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

Marignano and was now governor of Milan. Titian was also doing small jobs for Alfonso d’Este, who in August of that year paid him forty-eight lire for a sketch of a bronze horse. Early in the following winter Alfonso, who was planning to rebuild part of his castle, asked Titian to send him a sketch of a Venetian balcony and to supply him with a painting for the ducal bathroom of nymphs bathing. Titian responded to these requests with a letter – it is not in his own handwriting – saying that if his sketches of the balcony were not satisfactory he would do others because he was dedicated, breath, body and soul, to serving His Excellency, and he was honoured to obey him whenever and in whatever way he commanded. As for the Bathing Scene, he had not forgotten it, indeed he was working on it daily and the duke need only let him know when he would like it sent.

      But a few weeks later Alfonso was persuaded by reports of the Assunta to cancel the Bathing Scene and to offer Titian a much more ambitious commission. On 1 April 1518, in a letter addressed to ‘the Most Illustrious and Excellent Lord, my Lord Duke of Ferrara’ and written by the same hand as the earlier letter about the balcony, Titian acknowledged receipt of a canvas, stretcher and instructions for a painting. Titian’s intellectually sophisticated ghost wrote that he found the subject so beautiful and ingenious that the more he thought about it the more he became convinced that the grandeur of the art of the antique painters was due to the generosity of great princes, who had allowed painters to take the credit for works of art which merely gave shape to the ingenuity and spirit of those who had commissioned them. To say that the soul of a work of art resided in its patron while the artist was merely the physical agent was an extraordinary conceit and certainly not one that would have occurred to any painter, let alone one as proud of his powers of invention as Titian. (Giovanni Bellini had refused outright to paint a subject according to a programme described to him by Isabella d’Este.) So whoever composed that letter must have been a friend whose judgement Titian trusted absolutely. Although there is no way of proving the identity of the author of the letter, the most likely candidate is Andrea Navagero, the poet and classical scholar who had persuaded Titian to refuse Bembo’s invitation to Rome in 1513 and who had himself recently returned from Rome to Venice.22

      On 22 April Jacopo Tebaldi, the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice, reported to the duke that he had paid a visit to Titian. He had given him the ‘the sketch of that little figure’ and Titian had taken note of the duke’s further instructions for his painting. Titian wanted to know exactly where the duke proposed to hang it in relation to the other pictures in the room,23 and he promised to begin work on it that very morning. There is no record of Alfonso’s reply. Perhaps he took the opportunity to answer Titian’s question about where the picture would hang, and to see the Assunta with his own eyes when he paid a visit to Venice in early June. We can be sure that the duke nagged the painter in person – the sight of Titian’s astonishing painting of the Virgin flying up to heaven surrounded by angels can only have inflamed his natural impatience – and that Titian disarmed him with his usual courteous but disingenuous assurances that he would make the painting a priority.

      If Titian hoped that the government would continue to excuse his failure to make progress with the battle scene while he satisfied the demands of the Duke of Ferrara, he was mistaken. On 3 July 1518 he received a stern warning from the Salt Office. Unless he began immediately on the canvas for the Great Council Hall, which had been neglected for so many years, and unless he continued to work on it until it was finished, their magnificences would have it painted by another artist at Titian’s expense. Titian, who had reason to be confident that there was no other artist capable of or even willing to attempt a painting for the difficult site between the windows facing on to the Grand Canal, seems to have deflected the threat by agreeing to complete Giovanni Bellini’s unfinished Submission of Barbarossa,24 which he did not actually get around to for another four years. His private practice was busier than ever before. His mind was racing with fresher and more compelling ideas. Titian would not be rushed, either by his own government or by the Duke of Ferrara.

      He did not complete Alfonso d’Este’s painting until January 1520, twenty months after he had promised to begin it ‘that very morning’. It would be the first of three canvases for the duke with which the artist who had transformed Christian art with his Ascending Virgin surrounded by angels breathed new life into painted fables about the orgiastic revels of pagan gods and goddesses and their freedom to behave in ways that mortal men could only relive in their classically inspired imaginations. For the Worship of Venus (Madrid, Prado) he borrowed his own baby angels from the Assunta and let them loose in an apple orchard where he turned them into a swarm of unruly little pagan cupids tumbling and flying about, gathering and throwing apples, shooting arrows, wrestling, hugging, kissing and dancing before a statue of Venus, the goddess of uninhibited sexual love.25

      Titian’s life was about to take a new turn, one that would lead him to international fame and place Venice on the map as an artistic centre to rival the glory days of Florence and Rome. He had never lacked confidence, but now, as he entered his thirties, he knew this about himself: he was more than ready to work for the greatest princely collectors, but he would do so at his own pace; and if he was required to spend time at their glittering courts, he would never stay long enough to be anyone’s court painter, always returning as soon as possible to Republican Venice.

PART II

       1518–1530

      Look at the ‘Bacchanals’ in Madrid, or at the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery. How brim-full they are of exuberant joy! You see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer conditions, but life so free so strong, so glowing, that it almost intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs – the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate the sun.

      BERNARD BERENSON, ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE, 1938

ONE

       Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara

      You see, the Cupids are gathering apples, and you might be surprised at their numbers, but that they are the offspring of the nymphs and govern all that is mortal, and their multitude is proportioned to the varied desires of mankind … They hang their golden arrows and quivers on the boughs, and rove in swarms about the place … Blue, gold, or coloured are their wings, the hum of which is like music. The baskets in which they throw the apples are of cornelian, emerald, or pearl … Ladders they need not, for they fly into the very heart of the fruit; they dance and run, or rest, or sleep or sate themselves with apples. Here are four of the loveliest of them. One throws an apple to the other; a third shoots his arrow; but there is no wickedness in him … The riddle which the painter gives us here to solve doubtless expresses love and longing …

      PHILOSTRATUS, IMAGINES, THIRD CENTURY AD1

      He who rests must take action and he who acts should take rest.

      INSCRIPTION ON A CARVING BY ANTONIO LOMBARDO FOR ALFONSO D’ESTE’S STUDY

      Alfonso I d’Este, third Duke of Ferrara and the first in the chain of Titian’s aristocratic foreign patrons, was a rough diamond. He traced his ancestry back to the knights of King Arthur’s round table, but he dressed carelessly, and his manner was gruff. He enjoyed playing outrageous practical jokes and working with his hands. When he was a young man it was reported in the Venetian Senate that the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara had the habit of strolling about Ferrara stark naked – ‘nudo, nudo’; it was also said that he had fathered several illegitimate children, and contracted syphilis. Even after he had inherited his title and with it the weighty responsibilities of ruling and defending a large and much-contested state, he continued in his spare time to enjoy carpentry, painting pottery, casting in