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

The Battle of Spoleto, the canvas he was supposed to be painting in return for his government studio, had gone stale on him. It was to be in a difficult position, as he had occasion to point out more than once, and medieval history paintings were not his forte. The more he thought about it the more his imagination was fired by a different battle, the Old Testament battle in which the Israelites are saved by God from Pharaoh’s army. Titian had already proved himself a master designer of woodcuts with the Triumph of Christ, and the Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, to which he now turned his attention, is arguably the greatest and most dramatic woodcut ever made18 and is certainly one of the greatest of all depictions of war. It measures 1,225 mm by 2,215 made from twelve blocks, a scale never before or after attempted for a Venetian figurative woodcut. Although there is no proof that Titian intended this heroic image as an allegory of the war that was threatening the Republic of Venice with extinction, the relevance at that time of the story of the salvation of God’s chosen people and the destruction of their enemies might have seemed especially moving. Titian chose the episode from Exodus chapter 14 when Moses, having parted the waters to allow the retreating Israelites to escape from the Egyptian army, is instructed by the Lord to stretch out his hand over the sea, ‘that the waters may come again upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen … And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.’

      It may have been a coincidence but was nonetheless appropriate that the Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea was completed by February 1515.19 On 1 January the Venetian alliance with France had been given new life when the vigorous twenty-one-year-old Francis I succeeded Louis XII on the French throne. Francis declared himself duke of Milan, and in August crossed the Alps with the largest army ever assembled up to that time. In September, at Marignano (now Melegnano), sixteen kilometres south-east of Milan, the French army with some assistance from Venetians won a resounding victory against the combined forces of the pope, imperial Spain and the Swiss mercenaries who occupied Milan on behalf of the emperor. It was the final battle of the war of Cambrai. With all the remaining enemies who had determined ‘to extinguish, like a great fire, the insatiable rapacity of the Venetians and their thirst for power’ routed, it was left to diplomats to settle the terms of a peace, which two years later restored the greater part of the Venetian terraferma to the protection of the lion of St Mark.

      While Venice celebrated what it saw as its victory, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in a letter written in 1517, rejoiced in the peace from a loftier international perspective. He foretold ‘the approach of a new golden age, so clearly do we see the minds of princes, as if changed by inspiration, devoting all their energies to the pursuit of peace’. He gave most of the credit to Francis, King of France:

      There is nothing this king does not do or does not suffer in his desire to avert war and consolidate peace; submitting, of his own accord, to conditions which might be deemed unfair, if he preferred to have regard to his own greatness and dignity rather than to the general advantage of the world; and exhibiting in this, as in everything else, a magnanimous and truly royal character.

      He also praised the leaders of the other states that had formed the league of aggression against Venice nine years earlier, giving special mention to ‘Maximilian Caesar, whose old age, weary of so many wars, has determined to seek rest in the employments of peace, a resolution more becoming to his own years, while it is fortunate for the Christian world’. Erasmus did not in this letter mention Venice as one of the peacemakers. Nor did he foresee that one of the ‘pious princes’, Francis I, and the grandson of Maximilian Caesar would be once again at war within a few years and that their long fight for dominance in northern Italy would delay the harmonious international relations that he had so earnestly anticipated.

EIGHT

       ‘His Industrious Brush’: Pentimenti and Portraits

      Confronted by a rival, whose name may be Pordenone or Michelangelo, Titian responds by engorging him. He appropriates his opponent’s style, or some part of it, which remains, for a brief moment, undigested within his own … The result is not, as with Hogarth or Renoir, disappointing: it is harrowing and short-lived. Titian works through the challenge, and his style reasserts itself.

      RICHARD WOLLHEIM, PAINTING AS ART, 1987

      When Titian was in his sixties he told a doctor that there were some days when he couldn’t paint at all and others when he could do and think of nothing else. Although his style changed radically in old age, his working habits were formed early in his career. When he was stimulated by competition or by the threat of losing a commission or by painting in fresco, he could work fast. But while the biographers of artists across different times and civilizations have told stories about wizardly speed of execution, as though the artists’ hands were directed by some supernatural force,1 Titian was known for his slowness and the procrastinations that stretched the patience of his patrons. He liked to work concurrently in different styles on paintings of different genres, stacking pictures that failed to satisfy him against a wall, leaving them unfinished or returning to them months, years or in some cases decades later. With growing success came the habit of taking on more tasks than he could realistically finish to a deadline. And he was capable of producing indifferent work on an off day or if the fee wasn’t high enough to merit his full attention: there are dull paintings – some come on the market or are stored in the basements of public galleries – that can be securely attributed to Titian, as well as some that are given to him without documentary evidence on the grounds of their high quality alone.

      Painting conservators can detect the layers of dust that accumulated while he set his paintings aside until he had solved a problem or could no longer put off the demands of a patron. He made his alterations over dry paint, cancelling out previous attempts with white lead paint, which shows up on X-rays. Joshua Reynolds, who claimed to have taken a painting by Titian to pieces to discover the elusive ‘Venetian secret’, would have envied our up-to-date technologies, which allow us to watch Titian at work, rearranging, adding and cancelling, searching for the composition and the tonal relationships in his mind’s eye. Titian was an explorer in paint, trying out new ideas, striking out in new directions, assimilating lessons from other masters and quoting them before discarding their example to find his own way into an unmapped future. Although he frequently quoted motifs from paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael, the story goes that later in his life he once said to an imperial ambassador in Venice, ‘who saw him use a brush as big as a birch-broom’, that he wished to paint in a manner different from that of Raphael or Michelangelo, because he was not content to be a ‘mere imitator’.2 He was, as his contemporaries liked to say of him, an exemplar of the Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the effort that goes into great art.3 But the false starts and the pentimenti – changes of plan while he worked on a painting4 – that can be detected beneath the assured surfaces of his masterpieces give us an idea of just how great the effort was. Bellini and Giorgione had taken advantage of the slow-drying property of oil paint to make changes, but Titian’s more numerous changes were so characteristic of his working methods that they have become a hallmark for distinguishing autograph Titians from imitations or mainly studio works.

      Although some of Titian’s compositions look as though he must have worked them out on paper before starting to paint, the majority of the preparatory sketches, if they existed, have long since disappeared, as have all but a few dozen of his other drawings, many of which are of debatable attribution. The whole question of Titian’s drawings, and what use he made of them, is one of the more vexed issues of Titian scholarship. The surviving sketches and drawings that are accepted, at least by some authorities, as autograph cover a wide variety of subjects – landscapes, animals, anatomical studies, sketches for portraits, studies for