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

Bridgeman Art Library

      Plate sections

      Tribute Money, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Gypsy Madonna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna © Artothek/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Man with a Blue Sleeve, The National Gallery, London © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Miracle of the Speaking Babe, Scuola del Santo, Padua © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Flora, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Pesaro Altarpiece, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice © Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Three Ages of Man, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery (Bridgewater Loan, 1945)

      Sacred and Profane Love, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Assumption of the Virgin, Venice, Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari © Universal Images Group/Photoservice Electa/Getty Images

      Noli me tangere © The National Gallery, London/akg-images

      Portrait of Federico Gonzaga, Prado, Madrid © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Man with a Glove, Louvre, Paris © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Presentation of the Virgin, Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice © Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Ranuccio Farnese, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection (1952.2.11). Image courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

      Pope Paul III, Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples © Alinari/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Pietro Aretino, Palazzo Pitti, Florence © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Equestrian Portrait of Charles V at Muehlberg, 1548. Madrid, Prado © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence

      Portrait of Prince Philip, Prado, Madrid © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Rape of Europa © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Entombment, Prado, Madrid © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Diana and Actaeon © The National Gallery, London/akg-images

      Diana and Callisto. Purchased jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery, London, with contributions from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, The Monument Trust and through private appeal and bequests, 2012

      Danaë receiving the Shower of Gold, Prado, Madrid © Bridgeman Art Library

      Reclining Venus, Lutenist, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Wisdom, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Portrait of Jacopo Strada, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna © 2012. Photo Austrian Archives/Scala, Florence

      St Sebastian, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence

      Death of Actaeon, National Gallery, London © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Flaying of Marsyas, Archbishop’s Gallery, Kromeritz, Czech Republic © Mondadori Electa/The Bridgeman Art Library

      Crowning with Thorns, Alte Pinakothek, Munich © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

      St Jerome in Penitence, Monasterio de El Escorial, Spain © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Pietà, Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice © The Bridgeman Art Library

      Self-Portrait, Madrid © Imagno/Austrian Archives/Getty Images

PART I

       1488/90–1518

      Titian may be said to have remodelled the language of painting, just as Dante established the language of Italy; there remains also the richness of emotion which expresses the man behind the work.

      CHARLES RICKETTS, TITIAN, 1910

ONE

       Mountains

      Might not this ‘mountain man’ have been something of a ‘canny Scot’ or a ‘shrewd Swiss’?

      JOSIAH GILBERT, TITIAN’S COUNTRY, 1869

      On a clear day in Venice when the wind blows the mist from the lagoon, you can see the distant mountains 110 kilometres to the north where Titian Vecellio was born into a large and locally prominent family in the little township of Pieve di Cadore, close to the border with Habsburg Germany. It was remote, sparsely populated country whose inhabitants were necessarily tough, hard working and used to rationing and penny-pinching. In summer and autumn there was plenty of milk, cheese, butter and fruit from the lush pastures and orchards. But the thin mountain soil did not produce enough grain to last through the long winters, when supplies had to be hauled up through snow-covered valleys on sleds drawn by horses either from Germany or from the fertile Venetian plain. The communal grain stores were closely supervised by the local authorities, who controlled prices for the poor.

      A loyal outpost of the Venetian land empire since 1420, the region of Cadore was divided for administrative purposes into centurie or ‘centuries’. And the location of Pieve, where an escarpment rises sharply above the then navigable River Piave, was important to Venice as a control point for one of the trading routes between its overseas dominions in the Levant and transalpine Europe. Convoys of pack animals and carts drawn by oxen or horses, one behind to act as a break when descending steep hills, criss-crossed the surrounding valleys. Merchants from the Habsburg Empire, the German kingdoms, Poland, Hungary and Bohemia carried silver, gold, copper, iron, sheets of tin, metal products, hides, worked leather, furs, coarse cloth and minerals to Venice, where the German exchange house, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, ‘would by itself’, so it seemed to one Jerusalem pilgrim in Venice at the turn of the fifteenth century, ‘suffice to supply all Italy with the goods that come and go’.1 Produce from the north was traded at the Fondaco for luxury goods made in Venice – glass and mirrors from Murano, refined soaps, richly worked and dyed silks and satins – or imported into Venice from the Levant: preserved fruits, molasses, wine and olive oil; seed pearls, ivory; and the products known as spices, a term that covered a wide range of goods from peacock feathers, fine-spun Egyptian cottons and the ingredients of pigments used by artists and dyers to flavourings (cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, saffron, frankincense, myrrh) that were also essentials as the bases of the only drugs available in Renaissance Europe.

      Timber and to a lesser extent iron mining were the principal local industries. Wood in this densely forested area was a precious export commodity, not to be wasted unnecessarily on domestic fires. Venice depended for its very survival on a steady and copious supply of wood from its hinterland, which was imported in vast quantities for building and fitting out the war and trading galleys; for the small boats that plied its waterways; for dykes, palisades and the pilings on which the foundations of its buildings rested; for stoking industrial furnaces and for the unusually numerous domestic fires. Venetians, as we can see from the multitude of conical chimneys in contemporary paintings, liked to keep their houses warmer than those in other northern cities.

      Timber