished, particularly those (like The Death of Actaeon and The Flaying of Marsyas) that were still in Titian’s studio at his death in 1576.102 An important corollary of this sceptical interpretation is an emphasis on the essential traditionalism of all Titian’s works. Even if it is allowed that his paintings became more loosely executed, this is not seen as representing a fundamental departure from the art of the past. The late Titian’s habit of conjoining variable degrees of finish in a single work, or at least of varying his execution according to the demands of the given picture type, iconography or commission, is seen as simply reflecting his mastery and fulfilment of the tradition of painting he worked within.103
Such arguments for Titian’s traditionalism are an understandable reaction to the sometimes exaggerated interpretations of Titian’s late works in the twentieth century, which were deeply coloured by Romantic and modernist tastes and ideals. This critical tradition has been plagued by its inability to establish due historical distance or objectivity, seemingly compelled to understand Titian’s late style as a kind of ‘future-orientated’ anticipation of much later artistic values and concerns. Even among the most serious scholarly literature it is not difficult to find florid over-readings of Titian’s loose brushwork that ascribe it a transcendent spiritual value, or make it an expression of Titian’s complex personality or turbulent emotional life. Many authors have waxed lyrical about the moving originality of the late works, readily comparing them with final paintings by Rembrandt or Monet and arguing that they share with other old-age styles a common preference for loosely defined forms or ‘proto-Impressionist’ handling.104 The focus on Titian’s technique, which admittedly is encouraged by the exposed brushwork of the late paintings, has led others to understand it in ‘proto-modernist’ terms – as being in some sense about the paint surface itself, or the act of working on it. Drawing on these accounts, postmodernist criticism has theorized the late style as a disruption or ‘defiguration’ of the Renaissance tradition of illusionistic painting. Although inflected with terms borrowed from the debates over contemporary art, this recent line of criticism has been useful in drawing attention back to the more disruptive and anti-traditional aspects of Titian’s late works, although now without the usual appeal to the language of Romantic expressionism or modernist objectivity.105
Such approaches have not yet realized a broader, historically based interpretation that situates the meaning of the late style within the wider individualistic trajectory of Titian’s career and in relation to the very different values that had sustained painting in Renaissance Venice. Too ready an adaptation of contemporary critical concepts can generate misleading identifications, with the very particular kind of self-reflexivity that belongs to the late Titian disappearing beneath the weight of theoretical exposition. The careful maintenance of historical distinction becomes especially necessary in order to counteract potentially misleading parallels, for example between Titian’s partial revelation of his working process to the viewer and the modernist concern with the picture surface; or between the insistently public, performative and communicative aspects of Titian’s later career and the radical subjectivism of post-modernity. Emphasis on these differences does not, however, invalidate the central insight within this line of criticism: that Titian’s way of painting from around 1550 onward destabilized or undermined the existing tradition of painting. These studies allow us to appreciate that Titian’s partial exposure of the mechanism, process and materials of oil painting to his viewers was a striking departure from the principles and norms of sixteenth-century illusionistic art, including those underpinning works in Venice, his adoptive city.106 Titian’s style has rightly been seen as a beginning – as paving the way for the primacy of the individualistic brushstroke of later centuries, his high-profile identity a prototype for the artist as a courtly impresario. But if Titian can be seen as a turning point in the history of art, as the one who opened the door to ever more individualized forms of painterly expression in the following centuries, his success also spelled the end for the older, more localized and collective forms of artistic practice that had been developed in Venice over a long period.
The aggressively unique quality of Titian’s late style is integral to its initial literary definition in Vasari’s ‘Life’, where it is noted that ‘this method of painting is the reason for the clumsy pictures painted by the many artists who have tried to imitate Titian and show themselves practised masters.’ Shortly afterwards, Vasari returned to the theme, noting Titian’s more general lack of willingness to teach, and contrasting this with the particular ability of earlier Venetian masters to pass on artistic knowledge to pupils.107 Ridolfi, who was certainly more sympathetic to Titian, nonetheless noted the old master’s habit of locking away his best paintings in a small room in Biri Grande when he was away so that his pupils could not copy them.108 Recent studies of Titian’s expansive studio practice appear to throw doubt on the evidence of these early sources, emphasizing instead the key role of the ‘workshops’ that encircled and enabled the production of the master as an international artist into the very latest stages of his career.109 But the argument in these studies is typically made along quantitative rather than qualitative lines, and does not explain the general failure of even Titian’s closest pupils to adequately follow his late style. The passage fromBoschini quoted earlier is put into the mouth of a supposed pupil, Palma Giovane. A fascinated apprentice closely watches the old master’s extraordinary performance in the creation of his paintings. But this cannot be taken at face value given that Palma Giovane was not in reality a pupil of Titian’s, and that his emphasis is in any case on the mysterious, personalized and untranslatable nature of the old master’s activity, rather than on the possibility that he could learn anything from his master.110
Though useful enough in dispelling the Romantic ideal of the lonely genius working in isolation, the recent studies of Titian’s workshop do not, finally, explain the lack of continuity between the experimentalism of the ‘late style’ works of the master himself and the mundanely repetitive productions of the pupils, which typically offer pallid and recherché renditions of Titian’s own paintings. Neither, indeed, do these studies succeed in challenging or explaining the fact that Titian’s later career coincided with the demise of Venetian painting, rather than with its continuance beyond his death in the hands of newly energized and creative generations of painters. Titian’s looser technique was only superficially similar to that practised by young radicals such as Andrea Schiavone and Tintoretto in the 1540s and ’50s, whose cursive and abbreviated brushwork served (in part at least) pragmatic imperatives, such as the need to work quickly and at low cost. If Titian’s broad style was later taken up by leading artists across Europe, such as Rubens, Van Dyck and Velázquez, it proved much less absorbable or influential in republican Venice.
Many of Titian’s paintings from around 1550 onward express artistic values that could not be readily incorporated into the traditional culture of Venice. His ‘personalized’ late style offered an implicit challenge or contradiction to the city’s values of self-effacement and collective culture. Significantly, however, Pérez’s report indicates that Titian defined his new manner against the more finished styles of non-Venetian artists (his old rival Michelangelo among them), rather than locals. Titian’s free manipulation of paint on the picture surface was always more international in orientation, anticipating just the kind of knowing courtly audience it went on to attract. The sophisticated collectors and painters from abroad to whom Titian’s style appealed could immediately recognize its distinction from the disegno practised in contemporary Florence and Rome. The style was to this extent also self-consciously taxonomic, providing a polemical alternative to the Central Italian tradition of disegno, which used careful preliminary drawings, defined outlines and high finish to realize the predetermined artistic concetto. Titian’s late style was perhaps even intended to recall the approaches of Venetian predecessors, such as Bellini and Giorgione, in making the argument against a tradition dominated by Michelangelo. An important aspect of Titian’s purpose in creating the late manner may have been to suggest his continuity with other painters and paintings in Venice to a wider international audience of non-Venetian collectors, patrons and artists. Part of the ‘argument’ was that his style was representative, and that he himself embodied the entire tradition. But insofar as it was premised on its ‘stand-alone’ difference from all predecessors, as on its resistance to emulation by others, it was also the issue of an ambitious individualist whose values had little in common with those of the Venetian Republic.
Titian’s late style has long been viewed as an expression of his old age, whether understood as destroying his ability to paint accurately or as a reflection of his deepening expression of personal or religious values. Certain recent commentators have rightly challenged the ‘expressive fallacy’, which reduces artistic style to a necessary reflection of bodily capacity or otherwise, or sees it as the passive mirror of a predetermining ‘personality’. ‘Titian’, it has been pointed out, was only very notionally present in his brush- or finger-mark.111 It is likely that his late style was determined in the end by neither physical frailty nor personal expression. It was, rather, a kind of improvised public performance of the technical, illusionistic and expressive possibilities of painting, as also a demonstration of his unique control of the oil medium. It may also have been a deliberate reference to his agedness, which he is known to have exaggerated, possibly for further dramatic effect: it was a self-conscious ‘old-age’ style that pronounced his gerontocratic authority in the field.112 It was in this sense also a hieratic enunciation of his assumed professional identity as the god-like ‘father’ of painting. Through his late style the old Titian identified himself as the very personification of painting. But to the extent that he had collapsed the shared models for artistic identity, production and transmission in Venice, he also brought this tradition to an end.
124 Leone Leoni, Portrait Medal of Titian, 1537, recto and verso. British Museum, London.
