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

and farms had been destroyed to provide a clear line of fire, and property within the city pulled down to speed up communication between threatened points. The population was swollen by refugees from the enemy-occupied territories around Vicenza and Verona. The university was closed.

      Titian, his formidable energy undiminished by the depressing mood of the city and bursting with ideas, studied the outstanding examples of central Italian art that Paduan patrons, more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than their Venetian contemporaries, had commissioned since the early fourteenth century when Giotto frescoed the Arena Chapel with scenes from the lives of St Joachim, St Anne and the Virgin, and from the life and passion of Christ. Donatello’s monument to the mercenary commander Erasmo Gattamelata, the first of the great Renaissance equestrian statues, occupied a place of honour in front of the Santo, where his bronze sculptures for the high altar included four relief carvings of the miracles of St Anthony. Mantegna’s frescos in the Ovetari Chapel, strongly influenced by Donatello, were the first paintings in the Veneto to adopt the idiom of the fifteenth-century Tuscan Renaissance.

      The members of the confraternity were lay brothers – and indeed sisters since women were admitted, although not into the chapter room. As family men required to conduct exemplary Christian lives, they understood the need to resist and to disclaim the passions, misunderstandings and temptations that can destroy the best of marriages – of the seventeen frescos in the chapter room, eight are about family matters. And it may have been for that reason that it was decided at some time during their early discussions with Titian that he would paint, instead of the miracle of the saint’s jawbone, the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, a story of domestic discord which doubtless appealed more to his sense of drama. A woman in thirteenth-century Ferrara is wrongly accused of adultery by her husband, a distinguished aristocrat who is convinced that another man has fathered their child. The supposed lover is identified by his striped hose as one of the young compagnie delle calze who organized theatrical events and were notorious womanizers. The woman protests her innocence, but a judge is unable to reach a decision. St Anthony gives the baby the gift of speech, allowing it to reveal its legitimate paternity to its father and assembled witnesses. The accused young man rushes forward in relief.

      Titian based his composition on one of Giotto’s frescos in the Arena Chapel. The frieze-like arrangement of the figures seems also to have been inspired by Donatello’s miracles and by Antonio Lombardo’s relief carving of the same subject, which had been installed in the Santo only a few years before Titian painted his fresco. The group of three women on the right is a direct quotation from Sebastiano’s altarpiece, finished only a month or so earlier, in the Venetian church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. But it is the lighting and the striking composition of the fresco that account for its dramatic tension. Titian realized the sky, the landscape and the upper part of the church in a single working session or giornata – the time, that is, that it takes the fresh wet plaster on which true fresco is painted to dry. The fresco is divided vertically in half by the edge of the dark church, identified as such by a red cross in a blind arch. The device of splitting his compositions in this way was one he would use again over the next decades, and with stunning effect only a few years later for the impeccably polished Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor (Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca).4

      On the church Titian propped a fictive statue of the Roman emperor Trajan,5 copied from a plaster cast or wax model of a Roman relief, which had recently been discovered in Ravenna.6 Although he would later occasionally incorporate all’antica inventions to give added meaning to his subjects, as he already had in the Jacopo Pesaro before St Peter, the figure of Trajan is the first instance in his career of his portraying a real antique model. It referred to a story told by Dante and in The Golden Legend 7 that was often used at the time to decorate wedding chests as a symbol of marital concord. Trajan, although hastening to battle, was persuaded by a grieving widow whose child had been slain to stop and administer justice. Centuries later Pope Gregory the Great saw a sculpted frieze depicting the Justice of Trajan and was so moved by the story that he prayed for the pagan Trajan to be baptized as a Christian by his tears and thus, unlike other pagans, who were automatically sent to hell, placed in Purgatory. Titian probably used it here to reinforce the visual message that Venice, like St Anthony, was dedicated to the administration of justice.

      Titian finished the Miracle of the Speaking Babe in early May 1511. Later in the month he was commissioned to paint two smaller frescos for eighteen ducats, with a down payment of ten ducats.8 On 22 May we have the first record of Titian’s brother Francesco, who was in Padua where he witnessed a document in the office of the confraternity, signing himself as a master painter resident in Venice at the Rialto, and where he may have acted as Titian’s assistant. The Miracle of the Repentant Son – in which a bad-tempered boy who has kicked his mother cuts off his foot in remorse, and St Anthony restores the foot when the boy’s mother begs that he be forgiven – was executed in eight giornate. The miracle is witnessed by the first of the portraits of real people – probably members of the confraternity – to whom Titian liked to give roles in his theatrical productions. The only figures who seem to be unaware of the miracle are two soldiers, one in armour looking away from the performance of the miracle, the other seated in the distance.

      The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, painted in six giornate, is the most turbulent of Titian’s trilogy of love stories. Possibly the first depiction in Renaissance art of an emotionally driven assault on a real, ordinary woman, the wind-blown landscape that echoes the violent act contradicts the written version of the story which takes place in a domestic setting. It is also one of Titian’s most theatrical early paintings.9 An insanely jealous husband, convinced of his wife’s infidelity, knifes her to death. The murder takes place in the foreground of the fresco, in the shadow of a rocky outcropping, while St Anthony, having resurrected the wife, is seen only in the distance forgiving the husband. In an age when extreme violence was commonplace, although rarely represented in Italian art, and women were regarded as the property of their fathers and husbands, Titian’s empathy with a woman violated by male intemperance is remarkable. As the model for the innocent wife sprawled in agony on the ground Titian quoted, in reverse, the pose of Michelangelo’s dramatically foreshortened figure of Eve from the Fall of Man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling10 or of the Virgin in his earlier Doni Tondo. Thus this most Venetian of painters made use of the two outstanding painters of the Florentine Renaissance, Giotto its founding father and Michelangelo the supreme genius of its maturity. Nor was this the last time Titian would quote Michelangelo, although that greatest of central Italian artists had probably not yet heard of the Venetian painter who would become his artistic opposite and principal rival. Titian executed the three Paduan frescos at top speed and apparently with no cartoons and only sketchy sinopie or underdrawings.11 The lay brothers’ request for domestic subjects gave him the opportunity to express for the first time his precocious understanding of the human heart, but he did so without a trace of rhetoric or religiosity, while his Shakespearean capacity to absorb, synthesize and enliven ideas borrowed from other artists transformed Venetian narrative painting, introducing a sense of naturalistic excitement that rendered obsolete the charming but static processions of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio.

      Titian left Padua shortly after 19 July 1511, the day on which he received his last-recorded payment there. It was not until 2 December, a year after he had accepted the commission, that Antonio da Cesuna, the steward of the confraternity, brought the final instalment of four ducats to Titian’s house12 in Venice. Titian’s receipt to the confraternity survives only in a nineteenth-century facsimile, which is however consistent with genuine examples of his handwriting. He signed it ‘Tician depentor’, Tician being the Venetian spelling of his name.13 Depentor signified merely that he was qualified to paint by membership of the painters’ guild. It wasn’t until much later that he signed himself pittore, painter.