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

He pursued Maria Savorgnan, the love of his life, to Ferrara, where he also fell in love with Lucrezia Borgia, the beautiful daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who had recently married Alfonso d’Este, the future Duke of Ferrara. In 1506, after the publication of Gli Asolani, which he dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia, Bembo decided to devote more time to his writing while pursuing a career in the Church, which he hoped would make fewer demands on his time than a career in politics. He spent seven years at the splendid court of the Duke of Urbino. Called to Rome by Leo X he secured a living as a cleric after taking the vow of chastity, and then produced three children by his Roman mistress, Morosina, the younger sister of a courtesan serving the Vatican.

      His libidinous behaviour as a young man would not have bothered the ebulliently hedonistic Leo, to whom a Venetian ambassador in Rome later attributed the famous remark: ‘Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.’ Best known to posterity as the pope whose sale of indulgences to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s caused Martin Luther to publish his Ninety-Five Theses and thus precipitated the Reformation, Leo made Bembo his secretary because he enjoyed the company of literary men. But when he renewed the alliance with Maximilian against the Republic Bembo found himself technically in the service of an enemy of his country. The association with Leo would not have been regarded as exactly traitorous in that age of continually shifting alliances. But it was a card for Titian to keep up his sleeve.

      As Dolce tells the story, the great lyrical poet Andrea Navagero, who understood Titian’s painting ‘just as if it were poetry, and particularly Latin poetry, which was such a great forte of his’, tried to dissuade him from accepting Bembo’s invitation because he feared that ‘Venice, in losing him, would be despoiled of one of its greatest adornments’. Navagero, who was a master of Latin rhetoric as well as poetry, is less read today than Bembo, who made his name writing in a Tuscan Italian that is still accessible. But at the time, although thirteen years younger than Bembo, Navagero commanded at least as much respect in intellectual and artistic circles, and more as a reliable member of the Venetian government.

      Titian must have been tempted to pay at least a short visit to Rome, the city that under Julius II had replaced Florence as the leading artistic centre of Italy. Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, the creators of the Italian High Renaissance, were only the starring geniuses among scores of talented artists attracted to the papal court from elsewhere in Italy. Michelangelo had only just finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The young prodigy Raphael was completing the decorations of the first of the papal apartments, the Stanze della Segnatura, with a team of assistants that included the wandering Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto. Leonardo arrived later in 1513 to work for Giuliano de’ Medici, the pope’s brother and captain general of his militia, and spent most of the next three years living in the Belvedere, the pope’s summer residence, while bickering with Leo, who complained not without reason that Leonardo never finished anything. Rome, then, was the place to be: to meet and learn from the greatest living artists; and to study and draw the ancient buildings and the antique relief carvings and sculptures that were causing sensations as they were discovered beneath the ground of the Holy City and that were considered an essential part of a young artist’s formative education.

      The single most exciting archaeological discovery in the entire Renaissance of classical art and literature was the late Hellenistic sculpture of a group of writhing figures unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506, when the subject was purportedly identified by Michelangelo as the unfortunate Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons wrestling with snakes. According to the story as told by Virgil in the Aeneid Laocoön was punished by the Roman goddess Minerva for warning the Trojans that the wooden horse the Greeks had brought into their city was a trick. The sculpture group had been praised by Pliny as one of the greatest of all antique sculptures, and for the rest of the sixteenth century and into the next writers, sculptors and painters vied with one another to find ways of evoking the dynamism, and the sexual connotations, of the writhing, twisting figures.

      Although it was later said that Titian would have been an even greater painter had he seen the antiquities in Rome as a young artist, he demonstrated that he could work just as well from sketches and models. Long before he finally saw the originals many years later, he incorporated in his pictures references to the Laocoön and other antique sculptures, as well as figures from paintings by central Italian artists that he knew only from sketches or cartoons. In Rome, furthermore, Titian would have been one of many, while in Venice he was in a unique position. Giorgione was dead, Sebastiano was in Rome, Giovanni Bellini was very old, and Cima da Conegliano and Carpaccio had failed to keep pace with the modern manner. Titian had a clear field and good connections in high places. He could paint more or less at his own pace free from the pressures to meet deadlines and to paint banners and theatrical sets at the whim of a prince, and free from the personality clashes that complicated the lives of artists at the papal court. Even Raphael, the very paradigm of a courtly artist, had been known to complain that he had sacrificed his freedom by attending the court of Julius II.4 Titian in any case never liked to be too far away from Cadore, or from Francesco.

      Despite the hard times, there were still private patrons in Venice who could afford to buy or commission paintings. And the Venetian government needed painters to complete the cycle of canvases for the Great Council Hall5 depicting that fundamental self-glorifying Venetian legend according to which a Venetian doge in 1177 had made peace between the two top rulers of the world, Pope Alexander III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and was rewarded by the pope with a series of gifts symbolizing Venice’s role as peacekeeper and that of the doge as the equal in power and status of both pope and emperor. The story was of course especially appropriate at a time when Venice was at war against a modern pope and emperor.

      On 31 May 1513 when, following the treaty of alliance with France negotiated at Blois two months earlier, the government was in a more optimistic frame of mind than it had been since the beginning of the war, a petition was read out to the Council of Ten on Titian’s behalf. Although he may have had help in phrasing it, perhaps from Navagero or another of his literary friends in high places, and the record of the petition is not in his hand, it is precious as the first document that reveals Titian’s confidence in his own powers and his skill in manipulating powerful patrons.

      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. And even though I have been insistently requested, previously and even now, both by His Holiness the Pope and by other lords to go and serve them: nevertheless, as Your Sublimity’s most faithful subject, and desiring to leave some memorial in this illustrious city, I have resolved, if it seems feasible, to paint in the Great Council Hall and to put into that task all my intellect and spirit for as long as I live, beginning, if it please Your Sublimity, with the canvas of the battle for the side facing the Piazza which is the most difficult and which no man until now has had the courage to attempt.

      Titian then turned to the terms he hoped to be granted:

      I, Most Excellent Lords, will be content to receive in compensation for the work I will do whatever payment is judged proper and much less. But because, as I have said above, I value nothing more than my own honour, and wish only to have enough on which to live, may it please Your Sublimity to award me for my lifetime the first sanseria [brokerage] in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi that becomes vacant, irrespective of other requests, and on the same terms, conditions, obligations and exemptions as Mr Giovanni Bellini, that is: two young men whom I wish to keep with me as assistants to be paid by the Salt Office, together with the colours and other necessities, as in the past months were awarded by the above mentioned Illustrious Council to Mr Giovanni. In return for which I promise your Most Excellent Lords to make this work, and with such speed and excellence that you will be very happy with it. To whom I beg to be humbly recommended.

      It was a bold proposal. Not only would Titian be the youngest artist ever to paint in the ducal palace, he was requesting the same terms as the venerable Giovanni Bellini, including the sanseria, an honorary brokerage in the Fondaco worth an annual