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

supplementary expenses such the usual duties, stewards’ fees and storage.2 In early August 1508 Sanudo reported that the building was now in use, but that the painters were still at work on the exterior frescos and rents for the ground-floor shops would not start being paid until 1 March 1509 (the first day of the year according to the Venetian calendar). He was evidently well informed because on 18 February of that year the German merchants celebrated the completion of the new Fondaco with a party at which the most important members of the government were entertained by a transvestite ballet, allegorical masques and the spectacle of a greased pig being chased around the courtyard by blindfolded men.

      Although the German emperor Maximilian had joined the League of Cambrai the previous December, he was still theoretically at peace with Venice according to the truce he had been forced to sign after the rout of his troops at Cadore in March 1508. It was only after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello on 14 May, followed by Maximilian’s occupation of the key Venetian towns on the terraferma, that the German merchants departed, and the Fondaco was turned into a hostel for war refugees from the mainland. The merchants were not gone for long. Within weeks some of them had returned, having been granted safe conduct through the war zones by the emperor and the Republic. The spices on which Venice held a monopoly were essential commodities, used as preservatives and drugs as well as for flavouring. Northern Europe needed Venetian spices, and Venice, its economy severely threatened by an expensive war, needed the northern European markets more than ever.

      Although Titian’s Fondaco frescos are the first of his works that can be securely dated within a few years, the question of when, exactly, he and Giorgione executed them is one of those tantalizing puzzles about his early career and his artistic relationship with Giorgione that will never be solved to the satisfaction of all scholars because most of the documentary clues about the frescos, although copious for the building itself, are missing. The only areas of agreement are that the painters could have started work in May 1507, soon after the roof was finished and while the scaffolding was still in place; that Giorgione finished before November 1508; that he painted the façade facing the Grand Canal and Titian the south-facing land entrance; and that Titian began working on his façade later than Giorgione did on his.

      We know that on 4 August 1507 Giorgione was paid an advance of twenty ducats to supply a painting for an audience chamber in the doge’s palace, and that the picture, which does not survive, was finished a few months before January 1508, when he received a final payment of twenty-five ducats. He was therefore busy during this period. Vasari said that Titian was recommended for the job of frescoing the side façade by a friend of his, a member of the noble Barbarigo family whose portrait he painted. But, although nobody has ever doubted that Titian frescoed the land entrance to the Fondaco, he is not mentioned in any relevant document. Giorgione’s name appears in connection with the frescos only because of a dispute with the Salt Office about his payment. He had received a down payment of 100 ducats, but according to a document dated December 1508 a committee of four artists – Giovanni Bellini, Lazzaro Bastiani, Vittore Carpaccio and Vittore Belliniano – revalued them at 150 ducats. Giorgione settled for 130 including painting materials, possibly as a compromise between the minimum agreed payment and the revaluation.3 The document doesn’t say when he completed the frescos, but similar cases of disputed payment took a year or more to be processed, which suggests that he could have finished his façade by late autumn 1507. In that case the painters whom Sanudo mentioned as being still at work in August of the following year would have been Titian and his team of assistants working on the south-facing land entrance.

      The only survivals of the frescos today are some ghostly detached ruins (the Titians in the Ca’ d’Oro, Franchetti Gallery; a standing nude by Giorgione in the Accademia Gallery).4 Titian’s land entrance being less exposed was better preserved than Giorgione’s on the Grand Canal, which has disappeared altogether apart from the standing nude woman, which is scarcely legible apart from the reddish tint of her flesh, which Antonio Zanetti, writing in the eighteenth century, described as ‘fiery’. Zanetti’s hand-coloured etchings and written descriptions, first published in 1760, are the most complete records we have of the appearance of the frescos. Although large sections were missing by then, it is evident from his and other prints, paintings and descriptions that their most remarkable feature was a series of life-size and lifelike figures. Some were male and female nudes in dynamic poses suggested by classical sculpture, which have been compared to Michelangelo’s nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They were the first realistic nudes to appear on a public building anywhere, and the first in the line of sensuous Venetian nudes by Giorgione, Titian and their followers. Other figures depicted by Titian represented familiar Venetian characters: a Levantine, a Swiss mercenary soldier; young Venetian aristocrats of about Titian’s own age wearing the striped hose and colourful short jackets of a compagnia della calza, representing nobility, peace and prosperity. There was a portrait of a certain Zuan Favro, a well-known and popular adventurer who several years later was convicted of smuggling spices. Sanudo described him as a most valiant man, a person of outstanding ability.

      If there was a programme or any kind of predetermined scheme for the frescos, none has ever been suggested. Vasari, who first saw them on a visit to Venice in 1541 when they were already fading, thought that Giorgione had painted some of Titian’s figures and wrote that those in charge of the project had given Giorgione (and by implication Titian) an entirely free hand, ‘provided only that he did all in his power to create a first-rate result’:

      So Giorgione started work. But he thought only of demonstrating his technique as a painter by representing various figures according to his own fancy. Indeed, there are no scenes to be found there with any order or representing the deeds of any distinguished person, of either the ancient or the modern world. And I for my part have never been able to understand his figures nor, for all my asking, have I ever found anyone who does. In these frescos one sees, in various attitudes, a man in one place, a woman standing in another, one figure accompanied by the head of a lion, another by an angel in the guise of a cupid; and heaven knows what it all means.

      Titian painted his most prominent figure in full colour over the main land entrance (now marked by a lion of St Mark above the door) where she interrupted a frieze in grisaille of military trophies and fanciful scenes of combat, one between putti and animals, another between sea monsters. She was a seductive, elaborately dressed woman seated on a ledge, trampling a decapitated head with her bared left leg while she brandished a sword over the head of a soldier in armour who had an innocent expression but concealed a dagger behind his back.5 Vasari6 thought she was by Giorgione and that she represented Judith ‘speaking to a German standing below her’; but he confessed that he was unable to interpret the meaning ‘unless Giorgione meant her to stand for Germania’. Perhaps Vasari did not know or had forgotten that at the time Titian painted her Venice was on the verge of war with the German emperor Maximilian I, whose armies had been laying waste to Titian’s homeland. So, far from representing Germany, the story of Judith – the Jewish heroine who decapitated the invading general Holofernes – would have had a special significance for Titian and for the Venetian Republic, one that carried a double meaning as an allegory of Venice as Justice or Fortitude, intended as a warning to the German merchants as they entered their Fondaco.

      Seen from Campo San Bartolomeo – as it could be throughout Titian’s lifetime before it was hemmed in by later buildings7 – Titian’s south-facing façade must have looked like a billboard proclaiming an overt sensuality, a sense of fun and a confident classicism that had not been seen before on this scale, let alone on the façade of a building. The frescos were the talking point of the city, and everyone without exception whose written comments survive considered Titian’s to be superior to Giorgione’s.8 The rumour went round9 that some wags congratulated Giorgione on Titian’s work, saying how much he had improved since he painted the Grand Canal façade. The older master, hurt to the quick, sulked in his house, refusing