Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale

faults, it is a remarkable painting. Evidently it satisfied its patron who years later would commission from Titian another altogether more masterly celebration of the same victory over the Turks.30

      Another candidate for Titian’s earliest painting is now, after a thorough restoration, the Flight into Egypt, which came to the Hermitage palace in the late eighteenth century, when it was subjected to one of the destructive treatments that were characteristic of the period. Although mentioned by Vasari as a commission from Andrea Loredan for his palace on the Grand Canal (now the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi), the picture was dismissed by some modern scholars31 on account of the muddy colouring of its landscape and procession of awkward figures. The restoration32 in the Hermitage laboratory, which was completed in 2011, removed layers of discoloured varnish and insertions by other hands, reattached the paint layer where it had come loose from the primer and closed horizontal seams that had opened where the three pieces of the canvas support had been stitched together. The picture is now much easier to read, and many, but not all, scholars are convinced that it is a very early work by Titian, possibly painted even before he entered Giovanni Bellini’s studio.

      Exhibitions of Titian’s paintings often begin with the Gypsy Madonna (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), so called because of the young Virgin’s dusky complexion, as the most striking example of Titian’s debt to and liberation from the example of Giovanni Bellini. Technical investigations show that it started as an attempt to understand by imitation Giovanni’s later way of treating the subject. Beneath the finished painting is a different Madonna, which is very close to Bellini’s Virgin and Child of 1509 in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Titian cancelled that homage to his great master. His Virgin and Child are set against a landscape with a soldier and fortress in the far distance and a brand-new cloth of honour, its crisp folds indicating that it has just that minute been shaken out. Their faces are plump, as though modelled in low relief, while their lowered eyelids invite us to meditate on the humanity of the two central figures of the Christian story. Whereas Giovanni’s Madonnas were usually carefully underdrawn, Titian in this painting used as his guidelines only summary strokes made with a fairly wide brush with thin wash shading applied at the underdrawing stage. He made changes as he painted: his first Madonna seems to have had a different face, and her hair was tied with a ribbon; the fingers of the Christ child were first stretched, then covered with the Madonna’s red robe and repainted. The result looks like nothing that had been painted by the hand or studio of Giovanni Bellini. With the Gypsy Madonna Titian proved to himself that he had learned everything he needed from that source. By then he had fallen under the spell of a different Venetian painter, who became for a while his alter ego. Giorgione (the name means ‘Big George’) of Castelfranco, who was closer to Titian’s age than Giovanni Bellini, introduced Titian to what Vasari called ‘the modern manner’, the style that, for want of a better adjective, art historians to this day call Giorgionesque.

FOUR

       Myths of Venice

      The order with which this holy Republic is governed is a wonder to behold; there is no sedition from the non-nobles, no discord among the patricians, but all work together to [the Republic’s] increase. Moreover, according to what wise men say, it will last for ever …

      MARIN SANUDO, THE CITY OF VENICE, 1493–15301

      As Titian explored the incomparably beautiful city that would nurture his genius he came upon allegorical images in stone and paint of beautiful women representing peace, harmonious administration, prudence and justice. His uncle would have told him that these were the political virtues that set Venice apart from all other cities at a time when the rest of Italy was plagued by upheaval and foreign intervention, and that many great writers and thinkers, foreign as well as Venetian, extolled the unique stability and independence of the Most Serene Republic. As the first republic to govern a large empire on land and overseas since the fall of republican Rome, Venice saw itself as a new, Christian Rome, founded by God in the fifth century AD so that a Christian empire would rise from the ruins of the pagan civilization. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror in 1453, and the subsequent immigration of exiled Greek scholars, Venice styled itself also as the New Byzantium and the New Athens. Venice, as one historian has put it, ‘claimed the bones, the blood, and the culture of ancient Greece and Rome’.2 But it did so in the name of God and its own special patron saints. The Republic enjoyed the protection and favour of many saints, of whom St Mark was the most important. The Evangelist, whose body, smuggled from his tomb in Alexandria by two Venetian merchants, reached Venice in 828 – an event known as the translatio, the transfer – was the alibi and protector in whose name the Republic conquered and defended its religious integrity, and whose symbol of a winged lion was emblazoned on banners carried into battle and installed all over the city and throughout the empire. Marin Sanudo, on an official tour of the mainland empire, noted an inscription on the walls of Pirano in Istria that read: ‘Behold the winged lion! I pluck down earth, sea, and stars.’

      Venice was governed as a republic by an oligarchy of some 2,500 patricians, about 5 per cent of the male population, who ruled according to an unwritten constitution designed to prevent the rise to power of any individual or faction.3 Membership of the patrician class was strictly by inheritance. Until long after 1381, when some new men were admitted to the patriciate in recognition of their contribution to the Venetian war against Genoa, no amount of money or service to the state could buy entrée. Regime-change in Republican Venice was made impossible by a unique system of checks and balances. No equivalent of the Florentine Medici family was able to take control of a hermetically sealed governing caste defined by lineage. No Savonarola, however charismatic, could influence the structure or policies of government.

      Thanks to the survival of government records and to Venetian patrician chroniclers, whose shared identity was defined by their hereditary right and obligation to rule, we know in some considerable detail about the day-to-day business of the Venetian government and the events, both trivial and important, that coloured life in Titian’s adopted city.4 The two most informative of the patrician diarists in the first decades of the sixteenth century were Girolamo Priuli and Marin Sanudo, neither of whom had especially brilliant political careers. Priuli, head of one of the great Venetian banking houses, was the gloomy conscience of his class. His diaries are full of threnodies about the sinful and luxurious habits that in his view were responsible for all the natural disasters and defeats in war that afflicted Venice in his lifetime. Sanudo, Priuli’s temperamental opposite, enjoyed the pleasures and display of wealth that Priuli condemned. Garrulous and sociable, he kept a collection of objects of interest from all over the world and a library of 6,500 books and manuscripts which made his house in the Calle Spezier behind the Turkish warehouse one of the essential sights of Venice, along with the arsenal and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, for VIPs in Venice.

      Sanudo was an obsessive recorder of minutiae. He wrote poetry, plays, a history of the doges and an account of the invasion of Italy by the French king Charles VIII, which led to decades of war on Italian soil between the French and the Habsburg empire. Today he is best known for his panegyric Of the Origins, Site and Government of the City of Venice,5 and above all for his diaries,6 which were notes for an official history of the Republic that he was to his great disappointment never called upon to write. Too much of a prattler for his own political good, he was forever pacing the corridors of the ducal palace, eavesdropping at the Rialto on news from abroad, continually in the public squares investigating every occurrence, no matter how minimal, how unimportant it was. He jotted down the incessant recordings that were for him ‘both wife and magistrate’ in a vernacular style that he himself described as ‘coarse, unadorned and low’; but it is precisely because he never polished