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

      Meanwhile, in the summer of 1511, only a few months after the resolution of his spiritual crisis, we find Contarini taking part in a jousting tournament at Mestre as one of eight nobles dressed in magnificent armour and silken doublets – the prize was a horse worth forty ducats. Venetians, after all, needed to cheer themselves up in those grim times. While modest merchants watered their wine and struggled to put food on their tables, wealthy members of the government suffered far less from the war. Inside information about troop movements on the mainland made it possible to import agricultural produce from their country estates into the city at inflated prices. Venetian estates overseas were undisturbed while the Turks concentrated on consolidating their Islamic dominions in the Levant. Venice had been at peace with the Ottoman Empire since 1503 and in 1513 obtained the renewal of its commercial privileges in the Ottoman territories. So overseas trade continued, albeit at a slower pace. Although most merchants dealt in quantities too small to justify the risk of re-export, the trading galleys of the richest sailed into the harbour of San Marco with cargoes of essential spices large enough to obtain guarantees of safe conduct through the war zones and into the transalpine markets. The rich and privileged, as Sanudo repeatedly informs us, continued to enjoy the luxurious habits that the rest of the population believed were offensive to God.

      In the first winter after the defeat at Agnadello all classes had enjoyed an unusually entertaining and riotous carnival. But in 1511 the season was altogether more muted after the Council of Ten, fearing violence or even insurrection from a discontented population, issued a decree in early February that forbade the wearing of masks and other disguises. It was unanimously signed by the Collegio and was followed a few days later by an official warning to all Venetians who continued to offend God by indulging in ostentatious displays of wealth:

      Although we are in great danger, as everyone knows, there are many who in disregard of God and of the obligations to Him and in disregard of the honour and the needs of our republic … continue to spend high, unnecessary sums of money. By this they do damage to themselves and cause general resentment; they show little love for their fatherland since many spend this money without having paid their taxes, which are imposed to preserve this state and to secure the existence of us all.18

      The enforcement of sumptuary laws, already the strictest in Europe, was tightened. Dress should be simple; the wearing of pearls and expensive fabrics was prohibited. There were specific instructions about the kinds of foods and numbers of courses to be served at dinners. And yet it was only days after the restrictions on carnival and the recent warning against unnecessary expenditure that the high-ranking and immensely wealthy nobleman Antonio Grimani, who had made his fortune in commodity dealing, hosted a lavish dinner in honour of Agostino Chigi. Just twelve years earlier Grimani, who had been elected naval commander in the Turkish war in return for a loan to the state of 16,000 ducats, had been arrested for failing to engage a Turkish fleet off the southern coast of Greece and for not disciplining his subordinate officers. The case was so sensitive that it took twenty sessions of the Great Council to reach a verdict of treasonable incompetence. Sentenced to exile, Grimani went to live in Rome with his son Domenico, for whom he had shrewdly purchased a cardinal’s hat for 25,000 ducats some years earlier. In 1509, thanks to his vast wealth and useful papal connections, his reputation was restored by an overwhelming vote in the Great Council. He returned to Venice where he was made a procurator of San Marco, and in 1521 at the age of eighty-seven the former incompetent traitor Antonio Grimani was elected seventeenth doge of Venice. Domenico, who had amassed one of the most important collections of ancient Greek and Hellenic sculptures, gave part of it to Venice on Antonio’s death, possibly as a gesture of gratitude for his father’s return to power. The pieces were housed in the doge’s palace where they could be studied by Venetian artists, not least Titian. Some are still in the Venice Archaeological Museum.

      Antonio Grimani’s dinner for Agostino Chigi was attended by fashionably dressed ladies dripping in jewels and by some of the highest-ranking members of the Republican government, several of them bankers, who were served numerous lavish courses of the finest forbidden delicacies. We can imagine how the younger male guests might have dressed from Titian’s early portraits of fashionable young men. Not only is the shirt worn by the Man with a Quilted Sleeve (London, National Gallery) gathered in what was thought of as the French way, his sleeves defy an order by the Senate issued in 1512 which explicitly forbade the wearing of ziponi made of expensive quilted materials.19

      In another time and place the Grimani dinner might have been enough to spark a revolution. The majority of ordinary Venetians certainly agreed with the official government line that the behaviour of a minority who ignored the proscriptions against feasting and fine clothes had brought disaster upon their city. There was widespread resentment that some of the wealthiest and most influential members of the ruling class avoided military service and the payment of taxes and forced loans, and that some used their money to buy offices for themselves and their sons. But if the government feared insurrection, it never happened. When in August 1511 Maximilian broadcast a message from Innsbruck to the Venetian popolani, inviting them to rise up against the ‘insatiable cupidity and avarice of the so-called gentlemen and rulers’ and to bear in mind that, ‘should you not be liberated, their pride and conceit will be such that you and your fortunes will soon be utterly destroyed and ruined by them’,20 his appeal was ignored.

      Although we know very little about Titian’s private commissions at this time, it is a safe assumption that his Venetian patrons were among the small elite who were in a position to indulge themselves during a war that impoverished the majority of Venetians, threatened the very existence of the Republic as an imperial power and saw some of the bloodiest military encounters that had so far been fought. The development of artillery after Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494 meant unprecedented casualties in battles, and some were on a scale no less shocking at the time than the slaughters in the world war of 1914–18 still seem to us. In February 1512 a five-day siege of Brescia, the Venetian gun-manufacturing town, by French and German armies left 15,000 corpses. In a battle fought at Ravenna a few months later on Easter Day between Spain and the pope on one side and France allied with Ferrara on the other, so many were killed that the following day the corpses lay thick on the ground so that for miles it was said to be impossible to walk without treading on them. Closer to home Venetian soldiers whose pay was delayed were forced to live off the land, where they looted the smallholdings of peasants. ‘All the soldiers’, wrote Sanudo, ‘act in their habitual way, dressing up in cloth of gold, and if they are not paid in time by the government, they do so much harm among the villages that they come out very well from it and rejoice, wanting the war to drag on as it does.’

      Titian’s paintings of sexy girls, well-dressed young men and Madonnas and saints dressed as though for banquets, conducting their sacred conversations in an unspoiled Veneto, give no hint, apart from the odd soldier resting in the background, that Venice at the time he painted them was at war. His terraferma – which was in reality devastated by warring armies, its farmhouses, fields and vineyards plundered by unpaid Venetian mercenaries as well as by enemy troops – remains a fertile Arcadia into which his patrons could imagine themselves escaping on a fine morning to make love in the open air or pray to the Virgin, her Child and the adoring saints for the return of peace and prosperity. Italian artists, unlike their German counterparts, rarely portrayed the realities of war, and Titian was no exception. ‘Painting’, Dolce wrote several decades later, ‘was invented primarily in order to give pleasure; by this token, then, if the artist fails to please, he remains unnoticed and devoid of reputation.’ If Titian’s wealthy patrons needed an excuse for taking pleasure in his paintings they could always invoke the Neoplatonic theory that the contemplation of beauty, recently given a heterosexual slant by Pietro Bembo, was a first step towards higher wisdom. Beauty was in itself a sign of virtue; and female beauty, which was rare and fleeting at a time of disfiguring illnesses and of primitive medicine, dentistry and cosmetics, was its ultimate expression. The cult of beauty put women on pedestals next to saints and as allegorical representatives of Venetian civic virtues.

      Titian’s religious paintings are realized in the same pastoral setting, the sacred figures sometimes