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

not do this injury to The Most Reverend Legate; and that he, Titian, should think of serving us well with that work which he is supposed to do for us which now weighs more heavily on our mind than anything else, and remind him about that Head7 which he began for us before leaving Ferrara.

      The letter was preceded by the delivery to Titian of the canvas for Bacchus and Ariadne and a sweetener of twenty-five scudi.

      A few months later it must have occurred to Alfonso that for all the good his sudden rush of common sense had done he might as well have gone along with the St Sebastian swindle. By the summer of 1521 Leo X, having enthusiastically formed an alliance with the twenty-one-year-old Habsburg emperor Charles V, was as committed to driving Alfonso’s French allies out of Italy as Julius II had been. Leo excommunicated Alfonso and imposed an interdict on Ferrara, and while the French and Venetians dragged their heels, his troops attacked and occupied key territories and towns of the dukedom of Ferrara. Even with the cards so heavily stacked against him, Alfonso refused to surrender or disarm. He was saved only at the last minute by an event that could not have been predicted. Leo, who was only forty-six, was found dead in bed on the morning of 1 December. He was overweight, drank too much and had been in poor health for some time, but his death was so sudden that poison was suspected, although it seems more likely that he had contracted malaria on a hunting expedition along the Tiber. He had left the papacy all but bankrupt. But what mattered to Alfonso at the time was that Leo’s death gave him the opportunity to recapture most of his hinterland, including Reggio and Modena. He celebrated with a minting of silver coins on which a shepherd rescues a lamb from the jaws of a lion with the biblical inscription de manu leonis.

      Alfonso was less fortunate in his negotiations with Titian, whose work on the Bacchus and Ariadne had been delayed by yet another distraction. This time it was an enormous fresco commissioned in the summer of 1521 by the local government of Vicenza for the loggia of their communal palace. The subject was the Judgement of Solomon, an obvious reference to the administration of justice. It was over six metres wide, more than twice the size of his Miracle of the Speaking Child in Padua, which probably explains the substantial fee of 100 ducats plus six more for painting the vaults of the loggia, and another ten for expenses and three helpers: his brother Francesco, who worked alongside him for thirty days, a certain Gregorio and a Bartolomeo, a ‘master painter’. Nothing more is known about Gregorio and Bartolomeo, who may have been local painters taken on for this job only. Paris Bordone, possibly Titian’s former studio assistant, was working on a much smaller Drunkenness of Noah (for which he was paid twenty-one ducats) adjacent to Titian’s fresco.8 If he was still smarting from Titian’s treatment of him several years earlier (in connection with the San Nicolò ai Frari altarpiece) he was never able to throw off the master’s influence. It was said that when a group of government officials came to survey the completed decorations of the loggia they praised Bordone’s fresco as the equal of Titian’s. If the story is true it may have reminded Titian of the occasion, more than a decade earlier, when Giorgione had been congratulated for painting Titian’s façade of the German exchange house, which everyone considered superior to his own. Giorgione had sulked. Titian by now was too well established, and far too busy, to worry about rivalry, especially from a painter he knew to be his inferior. Alas, we cannot judge either of their frescos because the loggia was destroyed in 1571 to make way for the one designed by Palladio that we see today.

      Alfonso invited Titian to spend that Christmas of 1521 with him in Ferrara and to bring with him the Bacchus and Ariadne, which he could finish over the holidays. Titian, caught off his guard, excused himself, pleading pressure of work. He then went off to Treviso to spend Christmas there, perhaps with the Zuccato family. Tebaldi, realizing that it was useless to expect Titian to change his plans, took it upon himself to make another offer, one that he was certain would please the duke and that he hoped Titian would find too tempting to refuse. He remembered that Titian had once mentioned a wish to visit Rome. Alfonso would be travelling to Rome to kiss the feet of the new pope as soon as one was elected. If Titian would come to Ferrara in good time for his departure Alfonso would be glad to take him along. On 26 December Alfonso responded enthusiastically to Tebaldi’s latest stratagem:

      M. Jacomo. If you had the vision of a prophet you could not have said anything more true to Titian. Nevertheless, the minute we have heard news about the new pope we wish to go in person to kiss the feet of His Holiness, assuming that nothing prevents us. So please advise Titian that if he wants to come he must come quickly. We would dearly like his company, but tell him he must not speak of this matter to anyone. And perhaps he should dispatch our picture at his earliest opportunity because there will be no question of his doing any work on our journey.

      On 3 January 1522 Tebaldi advised his master that Titian had returned to Venice, but was indisposed with a fever. And yet, when he visited him the next day, he found that he had no fever at all. In fact he looked well, ‘if somewhat exhausted’:

      But I suspect that the girls whom he often paints in different poses arouse his appetite, which he then satisfies more than his delicate constitution permits; but he denies it. He says that as soon as he hears the news that a new pope is elected he will, if nothing else prevents it, take a barge and come [to Ferrara] looking forward to accompanying Your Excellency to Rome. But I think he will not bring with him the canvas of Yours. He may change his mind, but he won’t confirm it.

      The girl who was exhausting Titian at the time of Tebaldi’s visit to his studio may have been Cecilia. Titian had brought her to Venice from Perarola di Cadore, the hamlet where the ancestral Vecellio sawmills were located, and where her father was the son of a barber, a respectable profession at a time when barbers were qualified to carry out minor surgical procedures. She was living with Titian in the terraced house behind the Frari that he rented from the Tron family,9 and she may already have been pregnant with their first child. Since we know that Titian used friends and members of his households as models we are free to speculate that Cecilia might have been the model for his Flora, that lovely buxom girl, whose skin has the glow of healthy pregnancy and who points to the bulging waistline under her white shift.10 Perhaps he used her face again for the Venus Anadyomene.11 Titian altered that head during the painting, and she has the same colouring and features as the Flora.12 But the most that can be said with certainty is that Flora’s features and colouring were of a type Titian favoured over a number of years and which we see again in the twinned women in his earlier Sacred and Profane Love, in the Young Woman with a Mirror and in the Madonna in the Pesaro altarpiece.

      Neither Titian nor Alfonso travelled to Rome in January. Although Leo’s cousin Giulio de’ Medici had been the favourite for the papal throne, it was an outsider, the dour and scholarly sixty-three-year-old Dutch cardinal Adrian Dedal of Utrecht, who was elected by the conclave as Pope Adrian VI on 9 January. Adrian, however, did not arrive in Italy until August. Tebaldi meanwhile thought up a more practical suggestion, one more likely to appeal to Titian’s circumstances and temperament. On 4 March he wrote to the duke that he had not bothered to report his many conversations with ‘maestro Titiano’, who always assured him that he would finish the Bacchus and Ariadne, as he had done yet again that very day, when ‘he told me that he wanted to put aside some other pictures and finish Your Excellency’s’:

      But, my lord, I doubt very much that he will do so, for he is a poor fellow and spends freely, so that he needs money every day and works for anyone who will provide it, at least as far as I can see. Thus when some months ago Your Excellency sent him those twenty-five scudi, he began the picture on which he had up to that time done nothing, and he worked on it for many days and made good progress, and then left it as it is now. It is my opinion therefore that it would be a good idea if Your Excellency would send him some scudi, so that he has some spending money and can satisfy your wish to have the said painting.13

      But the painting was still not