He had rivals in Venice but none of much talent, none that he did not crush by his excellence.
(Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite, 1568)
Titian’s true disciples … never saw his studio.
(David Rosand, Titian and the Critical Tradition, 1982)
Titian seems to have always been a controversial figure in Venice, and many locals must have seen him as one whose artistic practice challenged the age-old customs governing the business of art in the city. Titian’s early sparring with his patrons at the Doge’s Palace was noted in chapter One, as was the way in which this revealed what may have been an ongoing antagonism with his master, Giovanni Bellini. When the patrician officials changed their minds about granting Titian the next available sansaria, the young painter promptly ascribed this to the intervention of other painters, blaming ‘the tricks and cunning of some who do not want to see me as their rival’.1 These older painters were clearly angered by Titian’s attempt to queue-jump in the quest for the sansaria, a stipend that also gave its recipient a semi-official profile as the leading painter of the Venetian state.
The continuing struggle to make Titian deliver the battle painting (illus. 98) he had promised in 1513 epitomizes the difficult relationship the artist had with patrons acting for the Venetian state. These officials had agreed to reinstate his spettativa by the end of 1514 but were clearly uncomfortable with the fee Titian demanded, promptly reducing it by a quarter, to 300 ducats.2 It was not until 1523 that Titian finally came into possession of the coveted salary, probably as a reward for his completion of Bellini’s unfinished Submission of Frederick Barbarossa and some frescos for the ducal chapel of San Nicolò and elsewhere in the palace – a burst of activity apparently stimulated by the election of Doge Andrea Gritti.3 The original battle painting, however, remained uncompleted, and perhaps never would have been had the Senate not voted to withdraw the sansaria and make Titian repay all the monies he had received in 1537. The Battle of Spoleto was promptly finished just over a year later, and Titian’s salary restored once again.4
The delay to completion of this painting for a quarter of a century cannot have endeared the painter to the Venetian authorities, and it is no surprise to find that problems quickly recurred in the following decades. They attempted to cancel Titian’s sansaria on two further occasions, in 1545 and 1552, again because of the non-delivery of paintings.5 By comparison with most other leading painters in Renaissance Venice, Titian’s output of official paintings was remarkably small. In addition to the works mentioned above he completed a votive painting for Gritti in 1531 and just a handful of ducal portraits for the palace.6 After finishing The Battle of Spoleto he did not paint any further official history paintings, although in 1563 he left a commission of this type to his son Orazio, who unsuccessfully petitioned the Senate for a higher fee than that awarded to the other painters working alongside him (Federico Zuccaro and Jacopo Tintoretto).7 By this time, Titian’s determination that Orazio should inherit the painting empire he had built up is very evident. Despite the negative outcome of the request for a higher fee in 1564, Titian was soon lobbying the state on the question of his son’s inheritance of the sansaria itself. Again, the documents suggest hesitation on the part of the Venetian authorities and the request was initially rejected. Following a petition in 1569, however, the old painter finally succeeded in transferring his sansaria to his son, compromising the traditional republican system of equity and openness by securing a ‘private’ transfer of public funds based on genealogical inheritance rather than proven ability or years of service.8
Titian’s career-long contention with public or corporate patrons in Venice was not confined to the state itself. It isn’t known why he did not, finally, paint in the albergo (meeting room) of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Titian had joined the Scuola as early as 1528 and his co-option in 1552 onto the so-called zonta, the powerful decision-making body called when a large-scale project was in hand, indicates that he was about to undertake the commission.9 But Titian seems to have withdrawn at the last moment: he may have wanted to prioritize commissions for portraits and poesie from his new patron Prince Philip; or perhaps the price that he asked was too high for the Venetian cittadini who ran the Scuola. Whatever the case, this kind of incident was by no means isolated in his Venetian career. In the 1530s and ’40s, Titian was often in dispute with local patrons: with the brothers of the Scuola di San Pietro Martire over the altarpiece he had painted for them (illus. 64, 65); with the nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli on Murano over an Annunciation they had commissioned; and with the long-suffering monks of Santo Spirito in Isola.10 In each of these disputes, the contention involved an argument over the price Titian demanded for his work. We have seen that this was an issue right from the outset of his ‘official’ career at the Doge’s Palace. By the period of his maturity Titian’s conflicts with local clients were deter mined primarily by the comparatively large fees his works were commanding at the courts.
Titian’s habit of non-production or long delay in the delivery of paintings for Venetian patrons is likely to have been a direct result of this price differential – one that often led him to prioritize the demands of his foreign clients and to demand ever higher fees from local ones. At Santo Spirito he was commissioned to paint The Descent of the Holy Spirit as early as 1529, but only delivered the work more than a decade later, in 1541, after repeated complaints from the monks. The legal dispute that followed, when damp quickly caused the paint on the altarpiece to peel off, inevitably focussed on money: Titian demanded an extra 100 ducats on top of the 400 originally agreed, and also the cost of the restoration, both of which the monks refused to pay.11 At the Angeli, the dispute supports more directly the point made above, with local patrons losing out to a leading courtly client: the nuns had initially agreed to pay 500 ducats for their altarpiece, but this was as much as five times the amount usually paid for works of this type in Venice, and they quickly transferred the commission to Titian’s main rival in the city at that point, Pordenone. Not for the first or last time in his career, Titian simply substituted a lowerpaying local patron for a foreign one willing to pay more: he sent his painting abroad to the Empress Isabella, in return for which Charles V reputedly awarded him 2,000 ducats.12
Vasari’s report that Titian received as much as 500 ducats for his initial portrait of Charles in 1530 suggests that a sometimes vast disparity had opened up between Titian’s financial rewards at home and abroad (illus. 74). His reward for this Imperial painting was, indeed, as much as twenty times that he received for his official portraits of the Venetian doges (25 ducats each), and although Vasari’s figure cannot be proven, and may be an exaggeration for rhetorical effect, its general veracity is corroborated by the fact that little more than one-sixth of the 620 ducats Titian could expect from his annual pensions in 1550 was paid by the Venetian state.13 This kind of basic expectation made Titian a very wealthy man indeed in his later career, at least by Venetian standards, given that a worker in the Arsenale could expect no more than 50 ducats per annum, a citizen (cittadini) working in the chancellery around 200, and even a patrician castellan (podestà) not more than 500.14 This, and Titian’s many other lucrative business involvements in this period, suggests that the description of him as a multimillionaire by sixteenth-century standards is probably no great exaggeration.15 Certainly his wealth was wholly unmatched by any other artist in Venice. A vast economic disparity within the profession of painters in Venice seems to have grown up: while Vincenzo Catena left 20 ducats each to the daughters of five local painters in 1531, Titian was in a position to lavish a dowry of 1,400 ducats on his daughter Lavinia in 1555. Meanwhile, the very talented Lorenzo Lotto lived in straitened circumstances during his later career in Venice and was sometimes reduced to selling his paintings at travelling fairs, as his surviving account book shows.16
In his aggressively inflationary pricing policy, as in his accrual of vast wealth through his long employment by the courts, Titian disturbed the established patterns of exchange between painters and patrons working in Venice, and at the same time challenged the traditional social identity of painters in the city. His bold disavowal of local customs and expectations in this respect is broadly in keeping with the wider picture of Titian’s individualistic artistic practice that has been developed in the course of this study. It is also evident in the spiralling social exclusivity of his pattern of patronage: the painter seems increasingly to have judged Venetian commissions to be less significant than those from abroad. It is true that he continued to paint for local patrons from time to time in his late period, and we certainly cannot establish this pattern of international export in too rigid or absolute terms. But it is nonetheless the case that Titian only very occasionally accepted commissions for more lowly Venetian patrons, such as the Scuole Piccole or the so-called scuole dell’arte attached to the city’s trade guilds.17 In the 1550s he more or less retired, even from more prominent Venetian state or public commissions. But if Titian thus became less and less interested in Venice, then perhaps, as has recently been suggested, Venice also became less interested in him.18 Flattering reference to the old master was the norm among the younger generations of painters working in the city. Titian stood as a kind of monumental exemplar of success in the art of painting. But he also seems to have been a somewhat distant figure, whose works were difficult to emulate. Even among these younger generations of painters, however, there was resentment, and some at least may have seen him as a jealous and avaricious old master who had dispossessed them of their rightful reputation and position as painters of the Venetian Republic.
Titian’s public image was greatly advanced by the publication of Dialogo della pittura by his literary friend Lodovico Dolce in Venice in 1557. The editor of the standard modern edition of this work is at pains to establish the independence of the text from its immediate artistic context, and in particular from the opinions of Titian himself and his circle.19 But the separation of literary and artistic culture in Venice that this division implies is impossible to sustain, and it is clear that Titian and Dolce were very close friends and frequent collaborators in the period of the publication of the Dialogo.20 ‘Autobiography’ may be too strong a word to describe Dolce’s book, yet within a few years of its publication the charge that Dolce’s words could not be trusted because he had been ‘helped in certain important places by his friend Titian’ had already been made.21 It is quite clear that Dolce deployed conventionalizing literary tropes in describing the career of Titian. Nonetheless, it is very likely that he was helped or directed in certain ways by the artist he glorified. Such ‘interference’ is indicative of the formative role Titian played in later life in shaping his professional identity for public consumption.22 It suggests a much closer relationship between the Dialogo and Titian’s near-contemporary self-portraiture than has been admitted previously, and that text and image worked together in the wider promotion of Titian’s public persona.
The Dialogo is usually seen as mounting a determined local defence of Venetian painting in the face of Vasari’s recent attack in Lives of the Artists (Florence, 1550). Vasari had minimized the role of the Venetians in the progress of Renaissance art, arguing that they were too much concerned with the sensual value of colour (colore) and not enough with the more intellectual one of drawing (disegno). Dolce’s book, which drew in certain respects on the analysis of local practice first introduced in Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura, published in Venice in 1548, appears to promote a more textural and tonal approach to painting based on the manipulation of colours on the picture surface.23 But a closer reading shows that Dolce was unlike Pino insofar as he was primarily concerned with the promotion of Titian rather than with supporting the community of painters in Venice as a whole. Many of the leading figures in the city’s tradition of painting are, in fact, strongly criticized. Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, named as Titian’s two masters, come in for particularly harsh treatment. Gentile is described as a ‘clodhopper’ whose line is ‘arid and laboured’, while the paintings of Giovanni simply ‘did not please’ Titian. The work of both brothers is described as ‘dead and cold’ and as having ‘no movement and projection’.24
Though the superiority of pupil over master, new over old, was familiar enough in Renaissance discussions of art, the topos comes under a new kind of pressure in the Dialogo. If it had always served to highlight artistic progress, it also allowed for continuity in the transmission of the tradition, helping to map the wider pattern of artistic inheritance.25 In the more aggressively teleological language of the Dialogo this dual function is abandoned, the achievement of the pupil simply obliterating that of the master. That this shift away from the typical model of artistic genealogy occurs in an account that purports to define a wider Venetian artistic tradition is characteristic of the essential contradiction within Dolce’s text. The brusque dismissal of the paintings of Giovanni Bellini in favour of those of his pupil is especially noteworthy. Prior to the publication of the Dialogo, as we saw in chapter One, Giovanni was widely considered as the Venice’s leading painter.26
Titian’s contemporaries and younger painters fare little better than the older generation. Giorgione offered just a ‘little tiny spark’ of talent and ended up hiding in his house for shame after the public praised Titian’s frescos on the side wall of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, thinking they were by him. Dolce works a variation on this story to exemplify Titian’s superiority to Sebastiano del Piombo, another Venetian pupil of Giovanni Bellini. As he walked through the stanze in the Vatican with Sebastiano, we are told, Titian commented that the restorations to certain of the damaged heads in Raphael’s frescos were the work of a ‘presumptuous and ignorant fellow’ without realizing that they were the work of his interlocutor. The paintings of Pordenone, Dolce goes on to note, were much praised but always remained ‘at a great distance’ from Titian’s perfection, while Jacopo Tintoretto is probably the unnamed painter repeatedly castigated in his text for greed and lack of propriety.27 Given all this, the sense that the Dialogo wields a two-edged sword in its account of Venetian painting is hard to avoid. An apparent defence of the local tradition is simultaneous with repeated attacks on its leading representatives. Even when the key commitment to colore is at stake, the argument in its favour is made through a criticism of a Venetian painter. This time, the victim is Lorenzo Lotto, whose ‘pernicious tones’ are contrasted with the perfect colouring of Titian.28
These specific attacks are supported by frequent lamentations on the poor state of painting in Venice more generally, and by assertions of Titian’s centrality and predominance in the artistic culture of the city. ‘Few paintings in Venice’, we learn, can move the spectator, ‘leaving aside those of Titian’, and it would have been better if he alone had completed all the paintings in the main state room of the Doge’s Palace.29 Despite its new subject-matter the Dialogo is a conventional kind of text and makes its arguments through well-worn literary tropes and rhetorical devices. It proceeds through the use of the simple binary oppositions and antinomies that were the stock-in-trade of humanist writing of the sixteenth century. Its chief model was Vasari’s Lives, in particular the crowning biographies of Michelangelo and Raphael. Vasari had depicted the career of Michelangelo in terms of divine wrath: drawing on models familiar from Judaeo-Christian theology, Michelangelo’s works were framed as being violent, supernatural interventions against the weak and error-strewn ways of the wider community of artists. When Dolce describes Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin (illus. 50) as a ‘miracle’ and lays emphasis on its disruptive effect on other Venetian artists, he has Vasari’s Michelangelo in mind.30 Yet Vasari also offset or balanced this interventionist model by including a ‘Life of Raphael’, in which the socially accommodating and respectful value of cortesia (courtesy) predominates. Dolce, alert to this ploy, also interweaves an answering narrative into his Dialogo, making his ‘Titian’ combine the two leading Vasarian identities. Titian’s character is amicable and ‘courteous’ like Raphael, even if his works overturn the existing order like those of Michelangelo. Titian’s artistic radicalism is set against a repeated emphasis on his refined manners and high social connections.31 Titian becomes the carrier of the wider propagandistic argument for the elevation of painting within society on the courtly model; he is shown to embody the ‘dignità della pittura’ and its distinction from an ‘arte mecanica’, the artist’s high monetary rewards justly reflecting this intellectual distinction in economic terms.32
The dual aspects of the Titian identity allow Dolce to make the case for his subject’s ultimate superiority to Vasari’s Tuscan heroes, and to thus fulfil the propagandizing aim of his publication. But it is worth reiterating that the kind of courtly individualism Dolce promotes in the figure of Titian does not reflect Venetian cultural values. The elevation of art as an intellectual and courtly activity may be a familiar enough theme in Central Italian art theory from Leon Battista Alberti onward. But such aspirations did not conform to the traditional evaluation of visual artists in Venice itself.33
Recognition of the literary conventions and debts underpinning the ideal image of Titian presented in the Dialogo does not reduce its importance as a revealing historical document. The potent combination of artistic freedom and social elevation attributed to Titian in the text does not radically misrepresent the key motivations and aspirations that governed his artistic practice and identity. The likelihood that Titian himself played an active role in its formulation only increases the need to recognize the Dialogo as a product of the artist’s immediate circle in Venice. As we have seen, many other forms of historical evidence (not least the paintings themselves) indicate that the tropes Dolce employed effectively encapsulate key aspects of Titian’s artistic practice. Titian’s jealous or appropriative attitude to the work of other Venetian artists, whether teachers or followers; his self-identification as guardian and personification of the entire Venetian tradition; his deep engagement with the distinctly non-Venetian aspirational culture of the European courts: all are coherent with the main themes of Dolce’s text. But although this pioneering written account has naturally provided a model for many later writers on Titian, its heroic narrative of justified artistic domination clearly cannot be taken at face value. Its seamless story of artistic supremacy raises more questions than it answers. The identification of Titian as the central figure in an ongoing and unified Venetian tradition based on colour in the late 1550s probably owed more to rhetorical strategy than to historical reality. It ignored or concealed the antagonistic relationship between Titian and local painters – though as we have just noted these readily re-emerge as literary aporia at the margins of the text. The historical timing of Dolce’s literary intervention suggests that it is best understood as another aspect of the painter’s attempt to mould his image for the wider public.
In 1537, just four years after he was ennobled by Charles V, Titian was featured in a medal by Leone Leoni, a commission presumably arranged by Pietro Aretino, a relative and protector of the young sculptor during his stay in Venice (illus. 124).34 The earliest known image of Titian occurs in a visual type with very pronounced all’antica associations. Shown in the profile view that he was to return to in a famous late self-portrait (illus. 129), Titian is individualized insofar as he is already shown with the aquiline nose, high forehead and skullcap that were to become familiar in later depictions. And on the reverse, the Bacchante and amoretto may even reference his famous Bacchanals in Ferrara: the woman, in particular, has certain features in common with the heroine in Bacchus and Ariadne (illus. 44). But the distancing profile view on the verso sacrifices exploration of personality or psychology to the assertion of status.
Titian was not the first artist in Venice to have himself depicted in this format: both Gentile and Giovanni Bellini had medals struck, a clear indication of the rising profile of leading painters in the city. Giovanni’s medal, however, shows the painter in the manner of a public civil servant rather than as an aristocratic intellectual (illus. 125).35 As in the related Belliniano drawing (illus. 7), Giovanni’s hat is pulled down firmly over his forehead and he sports the stola often worn by Venetian citizens. The border legend identifies him as ‘Ioannes Bellinus Venet Pictor’ (‘Giovanni Bellini, Venetian Painter’). This contrasts with the legend on Titian’s medal, reading ‘Titianus Pictor et Eques C’ (‘Titian, Painter and Imperial Knight’) with reference to his recent elevation to noble status by the emperor.36 If Giovanni’s public persona was defined by his place within the Venetian hierarchy, Titian’s was owed to his royal Habsburg patron Charles, and the details of his appearance and dress confirm his very different and non-local identity as an independent artistic creator.
125 Camelio (Vittore di Antonio Gambello), Portrait Medal of Giovanni Bellini, c. 1506. British Museum, London.
If Leoni’s medal offers a contrast to the corporate republican identity promoted by the Bellinis, then it is equally distinct from the more personal or psychological approach to self-imagery in Venice introduced by Giorgione in his lost Self-portrait as David (illus. 126).37 Giorgione’s characteristically ambiguous and allegorizing identification with a sacred figure, probably chosen to symbolize his own artistic tussle with the ‘Goliath’ of nature, is replaced in Titian’s oeuvre by a tellingly contained and worldly image of the painter that is always more socially ambitious and self-assertive. Titian abandons Giorgione’s disguise as an Old Testament figure even as he distances himself from the specifics of the Venetian social hierarchy. In these works it is his readiness to lay aside fashionable notions of the divino artista in favour of a more secular and contemporary identity that is most striking.38 Over the course of the 1540s, images of Titian proliferated, constructing a durable public image for the painter that did not depart radically from the basic terms established in Leoni’s medal. The painter appears in the manner of a courtly aristocrat with insistent reference to his status as an imperial knight. Pastorino de’ Pastorini’s medal, cast in Rome in 1546, adds little to Leoni’s, but by this point Titian had apparently already painted a self-portrait to preserve his memory for his two sons. A woodcut of 1550 records another lost self-portrait, which may be similar to one he gave to Charles V in March of that year (illus. 127).39
Giovanni Britto’s print opens up our view of the artist beyond the limiting commemorative profile of the earlier medals, imbuing him with intellectual power and vision. The cap set well back on the head reveals even more clearly the broad expanse of Titian’s high forehead, suggesting the predominance of his mind in the manner of contemporary images of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle.40 His penetrating gaze towards an object or person that the viewer cannot see signifying his superior inward vision, and perhaps too his ability to look beyond the mere surfaces or motifs given in nature. At the same time, the expensive furs that drape his shoulders indicate the other side of his identity introduced in Leoni’s medal. Titian, the new Apelles to Charles’s Alexander, sports the double chain the emperor gave him on his elevation to noble rank in 1533.41 There may be some intended ambiguity over Titian’s precise activity in the portrait, given that he works on a small tablet with a pen or stile rather than a brush. Though it is highly unlikely that he is shown writing, he appears to draw rather than paint, as if to answer the recent comment by Michelangelo, reported by Vasari, that he did not practice the art of disegno sufficiently. This would be in keeping with the visual emphasis given to Titian’s mental capacities, noted above.42 A similar kind of equivocation is evident in other images of Titian, as if the easy coalescence of ‘Eques’ with ‘Pictor’ first announced in Leoni’s medal was proving difficult to accommodate.
126 Wenceslaus Hollar after a lost self-portrait by Giorgione.
In many sixteenth-century depictions of Titian there is, in fact, either no direct reference to Titian as a painter, or this is visually marginalized or presented euphemistically. There is nothing, for example, in the influential Self-portrait in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, to indicate that Titian is a painter (illus. 128). In the much later Self-portrait in the Museo del Prado, the artist holds a small thin pen, a kind of residue attribute of his craft that is easily missed at the bottom left of the image (illus. 129).43 Francisco Vargas was perhaps only half exaggerating when he claimed that Titian used ‘paint brushes resembling brooms’ in his late style.44 But in the Madrid self-portrait any such reference to the old master’s extravagant manipulation of paint is carefully avoided. The necessary effects of the profession are made small compared to the man, whose brooding presence predominates over means and materials. As the ‘Pictor’ joins the social elite in the privileged space of aristocratic portraiture, so the actualities of his manual activity must be downplayed or made secondary.
127 Giovanni Britto, woodcut after a lost self-portrait by Titian of 1550.
Titian’s identity as a painter is sometimes also indicated by his being shown holding a portrait (illus. 131, 132).45 But even here explicit reference to Titian’s physical involvement in the act of painting is avoided. The need for such visual self-concealments or erasures reveals the ongoing tension between his public persona and his workshop activity, between the imperial knight and the manual worker. Even in the self-portraits proper, where the focus is more directly on the artist himself, exploration of ‘personality’ is less apparent than might have been expected. In the Berlin painting Titian already possesses the authority of age, but there is no indication of a falling off in his powers, a point made in physical terms by the bear-like energy of his body. The turning movement of the head against the torso reflects the impact of Michelangelo’s Moses (illus. 93), the monumental sculpture which Titian referenced in a number of other portraits from the mid- and later 1540s (illus. 86, 92).46 But there is also an aristocratic reserve which expresses high position, a dignitas that transcends the merely physical and is not simply an attribute of age. The clothing is expensive (furs and silks) and makes no reference to the patrician or cittadino toga and stola so often adopted by Venetian Renaissance artists in their self-portraiture.47
128 Titian, Self-portrait, c. 1550. Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
129 Titian, Self-portrait, c. 1562. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Titian’s self-imagery represents a clear departure from the traditional model for the painter in Venice, and was developed in response to his international courtly profile. Inadvertently, however, his self-portraits reveal a fundamental division between social reality and professional aspiration, given that Titian ran a Venetian family-style business in this very period. Titian worked with his hands (in his late style, quite literally on occasion) to manufacture paintings for sale, and to this extent his praxis contradicted the elevated aristocratic identity proposed in these works. On the other hand, these tensions or anomalies, and the kind of self-fashioning they reveal, were by no means unusual in the period. We must take it that the portraits of him functioned as a very useful promotional gambit within what has been described as ‘a self-marketing strategy on a European scale’.48
Many sixteenth-century depictions of Titian were sent to the Habsburg court: they were clearly intended to remind his geographically distant patrons of his continuing loyalty and service. A number were more directly stimulated by thoughts of succession or heredity in that patronal context. Following the vital meeting with Prince Philip in Augsburg in 1550, for example, Titian sent a picture of himself holding a small portrait of the prince.49 He subsequently adapted this idea to suggest a parallel connection between himself and his son Orazio in the context of continued service to Philip. But from the outset, Titian also envisaged a wider and more varied audience for his public image: the medals of Leoni and Pastorini, created in Venice and Rome respectively, were not directly motivated by the Habsburg connection and were reproductive in kind. Images initially created for Charles or Philip could also serve as models for wider dissemination. The Britto woodcut, probably based on a lost work for Charles, was undoubtedly sold as a commercial reproduction to all-comers and has its context in Titian’s wider exploitation of the print medium to further his career.50 The Berlin Self-portrait, on the other hand, appears to have been retained in Titian’s studio at Biri Grande: it may even be a loosely worked ricordo of another, more finished painting that provided the model for engravings of Titian by Lambert Suavius III and Agostino Carracci.51
Although the roles of ‘painter’ and ‘knight’ predominate in the sixteenth-century imagery of Titian, there is another aspect of his emergent identity which needs to be noted. In a number of works dating from the final decades of his life, Titian depicted himself as a pious donor in religious paintings. This was another aspect of the identification with patrons rather than artists mentioned earlier, one that assumes a new equivalence between the fields of production and consumption and that collapses, to some degree, the traditional social and economic distinction between artist and patron.52 Insofar as his self-portraits were self-generated, Titian was indeed their ‘donor’, so this kind of elision was apposite enough. In a late workshop painting the old Titian kneels before the Virgin surrounded by his wider family in a manner that recalls the traditional iconography of the Madonna of Mercy (Misericordia) (illus. 130).53 The painting also draws on the severe hieratic conception of the Madrid Self-portrait of 1562.54 In this late self-portrait Titian shows himself as less worldly and expansive than in the Berlin painting: as closed off from our apprehension in the manner of a commemorative image of the already-dead. Though the connection with the profile views featured in the earlier all’antica medals has often been made, the otherworldly quality of this self-image also reflects Titian’s gradual withdrawal from the wider world, one that also finds expression in the Madonna della Misericordia with the Family of Titian, with its emphasis on familial values and personal piety rather than an individualizing display of high professional or social status. The Madrid painting does not seem to have been made with the Habsburg court in mind and unsurprisingly was much less favoured as a public image of Titian than the earlier Berlin painting.
130 Workshop of Titian, Madonna della Misericordia with the Family of Titian, c. 1573. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. |
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It may be significant that Titian was not trained in the workshop of his father, Gregorio. We can only speculate whether the geographical and professional distance that opened up so quickly between the father (a timber merchant and supervisor of local mines in the region of Cadore) and the son he sent to Venice at the age of ten or eleven was an important factor in Titian’s subsequent progressive individualism. Whatever the case, it is clear that Titian, superficially at least, modelled his artistic practice on the established idea of the Venetian family-based workshop. Non-relatives such as Paris Bordone, Girolamo Dente and (perhaps) Domenico Campagnola were Titian’s pupils and assistants at a relatively early point in his career.55 But increasingly it was family members, such as his brother Francesco and younger cousins Cesare and Marco, who came to have a significant role in the Titian workshop in Venice. As Titian grew old, it was a much closer relation, his second son Orazio, who emerged as the master’s preferred successor.56 This is evident in the imagery of the Madonna della Misericordia as well as in the small ex-voto included at the lower right of the Pietà, in which Orazio is ‘privileged’ by his position at the shoulder of his father and closely mirrors his clothing and pious expression (illus. 161). But Titian had already gone to some lengths to promote the idea that Orazio was to be the main inheritor of the Vecellio workshop. Petitions to the Venetian state over Orazio’s inheritance of the sansaria were combined with appeals to the Spanish court with a similar kind of succession in mind.57 Almost inevitably, Titian also used the medium of portraiture to make his case.
In two related works from around 1560, probably made under the master’s close supervision, Titian is shown grasping a small portrait of Orazio lovingly in his hands (illus. 131, 132). The imagery neatly asserts the father’s responsibility for his son. Titian, we are to understand, was responsible for the ‘making’ of both Orazio himself and his artistic image.58 But, as with many other self-portraits and portraits of Titian from the period, this imagery of paternal heredity is made dependent on a third party: in all likelihood Philip II himself. As usual, Titian is shown sporting his double chain, the sign of his ennoblement in 1533 by Philip’s father. And both the medal and medallion were probably modelled on the lost self-portrait by Titian, sent to Spain in 1552–3 showing the painter holding a portrait of Philip.59 If this original self-image was intended to secure the smooth transfer of Titian’s patronage from the father, Charles V, to his son Philip, then the adaptation of the type in the works shown here might have served a similar function, presenting to his Habsburg patrons the suitability of Orazio as Titian’s replacement at the Spanish court.
The medallion in particular was a precious and highly wrought work, made of coloured wax enriched with gold, seed pearls, diamond and chalcedony glass. The expensive media confirms the very special quality of those depicted, but the type of succession indicated in the image has very little to do with the ordinary Venetian-style handover between father and son in the workshop. Titian’s evident concern to secure the continuation of the Vecellio shop beyond his own death in the hands of his painter-son may appear to follow the age-old pattern of Venice. But the tacit appeal in these works was very different in kind, envisaged as an aristocratic inheritance of court patronage rather than an artisan-style transfer of the business. Titian petitions his master at a royal court to guarantee the conveyance of the many personalized privileges he had long enjoyed to his son, offering an image of himself as a kind of guarantor of his heir’s quality. He sends expensively crafted objects – perhaps as gifts – in support of his case, and pointedly employs the elevating medium of portraiture (in the production of which, of course, he had long excelled for the Habsburgs) to promote his cause. The kind of imagery Titian utilizes suggests that the succession to Orazio will be analogous to the inheritance of royal favour and privileges from one generation to another within a noble lineage of courtiers. As is typical in the self-imagery of Titian, the two Vecelli are not shown as painters: neither wields a brush. While Titian’s intellectual quality is implied by his high forehead, the young Orazio, whose youth may be exaggerated, is shown sporting a Spanish-style lace ruff and gold-braided jacket, indicating his identity as a young courtier. Orazio could, in fact, legitimately claim such a status, given that the patent of nobility awarded to Titian in 1533 conferred the rank of Noble of the Empire on his sons. Titian, in any case, had always had in mind some such elevated social identity for Orazio and his older brother Pomponio, whose very names imply an association with courtly Rome rather than Republican Venice. In a letter of 1534, Titian had expressed his fervent hope that ‘with the grace of God and of my patrons [Pomponio and Orazio] … will become proper gentlemen’.60
131 Portrait Medallion of Titian and his Son Orazio, c. 1560, ornamented coloured wax. National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh.
132 Agostino Ardenti (attrib.), Portrait Medal of Titian and his Son Orazio, c. 1560. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.
In the early 1570s Titian produced his so-called Allegory of Prudence, a work that documents more fully again his growing desire for artistic continuity based on an ideal of family and workshop succession (illus. 133).61 Despite recent doubts, it is likely that Erwin Panofsky’s suggestion that the Allegory features portraits of Titian, Orazio and (more speculatively) Marco, as the three generations of the Vecellio workshop, is correct.62 The family is shown here as subject to the passing of time – the imagery clearly picks up again the ‘Three Ages of Man’ theme that Titian had visualized in his early career (illus. 20) – but also as closely united by the ties of blood and by their common commitment to the aristocratic virtue of prudence (the latter made explicit by the superscription above the heads, reading ‘learning from yesterday, today acts prudently, lest by his action he spoil tomorrow’).63 Given this theme of family and professional unity, it is possible that the painting was (like the medallion) intended originally for the Habsburg court in Madrid, although it was never sent to Spain. Orazio, as we have seen, was central to Titian’s thinking about his successor in this period, and in the Allegory of Prudence he is accordingly given visual and thematic predominance as the man of ‘today’. His heavy, jowly head is depicted particularly powerfully, even if his haunted expression (in careful contrast to that of the innocent young man on the right) suggests his awareness of the depredations of time.64
Although it also expresses more universal ideas, the Allegory has its context in Titian’s wider promotion of his painter-son as the rightful successor to his artistic practice, an argument that, as we have seen, he pursued vigorously in petitions to his major patrons at home and abroad. But in order to arrive at this ideal image of shared family values and workshop continuity, Titian had to greatly manipulate the biological and historical facts. Marco (1545–c. 1611) was not, as the genealogical progression envisaged in the Allegory seems to imply, Orazio’s son, but rather a distant second cousin who had arrived from Cadore around 1560 and probably only played an active role in the workshop in the final decade of Titian’s life.65 And while the very loose brushwork in the figure of the past (or ‘yesterday’) hauntingly suggests Titian’s readiness to move over in favour of the younger generations of his family, the evidence suggests that he remained all-dominant in these final years.
In recent years studies have attempted to revive the critical reputation of Orazio, and have laid emphasis in particular on his undoubtedly crucial role as his father’s workshop manager.66 But any attempt to build an impressive pictorial oeuvre for Titian’s favoured son is doomed to failure, given that only a handful of paintings can convincingly be attributed to him, and that these are of strikingly mediocre quality.67 It is, in fact, the extent of the contrast between Titian’s own late work and that of his son that is most telling – one that was amply apparent to contemporaries, whatever Titian himself may have believed. El Greco roundly mocked Vasari’s mistaken attribution of Orazio’s history painting for the Ducal Palace showing The Battle of Castel Sant’Angelo (lost, 1563) to Titian himself, noting its very poor quality.68 A similar perception may have underlain the Senate’s refusal of Titian’s petition on behalf of his son for more money for this work. A few years later, in 1569, the authorities in Brescia insisted on paying a lower sum than had been asked for the three (lost) ceiling paintings Orazio had completed for its town hall, noting that they were not by Titian himself and therefore of less value.69 On the other hand, Titian went to great lengths to promote his son’s work: the small Crucifixion (illus. 134), sent to Philip II in September 1559, was apparently produced as part of the ongoing attempt to secure Orazio’s inheritance of his position at the Habsburg court that underpinned the production of images such as Ardenti’s medal, the wax medallion and perhaps the Allegory of Prudence. A letter from Titian explains that Orazio had painted it for the king as ‘a small testimony of his great desire to imitate his father, serve and create pleasing things’.70 But as early as 1574, at El Escorial, the little painting was attributed to Titian himself, suggesting that the attribution in the old painter’s covering letter was not believed at court. It seems likely that Titian helped in the final execution of the work in order to massage his son’s pictorial curriculum vitae. There is a telltale mixture of spatial uncertainty and a lack of convincing movement in the depiction of the three blood-collecting angels; but at the same time the work has been supplied with an overall painterly handling that adds a certain visual fluency to the composition, which may betray Titian’s intervention to make Orazio’s promotional painting more coherent with his own contemporary works for Philip.71
133 Titian, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1570. National Gallery, London.
The painting Titian sent to Philip as evidence of his son’s great talent is interesting as a kind of deliberate mock-up of Titian’s late style, which can also be found in certain workshop copies of the master’s later works.72 But it has precious little in common with the static and recherché works that Orazio and other pupils, such as Marco and Cesare Vecellio, typically produced for provincial patrons of the Veneto in subsequent years. The determinedly retrospective quality of many of these paintings is indicative not only of a pragmatic concern to meet the conservative tastes of parochial patrons, but also of the defensive retreat of those closest to Titian from the individualism of the master’s late style. Orazio’s paintings for San Biagio church in Calalzo di Cadore (1566), or for Santa Maria Assunta in Fregona (c. 1575–6, illus. 135), for example, make very little reference to his father’s contemporary paintings, appearing rather as ultra-orthodox works in a broadly Titianesque manner, quoting directly from famous compositions of the 1520s and ’30s.73 And the same is true of the paintings by other members of the workshop dating from after Titian’s death: Marco Vecellio, for example, continued in this vein beyond the turn of the century.74 His paintings share a similarly flaccid handling and static presentation with those of Orazio, contradicting the formal dynamism and technical freedom of the original models to create a highly conventional smoothness of surface that makes the figures appear inert (illus. 136). Indeed, it is the very lack of artistic ambition in these works – the extent of their retreat or isolation from Titian’s own remarkable creative present in the 1560s and ’70s – that is most revealing. The pupils’ pallid, timorous style can be seen as the negative imprint of the ultra-progressive master they served. In marked contrast to the dynamic, self-confident workshop Giovanni Bellini organized in his late period – one that harboured semi-independent and ‘progressive’ artistic personalities, with their own nascent creative ideas – Titian’s was beset by a radical insecurity that led its members back to the visual clichés of an earlier time.
134 Orazio Vecellio and Titian(?), Cruifixion, 1559. Monastery of S. Lorenzo, El Escorial.
Neither Orazio nor other workshop pupils could follow Titian’s increasingly unique approach to painting, not least because the old master failed to pass on the basics of drawing, which had never been integral to his artistic process and had become less significant still in his spontaneous late style. We have noted that patrons quickly spotted the qualitative difference between father and son, and were unhappy with receiving works by Orazio under Titian’s name, insisting on something done by the older painter alone. Titian did manage to get a part of his Habsburg pension transferred to Orazio in 1571, but this did not mean that his son was guaranteed to succeed to his position at court, and it is clear that, as a painter at least, the heir was never quite the substantial man-of-the-present envisaged in the Allegory of Prudence.75 The idea expressed therein that Marco was a promising ‘young dog’ of the third Vecellio generation was also something of a pipe dream, as feeble works such as his altarpiece for the church at Nebbiù indicate (illus. 136). In the event, Orazio died of the plague in 1576, shortly after his father. And while Marco completed a few of Titian’s paintings, self-consciously signing them ‘di Tiziano’, he quickly revealed his artistic mediocrity.76 As we saw in the Introduction, the workshop at Biri Grande came to an abrupt and grim end, among thievery and family infighting, such that it is fair to say that the workshop did not survive its creator’s death.
135 Orazio Vecellio, SS. John the Baptist, Catherine and Lucy, 1575–6. S. Maria Assunta, Fregona.
136 Marco Vecellio, SS. Anthony Abbot, Lucy and Mary Magdalene, 1584. S. Bartolomeo Apostolo, Nebbiù.
This rapid end contrasts poignantly with the aged Titian’s dreams of succession and continuity through the family line, secured by the sustained royal patronage of the Habsburgs. But the failure of Titian’s workshop was in part a product of his own success as an individualistic artist. The very extent of Titian’s authority, his final predominance over younger painters in his immediate circle, contributed to their inability to outgrow or survive their artistic father in a creative sense. In the period when Titian sought to secure family succession, his painting style and technique became largely unteachable, a free pictorial experiment that could not be readily learned or translated. Though Titian’s late mode intimated a connection with earlier Venetian painting through its focus on colorito, it also involved a further reduction in the importance of drawing, the fundamental skill that pupil learned from master in the Renaissance tradition. It seems likely that Titian did not regularly teach drawing, either to Orazio or his other young followers, and this omission undermined the possibility of the continuation of his style beyond his death.77
It is no accident that the younger generation’s relation to Titian was typically expressed in the malleable representational domain of painting itself, and that their putative association with him typically contradicted the historical facts. Their anxious attachment was shaped through fictionalized relationships and identities, rather than the concrete realities of instruction in his workshop. This new kind of identification with Titian reflects a point of wider transformation in art history in which the traditional basis of visual practice in the oral culture of the local workshop gave way to written taxonomic narratives of style with a newly international dimension and audience. In the second half of the sixteenth century, literary definitions and concepts began to permeate workshop practice with increasing intensity, in Venice and elsewhere, generating a new sense of the significance of geographically based ‘schools’ and traditions, as also of the central role given to certain named artists in defining these entities. Artists in this period began to understand themselves in relation to a wider world of art history beyond their immediate circle or contacts, and to interpret their activity in relation to pre-established verbal categories and values that were attached to specific artists. Within this newly abstract world of artistic identities and putative associations, the key relationship between father and son that had long sustained workshop culture remained important. But it now functioned in an abstracted sense, bypassing biological fact.
The topos was repeatedly adopted by members of the younger generation of artists in Venice in relation to the monumentalized figure of Titian. His pupil Giovanni Mario Verdizzotti apparently ‘loved and cherished him as a father’, and this kind of paternalistic identification was not confined to the Titian workshop alone. Ridolfi noted that Paolo Veronese considered Titian ‘the father of art’ itself.78 In his Marriage at Cana, painted for the monastic refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore, Veronese showed himself alongside Titian as a musician at the feast (illus. 137, 138). Garbed in lavish clothing that references their contrasting palettes, the two painters are shown creating music together. Veronese’s viola da gamba combines harmoniously with Titian’s double bass, just as his cool silvery and yellow draperies resonate with the older master’s vivid reds and scarlet.79 This visual conceit, based on a flattering but commonplace analogy between painting and music, neatly expressed the idea that Veronese was Titian’s true artistic son and heir. This notion may have seemed especially justified given that Titian had recently awarded Veronese victory (in the form of a gold chain) in a high profile artistic competition between aspirant young painters, held in the new Marciana library designed by Jacopo Sansovino.80
Veronese was, in reality, the son and grandson of lowly stonecutters, and had been trained by two minor painters in Verona (Antonio Badile IV and Giovanni Caroto) before moving to Venice around 1550. He was evidently painfully aware of the minimal social and professional status ascribed to him as a low-born provincial painter in his adoptive city. A few years before painting the Marriage he had changed his surname from Spezapreda (stonecutter) to Caliari, the name of a well-known aristocratic family of Verona. This allowed him to identify himself with his high-ranking patrons in a manner that Titian, who frequently made this kind of identification in his self-portraits, would certainly have approved.81 Veronese’s self-representation in the San Giorgio painting, draped in expensive silks and satins, carefully concealed his stonecutter background, even if the depiction of the painters as entertainers rather than diners at an aristocratic feast also accommodates the social deference required by his distinguished patrons. At the same time, Veronese’s place alongside Titian asserts his role as rightful heir to the Venetian artistic tradition.
Veronese was not Titian’s pupil, nor was he, as we have seen, the main focus of the old master’s current ideas regarding a successor to his position. A similar disjunction between image and reality is evident in a work by the young immigrant El Greco, or Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who arrived in the city from Crete in 1567 as a fully matriculated icon painter. In his The Purification of the Temple, which may date from shortly after the end of his Venetian period (1567–70), El Greco situates a group of artist portraits in miniature to the lower right, the place where one might expect to find a signature (illus. 139, 140).82 In a sense the little figures do indeed fulfil this ‘signature’ function, for they refer the viewer back to the supposed sources of the painter’s artistic formation. At the same time, the young El Greco expresses through these portraits the kind of self-conscious reference to personifications of ‘tradition’ that was common to his generation.83 Standing as guarantors of El Greco’s credentials as a modern painter in the Italian tradition are Titian, in an image based on the Berlin self-portrait (illus. 128), and just to the right, though in a notably less prominent position, Michelangelo. And next to him, the Croatian miniaturist painter Giulio Clovio, who El Greco also depicted in a near-contemporary portrait and who was an especially important supporter in this period. The young figure on the far right who completes the quartet is usually identified as Raphael; if it is indeed him, this would mean El Greco had wholly excised himself in deference to the older generation. It is more likely to be a self-portrait, the aspirant young artist showing himself in more assertive fashion as heir elect to the two traditions of sixteenth-century Italian art (Florentine and Venetian) embodied in the figures of the aged artists on the left. The raised right hand that appears to point him out, whether taken as belonging to his supporter Clovio or to El Greco himself, further emphasizes the idea of rightful artistic succession from old to young.
Just as Veronese’s self-portrait in the Marriage at Cana suppressed his socially humble, non-Venetian origins, so El Greco’s painting conceals his training in a traditional, Byzantine-orientated Cretan workshop. And just as Veronese attaches himself to the figure of Titian, understood as the personification of the Venetian tradition of painting, so El Greco places his self-image alongside that of the old master to suggest his role as artistic heir apparent. The inclusion of Michelangelo, however, may reveal the precocious young painter’s knowledge of recent art theory, which proclaimed that if the design of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian were joined together in one artist, perfection would ensue.84 More concretely, the combination may reflect El Greco’s imminent departure for Rome, where Michelangelo held sway over Titian. Whatever the case, it is certainly significant that when Giulio Clovio wrote a letter in support of El Greco’s move, he backed the suggestion made in The Purification by asserting that El Greco was ‘a disciple of Titian’. His commendation was particularly well calculated given that the recipient of his letter, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome, was himself a long-standing supporter and patron of Titian.85
It is apparent from the style and technique of paintings such as The Purification of the Temple that El Greco was singularly unable to emulate Titian’s difficult late style, and that probably he knew very little about it. El Greco’s Venetian manner is instead broadly reminiscent of that of artists of the younger generation, particularly Jacopo Tintoretto, and he is very unlikely ever to have been Titian’s pupil.86 The same is true of the paintings of another supposed Titian pupil in this period, Palma Giovane, whose testimony regarding the elder master’s late style reported by Boschini is often taken as evidence that he was a member of the workshop.87 Palma owned Titian’s Pietà and, as mentioned earlier, wrote a prominent inscription on it, proclaiming that Palma ‘reverently completed what Titian had begun’. But recent scholarship has radically reduced Palma’s role in the completion of the painting, indicating that he merely acquired the work after Titian’s death, and then added the flying angel and propagandizing inscription implying his natural succession to the exalted role of leader in Venetian painting. That Palma actively manipulated the past in order to link himself to Titian is also clear from the monument he erected in Santi Giovanni e Paolo in the 1620s, discussed in my Introduction (illus. 5).88 In this work, which perhaps reprises the genealogical patterning of artists across three generations in the Allegory of Prudence, Palma is shown as the final link in a chain extending back to the early sixteenth century. Debts to family are certainly indicated by the inclusion of Palma Vecchio, a relation of the younger Palma. But these readily give way to those owed to the father figure of Titian.
The careful placement of the three portrait busts, with Titian elevated in the centre, suggests this final triumph of artistic over biological genealogy: while Jacopo appears as Palma Vecchio’s relative – perhaps even as his son – both are shown as pupils of Titian and thus as more deeply indebted to him for their artistic achievements. The chronological lineage suggested in the monument is, however, largely fantasy, given that Palma Vecchio was Jacopo’s great-uncle rather than father, and was a near-contemporary of Titian, who had died twenty years before Palma Giovane was born. Palma’s true biological father and artistic master was, in fact, the obscure Antonio Palma, who had precious little to do with Titian. Palma Giovane had, in fact, left Venice at around the age of sixteen to become a court painter at Pesaro under Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. It may be that he attempted to cultivate a connection with Titian following his return to Venice around 1570, but modern scholarship suggests that he was not part of the inner quorum of pupils in the workshop in this period, identifying Palma as, at best, either a follower or a member of Titian’s wider circle.89
137 Paolo Veronese, The Marriage at Cana, 1562–3. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Palma’s monument gives due notice of the way in which biological and artistic identities became newly susceptible to manipulation by the earlier seventeenth century. Its imagery is also a measure of how a putative connection with Titian could be used to legitimate present identity and practice. While some vestigial reference to biological forbears was still seen as important, these could be carefully preselected, such that the father–son relationship that had previously sustained the transmission of painting practice between the generations was excised from the image altogether. Familial relationship was now considered more superficial than the debt owed to the supreme artistic father figure of Titian. The strategy of self-depiction in close proximity to an image of Titian is common to the works by Veronese, El Greco and Palma Giovane discussed above. Alessandro Varotari, known as Il Padovanino, developed this approach in his Self-portrait of around 1625–30, showing himself alongside a Titian now fittingly monumentalized through his transformation into a finished work of art in the shape of a sculptural bust, and perhaps also conflated with his natural father (illus. 141).90 A further variation of this approach is evident in works such as Leandro Bassano’s posthumous portrait of his father Jacopo, whose appearance is modelled on that of Titian in his late self-portraits (illus. 128, 129, 142).
138 Detail of The Marriage at Cana.
139 El Greco, The Purification of the Temple, c. 1570–71. Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
The imagery of artistic fatherhood was essentially new in Venetian art, and it is no accident that its sudden popularity coincides, chronologically speaking, with the incipient failure of the artistic tradition that it represents as ongoing. It emerged at the very point when Titian’s dominance, in both a professional and artistic sense, reached its apogee. But his unprecedented rise had disrupted the Venetian, republican ethos of painting based on features such as unquestioning service to the state; the equitable distribution of patronage and monetary rewards between the city’s workshops; the acceptance of a relatively humble social status within the city’s fixed social hierarchy; and the unquestioned commitment to the teaching of pupils in the workshop. Younger artists, both within and beyond the ambit of the Titian workshop, struggled to emulate or understand his late style, with its radical departure from the Renaissance tradition of preparatory drawing that had been well established in Venice by the middle decades of the fifteenth century.
It is to this extent an irony that Giovanni Britto’s polemical woodcut, showing Titian in the act of drawing, remained a popular source for later generations keen to show il grande vecchio as the epitome of the great tradition of Venetian Renaissance art (illus. 127, 143).91 But the production of images of artists suggesting the smooth transmission and succession between the generations was always a matter of projection, the fabrication of a tradition on the verge of disintegration. ‘Tradition’ in this troubled artistic context became a question of carefully composed artistic representation, a veritable work of art in its own right. Its formative capacity was both fictionalized and enlarged such that younger artists felt the burden of the past ever more keenly, and the associated need to prove their attachment to its main representative. By 1600, we might say, proper adherence to Venetian tradition was established not by specific blood relations, by training in a given workshop or even by affinities in artistic style and technique, but rather by the assertion or representation of an artistic allegiance. ‘Tradition’ itself, in this newly invented and projective world, functioned as a taxonomic or ideological referent; as already completed and monumentalized in the figure of Titian.92
140 Detail of The Purification of the Temple.
The reverse side of these idealizing projections was, perhaps inevitably, a less exalted view of Titian among the Venetian painters who sought to accommodate his individualistic artistic practice. As we have seen, suspicion of his pecuniary motives arose among the leading representatives of Venetian painting as early as 1513–14 regarding his pursuit of the sansaria at the Doge’s Palace. In Titian’s telling comment, it was the unwillingness of other leading painters – Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio chief among them – to see him as their concorrente, rival, that was the problem. Rivalry was, in fact, always central to Titian’s response to all other painters, and he seems to have had very problematic relations with any pupils who showed nascent signs of talent: Paris Bordone and Jacopo Tintoretto in particular are reported to have left his workshop in unhappy circumstances after only short periods of training.93 The slow start to Tintoretto’s career can, in part, be ascribed to the older master’s malign influence. Aretino, Dolce and other members of Titian’s inner circle at Venice at the mid-century quickly published criticisms of the younger master’s supposed ‘hastiness’, and also made patronizing comments regarding the overly ‘pious’ appeal of the works of the impoverished Lorenzo Lotto.94 Titian’s rivalrous attitude to Pordenone, the Friulian painter who arrived in Venice around 1530, is also notable in this regard, and may even have played a decisive role in encouraging him to finish the battle painting for the Doge’s Palace, which includes prominent quotations from his young competitor’s recent works.95 From early in his career, as we have seen, Titian finished works by painters such as Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Palma Vecchio, his appropriative alterations partially occluding the original inventions of these painters in favour of his own manner.
141 Alessandro Varotari (Il Padovanino), Self-portrait with a Bust of Titian(?), c. 1625–30. Museo Civico, Padua. |
The state documents discussed earlier in this chapter are typically implicit and conciliatory in their approach to Titian, and never close the door on further negotiations with him. But they nonetheless indicate that the patrician representatives of the Venetian Republic had a more or less consistent sense, over many decades, that Titian was embezzling money from them. Surprisingly, it was Aretino who first gave public voice to the idea that Titian was avaricious, in his letter of October 1545, mentioned earlier, to Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence. As we have also seen, Aretino’s equation of the non-finito of Titian’s brushwork with the desire for money was quickly transferred to members of the younger generation, such as Tintoretto and Schiavone. But the perception that the old master was particularly greedy did not disappear. Among the representatives of the high-ranking court patrons with whom he did business, it seems to have emerged as a kind of unwanted counter-identity for Titian, one that wholly contradicted the image of nonchalant courtly restraint and dignity of the self-portraits. ‘When it comes to money’, noted Giovanni Francesco Agatone in a letter of 1567 to the Duke of Urbino, ‘there is no more obstinate man in Venice than Tiziano Vecellio … and his son … certainly in terms of avarice is in no way inferior to his father.’ This, of course, was a double put-down: though Orazio could claim equality with Titian in terms of greediness, he certainly could not with a paintbrush.96
142 Leandro Bassano, Portrait of Jacopo Bassano, c. 1590. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
143 Pietro della Vecchia, Portrait of Titian, c. 1650–60. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Titian, it was noted, would ‘have himself skinned alive’ for money – a comment which seems particularly apt in relation to the painter’s late Flaying of Marsyas (illus. 122, 164) – while in a letter of 1568 the art dealer Nicolò Stoppio suggested that Titian regularly conned his patrons by selling off works by inferior pupils as his own, having finished them ‘with two strokes of his brush’.97 Double-dealing over the attribution of workshop replicas to Titian himself underlies Stoppio’s further satirical description of the painter and a rival dealer, Jacopo Strada, as ‘like two gluttons at the same dish’. Stoppio describes Titian stringing his patron along by delaying completion of the portrait he had promised him (illus. 144), while hoping to use his sitter’s contacts with the court of Emperor Maximilian II to pass off workshop copies of Philip’s poesie as autograph works.98 Titian, Stoppio tells us, considered Strada a fool, but there were undoubtedly certain analogies between the careers of the two men. Even if we lay aside Stoppio’s judgemental identification of Titian and Strada as a pair of avaricious gluttons, it is true enough that both were engaged in dealing in art for large financial gain in the late 1560s, and that the lucrative export of paintings from Venice to the wealthy Habsburg courts was their main line of business.
144 Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada, 1567–8. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. |
Given these similarities, it is interesting to note that Titian drew on certain aspects of his own self-portrait when conceiving his image of Strada. In both paintings the sitter is placed behind a table to the left and is shown in a dynamic posture with the head turned sharply away from the torso and arms.99 Other details also suggest Titian’s identification with Strada: as in the Berlin Self-portrait (illus. 128), the sitter sports a gold double chain – one that referenced their common dependence on the vast wealth of the Habsburgs, and their role in the provision of precious works of art to them. Stoppio noted that Titian had asked for ‘a sable lining for a cloak’ from Strada in return for his portrait: it may be this coveted item is identifiable with the extravagant fur that already appears to slide off the sitter’s right shoulder in the painting.
Titian’s identification with Strada must, however, have been a matter of unacknowledged sublimation, and it is likely that Titian also sought to distance himself from his sitter by the very act of taking his portrait. Commentators have understandably been loath to see the portrait of Jacopo Strada as referring to Stoppio’s or Titian’s negative judgement of Strada, given that it was commissioned work. But there may nonetheless be an alternative reading available: a critical subtext that runs alongside, even if it does not undermine, the usual flattery of the sitter in a Titian portrait. The statuette of Venus that Strada grasps was a precious antique, and the coins on the desk below it must refer to his recent publication of a book on consular coins.100 But this area of the painting also suggests a less-than-ideal exchange of salacious erotic works for money. The recent ‘ideal’ reading of the portrait ignores Titian’s careful depiction of Strada’s cunning and suspicious physiognomy. Even if we accept that Titian sought to maintain his usual deferential stance towards his sitter, it may be that he found this difficult, and that he simultaneously sought to comment on Strada by including more negative indications of his character and activity as an avaricious art dealer.
In the years following Titian’s death in 1576, Jacopo Bassano and his sons included a richly satirical image of the painter as chief moneychanger in The Purification of the Temple (illus. 145, 146).101 Instead of the dignified gentleman-artist featured in Titian’s self-portraiture, the elderly master now appears as a frightened, money-grabbing merchant in retreat; his depiction in this guise cannot help but recall the less-than-sympathetic view of the avaricious old artist in the words of contemporary patrons and their agents. It is worth considering Bassano’s pictorial sources in a little more detail, in order to draw out the satirical bite of this anti-image of Titian. The depiction draws primarily on Titian’s Berlin Self-portrait, which had probably remained in the studio at Biri Grande until the painter’s death and which Bassano must have seen there.102 Bassano’s moneylender Titian shares that painting’s turn of the head and slope of the heavy shoulders, and indeed the whole orientation of the body as if responding to something happening to the left. However, in the narrative context of The Purification, the sharp turn of Titian’s head indicates the direction of his escape. The position of the arms is also based closely on the self-portrait, although here their pincer-like movement, encircling the valuables on the cloth-covered table, expresses the painter’s carnal greed and instinct of self-preservation. Details such as the red sleeves and the money lying on the table, as also perhaps the shifty expression, are closer to the Jacopo Strada portrait of 1568.
The Purification of the Temple was a newly popular type of subject-matter in late sixteenth-century Venice, one that possessed strong Counter-Reformation overtones and which even on a thematic level distinguished a recently purified present from the corrupt old ways of the past. It is very likely that Bassano knew of the young El Greco’s repeated depictions of this subject, and particularly the version discussed above, featuring the portrait bust of Titian (illus. 139, 140): it may have been this painting that suggested to Bassano the idea of including a satirical version in his own work. But when El Greco made his Purification in the early 1570s, Titian was still alive, and he is shown in the usual manner as a revered authority figure and guarantor of the younger painter’s artistic credentials. Bassano, in contrast, disguises his image of Titian by making him an actor in the narrative, though the satirical identification indicates that not everyone was willing to take Titian’s role as the respectable embodiment of Venetian tradition at face value.
This was Titian as he did not want to be seen. Now the usual high brow and skullcap, long used as identifying signs of nobility and intellectuality in the self-portraits, are mocked by their new context in a scene of material greed and corruption. The rich fabrics, still carefully emphasized, now reflect nothing more than Titian’s ignoble pursuit of monetary profit. And what had been a dignified turn of the head away from the viewer in the Berlin painting is now made a debasing reaction to Christ’s wrathful gaze from the left across the painting. Titian’s motion, turning away from Christ, in itself symbolizes his avaricious concern with worldly gain. There may have been a more precise cause for this sinister image of the greedy Titian: it has been suggested that he had sold some paintings of animals by Bassano as his own, and that the satirical image was therefore the outraged victim’s revenge. But Bassano was apparently on good enough terms with Titian, visiting his studio and exchanging ideas.103 In the 1580s, Jacopo’s older son Francesco lived in Titian’s house at Biri Grande while his younger one, Leandro, painted the posthumous portrait of his father, mentioned above, looking very much like Titian himself (illus. 142). Yet the reverse or negative image of Titian as a worldly old miser was, as we have seen, already a well established aspect of the public discourse surrounding the painter in the later sixteenth century, and Bassano’s mocking depiction would have been easily understood and enjoyed by patrons and fellow painters alike.
145 Jacopo Bassano and workshop, The Purification of the Temple, c. 1580. National Gallery, London.
Though Titian was typically promoted by his supporters as a dignified and courteous personality, something of the worldliness or even depravity implied in Bassano’s image stuck. Titian’s baser proclivities may even have become a commonplace in the following century, when the worldly sensuality of Venetian painting he was seen as epitomizing was defined against the high-minded morality of the disegno-based aesthetic of Central Italy. According to this perception, Titian’s erotic subject-matter is seen as a reflection of the painter’s own lustful appetites; or he is moralized as a victim of his enthralment to the sensual allurements of art. As early as 1522, in fact, Jacopo Tebaldi, the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice, reported that Titian exhausted himself with his female models, who ‘he often painted in different poses and who arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits’. By the end of the century rumours were circulating that Titian had a lover known as Violante, while Ridolfi, writing in 1648, associated this woman with Titian’s model in a number of his early paintings of belle donne (including the Flora, illus. 30).104
146 Detail of The Purification of the Temple.
A painting known as Titian with his Courtesan (Tiziano con l’amorosa) was well-known in the seventeenth century, when it was in the Borghese collection in Rome: prints based on it circulated widely and its general appearance is preserved in a near-contemporary copy, now at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire (illus. 147, 148). It is unlikely that Titian himself had much to do with this work, given that the image has a potentially satirical meaning at his expense.105 That the painting was intended to expose and ridicule Titian’s supposed lasciviousness in his old age is evident from the fact that it was modelled on an early sixteenth-century work by Giovanni Cariani, in which a lustful elderly client is shown approaching a Venetian courtesan (illus. 149).106 Both Cariani’s work and the painting at Sudeley are based on the familiar iconography of the ill-assorted couple, featuring old and young in an inappropriate amorous relationship, a well-known satirical theme in Northern European art.107 The substitution of Cariani’s old lecher for the familiar face of the aged Titian must have been encouraged by the latter’s erotic paintings: those repeated images of sexually available young women or courtesans that had become so famous across Europe and which had led to the circulation of mock-moralizing rhymes against the old painter’s alleged sexual indulgences (illus. 30, 32, 35, 43, 112, 113, 114).108 Titian’s gentle gesture, laying his hand on the woman’s belly, led sentimental nineteenth-century commentators to interpret the painting as an image of the old master’s commitment to his family, with the young woman identified as Titian’s daughter Lavinia.109 It is much more likely, however, that this gesture (not present in Cariani’s painting) confirms that Titian has already impregnated the young woman depicted, who will soon give birth to his illegitimate child. This darker meaning is emphasized in both the painting and in related prints by the inclusion of a skull in the bottom-right and a satirical inscription, making Titian’s supposed sexual weakness into an allegory about the seductions of art. Perhaps, as has recently been suggested, the pregnant young woman is ‘Painting’ herself who, even as she bears fruits, seduces the painter into further immorality.110 Reference back to Cariani’s painting was central to this meaning: the libidinous Titian is like the lecherous, ugly old man who offers a beautiful young courtesan money for sex. The familiar profile view undoubtedly gathered its bathetic effect when it was contrasted in the viewer’s mind with the many dignifying and monumentalizing portraits and self-portraits of the artist in circulation.
It is worth asking whether the Venetian tradition of painting really existed any longer by the period of Titian’s early maturity. It is at least arguable that its end was coterminous with Titian’s assumption of a predominant position among the artists working in the city from around 1520 onward. By killing off the old order dominated by the Bellini family, Titian also destroyed the more collective and public artistic culture it had represented so well. His reign ushered in a more competitive and individualistic kind of arrangement based on intense rivalries between aspirant artists and their followers. Lip-service continued to be paid to the older ways, but the reality was always a reflection of Titian’s own jealously dominant professional and artistic identity. A growing body of scholarship has noted the sharp upturn in competitiveness in the city’s artistic culture during the sixteenth century, between artists but also among the patrons keen to secure their services: this was equally evident in once communally orientated public institutions, such as the Scuole, and in the increasingly influential domain of private collectors and connoisseurs. ‘Rivalry’ between the city’s leading painters may even have become the defining concept, as was stressed in an exhibition held in 2009: the production of paintings that self-consciously recall, and then challenge, pre-existing examples on the same theme became a leading feature of Venetian art in Titian’s period.111
147 Venetian School, Titian with his Courtesan, 17th century. Morrison Collection, Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire.
All this indicates that some revision to the conventional idea of an identifiable and unified ‘Venetian tradition’ is required. This is usually pictured as remaining essentially true to the city’s conservative cultural values and tastes, as progressing smoothly from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth without fundamental interruption, its forward chronological extension dependent precisely on the activities of Titian himself. In reality, Titian’s rapid emergence initiated a sea change, and the breakdown of the older community of artistic values was well under way in the period of his early maturity. We need to acknowledge an increasing distinction between the artistic and the sociopolitical cultures of sixteenth-century Venice, one that was itself a product of Titian’s domineering presence in the city. Any wider move away from the centuries-old republican ideology dominating Venice’s political culture was necessarily more circumspect and incremental than in the relatively small professional field of painting, where the impress of a newly dominant individual was freer to exact rapid and radical change and, indeed, to redefine the entire scope of expressive possibility. If, in the period of Bellini dominance, the careers of the city’s leading artists reflected and embodied the underlying political and social ethos of the Venetian state, then in the ‘Age of Titian’ or ‘Age of Rivals’ that followed, this unity between the painter and his local context was increasingly undermined.112
148 Antoine Bonenfant, Titian with his Courtesan, c. 1630–40, etching. |
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149 Giovanni Cariani, The Seduction, c. 1515–16. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. |
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Venetian painting under Titian’s auspices was always in a state of incipient or potential conflict with Venice’s social values. The painter’s courtly individualism was problematic for the republican mainstream of Venetian culture, and must in part explain his repeated arguments with the Senate over his role as official painter, as also his disagreements with local lay confraternities and ecclesiastical patrons over prices and working conditions. In response to this, as we have seen, Titian’s immediate followers in his workshop returned to a simpler and pointedly ‘traditional’ style that perhaps sought to reconnect them with the more orthodox values of Venice. This attempt to reintegrate or reconcile with the past is evident too in the responses of other painters in the city, whose works often also possess significantly retrospective elements, even if they are not characterized by the pallid defeatism of those closest to Titian. Paolo Veronese’s response to the dominant Titian on his arrival in Venice from Verona around 1550 was similar to that of the workshop followers insofar as it too suggested a return to an earlier phase of the master’s career for inspiration.
For example, Veronese offered variations on the composition of Titian’s Pesaro Madonna of 1519–26 (illus. 53) in a sequence of sumptuous paintings of this type for Venetian churches (illus. 150, 151). Veronese’s gatherings of figures around outsized architectural columns and bases appear as variations on Titian’s famous prototype.113 But the younger painter is not so passive in his reference as is sometimes assumed, also pointedly simplifying his source as if to offer a correction to its formal and iconographic experimentalism. Such works pull back from the personalizing implications of Titian’s model, studiously resolving its ‘subjective’ spatial ambiguities in favour of a more frontal or planar presentation, and replacing the donor portraits with an orthodox, supra-personal presentation. Veronese’s purification of his model in this regard might reflect the gathering Counter-Reformation in Venice after 1550, and in the example of the Giustiniani painting at least (illus. 150), may have been in keeping with the wider move towards stylistic simplicity evident in the austere architecture of the Sansovino-designed church of San Francesco della Vigna and its wider programme of pictorial decoration.114 But this kind of deliberately ‘traditional’ effect is also evident in Veronese’s other altarpieces, suggesting the development of a more conservative taste in Venice during the period of Titian’s later career. Veronese’s solid, monumentalized figures certainly draw on Central Italian models of the early cinquecento, with their source in Raphael. But the measured style of his altarpieces also makes a kind of deliberate reconnection with the sacra conversazione type, established by Giovanni Bellini and his followers in the late fifteenth century, and to that extent offers to resurrect the specifically Venetian tradition that Titian had dismantled in his works of this type from the 1520s.
150 Paolo Veronese, Holy Family with SS John the Baptist, Anthony Abbot and Catherine (Giustiniani Altarpiece), c. 1551. S. Francesco della Vigna, Venice.
Veronese’s mythological paintings demonstrate a similarly nostalgic return to an older manner of painting, re-establishing the clear division between Christian and all’antica modes of presentation that Titian himself had helped to lay out before 1530, but had later challenged in the poesie for Philip and in other late works of this kind.115 In response to Titian’s poesie, Veronese carefully suppresses the darker aspects of themes such as Venus and Adonis, Diana and Actaeon and the Rape of Europa in favour of more static and light-hearted erotic and decorative presentations. In place of the heightened narrative drama, complex psychological interaction and intimations of physical and mental suffering of the poesie, Veronese restores the iconic centrality of the sensuously reclining female nude, whose domineering fleshy presence simultaneously resurrects the original hieratic separateness of the mythological genre. In The Rape of Europa (illus. 152) Veronese suppresses the violent drama of Titian’s poesia (illus. 120), relocating the scene to a pastoral landscape (albeit with a sea view) and placing the lavishly draped heroine in an elegant side-saddle posture atop a docile bull (Jupiter), who sprawls obediently on the earth.116 Surrounded by her fussing ladies-in-waiting, Europa readies herself for the departure shown in sequential fashion in the background. The heroine’s orderly retreat recalls Carpaccio’s paintings of public ceremonial departure of the late fifteenth century rather than the uncontrolled, bareback ride of Titian’s poesia.117 The significance of this modification lies in the reversal of gender roles, the victory of the feminine principle of Love indicated by the dozy passivity of the bull-Jupiter, as by the careful suppression of the idea that Europa’s abduction is in any way involuntary or that it can be equated with a physical rape.118
151 Paolo Veronese, Virgin and Child with Saints and Musician Angels (‘S. Sebastiano Altarpiece), 1559–60. S. Sebastiano, Venice.
152 Paolo Veronese, The Rape of Europa, c. 1580. Palazzo Ducale, Venice.
In Veronese’s Diana and Actaeon, the young hunter simply reclines on a bank enjoying his view of Diana and her nymphs while his hounds drink at the fountain.119 In place of Titian’s fraught moment of forbidden desire, Veronese encourages the viewer to follow the lolling Actaeon’s gaze and enjoy with him a pleasing view of naked female flesh. He also made a similar type of transposition to Titian’s poesia showing Venus and Adonis in his repeated versions of this subject, carefully cancelling any sign of Venus’ disquiet over Adonis’ desire to hunt (illus. 115, 153). If Veronese’s initial depictions of this subject still reference the twisted contrapposto of the protagonists in Titian’s version, in those that follow the internal tensions are dismissed in favour of a harmonious erotic relationship. In his contemporary depictions of Venus and Mars, Veronese offers increasingly static presentations of the lovers, creating non-narrative erotic tableaux that effectively elide the subject-matter.120 If Titian’s poesia of the early 1550s had reversed the epithet ‘Omnia vincit Amor’ for tragic effect, Veronese gradually reasserted the centrality of this Virgilian trope in his mythologies of the 1570s and ’80s, making Venus victorious over her mortal lover (as she is over the god of war) and in the process shifting the tone back towards the comic.121
153 Paolo Veronese, Venus and Adonis, c. 1585. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Veronese’s approach to classical subject-matter becomes ever more generic in kind, one subject collapsing into another as the painter re-establishes a single governing mode for the mythological type based on the idea of the ultimate victory of Love. In these works Veronese effectively unpicked the complex hybrid mode of the poesie, reasserting the original distinctness of the genre from the predominant tradition of Christian narrative art, discussed in the previous chapter. Reference to Titian’s later mythologies typically involved a simplifying return to an approach that has more in common with Venetian mythological paintings of the early decades of the century. Veronese’s approach to form may not reference classical relief composition so directly, but his monumental, static and rotund figures are nonetheless placed close to the picture plane, their fleshy bodies typically supported by extended areas of drapery which flatten and expand across the picture surface, discouraging the eye’s movement into depth. In support of this decorative approach Veronese typically avoids any reference to violence, retribution or suffering, and reduces dramatic action to a minimum, usually in the form of an erotic gesture or a humorous aside. The associational richness of the poesie is to this extent also replaced by a single, quasi-allegorical focus on the pleasures, virtues and ultimate triumph of Love, reiterated through different mythological subject-matters. As in his altarpieces, Veronese offers a reforming purification of the genre that is deeply retrospective in nature, seeking to restore the simpler parameters of the Venetian tradition that Titian had progressively abandoned. Although the picture surface is animated by Veronese’s fluid and delicate touch, this is held in check, as it were, by the sumptuous illusionism of the image, and thus does not follow the more assertive manner of Titian’s late style.
Even the more rebellious figure of Jacopo Tintoretto often referenced Titian’s early Assumption of the Virgin (illus. 50) in his altarpieces. Like Veronese, he retreated from Titian’s ‘serious’ remaking of mythological painting, employing satirical irony or (in his later career) abstracting allegory in his approach to such subject-matter.122 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tintoretto’s relationship with Titian has always been represented as one of antagonism. The reports in early sources that Tintoretto was ejected from Titian’s workshop after just a few days may not be strictly accurate, but they do give expression to the younger master’s position of antagonistic independence, the sense that his being orphaned by ‘the father of art’ was somehow essential to the trajectory of his future career. And it is telling that, unlike Palma, El Greco, Veronese and others, Tintoretto did not represent himself in an intimate father–son type of relationship with the old painter, or as his artistic heir. In contrast, Tintoretto’s self-portraits, both early and late, show him as fiercely independent, their aggressive, simplifying frontality promoting an idea of the painter as something very different to the finely dressed, status-conscious figures who typically appear in analogous works by Titian and those who sought to attach themselves to him (illus. 154, 155).123
154 Jacopo Tintoretto, Self-portrait, c. 1546–8. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In a monograph of 1999 I argued that Tintoretto’s dynamic career was fuelled, in part at least, by the distance he self-consciously created from the monumentalized father figure of Titian; and that this was symbolized in his very nickname (‘Tintoretto’, the little dyer), which identified him with his own, biological father rather than with Titian, and also with the Venetian popolo minuto: with those ‘little people’ or ordinary Venetians that Titian’s meteoric rise had left behind.124 Though Tintoretto’s exposed brushwork is often compared with the late style of Titian, his manner appears to have been developed quite independently and served a very different kind of imperative. Rather than Titian’s courtly dissimulation or display of technical mastery, it facilitated a business strategy based on rapid production, low pricing and a high turnover of patrons. Working quickly, cheaply and for all-comers, Tintoretto moved into the more trad itional professional space of the local Venetian painter vacated by the international grandee Titian. Tintoretto’s non-finito was also unlike Titian’s, insofar as it was supported by a revival of extra- or pre-figural perspective space, aided by the use of perspective boxes and preparatory drawings. Thus Tintoretto’s approach to pictorial space has often been linked to the publication of architectural perspective models in Sebastiano Serlio’s Libri dell’architettura (1537–51), but it can perhaps also be seen as a partial reversion to the linear approach of the Bellinis, noted in chapter One (compare illus. 11, 12, 13 with illus. 156), albeit in more theatrical manner, and more certainly as a pointed departure from Titian’s ‘psycho-physiological’ subjectivism.125
155 Jacopo Tintoretto, Self-portrait, c. 1588–90. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
It is often noted that relatively few drawings are known by Titian, a low survival rate that confirms the essential accuracy of Michelangelo’s suggestion that Titian bypassed this crucial preparatory stage.126 But the evidence from the workshop of his main predecessors in Venice – the Bellini – suggests that drawing had previously played a vital role in the formation and transmission of the local practice of painting. Insofar as Venetian style is identified with the practice of the Bellini, it laid a very particular emphasis on the control and manipulation of linear perspective models derived from Alberti, albeit adapted to express local cultural meanings, as also on a fuller kind of colouristic treatment.127 To this extent, then, Titian’s lack of drawing was more of a departure from Venetian practice than a fulfilment of its wider ethos. Technical examination of his paintings has tended to confirm that although Titian used under-drawings in the process of generating his paintings, these were susceptible to radical change in the course of execution, and that he often painted over other works, changing not only the position of figures but even the subject-matter or very picture type as he went along. Analysis has also shown that there was no necessary or final relation between Titian’s fluid technical procedure and the final appearance of his paintings in terms of finish, or non-finito. To this extent, the artist’s late style did not in fact involve a radical change in his manner of working, even if the products looked decidedly different. But this does not make Titian’s improvisatory procedure any more traditional, or any more Venetian.
156 Tintoretto and workshop, Last Supper, 1591–2. S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.
It is notable that both Veronese and Tintoretto reincorporated preparatory drawing into their workshop procedures.128 It is likely that they found Titian’s approach in this regard to be problematic, in particular for the creation of large-scale, multi-figural works as also for the teaching of pupils in the workshop, as stated earlier. Drawing had traditionally functioned as the essential means for the transmission of painting skills to younger generations of artists, and Titian’s partial abandonment of it was another indication of the individualism of his approach.129 Seen from this perspective, the radical variety of colorito proposed in Titian’s mature style appears as an exception to the rule among Venetian masters: one that had problematic consequences for the ongoing tradition of painting in the city.130
Though Tintoretto often quoted Titian’s paintings, his manner of painting was tellingly based on a technical recommitment to at least some aspects of the traditional procedures of drawing, or disegno. This meant that Tintoretto’s style was more readily imitated by others. It was not only painters such as El Greco and Palma Giovane who found Tintoretto’s style conducive: within his thriving workshop, run along traditional lines, immediate family members such as his daughter Marietta and two sons Domenico and Marco learned to paint like their father, and it is at least arguable that the majority of the prominent public works completed by ‘Tintoretto’ from around 1580 onward are products of his workshop. While it may not be possible to say that the younger Tintorettos’ works match those of their father in terms of their fluidity of touch, it is nevertheless true that Domenico and Marco had a major and perhaps semi-independent input in fulfilling key commissions, such as the Nativity (a rare late commission from Philip II, illus. 157), the Paradise for the main council room in the Doge’s Palace, and the two large choir paintings for Andrea Palladio’s church of San Giorgio Maggiore (illus. 156).131
157 Workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1583, Nuevos Museos, El Escorial.
Tintoretto’s adoption of the persona briefly outlined above was, in part, a response to the creative impasse that Titian’s predominance had created. Its specific qualities are indicative of the problem that the elder master’s artistic individualism had generated. Tintoretto’s career recreated the older kind of identity that had secured the transmission of painting skills down the generations in Venice. Tintoretto’s opposition to Titian was, fitting ly enough, defined through his identification with Michelangelo, Titian’s artistic ‘other’ and lifelong bête noire.132 Michelangelo’s key creative principle of disegno laid special emphasis on the practice of drawing, and this became central to Tintoretto’s own workshop practice in a manner that contradicted Titian’s example. Tintoretto’s final predominance in later sixteenth-century Venice was based on his busy workshop and skill as a teacher, and this communal approach was especially celebrated by his many pupils and followers. In his life of the artist, first published in 1642, for example, Carolo Ridolfi (who probably drew much of his information from Jacopo’s most successful painter-son, Domenico) notes the old Tintoretto’s advice to his young Bolognese pupil Odoardo Fialetti, that ‘he ought to draw and draw again’. This was to paraphrase Michelangelo’s own words on a drawing he had made in the early 1520s, suggesting again Tintoretto’s adherence to the Tuscan master’s example.133 In his handbook extolling the virtues of disegno, Il vero modo et ordine per dessegnar tutte le parte et membra del corpo humano, published in Venice in 1608, Fialetti included a woodcut image that probably shows the busy Tintoretto workshop in full action, with a studious young apprentice, busy drawing, featuring prominently in the foreground (illus. 158).134
The publication of didactic, ‘academic’ workshop manuals such as Fialetti’s can be seen as symptomatic of the crisis in local painting that Titian’s radical abandonment of drawing and of teaching in his workshop had generated. Such publications suggest that local artists now felt the need to move away from Titian’s individualistic example and to reinstate drawing as fundamental to their artistic practice. The move back towards disegno in early seventeenth-century Venice was in this sense something more than just a reflection of the spread of Central Italian academic classicism through Italy. Fialetti’s involvement indicates that the locus of the shift was the ongoing Tintoretto workshop, now recognized as a lasting and successful alternative to the long-destroyed studio of the Vecelli at Biri Grande. Workshop anecdotes against Titian from Tintoretto’s circle indicate that the older master’s long-standing opposition to his erstwhile pupil had not been forgotten. Thus we hear that ‘Tintoretto said that Titian had made some things that could not be improved or surpassed but that other of his works could have been better designed.’135 Was Ridolfi merely careless in putting the familiar Michelangelo criticism into the mouth of Tintoretto? Or was the translation to the artistic rivalry within later sixteenth-century Venice itself more deliberate, based on something that was actually said and believed in the Tintoretto workshop? In favour of the latter interpretation is the fact that drawing had become an important issue again in the Venice of the later sixteenth century. Quite apart from its polemical role in the disegno–colore aesthetic controversy with Central Italy, it was still the practical means by which pupils could be taught in the workshop. Titian’s repudiation of it spoke also of his final abandonment of the workshop tradition of painting that he had come to represent.
158 Odoardo Fialetti, etching from Il vero modo et ordine per dessegnar tutte le parte et membra del corpo humano (1608).
Training his family and other pupils in the workshop to paint in his manner, while also allowing them everincreasing independence in the execution (and perhaps even the planning) of major public commissions in Venice, Tintoretto pointedly re-emphasized the continuities of material practice that had previously sustained local painting. At the same time, he reasserted the relatively humble, artisan identity that Titian had eschewed. Focussing primarily on the pictorial needs of local patrons, he moulded his practice in conformity with the pre-Titian local ideal of cultural mediocritas. In this way, Tintoretto sought to revive or restore the lost tradition of Venetian Renaissance painting; it may be no accident that among all the sixteenth-century workshops, only Tintoretto’s survived successfully into the following century, continuing to trade under the family name into the 1670s. But his venezianità was nonetheless fundamentally retrospective, and to this extent had much in common with other local artists attempting to accommodate Titian’s difficult example of progressive individualism. It was to some degree polemical, a competitive gambit or marketing posture formed in reaction to Titian, and was ultimately determined by the latter’s overarching artistic authority. Tintoretto was not, after all, Bellini: in relation to Titian he was an artistic pupil or son rather than a master or father. The kind of traditionalism he espoused was very deliberate in kind and was fundamentally contradicted by the experimentalism of his own style and technique. Like the manufactured artistic genealogies we have discussed in this chapter, it reflected a new, post-Titian climate of heightened artistic self-awareness. Tintoretto’s contradictory persona was also a product of the polemical theories and identities that spelled the end for the conventional values of Venetian Renaissance painting.
159 Titian, Pietà, c. 1570–76. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
