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

up to standard. When he had done that work he would take it to Ferrara and stay there until it was completed. But, no, he couldn’t name the date. And then he had the presumption to ask a favour of Tebaldi. Titian had a Venetian friend who wanted to go hunting for birds on the banks of the Po, purely for his own pleasure, certainly not for profit. Would Tebaldi be kind enough to solicit a hunting licence from the duke for his friend and a servant? Tebaldi claimed to be reluctant to request a privilege that was rarely granted to outsiders. Titian, who had reason to be optimistic about the duke’s reaction to any suggestion that might hurry him along, assured the ambassador that when he had received such a special indication of the duke’s goodwill he would be so happy that he would put all of his skill and ingenuity into drawing and colouring a pair of figures in the Bacchus and Ariadne. Tebaldi, who was not amused, told him to stop joking and just take the painting to Ferrara as soon as possible.

      These were strenuous times for a painter who was rarely able to work fast. Titian had resumed work on Jacopo Pesaro’s altarpiece in the Frari, which he seems to have put aside shortly after his first payments in 1519. In 1522 he received further instalments in April (ten ducats, six lire and four soldi), May (the same amount) and September (ten ducats). As the only major painter working in Venice and the recipient of a broker’s patent he was required by the government, furthermore, to paint his first portrait of a doge, the octogenarian Antonio Grimani, who had succeeded Leonardo Loredan in July 1521, but died after only two years in office. Meanwhile he could not ignore a resolution passed by the Council of Ten on 11 August 1522, a copy of which was delivered to his door by a messenger. The Ten demanded that he complete the canvas ‘fourth from the door in the Hall of the Great Council’ before the following 30 June under pain of losing his chances of a broker’s patent as well as all the advances received so far from the Salt Office. The painting in question was the Submission of Frederick Barbarossa before Pope Alexander III, which Giovanni Bellini had not finished before his death. This time Titian took the threat seriously, and began to spend his mornings, so he informed Tebaldi, working in the palace.

      Meanwhile Titian had put his best efforts into Averoldi’s polyptych for Brescia, which was unveiled over the high altar of Santi Nazzaro e Celso on the saints’ feast day in late July 1522.14 Although he had grumbled to Tebaldi about his payment of 200 ducats it was in fact one of the most expensive altarpieces of the time. The St Sebastian that Alfonso d’Este had coveted is the largest figure. The central Risen Christ is another of his most powerfully moving figures; and the Annunciating Angel is one of his most charming and frequently reproduced angels. To achieve the particular black of the donor’s robe as he kneels with the titular saints Titian used no fewer than ten layers of paint and glazes. Since he had accepted the commission it had grown from three to five panels, and the biggest challenge was integrating five separate paintings into a harmonious single polyptych. It was one that he triumphantly met, as he must have thought himself when he signed it ‘TICIANUS FACIEBAT/MDXXII’ (Titian was making/1522).15 This was the first time Titian used the reference to Pliny indicating that great art is never finished.

      Alfonso’s Bacchus and Ariadne was still not ready at the end of August, and when Titian showed no signs of moving from Venice there were more irate messages from the duke. On 31 August Tebaldi hastened to Titian’s studio to see the much-coveted painting, and wrote to the duke the only specific description we have of a work by Titian in progress.

      Yesterday I saw Your Excellency’s canvas, in which there are ten figures, the chariot, and the animals that draw it; and maestro Titian says that he thinks he will paint them all as they are without altering the poses. There will be other heads and the landscape but he says they can be easily finished in a short time, at the longest by next October, when he will have finished everything, in such a way that if Your Excellency does not want additions, the whole thing will be finished and finished well in ten or fifteen days.

      Titian, he continues, begs His Excellency to put aside his anger against him, which has made him so afraid that he says, ‘not joking and with a solemn oath’, that he will never again come to Ferrara ‘without a safe conduct in writing’ from the duke. Nevertheless, he does greatly regret having aroused such anger and will finish the work in Ferrara by mid-October. ‘He has said to me three or four times that if Christ were to offer him work he would not accept anything if he had not finished your canvas first.’

      But to Tebaldi’s embarrassment Titian did in fact fail once again to keep his word with Alfonso. When he had not met the deadline he had promised to keep with a solemn oath, Tebaldi reported to the duke that he had tried to put the fear of God into Titian with tremendous bravado in the name of His Excellency. But Titian had coolly explained that he had had to change two of the female figures and certain nudes, which he would finish by the end of the month. He would bring the picture then, and finish off some heads and other details in Ferrara. He couldn’t come now because here in Venice he had the convenience of whores and of a man who would pose for him in the nude. He was working in the Hall of the Great Council in the mornings, but would devote the rest of his time to the duke’s picture. At the end of the month Tebaldi wrote that Titian had promised that he would embark for Ferrara without fail on the following Sunday evening and had asked him to arrange for a barge. Giddy with relief, he had told Titian that he would provide ‘one, two, or more barges, as many barges as he wants’, and that he was free to bring along his girls if their presence would calm his spirit. But the duke was to be disappointed yet again. The autumn passed, and Titian failed to take up Tebaldi’s desperate offer. He had received the twenty-five scudi by 2 December, and on the 5th he renewed his promise to visit Ferrara and indicated that he might or might not be induced to bring a figure of a woman that he had finished. Once again he spent Christmas in Treviso, probably with the Zuccati.

      Alfonso’s Bacchus and Ariadne was delivered to Ferrara over Christmas by Altobello Averoldi, who had been appointed governor of Bologna and had offered to drop it off on his way to take up his post. Titian, then, may not have been present when his painting, still unfinished, was unpacked from its crate. Although Alfonso had paid for the full range of the most expensive pigments, the overall effect would not be achieved until Titian applied the final scumbles and glazes (most of which have been removed in subsequent restorations).16 Nevertheless those of us who have stood entranced in front of the Bacchus and Ariadne at the London National Gallery may imagine the duke’s reaction to his first sight of the picture that had haunted his dreams for more than two years. This time, possibly at Alfonso’s suggestion – or perhaps at Ariosto’s – Titian had mixed his mythological sources. The subject, like that of the Worship of Venus, was taken from Philostratus. In the Imagines, however, Ariadne was asleep when Bacchus arrived on the island of Naxos, and his unruly followers were ordered to tiptoe in silence so as not to awake her. Titian would certainly have preferred the more dramatic versions as told by Catullus and Ovid, which permitted him to depict the clashing cymbals and general mayhem of the trail of bacchants accompanying their leader on his way back from India. Bacchus, the embodiment of youth, beauty and enjoyment, sees the despairing Ariadne, who has been abandoned by Theseus. He leaps from the side of his chariot. Their eyes meet. Ariadne is at once frightened and seduced. He promises that she will be immortalized as a constellation of stars, which appear in the sky above her. In the exact centre of the foreground the drunken baby satyr, dragging the bleeding head of a dismembered bullock like a toy, gives us a knowing stare. (Titian softened the glaze on one of his eyes with the tip of a finger.) The tigers, which Ovid said might frighten the girl, are wittily transformed into cuddly adolescent cheetahs, portraits of two of the hunting animals in Alfonso’s menagerie. The bearded bacchant on the right is one of Titian’s most obvious quotations of the Laocoön,17 this time snakes and all, and is taken from the same side view he had used for Averoldi’s St Sebastian. Ariadne’s face could be a portrait of Laura Dianti, but the broad-shouldered model for her body, the pose of which was much revised, looks more like a man’s.

      Titian’s two assistants delivered another consignment of his effects by 30 January 1523 when the ducal accounts record payments for a barge that had delivered a painting on panel18 sent