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

tangere (London, National Gallery) and the Baptism of Christ (Rome, Pinacoteca Capitolina), both painted just before or after the Padua frescos, are too small to have been intended for church altars, where the pastoral landscapes, which could suggest pagan revelries, would not have been acceptable. For the highly erotic Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland), which is about the same scale and date, he used the same model for the shepherd as for the Baptist in the Baptism of Christ and the same model for the blonde girl who is in the act of initiating passionate sex with her naked shepherd for the St Catherine in the Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor (Mamiano, Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca). This is one of the most gorgeous sacred conversations ever painted, the reds, blues, mauves and whites worn by the lovely dark-haired Virgin and glamorous St Catherine glow against their dark-curtained enclosure while the black and white robes of St Dominic and the donor to whom he introduces the splendid vision are silhouetted against the peacefully receding landscape. If we didn’t know the Christian story we might imagine that the men had come upon a harem. Such paintings would have been commissioned by private patrons who were steeped in the pastoral stories of Jacopo Sannazaro and his imitators and who were perhaps sophisticated enough to enjoy the teasing play of an Arcadian landscape as it could have been in the golden age of pagan revelry with the golden age in which Christ was born.21

      Nevertheless, although Titian has sometimes been accused of shallow religious beliefs, at least in his early life, no artist of little faith could have painted the intensely moving Entombment of Christ (Paris, Louvre),22 a painting that glimmers with what has been aptly described as a ‘mysterious weirdness’,23 in which Giorgionesque dreaminess gives way to the tumultuous emotion of each mourner as the slack but perfect body of Christ, already cast in shadow, is lowered into the tomb. This intensely moving study in grief has been unjustly neglected, possibly because until recently it hung next to the Mona Lisa and was difficult to see through the crowds determined to focus their attention on the most famous painting in the world.24 The patron is unknown, but if, as has been suggested,25 Titian portrayed himself as the young bearded mourner who supports Christ’s legs26 it is not unreasonable to speculate that he identified with this sacred subject, one to which he would return later in life.

      At around the same time Titian was working on these paintings he was also designing one of the most astonishing of all visual celebrations of the Christian faith. It is not a painting but a woodcut illustrating the Triumph of Christ;27 and like all of Titian’s woodcuts he drew it directly on the blocks in collaboration with the master cutter. Although the sources differ about exactly when Titian began the composition, the first multiple impressions were sold in 1517, at the end of a war in which the forces of evil had tried and failed to destroy God’s chosen city. The main inscription describes the Saints singing of how Christ has triumphed over death and is leading all to peace through the gates of heaven. The ‘infinity of figures’, as described by Vasari, are taken from the Old Testament and the Gospels: ‘the first parents, the patriarchs, the prophets, the sibyls, the innocents, the martyrs, the apostles, and Jesus Christ on the triumphal car, drawn by the four evangelists and the four doctors, with the holy confessors behind …’. The woodcut, which is made from ten blocks, incorporates motifs borrowed from several other artists: Mantegna, Michelangelo, Raphael. Titian probably intended it as an answer to Jacopo de’ Barbari’s three-block Triumph of Man over Satyrs and to rival Dürer’s woodcut-in-progress of the Triumph of Maximilian, begun in 1512. The subject may refer to Savonarola’s famous treatise, The Triumph of the Cross, published in Florence in 1497, the year before his execution. If so it conveys a different message. Savonarola describes Christ wearing a crown of thorns, holding the Bible in His right hand and in His left the cross and instruments of His Passion. In Titian’s image Christ carries only a sceptre, the sign of the worldly domination of His Church, as He returns in triumph from a victorious campaign against the forces of evil.

      The Triumph of Christ was commissioned by an entrepreneurial publisher, Gregorio de’ Gregoriis. Although it is the only masterpiece de’ Gregoriis ever published, he did not mention Titian’s name in his application for copyright. Perhaps he banked on the subject more than the artist to appeal to an international market large enough to bring a return on his considerable investment. All woodcuts were expensive to produce, Titian’s Triumph of Christ was unusually elaborate, and since he had not yet established an international reputation de’ Gregoriis doubtless decided that his name would not encourage buyers. De’ Gregoriis, in any case, cannot have anticipated the huge success of the woodcut. Although the impressions can’t have been cheap to buy, Titian’s image of the triumphant Saviour restoring order to the Christian world was an international bestseller, hung or pasted on the walls of domestic households throughout Christendom by people who had never heard of Titian and who would never see his paintings. Later in the century motifs from it were used for a stained-glass window in Burgundy.28 It was copied in a painting in the cathedral of Prague, and became so popular that six separate woodcut versions of it were produced in the decades that saw Titian’s fame as the greatest colourist in Europe soar above his genius for designing complex images in black and white.

SEVEN

       ‘Some Little Bit of Fame’

      Since childhood, Most Serene Prince and Most Excellent Lords, I TICIAN, your servant from Cadore, have devoted myself to learning the art of painting, not so much from the desire for profit as to acquire some little bit of fame, and to be counted among those who at the present time practise this art as a profession.

      PETITION BY TITIAN TO THE COUNCIL OF TEN, MAY 1513

      Titian in his mid-twenties was not yet internationally famous, but he was the best-known young painter in Venice. His frescos on the German exchange house were one of the talking points of the city; and his only rival as the painter of choice for wealthy clients was the aged Giovanni Bellini. Some of his keenest admirers were members of the ruling nobility, not least Pietro Bembo and Andrea Navagero, prominent intellectuals and connoisseurs of modern art. In the spring of 1513 Bembo invited Titian to join him in Rome, where he had been appointed secretary to Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had been elected to the papacy on 4 March following the sudden death from fever of Julius II. Titian had been in touch with the Bembo family since his days in Giovanni Bellini’s studio and later in Padua. The exhilarating although now damaged and overpainted Tobias and the Angel Raphael (Venice, Accademia)1 bears the Bembo coat of arms prominently displayed next to the little dog – the first of Titian’s delightful portraits of animals.2 The apocryphal story of Tobias’ journey in search of a cure for his father’s blindness was a popular subject in Renaissance mercantile communities, but more so in fifteenth-century Florence than in Venice. The main figure is always the archangel Raphael, the guide and guardian of Tobias, who is his identifying attribute. Bernardo Bembo, who served as Venetian ambassador in Florence, and his son Pietro, who had been educated there, might well have appreciated the Tuscan theme and style of the painting. Vasari said that Bembo had sat for Titian before the invitation to Rome, but his only surviving portrait by Titian is the much later one of 1539 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), when he was nearly seventy, wearing the scarlet cape and hat of a cardinal, a position to which he had been elevated by Pope Paul III.3

      As a young man Bembo had hoped to follow the example of his father by serving the Republic as an ambassador. But five attempts to obtain an ambassadorship were voted down in government, each time by a large majority. He was considered too young for a responsible position in government; and he spent too much time away from Venice gallivanting in the princely courts of Italy where he had numerous