Titian's Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy (Renaissance Lives) [1 ed.] 9781789140828, 178914082X

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Imprint Page
Contents
Introduction: Abracadabra
1: Touch Me! Touch Me Not!
2: Possessing Nature
3: Babies and Fur
4: Lightness and Weight
5: The Sense of Things
6: Blood, Sweat and Tears
Coda: Gold Dust
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview

T i t i a n ’s T ou c h

☞ Books in the renaissance

lives series explore and illustrate the life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philosophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology. Series Editor: François Quiviger Already published Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason  Mary Ann Caws Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity  Troy Thomas Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares  Nils Büttner Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy  Niccolò Guicciardini John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity  John Dixon Hunt Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature  François Quiviger Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time  Bernadine Barnes Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer  Christopher S. Celenza Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature  Elizabeth Alice Honig Rembrandt’s Holland  Larry Silver Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy  Maria L. Loh

T ITIAN’S TOUC H Art, Magic and Philosophy M a r i a H . L oh

R E A K T ION B O OK S

For Caspar

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2019 Copyright © Maria H. Loh 2019 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 082 8

cover: Titian, Portrait of a Lady (‘La Schiavona’), 1510–12, oil on canvas (detail). © The National Gallery, London. Presented through the Art Fund by Sir Frances Cook, Bt., in memory of his father, Sir Herbert Cook, Bt., 1942.

contents

Introduction: Abracadabra 7 1 Touch Me! Touch Me Not! 35 2 Possessing Nature 64 3 Babies and Fur 97 4 Lightness and Weight 124 5 The Sense of Things 156 6 Blood, Sweat and Tears 198 Coda: Gold Dust 233 references

242 bibliography 273 acknowledgements 278 photo acknowledgements 279 index 281

Introduction: Abracadabra

P

igments, spices, scholars and slaves. Pilgrims, Protestants, gossip and gold. Venice had always been a city of flow. In the sixteenth century, it stood at once upon the old world of commerce and trade with its relentless movement of goods and upon the new worlds that were being opened up to the literate citizen by printed books. This confluence of things and thoughts brought the imag­ in­ary and faraway both delightfully and dangerously close for inspection. From luxury commodities to heretical beliefs, from translations of ancient classics to new, exotic species of plants and animals, the pleasure of variety, difference and possession in this circulatory world in flux is evident in Titian’s art. According to legend, the young boy made his first paint­ ing with ‘the nectar from flowers’ derived from the woods around his hometown of Pieve di Cadore in the vertiginous slopes of the Dolomites (illus. 1).1 His father was both a gov­ ernment official and captain of the militia during the Italian Wars; he was also in charge of inspecting mines and oversee­ ing timber production. Before his tenth birthday, Titian was sent from the desolate highlands of the north to the intense 1 View north from Pieve di Cadore.

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urban matrix of Venice, where he became an apprentice in the mosaic workshop of Sebastiano Zuccato, studied with the Bellini and eventually collaborated with Giorgione. It has been said that ‘when Titian went to Venice the fifteenth century was closing; but it was still the fifteenth century.’2 Indeed, throughout Titian’s long, prolific career (c. 1490– 1576), he was experimental, modern and forward-looking, but his visual practice did not entirely jettison the conven­ tions and convictions that had been inherited from ancient and medieval authorities. In this regard, he was a painter of contradiction and a master of synthesis. Titian was an extraordinarily gifted storyteller, but he was also a formidable historian. His works preserve within them some trace of the anxieties, concerns, dreams and hopes of early modern Venice. This is not to say that the artist’s images functioned merely as a mirror of his times. Rather than a direct imitation of the natural world that he saw around him, Titian’s exploration into the very nature of things was a form of visual philosophy that resonated with the cutting-edge investigations taking place in the nearby university town of Padua as well as the new technologies and trade secrets being developed in the ship yards, apothecaries and silk and gemstone industries in the city. He was a man fully embedded in the world, at once a painter, a philosopher and a sorcerer. His brush, like a magician’s wand, possessed the uncanny power to change oil, dust and threads into im­ mor­tal objects of desire. His contemporaries claimed that everything he touched was inspirited and came to life, and his friend Pietro Aretino raved: ‘Titian held the sense of things in his brush.’3

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Introduction: Abracadabra

The difficulty in writing a monograph focused on an artist as famous and as beloved as Titian is to tell a compelling story without rehashing the same old tales. Writing in the long shadow of Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle’s unsurpassed biography of the artist (1877) and Harold E. Wethey’s formidable catalogue raisonné (1969– 75), subsequent scholars have approached Titian and his art either from the text-based interests of the iconog­rapher con­ cerned with meaning or from the perspective of the social historian who asks questions about gender, the status of patrons, and the cultural, commercial and political world in which the artist operated. Following an essay by David Rosand on ‘The Eloquence of Titian’s Brush’ (1981), some of the most innovative scholarship in recent decades has focused on the artist’s painterly exploration of materiality, the body and the senses. Drawing from this rich arsenal, I would like to demonstrate further that these fleshy, earth-bound conditions embrace profoundly philosophical concerns as well. What can Titian’s paintings tell us about his world? This is essentially a historical question, to which a philosophical one can be added: how do we think with Titian’s paintings? This double-sided proposition might be restated in the following manner: how is the world engendered in an image, but how, too, does the visual explore and interrogate the world? To respond to these questions and by way of intro­ duction to Titian’s pictorial intelligence, I offer an extended consideration of two of his most profound works. The first presents an unidentified female sitter from around 1511; the second portrays a falsely accused archbishop twice painted in the 1550s.

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But first, a brief word about our approach. It is said that museum visitors spend on average 27.2 seconds in front of an artwork, giving ‘brief looks to many works’.4 This book, in contrast, will show the reader how to look at works for a long time. The process will be accumulative: we begin with a few in-depth studies and expand to a larger repertoire of thematic considerations. With paintings of the distant past, modern viewers are often daunted by the sheer amount of contextual knowledge that seems to be required in order to decipher the identity of this or that saint, goddess, historical personage or locale. Without easy access to this data, one can feel at a loss as to where to begin. A good painting, however, can and should communicate so much more, and Titian – it cannot be denied – was a painter of some very good paint­ ings. A secondary aim of this book, therefore, is to demonstrate to the non-specialist how to look a painting in the eye, so to say. The following chapters will take up this task moving roughly chronologically, but above all thematically through some of Titian’s most startling paintings. Relevant historical details and summaries of previous interpretations will be provided when necessary to help guide the unfamiliar reader, and some new (and often provisional) theories will be pre­ sented for consideration. At the centre of the story, however, will be the conceptual, material and magical work of the paintings themselves, images at once ambivalent and ambig­ uous, presenting the viewer with the sensible realities of nature through the abstract perfection of art, blurring the distinction between reality and fiction. The aesthetic force of Titian’s art, as we shall discover, resided precisely in this nebulous in-between, which was simultaneously too real

2 Titian, Portrait of a Lady (La Schiavona or La Famigliare), c. 1510–12, oil on canvas.

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and too ideal, too concrete and too abstract, too sensory and too conceptual. The Nebulous In-bet w een Everyone has a favourite Titian painting. I have many, but I begin with the magnificent Portrait of a Lady (illus. 2) in the National Gallery in London. Over the centuries, the painting assumed various false identities, moving across Europe as a copy after a lost original by Giorgione, as an authentic work by Bernardo Licino, as a portrait of the Queen of Cyprus, and as La Schiavona (the ‘Dalmatian Woman’). There have been numerous disagreements about the woman in this por­ trait, and there is indeed something liminal about her. Some have insisted on seeing Slavic features in the woman’s face; others with equal conviction have not. The subject in the painting is at once girlish and matronly. Some say she is approaching middle age, but the majority agrees that she is a healthy woman in her early twenties. Her face is young, but not naive. She seems welcoming, but would suffer no fools. Her dark brown hair is parted straight down the middle, held up and back in a gauzy net known as a scuffia. She wears her dress loose, but cinched at the waist. According to Titian’s cousin Cesare Vecellio (the author of a late sixteenth-century costume book), this modest and unencumbered style allowed Venetian women to be ‘fit and quick to attend to their house­ hold duties’.5 The sitter is, to be sure, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, but as compelling as all the heroines of neo-realist cinema combined. She belongs to both the realm of fine art and the nitty-gritty actuality of everyday life. The sculpted portrait,

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which appears in the lower right-hand corner, amplifies this uncanny effect. Standing before the canvas in the National Gallery, the eye is drawn to the frayed edge that flutters across the woman’s chest. Scholars have generally described the material of the dress as wool. But perhaps it is silk, which was an important export commodity for Venice (and one would think that a woman important enough to be commemorated in a por­ trait as such would want to be dressed in this cloth of luxury). Titian’s other sitters from this period certainly thought so. For instance, the same kind of delicate brushstrokes are used on the neckline of the ‘doublet of silvered satin’ belonging to the sitter in A Man with a Quilted Sleeve (illus. 3) painted in these same years.6 Here, too, the strands of silk thread twist into little wisps along the edge (illus. 4, 5), and the tactile nature of this jagged line lures the spectator in for closer inspection. At arm’s length to the surface of the painting even the colour begins to escape easy definition. It is a rosy purplish in-between, a sombre version of what textile manufacturers called paonazzo (also pavonazzo), a colour that is created through a two-bath process in which the thread is dipped into suc­ cessive vats of red and blue dyes.7 Early modern dictionaries defined it as a colour between black and blue, yet when it appears in primary sources it often describes cloths that are closer to purple and even red. Named after the shifting iri­ descence of the peacock’s plumage, it was associated, in fact, with chromatic instability.8 Paonazzo was worn in ‘ambiguous circumstances’ including mourning, celebration and defeat, and was used for a wide range of contradictory situations.9 It was extremely popular, but also easy to fake using inferior

3 Titian, A Man with a Quilted Sleeve (Gerolamo Barbarigo[?]), c. 1510, oil on canvas.

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Introduction: Abracadabra

materials. In order to protect buyers from the recipes of clever textile dyers, Venetian authorities were obliged to lay down strict regulations that fabric trafficking as paonazzo had to con­ tain a certain amount of kermes and indigo in its constitution. And this is where things start to get really interesting. To a certain extent it does not matter whether the material depicted is wool or silk – Titian would surely have smiled at our confusion and roared with laughter: ‘it is made of paint!’ But then it wasn’t quite that simple either. Cross-sections taken from the paint used by Titian for the dress reveal an opaque layer of white lead mixed with red lake followed by a second layer of the same with ultramarine pigments; in some

4 Detail of the neckline in Portrait of a Lady (illus. 2). 5 Detail of the neckline in A Man with a Quilted Sleeve (illus. 3).

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sections, however, the more translucent glazes show traces of kermes and indigo dyestuff! Conservators have noted that the chemical make-up of the glazes contains colours that may have been extracted from actual silk fibres.10 It is as if the painter was channelling the chromatic skills of the frugal setaiolo, adding just enough pure dyes to ensure that the dress could pass as paonazzo. The production of silk was a strange and magical process: caterpillars transform the nutrients of mulberry leaves into a fibrous excretion that hardens into cocoons; this liquid silk then unravels to produce silk threads. In this regard, the painter shared the silkworm’s ability to metamorphose nature into art. The woman’s dress is a gorgeous simulacrum, yet it is also made of the actual stuff of silk and of the real dyes of paonazzo, turning the visual surface into a recursive game of nature versus art versus nature (and so on). This oscillation between fiction and reality goes to the heart of Titian’s visual philosophy. Like the vibrant chromatic surface of Titian’s canvas, the young woman is also portrayed standing on the threshold between multiple realities. She enacts a simultaneous game of hide and seek and of show and tell. The black-edged kerchief covers her right shoulder, but reveals her left shoulder to the viewer. The delicate ribbons that stretch and curve around the diaphanous fabric of the scuffia, like the two gold chains that wrap around her neck and slip down the front of her dress, announce their symbolic worth. Two is also the number of rings she wears on the middle joint of her ring finger: two bands of gold crowned by a small blue stone and a small red gem. Titian was, to quote Rosand, ‘always an expert jeweler with the brush’.11

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Introduction: Abracadabra

Her beautifully foreshortened left hand is caught by the light on the edge of the parapet while her right hand slips into the hazy shadows of her enormous sleeve. Unfurling in the lower half of the composition like a ship’s sail, these sleeves would have greatly displeased the sentinels of the Venetian Renaissance fashion police known as the Provedadori sora le pompe de le donne who regulated how many yards of fabric and even how many grams of jewellery a woman was allowed to carry on her body in public. On 5 February 1511, the Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo reported on the prohibitions that had been set against fringes, fur-trimmings, and all manner of slashed, opened, ornamented and baggy sleeves consisting of more than two braccia of fabric.12 Sumptuary laws had to be instituted time and again throughout the sixteenth century as unruly women and men as well as the tailors who indulged them found new ways to circumvent the rules, leading the Venetian nobleman Girolamo Priuli to lament: ‘a Venetian law lasts but a week.’13 Pleats were also frowned upon, for they provided visible evidence that the individual was trying to get away with more inches of cloth than were necessary for everyday life and permitted by law. The grey sash that cuts across the waistline of the young woman doubles over upon itself to hide inner reserves of cloth while also gathering the surplus fabric of her dress into horizontal troughs above and vertical gullies below. In a city that prided itself on the ethical principle of mediocritas (equality) such extravagance would not have gone unnoticed.

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L a Famigliar e and the A rt of Hospita lity But this woman is no lady strutting about in the public squares of the city. She is an image and would have been allowed greater liberties than her flesh and blood counter­ parts. Fiction trumps reality. Once upon a time, this painting hung in a private home, almost certainly in Venice or in the Veneto. The fashionable sitter is both calm and vigilant. The stark symmetry of her facial features is offset by the slight tilt of her head. The dimple formed by the weight of her lower lip and her soggiogaia (double chin) – what the Renaissance beauty theorist Agnolo Firenzuola identified as an especially attractive feminine feature – enhance her overall sense of warmth and presence.14 There is something intimate and tender in the way she has been portrayed. These details might lead us to conclude that this is a portrait of a famigliare (a member of the household) or at least someone that persons in the house were pleased to see honoured in this way. This is neither an outrageous nor a particularly original suggestion.15 So try this theory on for size: could we imagine a scenario in which this was a portrait of Titian’s beloved? Not an anonymous lover or courtesan, but a portrait of the woman known as Cecilia whom Titian would bring to Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century, who would keep his house and be his mistress, who would bear him two sons (Orazio and Pomponio), and whom he would eventually wed in the autumn of 1525 before her untimely death in 1530.16 Cecilia was a famigliare in both the sense of a domestic as well as a member of the family. If Raphael would depict his lover, the baker’s daughter known as La Fornarina, perhaps Titian felt so

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Introduction: Abracadabra

inclined towards Cecilia, a barber’s daughter and a local girl from around Cadore. Titian was in his twenties when he made this painting; the young woman in the picture would have been an age-appropriate companion. Art sleuths have often wanted to find the face of Titian’s mistress in this or that painting: for instance, in the Venus of Urbino (see illus. 46). With that particular example, it always seemed unlikely that a man such as Titian would attach the face of his lover onto the nude body of another woman in a painting destined for the delectation of another man (the Duke of Urbino). In contrast, a biographical link of the kind that I am suggesting might explain the sense of unspoken ease as well as the physiognomic specificity that comes across here. This affective context might explain, for instance, why the woman’s twinned love bands are displayed so promin­ ently on her ring finger, which has been placed perpendicular to the spectator’s eye-line.17 The fifteenth-century Venetian human­ist Francesco Barbaro explained that rings were trad­ itionally worn on this finger because it represented ‘a lasting sign of the love’ that was ‘visible to all’ of the wife’s devotion to her husband and because there was ‘a small nerve that extends clear to the heart’ from that site.18 Rendered in red, blue and yellow paint, did these primary colours mark Titian’s two great loves: his art and his consort? Before I go any further, let me make the following admis­ sion: there are a lot of unknowns here, and I myself am inclined to approach it as informed art-historical fantasy at best. I think we can all agree, however, that even if the sitter is not Titian’s Cecilia, she would have been someone like Cecilia – a famigliare. This modest a priori will allow us to entertain

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an intimate, domestic scenario – a plausible hypothesis – that enables us to say something more productive about this ambitious image, rather than shuffling it off as yet another ‘Portrait of a Lady’. Titian’s bright-eyed sitter is just slightly smaller than life size, but the canvas is unusually large for a portrait (120 × 100 cm). The low viewpoint places the figure spatially above the spectator, as if she were standing at the top of a flight 6 X-ray showing the underlying design of Portrait of a Lady (illus. 2).

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Introduction: Abracadabra

of stairs.19 Experimenting with the composition, Titian had initially placed a window with a glimpse of a cloudscape in the upper right-hand corner. At first it was a rectangular window, then Titian made it round with a view of the sky cut by a single stratocumulus cloud, and finally – for reasons we can 7 Giotto, Charity, 1306, fresco.

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never know – he painted it out. In the lower right part of the painting, the artist had drawn an elliptical form, possibly a dish, which he eventually replaced with the stepped wall. These details are still visible in X-rays (illus. 6), revealing the artist’s spontaneous process of trial and error. This is con­ firmed by infrared reflectograms, which indicate further that the woman’s right hand was resting previously between the sash and her waist while her left hand was extended towards where the dish might have been.20 In such a configuration, she would have resembled Giotto’s personification of Charity (illus. 7) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, an image Titian knew well. For the sake of argument, how wonderful it would be to imagine this painting hanging in the painter’s home. Titian’s first residence in the Venetian neighbourhood of San Polo was part of a multi-storey housing block known as a casa da saz­ ente that was used primarily for habitation (his studio, which he shared in these years with his assistants Antonio Buxei and Ludovico di Giovanni, was across the canal near San Samuele).21 Placed within such a domestic setting, the port­ hole window in the underdrawing would have made more sense as an illusionistic opening above and behind the figure. Perhaps it was hung just as one turned from the dark tunnel of the stairs into the main floor of the house. Perhaps there was an actual window on the wall to the left, for this is the direction of the light source within the painting. And, of course, if not in Titian’s home, perhaps it was in the recep­ tion room of a Venetian palace where pictures known as quadri da portego, including portraits of family members and scenes with themes of hospitality, were found.22

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Introduction: Abracadabra

Following this line of argument, the portrait could be read in relation to the ancient Greek concept of xenia (that is, hospi­ tality shown towards strangers). In practice, xenia appeared as gifts of fruit that would be placed in the guestroom; in theory, the term came to be used to describe the kinds of illusionistic still-life frescoes that appeared on the walls of ancient Roman homes.23 Titian was known to be an exceptionally generous and gracious host. Might he have envisioned an image of a woman who would greet his guests with a platter of food in her left hand? While this reading offers a plausible social history for the use-value of the painting, much remains to be said about the display value and philosophical ambition of the final version. In the famous tale from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (xxxv.66), the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis made an image of a child holding grapes, which were so realistic that birds flew down to peck at the fruit. In another version of the story, it is said that Zeuxis was disappointed that the boy in the pic­ ture did not startle the birds so he painted him out.24 Titian, it seems, has done the reverse and deleted what might have been a still-life, retaining instead the portrait of the woman. Was the person depicted too dear to paint over? Was Titian trying to channel the generosity and inventive spirit of the ancients? Unfortunately, we will never know, but it would seem that the young Titian had grander plans for this painting. Pygm a lion in Lov e Instead of a charming artifice of the kind described above, Titian inserted a different kind of philosophical disputation represented by the remarkable portrait-within-the-portrait

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(illus. 8). This, too, resulted from a lot of trial and error. Titian’s first idea was to decorate this surface with ‘V. V.’, the first letter of which is still visible to the naked eye. In the final version, he placed ‘T. V.’ in the lower left-hand corner instead. This was a riff on the traditional inscription com­ monly found on other Venetian portraits of this period, which carried contested meanings to do with the commem­ oration of a living subject (vivens vivo), the transience of life (vanitas vanitatum), or virtue and truth (virtù et verità).25 ‘T. V.’ was also a pun for ‘Tiziano Vecellio’. More urgently, however, the relocated initials and the relief portrait push the viewer to think about who or what is living, ephemeral and true. The sculpted parapet has also been interpreted as relating to the paragone – that is, the debate or rivalry between painting and sculpture.26 Painting was a liberal art, but sculpture was a more difficult art. Painting could create a marvellous illusion, but sculpture was accessible to the blind. Painting was flush with chromatic naturalism, but sculpture was more durable. These and numerous other arguments are surely relevant, but Titian may not have been nearly as smug about the superiority of modern painting as some might contend. One might read the detail instead as a paragone between representation and reality wherein painting and sculpture join forces to defeat the mortal body of nature. Titian’s personal motto, after all, was ‘natura potentior ars’ (art [is] more powerful than nature).27 Rather than simply triumphing over men of marble such as Andrea Verrocchio or Pietro Lombardo in a multimedia nerd-fest, Titian’s portrait might be more productively placed against the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who

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Introduction: Abracadabra

carved a life-size ivory statue of a woman that was so beautiful he fell in love with it. In a disturbing passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (x.254–8), Pygmalion’s lovesickness is described as such: He spoke to her, he stroked her Lightly to feel her living aura Soft as down over her whiteness. His fingers gripped her hard To feel flesh yield under the pressure That half wanted to bruise her Into a proof of life, and half did not Want to hurt or mar or least of all Find her the solid ivory he had made her.28 8 Detail of the bas-relief in Portrait of a Lady (illus. 2).

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Alarmed by his own condition, Pygmalion prayed to Venus for a wife who would resemble his creation; moved by his display of emotion, the goddess brought his statue to life. In the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who created a new race of men from stones, Ovid provided an eloquent explan­ ation for how the veins in marble morphed into those found in the human body.29 There is indeed something ‘alive’ about the way the marble has been painted in Titian’s portrait as if it were carne viva or ‘living flesh’.30 The colours of the woman’s sleeve and the grey background bleed through the stepped wall, but there is also something deliberate about the way flesh, fabric and stone mesh together in a swirl of paint upon Titian’s canvas. The thin, oily beige glaze barely masks the chro­matic layers of paint that seem to pulsate beneath, reveal­ing a blush here and a bruise there, evoking the marks of Pygmalion’s frustrated desire. The surface is at once cold and greyish like marble and warm and creamy like skin. There is nothing particularly sculptural or classicizing about the rendering of the woman’s hair. Just below these painterly curls on the edge of her chemise, a delicate streak of blue paint pulses down the jugular of the stony figure like a vein gasping for air. It is a souvenir of the metamorphosis that has taken place already on the other side of the wall, and this memory is underlined by the gesture of the woman in the painting who places her hand upon the edge belonging to her surrogate image as if to acknowledge that her own presence is the result of Titian’s miraculous touch, a touch that seems to originate in the blue vein on the sculpture that begat the woman who begat the painting, collapsing the mortal body of the sitter back into the immortal forms of art once more.

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Introduction: Abracadabra

I have chosen to open my story of Titian with a focused analysis of this one early painting for a number of reasons. For one, it unstitches the teleological structure and developmen­ tal narrative of the traditional ‘life and times’ monograph by demonstrating that early works are no less sophisticated than those crafted in one’s wise old age. Titian painted La Famigliare in the first decade of his career. It was his first female portrait on canvas. It was his first female figure to address the spec­ tator frontally (even if the Venus of Urbino would be the most famous). It was possibly the first painted Renaissance portrait to incorporate a sculptural doppelgänger rendered in paint.31 It was incredibly experimental, but also outrageously learned for a young man in his twenties – it was his Citizen Kane. The intellectual sophistication of this early painting would resurface again in Archbishop Filippo Archinto (illus. 9), painted when Titian was on the cusp of his seventieth year. If the latter portrait can be read as a testament of the painter’s wintry reflections on the power of art to render men immor­ tal, this bold philosophical thesis was always-already at play in his earliest and most intimate portraits. The art-historical circumstances of the two paintings could not be further apart, and the differences offer us a valuable lesson. In the former, we are operating with fragmentary evidence about an ulti­ mately unknowable sitter. In the latter, there is a surfeit of information. The subject, Filippo Archinto, was born into a wealthy Milanese family in 1500. Following a standard humanist curriculum, studying law in the university town of Padua just outside of Venice, he advanced to various impor­ tant posts in Rome in the 1530s; he represented Pope Paul iii at the Council of Trent in the late 1540s and served as

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the papal nuncio in Venice under Pope Julius iii from 1554 to 1555. The following year, he was named Archbishop of Milan by Pope Paul iv, and this is when his fortune turned. Not everyone was pleased with Archinto’s push for Church reform. Marc’Antonio Pattanella and Pietro Boscapè, in par­ ticular, saw him as a threat; the first was the corrupt interim 9 Titian, Archbishop Filippo Archinto, 1558, oil on canvas.

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Introduction: Abracadabra

archbishop of Milan, and the second was the vicar general appointed by the first. The two men conspired to have Archinto brought up on false charges and, in early 1558, the archbishop was forced to flee to the hill town of Bergamo where he would die later that summer while waiting for his name to be cleared. 10 Titian, Filippo Archinto, mid-1550s, oil on canvas.

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On account of these dramatic events, the half-drawn veil in the painting has been interpreted in narrow terms as a symbol of Archinto’s ‘obscure years’ in Venice; as a protes­ tation against the attack on his reputation; and even as an allegory of the suppression of his ‘sinister’ side in old age.32 The story is complicated by the existence of a second version that is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (illus. 10). Aside from the missing curtain, it is a near-identical replica. But what a difference! The date of the two paintings is placed either around 1554 when Archinto was in Venice or 1558 when he was in exile. The latter seems unlikely given that Titian would have been preoccupied at that time with the overdue poesie cycle for the King of Spain (discussed in Chapter Six). Moreover, who, if we are to be logical here, would have their own disgrace immortalized in a paint­ ing (even if it is by Titian)? It would make more sense for Archinto to have sat for the painter in happier times during his Venetian tenure as the Apostolic nuncio. And yet what does all this data tell us about the ingenuity of the mysterious portrait? Not much. In other words, it says nothing about what this image is trying to accomplish beyond merely recording the face of a man for posterity; the version in New York achieves this, but the painting in the Philadel­ phia Museum of Art is visibly trying to do so much more. If we place La Famigliare and the Archbishop Filippo Archinto side by side, suspending for a moment all concerns about personal identity, profound existential questions come to the surface. Time passes, but the image does not change. Like the slender fingers of the archbishop that keep his place in the book he has momentarily put down, like the hand of La Famigliare that

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hovers on the threshold between art and life, we too are caught in the suspended layers of paint. Both portraits them­ atize Titian’s role as the philosopher-magician whose brush is an instrument of illusion and whose touch gives life to dead materials; both images have an uncanny way of pulling us in while simultaneously pushing us back out of the frame, leaving us somewhere between reality and fiction. In the one, we are confronted by a formidable woman who stands behind a stony parapet (and yet something in the warmth of her smile lures us further into the image). In the other, an older man seated in an elaborate armchair peeks out from behind a veil drawn halfway across the composition. There is something unnerving and vertiginous about what would otherwise be a conventional portrait of a cleric. Inan­ imate forms such as the archbishop’s rings, the carved detail on the wooden arm rest, and the row of brass tacks glisten and gape like Archinto’s half-cut eye. The dot of white paint in his pupil becomes disembodied, multiplying itself across the pattern of the veil. The ghostly material creates a vertical shower of heavy brushstrokes pulling our eye downward, yet the surface of this material is aggressively striated in the other direction. ‘Titian’s art’, it has been said, ‘brings together body, veil and paint as the very stuff and subject of representation.’33 The gorgeous trompe l’oeil in the archbishop’s portrait seems to be a summation of this claim. However, more than a simple ‘trick of the eye’, this detail is a trap for the hand that reaches out for tactile verification – there at the very site where Titian has painted Archinto’s two hands, where the painted cloth of the veil and the painted cloth of the archbishop’s gown blur into a majestic, flat field of paint in the lower right corner.

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Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy linked the portrait of Archinto with Pliny’s story of Zeuxis’ grapes and Parrhasius’ curtain.34 Zeuxis was unlucky with his paintings of grapes. On another occasion, in a painting contest with Parrhasius, he tried the same ruse and managed to trick the unsuspecting birds again. Smug with success, he told his rival to push aside the curtain in front of his submission so that he could get a look at his picture. Parrhasius’ painting was, however, an image of a cur­ tain. Could the Philadelphia painting have been made as a timpano (cover) for its own image?35 Pliny’s tale is often read in terms of rivalry between artistic giants. Parrhasius’ curtain is also discussed in terms of mimesis or imitation and the authority of nature versus the force of art. In most translations, Pliny’s crucial phrase linteum pictum is rendered as ‘a painting of a curtain’ rather than as ‘a painted curtain’. Grammatically, linteum is the noun in this construction although it has been noted that the phrase pos­ sesses a ‘purposeful ambiguity’, suggesting a linen cloth that could be both a curtain (subject) and a canvas (support).36 Pliny’s account of Parrhasius ends with a passage in which the artist is praised for his ability to give beauty to his faces and life to his figures in ways that suggest ‘the presence of other parts behind it also, and disclose even what it hides’.37 Image and object, signified and signifier, and art and nature collapse into one beautiful simultaneous proposition. And isn’t this the brilliant insight at the heart of Titian’s art? In La Famigliare this ontological game is played out through the marble portrait and the woman that stands behind it; in Arch­bishop Filippo Archinto this thesis is enacted through Titian’s linteum pictum. Moving effortlessly between representation

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and realiy, the work of Titian’s art was to challenge, to destroy and to reconceive truth in purely pictorial forms. If this introduction has sought to demonstrate anything, it is the following dictum: to be painted by Titian meant to live forever, but to paint like Titian meant to philo­sophize with a brush. This is the thesis of Titian’s touch.

11 Titian, Miracle of the Jealous Husband, 1511, fresco.

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T

ouch me! Touch me not! This is the tension that hovers on the surface of Titian’s paintings and that is often enacted in the stories that he por­ trays. From portraiture, so thick with the stillness of time, we turn first to the raw energy of Titian’s istorie from the early 1510s. In these psychologically charged religious narra­ tives, even the details of the natural world seem to respond, from the craggy cliff that assumes the brutality in the Miracle of the Jealous Husband (illus. 11) to the blades of grass that slant away from the Magdalene in the Noli me tangere (see illus. 13). From these devotional pictures, we will then look at Titian’s ‘musical paintings’ inhabited by figures touched by time and touched, therefore, by the shadow of death. The final section will turn to the interaction of touch, time, music and silence. history and istor ie The years around 1510 were tremendous, marked by years of terror, war and humiliation for Venice: the economy slowed to a trickle; merchants were put out of business; printers closed shop and decamped. Having survived the millennarian

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anxieties surrounding the year 1500, the first decades of the new century were dominated by the War against the League of Cambrai, a political coalition formed by the Emperor Maximilian i, Pope Julius ii, Louis xii and Ferdinand ii of Aragon. These forces had come together in order to curb the expansion of the Venetian State and to carve up its territories for their own enrichment. In the spring of 1508, Titian’s father, Gregorio di Conte Vecellio, fought with the victorious forces of General Bartolomeo d’Alviano against the imperial armies at Valle; a year later, however, Venice would be defeated in the Battle of Agnadello. ‘At twenty-two hours [after sunset] Piero Mazaruol, a secretary, came running in with letters in his hand from the battlefield . . . our forces had been routed,’ Sanudo recorded on 15 May. ‘And there began a great weeping and lamentation and, to put it better, a sense of panic.’1 A few months into the autumn of 1510 another tragedy occurred when Giorgione died unexpectedly from plague. The young painter had been Titian’s former collaborator; they had just completed a series of large-scale frescoes on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German trading post) by the Rialto Bridge. Titian’s sense of loss must have been incredible, but in this dark moment, a silver lining appeared in the weeks just before Christmas. On 1 December 1510, the young painter was paid an advance of 24 lire by Nicola da Stra to undertake the most important commission of his budding career: the fresco cycle for the Scuola del Santo. The ‘Scoletta’, as it was called, was a confraternity dedi­ cated to St Anthony in the town of Padua on the Venetian terraferma (mainland). In the upstairs meeting room, the Sala Capitolare, Titian inserted three scenes into the existing

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decorative scheme dedicated to the miracles attributed to St Anthony of Padua: the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, the Miracle of the Reattached Foot and the Miracle of the Jealous Husband. While Renaissance women could be members of this charitable orga­ nization, only the male members had open access to this space.2 It is interesting, therefore, that all three frescoes depicted scenes of cruelty and violence inflicted by horrific men upon innocent women: a man who falsely accuses his wife of adul­ tery; a man who shamefully beats his mother; and a man who stabs his wife to death in a fit of unfounded jealousy. St Anthony’s miracle in this last story, upon which I will focus, was to resuscitate the lifeless woman and reunite her with her husband. From a modern feminist perspective, this might not seem like such a happy ending for the wife, but from an early modern point of view it represented a vindication of her innocence. In the continuous narrative in the background on the right-hand side of the fresco, the repentant man pleads with St Anthony to intervene, but it is her gruesome murder that takes centre stage. How does Titian construct this visual lesson? Let us turn to the image for answers. We begin with verticality. Against a looming, craggy hill, a man holds a dagger above the fallen body of a woman. She is dressed in a fiery golden dress, which spreads out in the foreground as if it contained her last flickering breath. The fresco is situated in the corner of the northeast wall of the Sala opposite to a window. For a brief moment every day, the dress is lit up dramatically as the weak rays of evening light stretch across the room before the skies from the south-facing window slip into darkness outside. In the picture, the wife’s stockings have already gone the lifeless

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colour of the earth into which she seems to be sinking. The blood drains from the wound on her white chemise. Her head is pulled back, and she reaches up to stop the next blow that has been suspended by the stillness of the fresco. Her hus­ band glances down, his facial expression as cold and steely as his weapon. His violent state of mind is made visible instead by the repeated verticality of red and white stripes that rain down upon the woman like a storm of blows still to come. The flash of green inside the husband’s open sleeve binds him chromatically to the jagged bluff. His anger externalizes itself in the prickly broken branches that burst forth at the top of the mound, tying him in another associative gesture to an inanimate form beyond himself. The roiling layers of blue, green, ochre, sienna and umber that sink and bind into the plaster wall reflect his sense of inchoate madness. Most of the literature about this painting focuses on Titian’s stylistic sources and on the contractual documents, for the December 1510 commission is the first time that Titian’s profession appears in a written record.3 In my opinion, how­ ever, the most exciting observation about the Jealous Husband has to do with the actual surface of the work. In looking care­ fully at the fresco, it was noticed that the intonaco (or plaster preparation on the wall) was unusually built up almost 5 cen­ timetres (2 in.) around the wife’s extended arm.4 As a result, the raised surface of the wall cast an actual shadow upon itself. Again, as with La Famigliare, painted back in Venice in the months after this commission, it is not simply a matter of arguing that painting was ‘better’ than sculpture. On this occasion, Titian employed sculptural techniques to enhance the rhetorical force of his image. It is as if the foreshortened

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body of the wife is literally trying to break free from the site of her death – kicking, pushing and punching out into the viewer’s space on the other side of the picture plane. This special effect pre-dates the technology of 3d cinema by sev­ eral centuries, but achieves a similar result by creating an immersive field of vision, confounding the eyes and soliciting the touch. Three-dimensional surfaces in Venetian painting were not an uncommon thing; Carlo Crivelli often used carved and gilded wood to pick out gems, jewels, beads and keys to enhance the presence of divine figures in his altarpieces. Titian, however, deployed this old trick for very modern purposes: to maximize the emotional drama within the scene and the synaesthetic experience of the audience. By rendering the wife’s arm in this projective manner, Titian tempts the spectator to touch the very body in the scene that is the subject of assault. In this way, he cleverly sutures the spectator into the pov (point of view) of the abusive husband. At the same time, the viewer reaching up to touch the surface of the wall enacts the same gesture as the wife, suturing the viewer into her pov and heightening the pathos quotient through this unexpected double identifica­ tion. But it was even more complicated than this. On the one hand, the psychological ambivalence of this beautifully painted image of horrible injustice served as a moral lesson to the men who occupied the Sala Capitolare. On the other hand, despite the conflicted desire generated by this image to touch and to not touch, there was little room for the Venetian or Paduan male viewer of the time to see himself in the place of the hus­ band. For one, in the historical account of St Anthony’s life, it was noted that the insane spouse was a knight from the rival

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region of Tuscany.5 On top of that, Titian dressed the husband in the distinctive red and white colours associated in those years with Maximilian’s imperial soldiers who had only recently ravaged the lands around the city, and this symbolism would not have been lost on the patriotic men of the Scuola.6 Compelling visual dramas such as the Jealous Husband were often described as istorie. Deemed by Leon Battista Alberti to be the pinnacle of an artist’s work, istorie involved the narra­ tion of events (historical, religious, mythological and so on) and were composed with efficiency and concision so as to move, instruct and delight the mind and soul of the spectator.7 Titian would return to grand violent thrillers of this kind some decades later in the Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona (see illus. 45), but he also had the ability to convey the psychological stress and physical intensity of such situations even in a small picture of a street mugging. In the work known as the Bravo (illus. 12), painted some years after the Paduan frescoes, a young man with a wreath on his head (possibly a poet or musician?) is about to be assaulted by a shadowy figure. Both figures are seen from behind. The assailant’s costume and weapon identify him as a Landsknecht mercenary. With his right hand, he grabs the young man’s left shoulder, while in his left hand we see the flat pommel of his katzbalger dagger. The fiery colour and rippling forms of his puff-and-slashed sleeve heighten the sense of brute force.8 At the same time, the slits read almost like gaping wounds underlying the sense of vulnerability for both parties involved in the confrontation, and if we look in the shadows to the left we can see that the youth, far from being a passive victim, is reaching for a blunt item with his right hand (his instrument

12 Titian, Bravo, c. 1516–17, oil on canvas.

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or his own sword?). It takes the viewer more than just a moment to distinguish, identify and connect arms, hands and weapons to their owners, and in this moment of emergent discernability, the image manages to recreate the sensation of confusion and panic experienced by the figures. Titian’s art grappled with the extensive and expansionary power of the image. It was not simply about the subject matter depicted, but about what the image could do beyond itself – equal measures of drama and philosophy – and this applied to quiet devotional scenes as well. the tea rs of gr ass and pl ants Goodbyes can be awkward. What do you do when you unex­ pectedly run into someone to whom you have already bidden farewell? How long does one linger after the verbal exchanges have drifted into the air before physically separating from each other? Once you have walked away, how does one resist the desire to turn around for one last glimpse? If the other person does not reciprocate the gesture, how is one to take this? The emotional drama of such instances is beautifully enacted in Titian’s Noli me tangere (illus. 13), based on a scene from the Gospel of St John (20:17) and painted in the years after the frescoes at the Scoletta. On Easter Monday, Mary Magdalene arrived at Christ’s tomb to discover that the body was gone. Fearful that his corpse had been stolen, she began to cry in the early morn­ ing light: ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ She then encountered a man in a garden and begged him to tell her where the body had been

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taken. He addressed her by name and in the presence of his voice she recognized him as Christ. As she reached out to embrace him, Jesus replied: ‘Do not touch me because I have not yet ascended to the Father,’ and instructed her instead to go and tell the other apostles that he had risen. Multiple slices of time have been superimposed like trans­ lucent glazes upon the surface of Titian’s canvas: the Magdalene hears her name; the meaning of this miracle gels in her mind; she is overcome by successive stages of sorrow, alarm, joy and desire that dilate into one; her posture of abject grief suddenly doubles as prostrate adoration; Jesus is at once the gardener (holding the hoe), the Dead Christ (in his burial linen) and the Risen Christ (glowing with light); in one twisting gesture, he faces Mary and turns away from her as he hovers in a zone of indeterminancy between the human and spirit worlds. It is for this reason that he commands her to step back. At the centre of the composition, this injunction is reiterated by a giant X (formed by the diagonal lines of the gardener’s tool and the Magdalene’s body that extends up into the tree). This passive-aggressive dance of spiritual melancholia is further choreographed through light, colour, expression and topographical details. It is dawn in the story, but the weak, amber light reflecting from the pitched walls of the distant buildings could very well be read as dusk. White is the colour that binds the two figures together: the transparent veil that slips from the Magdalene’s shoulder mirrors the loincloth that conceals Christ’s humanity; his heavy shroud echoes her che­ mise. The contrasting colours of green and red, however, push them apart. Green is the colour of resurrected life. It washes over the land and bursts forth in the parched silhouette of the

13 Titian, Noli me tangere, c. 1514, oil on canvas.

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tree above Christ. Red is the colour of the Magdalene’s desire. It dyes the silk of her robe, blushes the surface of her face and glows at the tips of her fingers. The landscape has been read against a literary device known as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in which nature is endowed with human emotions.9 As with the ‘angry hill’ in the Jealous Husband, the surroundings seem to amplify the sacred drama in the foreground here. On the horizontal register, the shrub behind the Magdalene spreads out as if trying to extend itself, while on the vertical axis, the tree – like Christ – arches vio­ lently away from the Magdalene’s hand. Even the road in the background re-enacts this gesture by splintering in two. It has been suggested that the vegetation in Titian’s Noli me tangere ‘burgeons around Christ, as though fertilized by His blood’.10 If this is the case, then the Magdalene’s anguish acts like a pesticide, devastating everything around her. The landscape is verdant in the rest of the picture, but around the Magdalene all we find is a dry, indeterminate, brownish patch of land. The individual blades of grass on the left in the foreground, deli­ cately picked out by the tip of Titian’s brush, seem to sway, shaken to their core by the force of Mary’s melancholia. Some decades later, in a treatise on the humanity of Christ (possibly inspired by this very image), the poet Aretino would write that the Magdalene’s sorrow was so great that it moved the grass and the plants to tears.11 There is indeed something profoundly emotional about this landscape, and rightly so! The implicit display-value of the Noli me tangere as a gorgeous artwork is matched by its explicit use-value as a devotional painting. The depiction of Mary’s desire was to inspire the beholder’s spiritual meditation in

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the same sense that the Jealous Husband served as a reminder to the male members of the Scoletta to keep a pure heart towards the women in their lives as an outward sign of their devotion to their community and to their God. Social and political urgencies may have inspired Titian to construct a compelling moral tale, but both paintings also provided opportunities for the young artist to express the ambition of his art as art. One of the persistent challenges for Renaissance painting was to give volume to forms: to render three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. This was certainly one aspect in the paragone debates of the Renais­ sance, but it was a concern that had preoccupied painters up to the Cubist experiments of the twentieth century (and beyond). A second concern has to do with time. What film would achieve centuries later was, in the words of Erwin Panofsky, the ‘dynamization of space’ and the ‘spatialization of time’.12 Titian obviously had no inkling of how cinema would transform the art of storytelling, but what he strove for was to animate his istorie with every technological means at his disposal. Having focused thus far on sight and touch, these last two sections will now turn to the role of sound and music in two of Titian’s early works: the Three Ages of Man and The Interrupted Concert.

caesur a and the music of time Venice was a leading innovator in the music industry. In 1501 Ottaviano Petrucci introduced a way to standardize musical notation so that consistent partbooks and scores could be produced in and distributed from his Venetian printing press

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(illus. 14). Viols, lutes, harpsichords and cornets were being crafted from a dizzying array of materials, including maple, cypress, boxwood, yew, rosewood, kingwood, snakewood, spruce, and even ebony and ivory. Within this dynamic envir­ onment, paintings about music became very popular.13 Like the encounter between Christ and the Magdalene, Titian’s Three Ages of Man (illus. 15), too, portrays a pregnant moment overwhelmed by the simultaneous potentialities of voice and silence. In the foreground on the right, we find two infants and a winged putto slumbering and scampering away; they represent youth, the first age of man. On the left a couple gaze into each other’s eyes and linger in the silence of a paused performance; they are maturity. Off in the distance, an old man sits alone contemplating two skulls that he holds in his hands; he is old age. It is an elegiac song about love and about mortality set in an idyllic, pastoral landscape. 14 Jacob Obrecht, Missa Fortuna desperata (Venice, 1503).

15 Titian, Three Ages of Man, c. 1512–14.

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Pastoralism (derived from the Latin word pastor for shep­ herd) was an ancient literary genre that eulogized the leisure and simplicity of country life and pined for the lost thoughts and things of a mythic past. Nature was seen as a restorative site for lovesick men and other weary urban dwellers, and music played a prominent role in this landscape. It was, of course, an escapist fantasy, and this was surely part of its appeal (especially in uncertain times of war). A series of texts inspired by ancient pastorals were published in Venice in the years before Titian’s painting. The first was an illustrated book known as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), which recounted the journey of a young man named Poliphilo through a series of dreamscapes inhabited by singing and dancing nymphs, ancient ruins and inscriptions, marvellous fountains, music machines, elaborate pagan processions and other wondrous sights and sounds. Drawing from classical and medieval frag­ ments and texts, the language was both nostalgic and bookish as well as inventive and unruly; it combined the honeyed lament of the heartbroken poet with a distinctively modern fascination with antiquity. It was both hot and cold with woodcuts rendered in black and white that fed the hungry imagination of the reader (illus. 16). Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia and Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani inaugurated the new century. The first involved the confes­ sions of a young man named Sincero; a pirated version appeared in Venetian bookstalls three years before the official edition came out in Naples in 1504. The second was a fictional dia­ logue set in the historical court of Caterina Cornaro in Asolo. Written by Titian’s friend, Gli Asolani explored theories of love as expressed by an unfortunate lover (Perottino), a happy

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lover (Gisimondo) and an idealist lover (Lavinello). The editio princeps (first edition) of Bembo’s runaway best-seller was produced in 1505 at the presses of the great humanist pub­ lisher Aldo Manuzio (who also published the Hypernotomachia) and bore the elegant modern font that is called ‘Bembo’ to this day. Unlike the narrative drive that governs the literary text, however, the subject of Titian’s painting presents us with an ‘enigma’.14 What are these people doing here? Is there a story? If so, where does one begin and end? The Three Ages of Man does not even allow for a simple left-to-right reading

16 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499).

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of the pictorial space; instead, we must dart our eyes back and forth if we are to follow the temporal progression from youth to old age. This to and fro pulls the viewer into the unmoving time-space of the image where existential truths are explored against a sloping sun that will never advance beyond twilight. In What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose: The question what is philosophy? can perhaps be posed only late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely . . . There are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign free­ dom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all the parts of the machine come together to send into the future a feature that cuts across all ages: Titian, Turner, Monet.15 The Three Ages of Man would have served as a handsome pen­ dant to their examination of knowledge and time. And while they do not cite it as a specific example, the Three Ages of Man was the likely inspiration for W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Price’ (written in July 1936 during a ‘moment of grace’ between two wars). A paean to the transformative power of love in the moralized landscape, it begins: Who can ever praise enough The world of his belief? Harum-scarum childhood plays In the meadows near his home,

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In his woods love knows no wrong, Travellers ride their placid ways, In the cool shade of the tomb Age’s trusting footfalls ring. Who can paint the vivid tree And grass of phantasy?16 The Three Ages of Man is at once the poet’s muse and the phil­ o­so­pher’s stone. The painting is, for Richard Wollheim, a ‘mystery’ there ‘to be experienced’, a profound exploration of ‘human vitality as something tied to the body, and tied in consequence at once to physical sensation and to mortality’.17 For Giorgio Agamben, beneath the ‘crystalline serenity’ of the Three Ages of Man is the struggle for knowledge and the discovery of all that is lost and gained in moments of revela­ tion. Reflecting on this painting, Agamben argues that, on the one hand, once the lovers have come together, they will lose the mystery they once held for each other; on the other hand, a ‘new and more blessed life’ – that is, a higher aware­ ness of being – will result from the collision of the two entities.18 Such interpretations chime with early sixteenth-century Neoplatonic models of love. Part of the success of Bembo’s Gli Asolani was that it offered its readers a convenient summary of various lofty philosophical debates about love, presented in the appealing form of a pastoral dialogue. Instead of longwinded disputations in Latin, it spoke through metaphors and parables written in the vernacular. Of the unifying power of music, Bembo wrote:

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Musicians say that when two lutes are tuned in har­ mony and one is touched [l’un tocca] with the other placed before it, both instruments respond, and the same note is sounded both on the one which has been touched [che fa il tocco] and on the one which is untouched [l’altro non tocco]. O Love, what lutes or lyres respond to another with more sympathy than two of your enam­ ored souls?19 While this passage speaks of sympathetic strings rather than wind instruments, the music metaphor nevertheless gets at both the literal and philosophical implications of the amorous exchange that is taking place between the man and woman on the left. Many scholars have interpreted their music-playing in explicitly erotic terms, emphasizing the double entendre of the flauti dolci or ‘sweet pipes’ suggestively positioned by the woman.20 Wethey was scandalized, however, by this read­ ing and protested in a footnote that ‘The idea that the flutes are phallic symbols . . . is a product of the Freudian era, and, it seems to me, highly exaggerated.’21 Victory, on this occasion, can be granted to both sides of the debate. While there is no doubt that Renaissance viewers would have found this puer­ ile joke to be unquestionably humorous, possibly arousing and even clever, the role of music cannot be reduced to mere sensory titillation and entertainment. ‘Music’, wrote Franchino Gaffurio in his treatise Theorica musicae (1492), ‘ravishes the sky, earth, sea, birds, wild animals, stars, gods, humans, and hell.’ Once it was merely practice, then it became an art, and finally it was recognized as a science, but in the beginning there was only the desire for music – prima

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libido fuit (in the Latin original).22 Music was a primordial force that possessed the power to influence the individual’s drive towards life and death. With great eloquence and erudition, Gaffurio informed his reader of the medicinal, therapeutic and cosmic power of music: It is well known that Thales of Crete drove away illness and contagious disease by the sweetness of the kithara. Hierophilus examined the veins and pulses of the ill by comparing rhythms [heartbeats]. The physician Asclepiades often restored the senses of the frenetic, disturbed by illness, to health through harmony. The ancients cured fever and wounds with song. Terpander and Arion delivered the peoples of Lesbos and Ionia from very grave diseases by the assistance of song. It was believed that when there was greatest suffering under the hips, then the pains were diminished if the aulete sounded light melodies upon them. And Theo­ p­hratus was of the opinion that the aulete, by playing skillfully and melodiously, heals the bites of vipers. Moreover, Democritus, in his book On Epidemics, teaches that the playing of auloi was medicine for the many diseases of men. Truly, so great is the affinity between minds and the bodies of men and therefore also between the ailments of mind and body and [their] remedies.23 Renaissance musicians, poets, artists, philosophers, theolo­ gians and doctors understood to a certain extent that all sensible experiences of time and space were linked to the

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cosmic order by a universal harmony, an astral-magical rhythm that influenced everything from the rotation of the planets down to the ‘musicality of the pulse’.24 A person’s pulse, it was believed, was governed by a dif­ ferent metre at different moments in life. For instance, the fourteenth-century theorist Pietro d’Abano, who taught medicine at the University of Padua, correlated infancy with dactyl, adulthood with spondee, and old age with iamb.25 It would be tempting to graft this formula onto Titian’s com­ position, but the music in this scene seems to have stopped in maturity. The shadows that embrace the face of the young man seem to suggest the languid melancholy of a late after­ noon that is about to slip into the evening of his life. If the winged Cupid stirs the two babies (the tender souls of the lovers?) in the foreground, perhaps it is Father Time (or some other nameless figure) who contemplates their remains in the background long after the beat of their hearts and of their ballad has ceased. Eroticism is rarely just about hands, lips, mouths and breasts – more often than not, it is about death. The young man in Titian’s painting holds his reticent instrument in his right hand and reaches with his left arm for his companion, causing her to pause abruptly. At the end of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, the lovesick narrator laments to his pipes: ‘for a short while, you were a pleasant distraction upon my mouth and in my hands, but now you shall cast upon them a long silence, because the fates wish it, perhaps an eternal peace.’26 What is held and suspended in their gaze and in the silence of their stilled pipes is the bittersweet taste of carnal knowledge. It is the irruption of their own mortality in this tranquil place.

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Judith Dundas was correct, therefore, to link this image to Nicolas Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds, where a group of beautiful young people come across a tomb in the pastoral landscape reminding the viewer that Eros (love) is often accompanied by Thanatos (death).27 This is not, however, to suggest that the image is only about death, for life, as the circular compo­ sition suggests, will begin again. It is a call to pause for reflection that should be situated within a Renaissance culture for the enigmatic and emblematic, which encouraged reading, re-reading and continuous reflection (ruminatio).28 The girl’s taciturn flauti dolci in the Three Ages of Man might also be read, at least metaphorically within this complex cul­ tural context, in relation to the symbol // or what is known to musicians as a caesura. Borrowed from poetic notation and represented by two slanted lines, a caesura instructed the per­ former to interrupt the normal tempo of the composition with a short silence before resuming it again. In Anton Francesco Doni’s Dialogo della musica (illus. 17), the symbol punctures the flow of the song once after the word pietà (pity) and – some­ what fortuitously – twice after the word morire (to die). The caesura anticipates dramatic tension; it marks the pregnant moment in a musical score or, to extend the philosophical analogy, the instance before the actualization of what Agamben referred to as a ‘new and more blessed life’, and before what Deleuze and Guattari described as ‘a sovereign freedom . . . in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death’. This temporal and spatial zone hangs in between the two parallel strokes and in between the two reeds in the girl’s hands. In this regard, the title of the final painting in this chapter – the Interrupted Concert – would have been an equally

17 Anton Francesco Doni, Dialogo della Musica (Venice, 1544).

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appropriate descriptor for the Three Ages of Man; the inverse also holds true.

fermata and the time of music It seems ludicrous, from the comfortable retrospective seat of the historian, that the Interrupted Concert (illus. 18) was once thought to be a portrait of John Calvin, Martin Luther and his wife, Katharina von Bora.29 More recently, the man in the centre and the man on the right have been identified as mem­ bers of the Venetian cultural elite – Gusnasco da Pavia in front of the harpsichord and Gabriele dalla Volta holding a viol – whom Titian may have met through their mutual friend Bembo.30 On the surface it appears to be a group portrait,

18 Titian, The Interrupted Concert, c. 1510, oil on canvas.

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but then who is the plumed youth on the left: a generic figure often found in concert scenes? Some read the man in the centre (whose beautiful blue fur-lined coat has darkened with time) and the older man on the right (garbed in the black cassock of an Augustinian cleric) as an equivalency for the sensual and spiritual potency of music; others see the man in the middle as being faced with a Herculean choice between vice (the fashionable youth at the left) and virtue (the monk to the right). Some interpret the touch of the older man on the younger man’s shoulder as the intrusion of real time into ideal time; and still others have thought this detail generates a homoerotic frisson within the group. The trio has been dis­ cussed also as an allegory of the three ages of man, which brings me back to the previous image.31 As in the Three Ages of Man, a significant instance of com­ munion seems to be taking place between the figures in the Interrupted Concert, yet there is also a purposeful degree of ambi­ guity built into this scene. Unlike other concert scenes where men and women are usually shown in the act of singing and playing instruments, Titian has fashioned a complex image of silence. This sense of interruption is engineered through the sudden pivoting of the keyboardist, whose body language redirects our attention to that which is visual and tactile. It is difficult to say what exactly is transpiring in the Interrupted Concert, but the history of Renaissance music might offer some suggestions. In a wonderful essay on the depic­ tion of music and the passage of time, Jane Hatter linked such ges­tures, commonly found in Venetian paintings of the period, with an image from Gaffurio’s Pratica musicae (1496) in which an instructor is shown counting time by tapping the

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tactus (or beat) on the shoulder of a young pupil in front of him (illus. 19).32 Time, music and touch become one. In this con­ text, I would like to add a final, speculative coda that brings us back to the eloquence of musical symbols. If the two pipes in the Three Ages of Man suggested the slanted lines of a caesura or pause, might the keyboardist’s rotation here be likened to the symbol for a fermata? An arched semicircular mark with a dot underneath, when it appears above a note, instructs the musician to extend the duration of that note; alternatively it can appear above a rest, allowing the performer to insert an unspecified length of silence into the composition. In Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Fortuna desperata (see illus. 14), printed by Petrucci in 1503, the unblink­ ing fermata appears in the final stave to stretch out the note. In a culture fond of musical riddles these small signs were an 19 Franchino Gaffurio, Practica musice (Milan, 1496).

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invitation to interpretation. Thus if we look at the Interrupted Concert through the arch of the fermata, it inscribes the swiv­ elling movement of the musician who suddenly turns around (a gesture that is played out for different dramatic ends in the Jealous Husband and in the Bravo); it reiterates the shape of his eye that seeks his companion’s gaze (like the Magdalene in the Noli me tangere and the young woman in the Three Ages of Man); and it articulates the suspension of time that takes place in Titian’s paintings of interrupted music-making. This is in no way to suggest that Titian consciously struc­ tured his composition in the shape of a fermata. Unlike other Venetian artists such as Domenico Veneziano and Giorgione, who were praised for their musical skills, Titian was no practitioner, at least as far as we know – although he was an admirer and collector of instruments and, later in life, he acquired a beautiful harpsichord from Alessandro dagli Organi in exchange for a portrait through Aretino’s interven­ tion. What such a comparison hopes to make clear is the rich hermeneutical texture of both visual and musical forms in early sixteenth-century Venetian culture.33 On the one hand, the poetic key to both pictures is, in many ways, quite selfexplanatory: we are born; we grow old; and we die. On the other hand, the irruption at the heart of Titian’s two musi­ cal paintings – like the caesura and the fermata – invites the participation, improvisation and deliberation of its reader. The score comes alive when the musician performs it; the painting is reanimated when the spectator enters into its world. Deleuze and Guattari open What Is Philosophy? with the following proclamation:

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The young girl maintains the pose that she has had for five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it. The air still has turbulence, the gust of wind, and the light that it had that day last year, and it no longer depends on whoever was breathing it that morning . . . What is preserved – the thing or the work of art – is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.34 It is an affirmation of painting’s resilient ability to reach across time and connect with its multiple audiences again and again. Or in Bembo’s musical metaphor for love: ‘when two lutes are tuned in harmony and one is touched [l’un tocca] with the other placed before it, both instruments respond.’ The Latin noun tactus and the Italian verb toccare are derived from tangere, suggesting at once to touch, to reach and to cling as well as to move and to affect. ‘Touch me! Touch me not!’ says the spectator to the painting. And this is precisely what Titian’s early istorie and musical paintings do.

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T

ime stands still in paintings even while the nar­ rative dilates in both directions before and after the moment that is depicted. In the painting known as the Sacred and Profane Love (illus. 21), two female bodies – one dressed in a traditional Venetian wedding gown, the other nude – serve to allegorize Niccolò Aurelio’s legal possession of Laura Bagarotto, the daughter and wife of his disgraced adversaries, Bertuccio Bagarotto and Francesco Borromeo. The Venetian politician had been involved with the execution of the father and possibly of the husband as well. Yet a few years later he married Laura. Did Aurelio pursue her hand in marriage with a venal eye on her dowry or as an act of contrition? Did she marry him for love, for revenge or for something else? Many theories have been put forth as to what the painting means, but scenes from a marriage are always intensely personal while being formulaic at the same time.1 Take Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (illus. 20), which was painted for the Duke of Ferrara in the decades after he wed the strongwilled Lucrezia Borgia. It may have drawn upon an impressive bibliography of ancient texts, but beneath the veneer of humanist erudition, it too explores similar themes of longing,

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capture and metamorphosis. The works in this chapter speak of representation and the actuality of things, of pride and vulnerability, and of possession and dispossession. the hea rts of bea rs and tigers Public executions were not uncommon in Venice. In the summer of 1513 a serial rapist and robber who had terror­ ized over eighty women and girls was identified by one of his victims just outside the church of San Fantin. Tried and 20 Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–23, oil on canvas.

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condemned to death, the criminal was paraded up the Grand Canal on a boat to Santa Croce. Once there he was tied to a horse and dragged back over the bridges through the city to St Mark’s Square, where he was beheaded and quartered and his grisly remains displayed to the public.2 Capital punish­ ment was staged as an admonitory spectacle in the city’s main square between the two columns watched over by the statues of St Theodore to the west and the Lion of St Mark to the east, and by the enthroned figure of ‘Venetia’ as Justice (illus. 22) from the facade of the Doge’s Palace just beyond. The

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sorry execution of Bertuccio Bagarotto on 1 December 1509 was, however, a different kind of affair altogether. There had been much panic and confusion during the invasion of Padua by the Imperial forces earlier that summer. The local population did what they could to survive, opting to pacify rather than defy their victorious occupiers. The loss of territories on the mainland was psychologically, politically and financially devastating for the Venetian government. Things were desperate. Venetian nobles who did not con­ tribute to the war chests were named and shamed so that ‘the 21 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, 1515, oil on canvas.

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entire city could learn which citizens were lacking in patri­ otism’.3 Taxes, rents and even grain shipments from the Terraferma to Venice were interrupted. Inflation and food shortages caused further discontent; a decisive counter-strike had to be launched in order to restore confidence in the government. Scapegoats are easily created in all wars. Bagarotto became one of them. Falsely accused as a traitor for collaborating with Maximilian’s men, the respected jurist and law professor was sentenced to death by hanging along with three other Paduans in the winter of 1509. Even at the time, many Vene­ tians were shocked by the brutality and extremism of the witch hunt. Writing to a friend in Vicenza about the execu­ tions, the 23-year-old Luigi Da Porto (who later published the first version of the Romeo and Juliet story) reported that the wives of the four men – ‘great matrons’ whom he had 22 Filippo Calendario(?), ‘Venetia’ as Justice, c. 1350, stone relief with bronze sword on the west facade of the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

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once seen adorned in gold and splendour in Padua – were transformed by their pain, tearing at their hair, beating their innocent breasts, and wailing with such piteous cries so full of sorrow that they would have moved even ‘the hearts of bears and tigers’.4 On the day of the execution, Marin Sanudo, the faithful chronicler of early sixteenth-century Venetian history, sub­ limated his shock by commenting instead on the size of the crowd that had squeezed into the square to witness the deaths of the four ‘leading citizens of Padua’.5 Others were not so stoical. Girolamo Priuli lambasted the Venetian government for its stupidity and wrote in his diaries that the execution of four sexagenarians was a shameful occasion.6 Pietro Bembo (friend to both Titian and Aurelio) confessed that the ruling was too severe.7 The sight of such an ‘unhappy death’ pierced Da Porto’s heart.8 ‘Many people are saying’, he added, ‘that these Paduan noblemen wrongly died’, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the city that day. 9 Da Porto was too far from the scaffold to hear the speeches made by the convicted men, but he remarked that he saw ‘the wives, sons, and beautiful daughters of all ages’ who were brought out and forced to witness the infelicissimo fine (unhappy ending).10 Among this group, he would have found Laura Bagarotto, still in her twenties, who would have been close enough to hear her father reiterate his innocence before he was pushed off the podium by the executioner. Did she close her eyes? Or did she watch with horror as the life in her father’s body disappeared between the two columns in the square? Did she think about her first husband, Francesco Borromeo, who had also been captured? And was she thinking

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about all of this again five years later when she agreed to marry Aurelio? How could she not? As the Secretary of the Council of Ten in 1509, Aurelio would have attended the meetings in which their deaths were decided. He might have signed off on the measly 100 ducats rendered to Laura’s broken-hearted mother, Giulia, who was forced to live in a state of poverty in Venice. His signature, too, may well have ordered the agents of the Avogadori di Comun Straordinario to ransack the convent of San Matteo in Padua to look for the expensive damask dresses that Giulia had left for her ailing daughter, who was a nun there. As the Secretary, he would have been aware of the Council’s deci­ sion in 1510 to restore to the wives of the Paduan ‘rebels’ their confiscated dowries. He may have read, if not scruti­ nized, Giulia’s supplication in the spring of 1512. We know for certain that he helped Laura submit her petition in the winter of 1514. When he asked Laura to marry him he would have known that the marriage would bring him 2,100 ducats in addition to extensive properties on the mainland.11 Laura, for her part, would have realized this too. These historical facts are the paradoxical tragedy and triumph that underwrite Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. The painting would have made a handsome wedding pic­ ture for anyone. It is a gorgeous work featuring beautifully rendered figures in an expansive landscape brimming with details that would have satiated any collector’s eye. The bride on the left stares out at us (as so many of Titian’s women do), but she seems to look right through us, confronting us with­ out exactly acknowledging us. There is something at once proud, defiant and guarded in her face and posture. The stiff,

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cool, white satin dress simultaneously covers and illuminates her. The shimmering fabric, edged with gold thread, stands in stark contrast to the softness of her strawberry blonde hair that curls and falls on her shoulders. If on the surface she seems a little frosty, she nevertheless possesses some of the chromatic and luminous warmth that would be found in Titian’s Flora (illus. 23), painted in these same years. The bejewelled belt buckle on the bride, the stony carved surface of the sarcophagus, the hardness of the round ebony box on the left, the ornate chasing of the silver-gilt basin to the right, the feathers of Cupid’s wings, and the thorny stems of the bush in the foreground – the tangible materiality of surfaces is brought out by Titian’s use of paint and light. The pleasures of sight and touch are also enhanced by the sug­ gestion of sweet floral scents. The bride wears a crown of myrtle, a flower associated with marriage that blooms in May. A pink rose lies scattered on the fountain. A single detachable red sleeve leads the eye to a few flowering sprigs beneath a buckskin glove. It was common to treat gloves with a range of perfumed scents and oils derived from nature such as cypress, cedar, incense, musk, cinnamon, carnations, storax bark, nutmeg, orange blossoms and roses.12 These olfactory and gustatory triggers render the image an intense sensory experience. On the right, a nude woman with red and white draperies (the traditional colours of love and weddings) reiterates the colour scheme on the left; in her hand she holds a smold­ ering bronze vessel, interpreted by some as an attribute of charity and divine love.13 Behind them a winged cupid stirs the waters in the fountain, causing it to gush forth from the

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spout on the front. The elements of earth, air, fire and water seem to compete with each other and with the five senses for attention. And yet what did it mean that this painting with this imagery was made for this particular couple? Even the urbane and sophisticated Venetians were shocked by Aurelio and Bagarotto’s union on 14 May 1514. In one of his many newsworthy items, Sanudo reported that the groom was obliged to request permission from the upper echelons of the government and referred to Laura as the daughter of a hanged man and a widow with a large dowry; ‘everyone’, he added, ‘was talking about it.’14 Because Aurelio’s coat of arms is so visibly positioned at the centre of the composition on the fountain, he is usually assumed to be the patron of the painting.15 Rona Goffen, however, suggested that it might have been Laura.16 This is a proposition I would like to revisit. On the eve of Laura’s second marriage, she had lost her father and her first husband in the post-Agnadello purges, but through the timely intervention of her second husband she regained her worldly possessions, including her dowry, a white wedding gown (which Goffen correlated with the one in the painting), and some of her family holdings around Padua.17 It would be easy to be cynical, but one must also be practical and even hopeful. Despite the monetary gains and social security that might have made the alliance palatable to both parties in 1514, documentary evidence would suggest that both partners sustained the marriage with sincere hearts. If Aurelio had expedited the return of Laura’s confiscated dowry, he also provided generously for his ‘most dear and beloved consort’ in the wills that were drafted later on in his life.18 She seems to have accepted his illegitimate son Marco

23 Titian, Flora, c. 1515, oil on canvas.

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as her own as well as providing Aurelio with two legitimate heirs (Giulietta and Antonio), all of whom are mentioned with tenderness in his last testament. It could be said that Laura eventually found her happy ending, but when the painting was commissioned, her father’s infelicissimo fine was surely still fresh in her memory. Five years later, Laura’s younger brother Piero would make an impassioned speech before the Council of Ten. Piero recounted how he was left at the age of thirteen fatherless and penniless, forced to beg in the streets practically nude, treated like a dog and taken as a servant by a German soldier. He reiterated his father’s innocence and threw himself at the mercy of the councillors. Moved by the power of his words, they unanimously voted to grant him a state pension in acknowledgement of the wrong that had been done to him.19 His sister, however, had paved the way for the rehabilitation of the family’s reputation through the only means available to a sixteenth-century widow: marriage. w hen mercy seasons justice The Sacred and Profane Love has been compared with both Romeo and Juliet and Richard iii.20 Something about the sense of selfpossession projected by the two women reminds me of the doubled-identity of Portia speaking in the guise of Balthazar in The Merchant of Venice. Unlike Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroine and unlike her own brother Piero, however, Laura was unable to plead her case in the patriarchal courts of justice. If women were meant to be seen and not heard, the Sacred and Profane Love stands as an eloquent vicarious declaration.

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Neither of the two female figures is a portrait of the bride per se, but both speak on her behalf. What they tell us is some­ thing of Laura’s indefatigable will and her magnanimous spirit of mercy and justice, evoking the words of Portia’s famous speech written decades later: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute of God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (iv.1) If the tears of the Bagarotto women possessed the power to move ‘the hearts of bears and tigers’, the towering female figures in Titian’s painting would instil the ‘hearts of kings’ with the force of ‘mercy and justice’. As such, in addition to being a wedding picture and a Neoplatonic thesis, the Sacred and Profane Love is also a document about forgiveness and truth revealed by time. Let me bring together four disparate visual details noted by previous scholars regarding the iconography of Injustice,

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Truth, Judith and April to close my case here. Giles Robertson first linked the violent scene on the front of the fountain with a rape scene found beneath Giotto’s grisaille figure of Iniustitia in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (illus. 24).21 Titian, of course, had been in Padua just a few years earlier. Moreover, rape, as we heard, is as much about honour and shame as it is about sex and violence. The doubled reference to rape and injustice would have served here as a powerful allegory for everything that had befallen the Bagarotto family. Drawing from funerary inscriptions found on late Repub­ lican tombs, a second figure Robertson briefly mentioned in relation to the painting is Veritas (or Truth).22 I would like to extend this observation further here. In Cesare Ripa’s book of symbols, Iconologia (1593), Truth is described as ‘a beauti­ ful naked woman, holding the sun in her right hand and fixing her eyes on it’. While this description doesn’t quite match the woman on the right, the explanation that follows in Ripa’s text helps illuminate the potency of the nude figure in terms that move her beyond both the purely spiritual and the merely erotic and tie her to Bagarotto’s case. ‘Truth,’ Ripa writes, ‘is the custom of the soul to keep the tongue on a right path and to be faithful to the things she is speaking or writing about, that is, to assert always equally and without changing what is or to deny what is not.’23 The third detail comes from an illustration of Titian’s Judith from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (illus. 25), which Goffen proposed as a stylistic reference for the open-legged figure that dominates the left half of the Sacred and Profane Love. Judith, who assassinated Nebuchadnezzar’s general Holofernes, was often a stand-in for the personification of Justice, a pairing

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enhanced by the lexical similarity in Italian between Giuditta and Giustizia. A symbol of the power of feminine virtue in the vicissitudes of war, Judith was also a widow. The figure of Justice also held a special place in Venetian state iconog­ raphy. There is little doubt that Laura would have seen the fourteenth-century relief of Venetia on the western facade 24 Giotto, Injustice, 1306, fresco.

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of the Doge’s Palace, not far from the very site where her father was killed by hanging (see illus. 22). Venetia as Justice is seated on a Solomonic throne above turbulent waters with the swift sword of justice in one hand and a scroll behind her that announces: ‘Strong and just, enthroned I put the furies of the sea beneath my feet.’24 Like this figure, the bride in the Sacred and Profane Love sits in triumph, confronting her beholder (rather than seducing him), unblinking, unwavering and vigi­ lant, reiterating the innocence of her father. To follow Ripa, she is like Truth, keeping ‘the tongue on a right path’, ‘faithful to the things she is speaking or writing about’, asserting ‘always equally and without changing what is’, and denying ‘what is not’. To follow Shakespeare, however, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love can also be read as an allegory of Laura’s magnanimity, her spirit of forgiveness, elucidating the final line in Portia’s 25 Titian, Judith, c. 1508–9, detached fresco.

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speech: ‘And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.’ Regardless of the true identity of the patron, the painting stands as a daughter’s testament to the memory of her father and to the vow that she was about to make to her new hus­ band. Perhaps the Bagarotto stemma is absent from the image precisely because with the restitution of her family’s reputa­ tion and possessions she was at peace at last to leave that identity behind and to take on the name of another man. Writing about Titian’s images of Ovidian metamorphosis, Rebecca Zorach explained that ‘If, in fact, self-possession must be found upon dispossession and vice-versa, it might be more useful to view the self as oscillating (within the parameters of its particular symbolic and social conditions) between “possession” and “dispossession,” self-assured action and abject disarray, as it tries to situate itself.’25 The two female figures thus represent Laura’s metamorphosis. On this point, I turn to a final visual reference, which we owe to Beverly Louise Brown, of a fresco in the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua that depicts the month of April as a young woman in a white dress with red sleeves holding a bouquet of flowers in her hands (illus. 26).26 April was the first month of spring and it belonged to the goddess of love. Ovid tells us in the Fasti (iv.125–32): And no season was more fitting for Venus than spring. In spring the landscape glistens; soft is the soil in spring; now the corn pushes its blades through the cleft ground; now the vine-shoot protrudes its buds in the swelling bark. Lovely Venus deserves the lovely season

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and is attached, as usual, to her dear Mars: in spring she bids the curved ships fare across her natal seas and fear no more the threats of winter.27 From winter to spring, from ‘abject disarray’ to ‘self-assured action’ – two weeks beyond the cusp of April, Laura would become a new woman. Her marriage granted her a second life. This fourth figure represents the final step in the passage from Giotto’s Iniustitia to Ripa’s Veritas to Titian’s Judith to a life reborn in spring. The painting was not a literal illustration of events, of course, but standing before Titian’s canvas in the Venetian house of her new family, how could the young Paduan bride not have reflected upon some of these porten­ tous associations? 26 Nicolò da Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara, Allegory of April, c. 1430, fresco on the southern wall of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua.

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One can only imagine the gossip that must have hung in the damp Venetian air when the erstwhile bachelor Aurelio announced his plans to marry the young widow of an outlaw. What did his friend Bembo think? And did Bembo immedi­ ately relay this news to his confidante Titian? Finally, had the young Titian been in the dense crowd that gathered in San Marco to witness Bagarotto’s execution in 1509? If so, did he see Laura on that fateful day? Was he moved like Da Porto? Incensed like Priuli? Or apologetic like Bembo? There is no secure answer to these questions, only the visual testament that the painter left behind. From this, one might suggest that Titian cleared the overgrown woods, which imprisoned Giotto’s Iniustitia (a callous, close-fisted male form seen in profile and presiding over a scene of mayhem), to make way for Iustitia (the radiant female figuration of power, hope, and truth). Perhaps the two women in the Sacred and Profane Love represent Titian’s celebration of Laura’s vernal metamorpho­ sis for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.28 sta rstruck The transition from good daughter to good consort is often a difficult one. Behind Titian’s large canvas depicting Bacchus and Ariadne stood the stories of two formidable women. The first is Ariadne, the lovelorn daughter of the mythical King Minos, who betrayed her father, her family and her city by helping Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur’s maze only to be abandoned by him on the shores of Naxos later on. The second is Lucrezia Borgia, the wild daughter of Pope Alexander

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vi who was married off to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, in 1502 and whose death in 1519 prefaced the painting, which had been commissioned as part of a series of mythological scenes for the duke’s camerino d’alabastro in Ferrara. Laura, Lucre­ zia and Ariadne are unlikely companions, but all three women shared difficult journeys in which they were transformed by the men in their lives. Lucrezia, like Laura, was a widow. Her first marriage to Giovanni Sforza ended with an acrimonious annulment obtained through threats, bribes and accusations of incest and impotence. Her second marriage to Alfonso of Aragon ended with the husband’s suspicious murder just outside St Peter’s. Third time lucky? In some ways, it could have gone badly: the marriage (as would be expected) was arranged by her father for strategic and political reasons; Lucrezia was forced to abandon her son Rodrigo in order to present herself as a ‘virgin’ bride, an absurdity of which everyone involved was well aware; moreover, Ercole d’Este, the father of the groom, was resistant. A heavy price had to be paid to offset Lucrezia’s past, but her staggering dowry of 100,000 ducats and the annexation of various lands closed the deal.29 Despite – or possibly because of – the gossip in Rome, which alleged unholy relations with her father (the pope), this princess was eager to leave and start again in a new city.30 In addition to her dowry, she arrived in Ferrara with her own worldly pos­ sessions, including 20,000 ducats in gold and jewellery. She was well placed, therefore, to finance her own happy ending. It could be said that Lucrezia, like Ariadne, had been saved by a hero and transformed into a star. On the cold winter day when she entered Ferrara during the Feast of the

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Purification of the Virgin, it was reported that she fell off her horse in front of the church of San Giovanni.31 Given the occasion, such missteps might have been interpreted as a bad omen. Alfonso, however, like Bacchus in Titian’s paint­ ing, immediately swooped her up and placed her on one of his horses, and they continued on together. To be sure, the Ferrarese Bacchanals are neither wedding pictures (they were made almost two decades later) nor are they about Alfonso and Lucrezia’s relationship per se. The painting might be read, however, in light of their metamorphosis from pawns in an arranged marriage into a super couple in their own right. As it turned out, away from the intrigues of the papal court, Lucrezia thrived: she was an excellent hostess, an edu­ cated interlocutor, a talented musician, a muse for Alfonso’s poets and a skilled diplomat on his behalf; there was much affection in the court and among the people of Ferrara for the new duchess, and she was remembered as ‘always happy and smiling’.32 Despite their respective infidelities and inevitable conflicts, Alfonso and Lucrezia nevertheless shared seventeen fruitful years together. She would produce several children for the House of Este including a duke, a cardinal and a marquis and, in this regard, she was a very successful Renaissance wife.33 After her death at the age of 39 in 1519, Alfonso immersed himself in the two activities for which he is remembered: war and art. The first does not concern us, but the second gave birth to three of Titian’s most beloved artworks: the Worship of Venus, the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Bacchanal of the Andrians. Here I will focus on the second (see illus. 20). The 64th poem in Catullus’ Carmina is usually cited as the source for the Bacchus and Ariadne. For the most part, art

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historians have focused on the moment when Bacchus enters the narrative and rescues the Minoan princess. Indeed, it would seem that Titian followed the passage to the letter (lxiv.256 –64), illustrating the Maenads with ‘crazy minds’, figures shak­ing ‘thyrsi with their points hidden’ and ‘limbs from a dismembered bullock’, others with ‘twisting serpents’ and still other bacchantes with ‘drums’, ‘polished bronze cymbals’ and ‘harsh-sounding booms on horns’, as well as a ‘barbarian flute’ screaming ‘with its raucous song’.34 This is a well-known passage so I would like to consider instead the scene that precedes Bacchus’ heroic arrival in Catullus’ poem. Things were not going so well for Ariadne when she woke up alone on the shores of Naxos to discover that Theseus had sneaked off without her. At the heart of the poem we hear her give vent to her grief and anger in a thundering soliloquy cut with the sound of tears and waves (lxiv.124–31): They say that often, frenzied with her heart on fire, she howled out piercing cries from the depths of her lungs, then sadly scaled the steep hills from where she could cast her gaze out over the huge swell of the sea, then ran out into the waves of rippling salt water that pushed against her, lifting her soft clothes away from her bare legs, and, wretched, she spoke these words in her last complaint, heaving chilly sobs from her tear-wet face.35 Ariadne was, in many ways, the spokeswoman for the spurned lover. In Ovid’s Heroides (a series of letters written by heroines to their faithless men), her lament begins, as commentators

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have pointed out, practically mid-sentence, as if her thoughts could not hold themselves together.36 Like the Catullan soliloquy and the Ovidian epistle, Titian’s composition is similarly structured by an abrupt, disjointed and splintered start where the figure is awkwardly caught between conflicting emotional states and between her past and future selves. It has been suggested that this painting was hung beside a doorway in the ducal bedroom, in which case the spectator would have passed through the portal and spun around (like Ariadne) in order to see the picture on the wall.37 Wrapped in red, white and blue draperies, Ariadne waves to Theseus’ ship, which one sees on the horizon line that slips off the left edge of the painting. Thus, like Ariadne, the viewer must search the canvas to find the small and distant ship that is about to disappear, evoking her lament in the Heroides (x.43): ‘On a treebranch I tied my flickering veil to remind you of who you’d forgotten – until at last you were swept beyond my vision.’38 As the chapter on Theseus is drawing to a close in the first 25 centimetres (10 in.) of the canvas, the story of Bacchus opens up behind, centre stage. Simultaneously, Titian has scripted Ariadne’s future metamorphosis in the skies above. The process of being ‘placed among the stars’ is called cataster­ ism. In Titian’s composition, the heroine twists and turns in place directly beneath a crown of stars – the Corona Borealis – to signal to her subsequent apotheosis. The story thus begins and ends here, looped together by two disparate representations (sacred and profane) of Ariadne: as the glorious constellation that Titian has situated above her in the rich expanse of lapis lazuli that forms the sky; and as the abandoned wife of Theseus and the soon-to-be bride of Bacchus.

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According to most biographers, Alfonso’s marriage to Lucrezia was hardly an easy one: he had a penchant for pros­ titutes; she for his court poets (Bembo would dedicate Gli Asolani to her). Alfonso’s relations with Titian were equally strained. We know from the painter’s extensive correspond­ ence that he was an awesome procrastinator. On 1 April 1518, Alfonso’s agents sent Titian a set of stretchers and a fine linen canvas that had been made to measure for the duke’s cham­ bers. Spring turned into summer; before too long autumn arrived; still no painting. The duke sent a furious letter to his Venetian agent to ask Titian to hurry up. Over a year later, it was finally completed and sent on (this painting was the Worship of Venus about which we will hear more in the next chapter). Despite the delays, the duke was pleased and ordered two more bacchanals, but again, in the winter of 1520, he would be heard thundering on about the missing paintings, which he was ‘eagerly awaiting’. Titian responded with the sorry excuse that he hadn’t received the new stretchers and canvas and assumed the duke had changed his mind.39 Poor Alfonso. The formidable military strategist who had been ex-communicated by Pope Julius ii! Here he was coaxing a dilatory artist for some pictures. In late January 1523 Alfonso’s agent in Venice arranged for a ship to transport the canvas up the Po River to Francolino where a porter carried it over land to Ferrara where it awaited Titian’s final touches.40 By the time the Bacchus and Ariadne was installed in the cam­ erino in Ferrara, nearly four years had passed since Lucrezia’s unexpected death in childbirth. Despite the obstacles of their early history together, in the end Alfonso was overcome with sorrow, confessing to his nephew Federico Gonzaga: ‘I cannot

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write without tears, so grave is it to find myself deprived of such a sweet, dear companion as she was to me, for her good ways and for the tender love there was between us.’ Even Bernardino di Prosperi (Isabella d’Este’s informant in Ferrara) was moved by how affected the duke was by the loss: ‘truly his Excellency is grieving greatly. And yesterday in the procession he was as weak as if he had suffered a fever for some days. Wherefore it is now known truly the love that he bore her.’41 The Duke of Ferrara could hardly be remembered, how­ ever, as a romantic (he took up with his long-time mistress, whom Titian brilliantly portrayed).42 But perhaps the thera­ peutic musicality of Titian’s scenes offered the aristocratic widower a stage upon which to enact his own metamorphosis as he transitioned from the arms of one woman to the next. Like his older sister Isabella and his young wife Lucrezia, Alfonso was trained in the art of music. He would often sing or play music before and after and sometimes even during dinner time ‘and passed thus the time’.43 The many thoughts that must have transpired in the duke’s mind as he contem­ plated Titian’s pictures in those wintry years in the rooms above the Via Coperta. This liminal space linked his official public life in the castle to the more intimate spaces of his life beyond in the palace and gardens. The bacchanals, to be sure, had been a high-pressure commission for both patron and artist. Alfonso was engaged in serious sibling rivalry with Isabella, who had amassed an impressive collection of contemporary art in her famous studiolo in Mantua. Titian, for his part, was haunted by the super­star painters who had come before him such as Raphael

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and Fra Bartolomeo, both of whom had died prematurely before completing their commissions. Titian was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. At the very moment when he was rising as a star in Venice, one by one his com­ petitors left the stage to make way for him: Giorgione died in 1510 and Giovanni Bellini in 1516; Sebastiano del Piombo relocated to Rome in 1511; Lorenzo Lotto spent the 1510s in Rome and Bergamo (Tintoretto was still a baby, and Veronese would not be born until 1528). In Ferrara, Titian had to negotiate his way with Alfonso’s well-established (albeit less talented) court artists, but the stage was cleared for his ascendancy. In addition to contending with his own contemporaries, he also faced the paragone between Ancients and Moderns and between word and image. There is no doubt that the black and white pages of antiquity came to life in the raucous clam­ our of Bacchus’ rambling, drunken entourage that burst forth from Titian’s canvas. But again, Titian did more than simply illustrate these classical sources. The venerable silence of an­ tiquity is pierced in this scene by the small collared dog in the foreground, believed to have been a portrait-in-miniature of a favourite court pet, thus calling attention to its own con­ temporaneity. 44 The pair of gorgeous cheetahs, too, was thought to have been a double reference to a passage in Philostratus’ Imagines (i.15.2) as well as to the hunting leopards in the duke’s menagerie. 45 For Titian, it was never about recreating the past in its historical exactitude, but about making its tales, sorrows and dreams resonate anew. The spectacle that Titian staged, however, was fully modern. It is towards this bold modernity that I now turn.

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living pictur es Writing about the vast critical distance between the ‘minu­ tiae of detail’ and the ‘grandeur of impression’ in painting, the English art critic John Ruskin lambasted as the ‘lowest and most contemptible art’ those ‘Dutch house-painters’ of the Golden Age with their ‘calculable bricks’ and the faces of the eighteenth-century German portraits with their ‘num­ bered hairs and mapped wrinkles’. In contrast, the great artist achieves ‘inestimable beauty’ by reconciling the details and the whole. Titian’s flowers in the Bacchus and Ariadne, Ruskin

27 Details of flowers in Bacchus and Ariadne (illus. 20).

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concluded, exemplified just such an achievement.46 In the foreground Titian has depicted four specimens (illus. 27) – the caper flower (Capparis spinosa), rosemary (Rosmarinus offici­ nalis), iris (Iris unguicularis) and columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) – with great beauty, as Ruskin would claim, but also with a concern for accurate botanical description, an attention that characterized what would have been deemed as innovative scientific studies in early sixteenth-century Europe.47 Titian’s flower portraits are prefaced by a rich tradition of medical botany in the Veneto. 48 Pietro d’Abano (whom we encountered in the previous chapter) translated Pedanius Dioscorides’ De materia medica from Greek into Latin while teaching at the University of Padua. Two important preRenaissance herbal manuscripts were produced in this environment: the first, known as the Carrara Herbal, was a lavishly illustrated copy of Serapion the Younger’s treatise made for Francesco Novello (the Lord of Padua) around 1400; the second, known as the Liber de simplicibus, was authored by Nicolò Roccabonella and illustrated by the Venetian artist Andrea Amadio. Pharmacopoeias also featured prominently among the first printed books of the Renaissance (the 1483 edition of the Herbarium apulei was dedicated to Cardinal Francesco i Gonzaga, the paternal uncle of Francesco ii who would marry Alfonso’s sister Isabella d’Este). These handbooks described the medicinal properties and therapeutic uses of ‘simples’ (made from plants, flowers, roots and a wide range of botanical ingredients) and were often accompanied by schematic illustrations (illus. 28). Thus rose­ mary is defined as being found near the sea and in gardens and could be used pounded, boiled, powdered and stewed

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to improve vision and to alleviate dental, stomach, liver and chest pains, the symptoms of fever and fresh wounds. 49 In Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, two lonely stalks can be found next to the iris beneath the bearded man on the right. Because rosemary is a perennial evergreen, it was often symbolically linked to death and immortality, memory and love magic (an appropriate choice for the stories of both Alfonso and Ariadne).50 In this regard, Titian’s botanical inserts functioned as sympathetic magic, as phytotherapy intersected with art ther­ apy. The flowers portrayed all possess restorative properties rich with folkloric symbolism. Bracketing the main scene on either end of the Bacchus and Ariadne are the caper flower and the columbine. In Materia medica (ii.204), Dioscorides writes that Capparis spinosa was found in barren places, espe­ cially on islands, and its constituent parts were often used as purgatives and to soothe all kinds of inflammations and convulsions. Pietro Andrea Mattioli noted, in his commen­ tary on Dioscorides, that the aquilegia was rumoured to cure all sorts of sexual disorders and even ‘to restore man’s potency when, as a result of witchcraft, he was no longer able to fulfill his duties’.51 Alfonso, it seems, was especially concerned about his virility in the years after Lucrezia’s death.52 Irises, in turn, had been used since the time of Pliny as an antidote to snake and spider bites; they were associated with rainbows and with the Virgin Mary, and as such these purplish-blue flowers were said to connect the sacred with the profane.53 Erotic conno­ tations were amplified on this occasion by exotic ones, for Titian chose to depict a North African variety (Iris unguicu­ laris).54 Thus his flower portraits were at once ‘healing images’

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capable of balancing the humours and of restoring the nerves and historical records of brand-new scientific discoveries.55 In Titian’s floral marginalia, art, magic and science are one. This would not always be so as things were on the move. In general terms, three stages can be identified in the evolu­ tion of botanical illustration: the ‘stylized representation’ of illustrated codices and early printed herbals; the ‘naturalistic representation’ of the 1530s and 1540s; and the ‘scientific representation’ that characterized late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century studies working increasingly with botan­ ical collections.56 While a concern for drawing from life was already present in the early codices, the question of accuracy in ‘descriptive botany’ became a point of heated debate fol­ lowing the publication in 1530 by Otto Brunfels of the Herbarum vivae eicones, which featured drawings from Hans Weiditz the Younger.57 Even in the syntax of the title, the emphasis was placed on ‘living pictures of plants’ (rather than on images of living plants).58 Weiditz was surely inspired by his master Albrecht Dürer, who was likewise captivated by the beauty of nature, which he portrayed in a series of watercolours from approximately the same date as Titian’s painting. The Herbarum vivae eicones was copied, plagiarized, re-printed and eventually supplanted by Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium in 1542, with its modern emphasis on the image of scientific truth (pictura absolutissima).59 Titian was friendly with a circle of authors, including Aretino and Angelo Forte, who questioned the blind acceptance of ancient authors and called upon modern doctors to pursue their own investigations. These bold contemporary men thought that travel, personal study and dialogue with villani

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(country folk) would provide remedies to local ailments.60 On the one hand, Titian’s flower portraits, like Dürer’s nature studies, were made in the waning years of the first generation of medical humanists working in the universities and courts of Northern Italy from the 1490s to the 1530s.61 On the other, appearing just before the increasingly academic debates of 28 Pseudo-Apuleius, Herbarium (Rome, 1484).

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phytographers to come, their floral profiles attest to the ability of artists to engage with theory through practice avant la lettre. Venice, though built on water, was renowned for its gardens: Francesco Sansovino listed 231 of them in his sixteenth-century guidebook to the various sestieri of the city.62 The worlds of plants and of paint were intimately linked, too. Indigo and madder, for instance, were used to produce both herbal remedies and pigments and both could be purchased in apothecaries. Venice was, moreover, the Euro­pean capital for both pharmacists (spezieri da grosso) and specialist pigment sellers (vendecolori) on account of its well-established trading links, which provided access to raw materials from the Levant, Cyprus, Crete, Syria, Egypt and beyond.63 The city was, as Pandolfo Collenucio claimed, a ‘great center for the diffusion of information as well as commodities’, and its pharmacies were also a hub for news and gossip.64 It comes as no surprise then that Venetians were at the forefront of artistic innova­ tion in a city where ‘the color sellers’ shops were meeting places where information on new materials and new uses for familiar materials were exchanged by various artisans’ includ­ ing a wide range of easel painters, furniture and frame makers, leather workers, tarot card designers, glass makers, fabric dyers, gilders and illuminators, mosaicists and others.65 Titian’s use of high-quality pigments in the Bacchus and Ariadne is remarkable. The amount of lapis lazuli in the sky, in the drapery that wraps around Ariadne, on the lower part of the female figure in the centre, and in the petals of the iris and columbine is staggering. After gold, oltremare da venecia was the most expensive material an artist could use, and Titian used it at full strength, unmixed, in several instances. ‘The

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cheaper blue pigments, indigo and smalt,’ as the National Gallery conservators noted, ‘are conspicuous by their absence.’66 The canvas reads almost like a giant palette upon which dis­ tinct areas of pure paint have been laid down (indeed, the modern British painter Bridget Riley compared the way Titian ‘tips the picture plane flat’ in this painting with Cézanne).67 Ariadne’s sash is a thick smear of vermillion, while shimmer­ ing white highlights anchor the cloud of red lake that forms Bacchus’ billowing cape and the drapery of the little faun. Orpiment is used for highlights and realgar for the base of the central bacchante’s glowing tunic; a pool of azurite extends out to sea; a mosaic of malachite, verdigris, copper resinate green and yellow ochre coalesces in the trees. Lead-tin yellow is used to render the cloth tossed in the lower left-hand corner, but more importantly, it is also used to pick out the glint on the gold vessel, calling to mind Alberti’s reminder in Della pittura (1435) that ‘to represent the glitter of gold with plain colours brings the craftsman more admiration and praise’.68 Paint trumping gold, art defeating nature – could Titian have been aware of Alberti’s injunction, for it is here on the body of the pot that he signed his name (illus. 29)? In Titian’s living pictures, the evanescent world of people and things in flux is seized by his brush as the ‘minutiae of detail’ collapse into the ‘grandeur of impression’. Although Ruskin thought little of his precursor the English art histor­ ian Anna Jameson, even he would surely have agreed with her claim that ‘Titian’s pictures: they make children of us again; they surprise us with the feeling of a presence; they melt us with a familiar sympathy; we rejoice in them as we do in music, in spring-tide, in the fresh air and morning breath

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of flowers.’69 The convergence of medical studies at the university, the burgeoning printing industry in Venice and the availability of pigments through the channels of Venetian commerce enabled Titian’s art (like his humble flowers) to be more than just beautiful. It was a philosophical and material summation of a vast array of early sixteenth-century know­ ledges. In his canvases was an art, which instructed its viewer that the pursuit and possession of knowledge – philosophia – could be a purely visual thing.

29 Detail of Titian’s signature on the vase in Bacchus and Ariadne (illus. 20).

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obody could paint carne viva (live flesh) like Titian. It was not just the tactile sensation of skin, but the gestures, poses, facial expressions and body language of living, breathing beings. This aspect was especially pronounced in his various images of the most spontaneous of all creatures: children and animals. Judging from the visual evidence, Titian was a man who knew babies: the way the flesh on the back of their little hands and elbows dimples or the angle at which their small pudgy feet might suddenly kick up; how they scamper about when at play with each other; and the look on their faces when they see a rabbit or hug a puppy. From the testimony of his art, Titian was indisputably a dog person. Focusing on the depiction of flesh and fur, this chapter turns to the way Titian explored the skin of things. painting milk and blood The Worship of Venus (illus. 30) had been the first of the three bacchanals for Alfonso d’Este’s camerino d’alabastro in Ferrara. The curious subject came from Philostratus’ Imagines (i.6), an ancient Greek text consisting of ekphrases or highly animated

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descriptions of paintings, and the iconographic programme was guided by Mario Equicola, a gifted humanist who worked for Alfonso and Isabella. Two women burst onto the scene in Titian’s picture from the right, dressed in the tricolour associ­ ated with the figure of Ariadne on the nearby wall (discussed in the previous chapter). Above they are watched by a dry, col­ ourless statue of Venus, while below their colours are repeated in the scattered pile of lush cloths in the foreground and in the small rubies, sapphires, pearls and sculpted cameoes dotted across the composition. 30 Titian, Worship of Venus, 1518–19, oil on canvas.

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While Titian’s translation from word to image was rela­ tively faithful, his visual rendition offered an experiential immediacy that engaged the senses and dazzled the soul. The spectator is confronted everywhere with a glorious mess of soft golden curls, feathery blue and pink wings, squidgy rolls of baby fat, and chubby little hands and feet that clamour and wave across the verdant landscape. Some putti fly up to the trees to cull apples; others wait below to catch the spoils in a woven basket. Some wrestle and tussle with each other; others hug and kiss. In the foreground, a putto aims an arrow at another cupid who raises his arms in mock surrender. A group in the centre has banded together to catch a startled hare. Boisterous babes dance in a circle in the distance. Babies, babies, babies – as far as the eye can see! Babies in pre-modern art have been described as ‘thought­ f­ul and gloomy little old people’ (there is even a popular Tumblr dedicated to ‘Ugly Renaissance Babies’).1 For a gen­ eration of early Renaissance viewers accustomed to the ‘miniature adults’ that populated altarpieces, devotional panels, mythological landscapes and portraits with their grave expressions, awkward gestures and creepy anatomies, the spectacle in Titian’s garden would have been teeming with emotion and vitality. His angels were, to quote Aretino, painted with ‘milk and blood’.2 Well into the subsequent centuries, authors would identify Titian’s tender infants as a turning point in the paragone between Ancients and Moderns. Raphael, it was argued, had mastered the perfect putto antico, modelled after the serious children of ancient statuary; Titian, however, gave birth to the putto moderno, full of energy and possibility.3

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Titian’s modernity is philosophical to the core – his art exploited the aesthetic force of new media such as oil painting to break down the divide between representation and reality. The ability to build up layers of paint veiled by translucent glazes enabled the painter to create the illusion of breathing figures in dewy, fresh landscapes on the flat surfaces of his canvas. The utter diversity of poses, expressions, gestures and reactions is what Renaissance theorists praised as varietà (var­ iety). Titian’s invention, however, was no academic affair. Like the sound of children spilling out of the school playground in the hopeful afternoon sun, the Worship of Venus evokes life. Like the water gushing forth from the spout beneath the sculptural ensemble on the right (a motif Titian had used to similar ends in the Sacred and Profane Love), this painting was a meditation about the vital spirits in the heart that nurtured the animal spirits in the brain. It was about potentiality – and nothing embodies the idea of incessant becoming better than a toddler. The sense of jubilation that bursts forth in the Worship of Venus for Alfonso d’Este is recreated at the micro-level in an intimate devotional painting, the Madonna of the Rabbit (illus. 31), made some years later for the Duke of Ferrara’s nephew Federico Gonzaga. A substantially reduced cast of characters gathers against the tenebrous glow of a setting sun: two women (the Virgin in the centre and St Catherine on the left), one baby (the infant Christ), two rabbits (one in the fore­ ground that is the object of the child’s attention and a second one shuffling off the picture plane to the right) and a bearded male figure in the background. Wriggling with excitement, the chubby infant has a sweet little face full of curiosity and

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wonder, which is offset by his mother’s measured glance. Crowe and Cavalcaselle connected this painting with the birth of the artist’s first son, Pomponio, in 1524. The ten­ derness between mother and child attests to ‘the innermost recesses of a man’s heart who has begun to know the charms of paternity, who has watched a young mother and her year­ ling child, and seized at a glance those charming but minute passages which seldom or ever meet any but a father’s eye’.4 Whether this is true or not does not matter, for it is clear from this painting that Titian closely studied the way children dwell within their small worlds. The naturalism of his figures is thus twofold: not only do they look like real people, but they behave like real people. 31 Titian, Madonna of the Rabbit, 1530, oil on canvas.

32 Titian, Madonna of the Pesaro Family, 1519–26, oil on canvas.

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If the variety of gestures in the Worship of Venus demonstrates Titian’s boundless creativity, the isolated detail of the baby’s upturned right foot in the Madonna of the Rabbit speaks to his powers of observation. This detail was, in fact, one of his signature tricks from this period and can be seen, too, in the Madonna of the Pesaro Family (illus. 32), among other works. The skilful foreshortening heightens the sense of lifelikeness and momentary action and extends the child’s squeezable little foot out towards the viewer’s eye and hand. In this regard, the Madonna of the Rabbit is also an exploration of conflicting sensory experiences. Like the Noli me tangere, the Interrupted Concert, the Three Ages of Man and the Bacchus and Ariadne, we find a careful choreography of desirous hands and gazes that criss-cross the composition: the child reaches back and grasps St Catherine’s face, while her deferent hold upon the infant is mediated by the white cloth that prevents direct contact; the Virgin holds the white rabbit steady beneath her left hand, anticipating the sensation of soft, warm fur that the baby seeks to know. St Catherine looks at the Virgin who looks at the Christ Child who looks at the rabbit, and the group is watched from the middle ground by a shepherd who has his left arm on the back of a lamb, reiterating the Virgin’s left hand. Simultaneously, his hand highlights the precious contents of the Virgin’s right hand – the sacrificial ‘lamb’ that is her son. The foot of the man twists and turns to show itself, echoing the child’s gesture. This marginal figure has been identified as both St Joseph, in accordance with the religious scene, and as a portrait of the patron (I will come back to this below).5 Here and now, the seated figure seems to stare into nothingness. X-rays indicate,

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however, that the Virgin’s face was once turned to receive his glance, but Titian ultimately decided to direct her attention back onto the child.6 Like the Madonna of the Pesaro Family, this painting is a brilliant reconfiguration of the traditional sacra conversazione type in which the Madonna and Child are depicted in the company of saints and donors. In the former painting, made for a public space (the Franciscan basilica in Venice known as the Frari), Titian shifted the conventional frontal view of the holy figures by 45 degrees; in the latter, he reconfigured the towering vertical format of the altarpiece onto a small-scale panel intended for personal use. In both, a minor innovation in format created a more intimate and efficacious image. This twilight idyll was destined for Federico Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua, who would become one of Titian’s greatest early supporters. In this story thus far members of the two great families of Ferrara and Mantua – the Este and Gonzaga – have been key actors. This was a tight network of privilege and polite family rivalries played out though art. As noted earlier, Federico was the nephew of Titian’s great patron, Alfonso d’Este, and the son of Francesco ii Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este. He spent much of his own childhood as a child hostage: in 1510 Pope Julius ii demanded the young prince as human collateral in exchange for the safe return of his father during the stormy Italian Wars. Isabella sent her four-year-old son to the papal court with an apotropaic badge portraying a lone cupid surrounded by oak trees (della rovere), which was Julius’s family name and emblem.7 Federico must have been an exceedingly charming boy for he quickly became a favourite in the court of the Warrior Pope. In 1515 he was then sent to Paris as a hostage to King Francis i, where

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the princeling, again, endeared himself with his ‘host’ who made him a knight of the Order of St Michel and helped negotiate his engagement to Maria Paleologa (and later to Maria’s sister Margherita when the former was – allegedly – poisoned by Federico’s mistress, Isabella Boschetti). Federico was also the little brother of Eleonora Gonzaga, the Duchess of Urbino and wife of Francesco Maria i della Rovere, whose resemblances Titian captured for posterity (illus. 33, 34). For their son, Guidobaldo ii della Rovere, Titian would paint the famous and much-coveted Venus of Urbino (see illus. 46). 33 Titian, Eleonora Gonzaga, c. 1536–8, oil on canvas.

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Titian worked for all of these great men and women, but Federico was possibly the only one that he might have counted as a true friend despite their class differences. The marquis was younger than the painter, but he was extremely fond of him, addressing him on occasion in his letters as his ‘friend’, ‘dearest’, ‘dearest friend’ and ‘dear and excellent friend’.8 He once asked Titian if he could send him some portraits of animals that had come on a ship from Alexandria.9 Federico invited him to Mantua to ring in the New Year in 1522 and to 34 Titian, Francesco Maria i della Rovere, 1536–8, oil on canvas.

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celebrate Christmas in 1538; he helped him obtain the lucrative benefice of Medole for his son Pomponio; and he brokered his introduction to Charles v and the Habsburgs, who would become Titian’s most important patrons for the remainder of his career. Titian painted Federico on more than one occa­ sion, although only the panel in the Museo del Prado survives (illus. 35). It is to this gorgeous document that we now turn. 35 Titian, Federico Gonzaga, 1529, oil on panel.

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ca r ne viva/natur a morta There is no doubt that the Este and Gonzaga loved their pets like family – Equicola noted in his History of Mantua that Federico’s father owned more than two hundred dogs of various kinds.10 Aura, Bellina, Fanina, Mamia, Martino, Oriana, Ribolin, Rubino, Viola, Zephyro . . . these names are known to us for they appear in the letters and documents left behind in the family archives. One finds traces of various agents across Europe trying to acquire rare Syrian tabby cats for Isabella or a secretary reporting to the young Federico during his deten­­­­­ tion in Rome about the births of various puppies (including a set of conjoined twins).11 If devising icono­­graphic programmes for palatial decorations was standard fare for a court human­ ist such as Equicola, writing Latin epitaphs and eulogies for the deceased pets of his patrons was perhaps not exactly what he had envisioned when he joined the Este court. And yet, in 1510, one of the most brilliant neo-Latinists of his genera­ tion found himself composing an oration for the funeral of Isabella’s cat, Martino – an event that was attended by her favourite dog, Aura, and her son’s dog, Ribolin.12 A year later, when Aura accidentally fell off a cliff to her death, Isabella’s grief was so intense that poets across Italy, includ­ ing Bembo, sent her a flood of compositions in memory of her pet.13 Artists, to be sure, were not exempt from this kind of task. On 15 October 1526 Federico asked his court artist, Giulio Romano, to design a tomb for his dog, Viola, who had died in pregnancy; she might be the white Melitean that offers her paw to her master in Titian’s portrait.14 Federico, in turn, places

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his bejewelled right hand on her back. Like the hand on the lamb in the Madonna of the Rabbit, his gentle touch serves as a reminder of the peaceful coexistence between man and animal, mortal beings captured in Titian’s painting. The por­ trait dates to the years around Viola’s death, which coincides with the interregnum between Federico’s betrothal to Maria Paleologo in 1517 and his eventual marriage to her younger sister Margherita in 1531. In the second half of the 1520s, Federico was a very eligible bachelor. But what kind of poten­ tial husband was he presenting himself as? Casting aside his reputation as the tender child hostage, the adult Federico assumes his role here as the Marquis of Mantua (he would later be elevated to Duke in 1530, shortly after the portrait was made). Surprisingly, Federico rejected the militaristic codes of armour and weapons adopted by the men in his family in their portraits, and chose instead the courtly language of elegance and sweetness. His brother-in-law, Francesco Maria della Rovere, was shown with every inch from the neck down encased in heavy metal; Federico’s body, in contrast, is wrapped like an enticing gift in layers of finery – from the electric blue jerkin with its exquisite gold designs along the edges, to the extraordinary white shirt with its gossamer cuffs and delicate blue stitch­ ing. The grooved hilt of Federico’s rapier (a sword more for presentation than combat) reiterates the various gold rings that adorn his fingers, the gold tips that cap the velvet ties of his vest and the gold beads which mark out devotional time on the lapis lazuli rosary around his neck. And then there was that dog! Renaissance cynologists would have iden­ tified his fluffy companion as a canis delicatus, a type commonly

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associated with pampered ladies of leisure with too much time on their hands.15 Cecil Gould once described the Marquis in this image as ‘off-duty’.16 Indeed, Federico looks more like a well-turned-out playboy than a man of action. However, if he seems relaxed here, it is a testament to the painter’s skills, since the stakes were very high. 36 Agnolo Bronzino, Guidobaldo ii della Rovere, 1532, oil on panel.

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One cannot help but wonder what his other male relatives thought of his portrait in these tenuous years around the Sack of Rome, an event in which Federico’s negligence played some small part. For instance, did his nephew, Guidobaldo ii della Rovere (the future Duke of Urbino), have this image in mind as an example of what not to do when he sat some years later for Agnolo Bronzino, who would depict him as a hard man of steel standing next to a massive guard dog, so differ­ ent from his uncle’s lapdog (illus. 36)? Everything about the two portraits seems to be different. Where Bronzino’s clinical lighting constructs Guidobaldo as a cold, calculating soldier, the sfumato of Titian’s style softens Federico in a warm embrace. Where the nephew’s beard is clipped and trimmed, his uncle’s seems to grow freely, enlivened with an auburn glow. Where the chromatic and physical aggression of Guidobaldo’s red codpiece amplifies his virility, Federico’s peeks out almost as a joke in Titian’s portrait. And it is there, at the site of Federico’s masculinity, that the painter would sign his name – ticianvs – cleverly veiling the first four letters in the shadows (illus. 37). So what was Titian thinking when he set himself up as the butt of his own joke? Between friends, a detail as such becomes an inside joke. Between men, it becomes a puerile joke, but one must remem­ ber that Federico had a weakness for this kind of humour (after all, he commissioned the ludic frescoes of the Palazzo Te and provided safe haven for Aretino in the fallout around his scandalous pornographic sonnets).17 Between a patron and his artist, it becomes an incisive comment as to who’s on top and who’s on the bottom, and this confession Federico would have accepted with pleasure. Like the dog that recognizes his

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owner, the painter, too, offered his hand with loyalty and affection to his master, a bond signed and delivered through this witty gesture. Titian’s spirit animal was undoubtedly a dog. He certainly loved to paint them. Some forty-plus dogs sit, sleep, roam or race throughout his oeuvre. Sometimes they were the furry play­things of the rich (as in Federico Gonzaga); at other times 37 Detail of Titian’s signature from Federico Gonzaga (illus. 35).

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they were attentive guard dogs sticking close to their owners or grand hunting dogs huffing and puffing with their red tongues dangling out. More often than not, they were small­ ish dogs with floppy ears and coloured patches. Many were anon­y­­m­ous mutts, but the more refined examples were toy spaniels that were bred for companionship and as hand warmers in draughty aristocratic castles. Just such a dog – a phalène – appears with Federico’s older sister Eleonora Gonzaga in her portrait by Titian (illus. 38). This pup, with its distinctive caramel patches on the right eye, ears and back, will make a guest appearance in the Venus of Urbino, painted for Eleonora’s son in these same years, but in this instance her canis delicatus seems to be moping. A green velvet cloth marks the whole of its territory, which it has to share with a gilt-brass table clock. This would have been a fashionable gadget in the 1530s, but in Titian’s composition,

38 Detail of the little dog and the zibellino in Eleonora Gonzaga (illus. 33).

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one might also read the timepiece as the dog’s thought bubble since its expression of boredom and melancholy makes us, too, think about all the time that must have passed, like molasses dripping off a spoon, as Eleonora sat for her portrait. A little silver bell has been attached to the collar, but like the clock it remains silent. There is nothing the poor pooch can do but dangle its diminutive paws off the edge of the table and wait. If dogs are meant to resemble their owners then Federico comes across as a friendly, playful creature. Eleonora, in con­ trast, must have experienced quite a lot of downtime as she was left to oversee the day-to-day administration of her husband’s realm during his extended absences. Like Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, the Duchess of Urbino ‘sits quietly at home while Ulysseus is away at the wars’.18 Heavy gold chains, large pearls and yards of fine cloth hang and droop every­ where on the body of the duchess, and the physical weight of these goods, like the dog’s heavy face, seem to press down on us as we gaze upon the painting. While there is a long iconographical tradition that ties dogs to melancholia, more than this game of correspondences seems to be taking place, especially since, in classical animal lore, dogs were also associated with the scholar’s dedication to truth.19 This heightened ability to see beyond the surface of things can be extended to the artist as well. Titian’s ‘sense of things’ comes across in the way he has painted the silk rib­ bons that spread across the duchess’s black dress like a field of golden butterflies. With his brush dipped in this same glowing colour, he has rendered the contrasting textures of fabric, metal and fur with equal conviction.

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On her lap and chained to her waist, Eleonora holds a bejewelled fur tippet. Women were often portrayed with these extravagant accessories, known as zibellini, which con­ sisted of expensive fur pelts (usually of marten or sable) capped with a decorative animal head made from gold (as in the portrait), crystal, glass or enamel and covered with pre­ cious stones. They were initially designed to provide warmth, but quickly developed into luxury possessions.20 In this regard, zibellini served the same practical and symbolic func­ tion as lapdogs, and one is tempted to hypothesize that the presence of this bizarre hybrid object is the cause of the little dog’s despondency. Unlike cats (who remain essentially selfsufficient even after domestication), dogs are social pack animals and thrive from the attention and approval of their masters. Not only has its mistress stopped paying it any attention, she has replaced the living animal with a rather macabre doppelgänger, shuffling the pup off to the side where it languishes with other novelties such as the table clock. The uncanny way that the glassy eyes in the prosthetic head of the zibellino gaze blindly at Eleonora contrasts brilliantly with the sullen expression of the dog. This confrontation – of pet with pelt and of carne viva (live flesh) with natura morta (still-life) – lies at the heart of Titian’s visual dissertation where the lines between the animate and the inanimate and between art and reality criss-cross over each other. A further equivalency is being suggested here since both zibellino and portrait were man-made avatars of mortal creatures whose time (as the clock reminds us) is finite. Thus even if on her courtly exterior the duchess resembled the zibellino, encrusted and encased in precious materials, on a

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more profound existential and material level she was like her pet, waiting for flesh to cede eventually to art. If we jump ahead to the early 1540s, to the portrait of Clarissa Strozzi (illus. 39), we find a slightly different medi­ tation upon the human/animal relationship that is, first and foremost, about these uncertain processes of becoming. What 39 Titian, Clarissa Strozzi, c. 1542, oil on canvas.

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appears on the surface to be nothing less than a sentimental picture of a little girl and her dog reveals itself upon closer inspection to be so much more. In this regard, let me pref­ ace the next section with the following observation, made by the eighteenth-century English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds: Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however unprom­ ising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a Painter of genius. What was said of Virgil, that he threw even the dung about the ground with an air of dignity, may be applied to Titian: whatever he touched, however naturally mean, and habitually fam­ iliar, by a kind of magick he invested with grandeur and importance.21 Titian’s equal treatment of the marquis, the duchess, the tod­ dler, their clothes and their dogs gives eloquent testimony to this claim. ev ery dog w ill h av e its day The American comedian W. C. Fields is credited with having warned his fellow thespians never to work with animals or children. Titian’s portrait of the two-year-old daughter of Roberto Strozzi and Maddalena de’ Medici would have stumped him. Clarissa was the great-great-granddaughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici (il Magnifico), but her family spent many years living in exile in the Venetian sestiere or neighbourhood

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of San Canciano not far from Titian’s second residence and studio in the Biri Grande. Aretino was a mutual friend. After seeing the painting in the Strozzi residence he told Titian that his art could trick nature into thinking this child to be real and alive; moved by the presence and immediacy of the little girl hugging her puppy, he was (unusually) at a loss for words.22 Later generations of viewers, too, were astounded by Titian’s naturalism so much so that a panel of specialists at the Congrès de Lille in 1934 designated Titian’s phalène from Clarissa Strozzi to be the industry standard against which future contestants would be judged at all dog shows.23 Art, as Aretino predicted, vanquished nature. The little girl in Titian’s portrait is, likewise, a fabulous contradiction of terms. If the Interrupted Concert was mistaken in the past as a portrait of Calvin and Luther, Clarissa was once identified as a portrait of Charles v as a boy.24 There is something undeniably regal about her comportment. Her chubby face looks so childlike, yet her body language corres­ ponds to someone well beyond her years. For some she is an embodiment of innocence – a state portrait of the ‘child qua child’.25 The date stamp to the left above the girl (annor ii mdxlii) provides us with her age in the year 1542, placing an emphasis on the here and now. For others she is a prom­ ise of things to come, capturing the little girl’s ‘coming-to-be’, ‘her potential as Petrarchan beauty and ideal wife’, and of her ‘future role as dynamic marriage chip’.26 Clarissa is, therefore, at once like Eleonora Gonzaga (the poised, courtly wife) and the Worship of Venus (young life in constant flux). A reduced palette of white, red and green is distributed across Clarissa’s dress, the patterned damask to the right and the lush landscape

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beyond the window and is reiterated in the precious stones she wears. If her little body is everywhere restrained with circles of pearls and other gems, she will nevertheless outgrow these chains like the broken busolai biscuit she feeds to her pet. Rendered in the same chromatic palette as her dog, she is calm and alert, but like the animal she also has the potential for sudden emotional explosion (Clarissa is, after all, in her terrible twos). This possibility is further underlined in the sculptural relief in the lower right-hand corner that shows two putti wrestling. Luba Freedman first connected Titian’s portrait with Cicero’s comment in De finibus bonorum et malorum, about chil­ dren and animals being closer to nature than man.27 To be sure, an important new edition of Cicero’s text had just been published in Venice in 1541. My point, however, is not to attrib­ ute a specific literary source (Titian’s Latin was pretty poor, after all) but to demonstrate how certain classical themes manifested themselves in different ways at a given moment in time. The reference from Cicero’s treatise on the ends of good and evil appears in a larger critique of Epicureanism and in a debate about the difference between ‘static’ and ‘kinetic’ instincts: the former seeks self-preservation and freedom from pain, while the latter seeks pleasure.28 For Titian, the repre­ sentation of a child was an opportunity to grapple with the world in motion, to try and capture the transitory nature of childhood in distinctively adult terms, and to marry the static with the kinetic. Several centuries later, Sigmund Freud would rearticulate this dynamic as the tension between the ego and the id, a relationship which would be further complicated by the

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development of the superego, around the age of three, that instils the child with a sense of right and wrong.29 Clarissa is shown on the cusp of this momentous phase. This is not, by any means, to suggest that Titian was a proto-Freudian psychoanalyst (any more than he was a neo-Ciceronian). Instead, this fortuitous link serves here to affirm the painter’s power of critical observation and artistic imagination. The image is not only a portrait, but an elegy – like the Noli me tangere, the Interrupted Concert and the Three Ages of Man – that plays out the ballad of life and death. The animal seems to project more emotion in its bored but attentive expression than the distracted, wide-eyed innocence of the child. The proximity of their faces lends them a momentary intimacy and equivalency, but one that will soon be lost as the girl grows up and enters the social order of adults. Titian has captured this liminal stage with both charm and insight. Some thirteen years later, Clarissa would be married off to the aristocratic Savelli family in Rome. She would give birth to her own daughter and live into her forties. In 1542, how­ ever, the bright-eyed toddler, clinging to her little pet dog, stands on the threshold between her state of being (in the present tense) and her state of becoming (in the future tense). Titian’s image of Clarissa is a prophetic portrait, a talis­ manic image of the child already taking possession of the person she will become. It can be compared with another portrait, made by Titian in the same year, of Ranuccio Farnese (illus. 40), the grandson of the powerful Pope Paul iii, whom he would subsequently portray with his other grandsons, Alessandro and Ottavio (illus. 41). In 1542 the twelve-year-old boy was sent to Venice to oversee matters

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for his family as the prior of San Giovanni dei Forlani (by fifteen he would be a cardinal, by seventeen granted his own bishopric and, like Clarissa, he would eventually die all too young, at 35). During his Venetian appoint­ment, his parents, Pierluigi Farnese and Girolama Orsini, must have missed him immensely back home. What a joy it must have been to see his face again when they received the portrait from Venice. Titian conveys the weight of Ranuccio’s calling in luminous 40 Titian, Ranuccio Farnese, 1542, oil on canvas.

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layers of paint. The red silk doublet glows from beneath the oversized black cloak that bears the insignia of the Knights of Malta – the eight-pointed cross – rippling in the shadows on the right next to where Titian has signed his name against the monochromatic background. Ranuccio’s right hand holds a glove (the sign of a gentleman), while his left hand disappears in the darkness beneath his sword (the sign of an aristocrat). His codpiece is in line with his youthful face even if the rest of his costume exceeds his small years. 41 Titian, Pope Paul ii with Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese, 1545–6, oil on canvas.

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It has been said that Ranuccio Farnese tells us as much about the painter as it does about the sitter.30 There is much truth in this assessment. These were indeed heavy years for Titian: Cecilia had passed away on 5 August 1530, leaving him bereft and in charge of two young sons; his sister Orsa came from Pieve di Cadore to help him manage his demanding personal and business life; and the family moved into the house on the northern edge of the city where he would live, work and even­ tually die.31 His sons Pomponio and Orazio were slightly older than Ranuccio; all three were unruly pre-adolescent boys whose futures were quickly becoming a father’s most urgent concern. Perhaps this parental anxiety is what stirs beneath the surface of Titian’s pictures of children in 1542. As with Clarissa Strozzi, everything in the image of the pope’s heir is in flux: sweetness morphs into privilege; innocence slips into power; painting becomes prophecy; art wrestles with nature; and Titian’s carne viva triumphs over time’s unforgiving course. If this chapter focused on the bittersweet melancholy of flesh and fur, the next chapter will turn instead to the tension between the heavy sensation of human embodiment and the lightness of being that is brought into play in Titian’s religious and mythological pictures.

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O

chlophobia is a fear of crowds. It can happen in packed, airless museums such as the Louvre. Room Six of the Denon Wing – the ‘Mona Lisa Room’ – is a large and brightly lit space with extremely high ceilings, but the juxtaposition on the entrance wall of Paolo Veronese’s enormous Wedding at Cana (the largest painting in the museum) and Leonardo da Vinci’s diminutive Mona Lisa (the most famous) at the far end creates a vertiginous perspec­ tive that sucks the spectator into its carefully curated vanishing point. The unsuspecting art historian suddenly finds herself in a giddy crush of tourists who have travelled from afar, angling in a state of incredulous excitement, desperate to get close to Leonardo’s masterpiece. In such a crowd I once found myself, feeling as if the weight of my own body might suddenly drop me to the floor in slow motion. This experi­ ence is hardly unique, but this chapter opens with what was to be my remedy – Titian’s Entombment (illus. 42) in the small passageway behind the mayhem of the Mona Lisa. The first two sections will explore the representational challenge of conveying the conflicting sensations of lightness and weight through various images of floating and horizontal bodies.

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The final two will turn to the material paradox of hair and the way Titian paints it. light of the wor ld, w eight of the wor ld Students often confuse the deposition and the entombment. Indeed, both events occur shortly after the crucifixion of Christ and both involve tremendous weight from the vertical descent down the cross (deposition) to the horizontal journey to the tomb (entombment). In the Louvre Entombment, Titian chose to portray the latter. The painting was commissioned in the mid-1520s for the court of Mantua. As a devotional image, its stated purpose was to inspire private prayer. The dimensions (148 × 212 cm), however, exceed the body of the 42 Titian, Entombment, c. 1525, oil on canvas.

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spectator, and the large horizontal format offers an immersive space unlike the smaller-scale panels of the time.1 This sens­a­­­ tion of absorption is also created within the image. Caught between areas of light and darkness, three men struggle to carry the Saviour’s lifeless body across the composition. Two women, overcome with grief, hold onto each other at the left. The older woman is the mother of the dead man; the younger woman who comforts her is Mary Magdalene. Together they form a formidable psychological unit. The Virgin’s tears are hidden in the shadow cast by her veil; like her clasped hands, she, too, is a tightly closed form. The Magdalene, in contrast, is an open form: her legible expression of anguish sets the mood for the viewer; her wild tresses blow in the wind like the unbound hair of female mourners that Titian might have seen on ancient tombs. Moving from right to left the two women illustrate the emotional passage from denial, anger, bargaining and depression, to acceptance. Chromatically, they are also opposites: the Magdalene in a bitter-orange dress, a colouristic index of her intense passion; the Virgin in an icy blue cloak, the hard edges of which amplify her pain. If the women seem to progress emotionally from right to left, this rhythm is then doubled over in the other direction as the men move the other way in the foreground. Two of them – whose hunched postures are choreographed to reflect each other – gaze intently upon the body they transport towards the darkness. Like a pair of parentheses, they silently frame the subject. The bearded man’s illuminated face appears in crisp profile on the left. The solid green field that forms his robe is pinned down by a row of brass buttons, con­ veying a sense of stability. The gravity of the scene is further

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communicated through the man’s body language: as he kneels, to gain purchase on the stone block, his gesture doubles as genuflection before the body of Christ. In contrast to the formal and iconographical clarity of this figure, the face of the man on the right is hidden entirely from view. In fact, Titian’s handling of paint animates this part of the canvas from the cascade of blue dots (on the scarf that showers down parallel to Christ’s lifeless arm) to the short brushstrokes that race across the man’s red cloak (moving left, turning right, point­ ing up, curving down) to the smudged textures of the interior of his long robe. It is as if the weight of his burden and the urgency of his footstep have somehow blurred his very con­ tours. A third figure, whose expression and hair link him to the Magdalene, holds the corpse by the wrist. The blushing vitality of the young man’s fingers highlights the cold, pale flesh beneath his touch. Blood trickles down around the veins that stand out in high relief, but the colouration of the flesh suggests that all life has gone. Titian’s manipulation of light and forms reminds the viewer of the miracle of the eclipse at the crucifixion. In the Gospel of St Luke (23:45), we read that at Christ’s death ‘The sun was darkened and the veil of the temple was torn in two.’ In a similar fashion, the celestial body of God moves from the light of day in the foreground on the left to the darkness of the tomb that lies in the shadows on the right. And through this swift, poignant gesture gravity, horizontality and mortal­ ity become coterminous. This tragedy is further illustrated in a footnote at the lower right-hand corner of the compo­ sition where Titian has placed an upturned snail shell, emptied of its former occupant (illus. 43). Does it point to the tomb

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(towards which Christ moves) or does it refer back to the pathos of the mortal coil (that must inevitably be left behind) or perhaps to both? The American artist Alex Katz remarked that Titian ‘painted all these big, heavy stories. I like it empty’.2 In the poetic simplicity of this detail, the Old Master demon­ strates that it is possible to do both at once. On the one hand, Titian conflated the perception of darkness with heaviness and mortality, and, on the other hand, of luminosity with lightness and life. At the end of his life, Italo Calvino posited the ‘lightness of thoughtfulness’ against the ‘ineluctable weight of living’ in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. 43 Detail of the empty snail shell in the Entombment (illus. 42).

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I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verifi­ cation . . . Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness.3 The existential function of literature, he concluded, is ‘the search for lightness’ as a ‘reaction to the weight of living’. This discovery of lightness in darkness, hope in despair and life in death is found in the Louvre Entombment, but is even more dramatically explored in Titian’s Resurrection altarpiece (illus. 44) commissioned in 1520 by Altobello Averoldi, the papal legate of the northern town of Brescia. Art historians have traced the source of the Risen Christ and the St Sebastian back to the discovery in 1506 of the ancient sculptural group of Laocöon and His Sons and to Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves from the 1510s. 4 To be sure, the Averoldi polyptych was one of Titian’s most remarkable negotiations of the old and the new: he fused the multi-panelled format of early Renaissance altarpieces with a naturalistic vision of the world; he trans­ formed the relics of ancient statuary through the restorative power of modern painting. On the broken column in the lower right corner, Titian signed his work titanvs faciebat. The well-educated humanist would have identified this use of the imperfect tense of facere (to make) as an allusion to Pliny’s claim that Apelles and Polykleitos signed their works in this manner. Titian used to do, Titian was doing – the imperfect

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indicates an action begun in the past that does not necessarily have a conclusive ending. faciebat thus suggests that art, even when delivered and installed, remains a work in pro­ gress. The sixteenth-century art lover might have connected it, too, with Michelangelo’s famous signature on the Virgin’s strap of the Vatican Pietà.5 Titian was conversing, therefore, with both Ancients and Moderns. The heroic nudes in the Resurrection altarpiece, however, offer much more than just nerdy quotations of famous statues old and new. Beyond the formal similarities that might be charted and in light of its destination on the high altar of SS Nazaro e Celso, it was, one might say, a visual treatise on the theme of ‘weightless gravity’ that would concern Calvino’s poet-philosopher to come. Compositional concordances across the five panels of the polyptych hold everything in a tenuous balance in order to dramatize the narrative of redemp­ tion. At the centre, two astonished soldiers witness Christ’s triumph over death. This vertical axis is marked by the white burial cloth that flutters and coils in the wind like the flag above it. The emotional quality of these silent forms is reit­ erated in the glimmering morning light that singes the edges of the clouds and rolls back the night. On the left the donor and the Annunciate angel look straight ahead; on the right the Virgin and the saint lower their heads in humble accept­ ance of their divine fate. A sense of historical continuity is established through the armour of the soldiers at the tomb and the two early Christian martyrs Nazarius and Celsus, who act on Averoldi’s behalf as does the Virgin in the oppo­ site panel of the altarpiece. To complete the diagonal structure, Christ’s open gesture embraces Sebastian as if to remind the

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viewer that their sacrifices are one and the same. Averoldi, meanwhile, directs his gaze forward at the saint, as a reminder that he intercedes on the spectator’s behalf in this intricate path towards salvation. In contrast to the divine occupants in the upper register, the weight of human mortality is anchored in the zone below by the kneeling patron, the fallen soldier and the collapsed body of the saint. We are like these figures silhouetted against the light of the new day, caught between 44 Titian, Resurrection (Averoldi Altarpiece), c. 1519–22, oil on panel.

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standing, sitting, kneeling and falling, suspended between terrestrial and celestial domains as we witness the miracle of religion and art. this morta l coil Titian’s exploration of intense psychological anguish in the Entombment and of ‘weightless gravity’ in the Averoldi polyp­ tych prepared him for the violent physical confrontation in the Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona (illus. 45). Towering at 5 metres (16 ft) tall, the panel was commissioned for the chapel of the Scuola di S Pietro Martire in SS Giovanni e Paolo and por­ trayed the cruel murder of the thirteenth-century Dominican Inquisitor to whom the confraternity was dedicated. The altarpiece, as it stands today in the church, holds the peculiar honour of being Titian’s most famous work that is not actually painted by him, for the original was destroyed in a fire at the church in 1867. The event was an especially tragic one for Venice, but an excellent copy was donated by King Vittorio Emanuele ii to replace the lost masterpiece, and this gift was possible because the Martyrdom of St Peter was among Titian’s most admired, copied and adapted works.6 Artists passing through Venice were blindsided by the explosive audacity of Titian’s composition. Giorgio Vasari, for one, was taken aback by the human drama and atmos­ pheric effects, concluding in a spirited passage that it was ‘the most finished, the most celebrated, the greatest, and the best conceived and executed that Tiziano has as yet ever done in all his life’.7 Reproductive prints circulated almost imme­ diately, and at the end of the sixteenth century Caravaggio

45 Niccolò Cassana after Titian, Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona, 17th century, SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice (original destroyed in fire in 1867).

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would liberally borrow the posture of Titian’s fallen saint for his Martyrdom of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome. Titian’s picture worked at both micro- and macro-levels. Well into the nineteenth century, the English painter J.M.W. Turner observed: ‘The composition is beyond all system . . . the sublimity of the whole lies in the simplicity of the parts.’8 It is indeed a tight and concise construction. In a bold move, Titian relegated the main characters – Peter, Domenico (his companion) and Carino da Balsamo (his assassin) – to the lower third of the painting, while filling the central part of the pictorial space with fields of blue, white and brown paint and the upper third with two angels that seem to emerge directly from the chromatic palette of the sky. In retrospect, the pictorial experimentation of Titian’s early works served as test runs for this explosive action pic­ ture where chaos and balance vie for control. Even more so than in the Jealous Husband and the Bravo, the vulnerability of flesh is highlighted here by the swinging, slashed flaps of the heretic’s red breeches. The entanglement of tree branches, clouds and sky hangs heavily above Peter’s overpowered body. The internal energy of the image gathers along the low horizon line, with the vanishing point disappearing just behind Peter’s head – that is, the very place where the blade will strike. Sharp orthogonals shoot out from this spot, pro­ jecting Domenico’s panic-stricken outline that bursts out of the picture plane on the left. His form is offset, in the first instance, by Carino’s twisting body, which swings contra­ puntally into the composition. In a second detail, the pull of Domenico’s energy is counterbalanced in the distance on the right by the horsemen fleeing into the woods; these are

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Carino’s lily-livered accomplices who ran away in fear (like Domenico) when it came time to carry out the murderous deed. Virility, faith, cowardice and redemption converge in Titian’s febrile forms that push and pull at the real space of the spectator. The composition not only generates a vertiginous experi­ ence of the near and far, but creates an unexpected alignment of heroic and villainous actors. The weight of the assassin’s body is beautifully conveyed through the placement of his left foot upon Peter’s scapular, an action that pins the saint to the site of his death. The victim is also in the process of being split apart on the vertical axis: with his left arm, he reaches heavenward; with his right hand, he points downward to the place on the muddy ground where after he is struck he will write with the ink of his own spilled blood, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty.’9 The trunks of the mighty poplar tree – a species associated with redemption and (allegedly) modelled on an actual specimen near Titian’s house – amplify the force of the saint’s gesture.10 However, the angel with the raised arm that bears the martyr’s palm curiously reflects the executioner’s downward strike. This unexpected mirroring reminds the Christian viewer that the gift of everlasting life comes with the sacrifice of the body. In Titian’s religious scenes, the sensation of physical weight and metaphysical weightlessness worked together to move the spectator towards deeper devotion. However, the painter was well aware of how these relationships could also be mobi­ lized to enhance the affective force of non-Christian pictures, too. The Venus of Urbino (illus. 46) is just one such example. In contrast to the spiritual melodrama in the altarpiece made

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for a public place of worship, this painting of a reclining female nude commissioned for the private delectation of a young aristocratic man presents us with an entirely different sense of embodiment. It might seem odd to link together these two masterpieces in Titian’s oeuvre, yet the two paintings share many formal strategies and both speak to the magical power of art to func­ tion as a memento mori, warning its viewers: ‘Remember! You will die!’ But how, one might ask, can a picture of a reclin­ ing nude woman be an image of mortality? This moral is clear and present in the struggle between the preacher and the her­ etic in the woods. The Venus of Urbino, however, delivers this heavy message to its owner and intended reader Guidobaldo della Rovere, the future Duke of Urbino, through the lightest 46 Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas.

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and most delicate of forms that reveal themselves in the up close and far away. Horizontality, in this instance, narrates two contrasting tales of luxury, pleasure and levity, on the one hand, and of duty, life and death on the other. If Bronzino’s stately, upright portrait of Guidobaldo (see illus. 36) emphasized the latter, Titian’s complex picture brought together the fine threads that inexorably tied eros to thanatos. The devil, so to say, is in the details. For instance, while there is in the foreground of the Venus of Urbino an undressed woman reclining on crumpled sheets, in the background there are two attendants busy at work; it is their labour that enables her leisure. The face of the young woman hunched over the cassone is obstructed from our view, although the comparative simplicity of her clothing marks her as a maid. A second woman seen in profile towers above her: her vertical position, generous white sleeves, rich red dress and elaborate hairstyle suggest her superior domestic role. Yet on the shoulders of this second figure is draped a gold-coloured gown with shimmering blue ribbons, a colour scheme echoed in the fabric wall-hanging behind her. Renaissance clothing involved heavy lifting: a woman’s outfit could weigh up to 24.5 kilograms (54 lb) – comparable to a suit of armour, which weighed between 20 and 29 kilograms (45–65 lb).11 This upright figure burdened with the weight of two dresses (her own and the one she carries) represents the material realities of everyday life in the sixteenth century and stands in stark opposition to the supine nude in the foreground who com­ mands the spectator’s attention. More than just a pretty picture, the Venus of Urbino is a dialectical composition that explores the limitations of aristocratic love and duty.

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The Venus of Urbino has been characterized as many strange and contradictory things, from pornography for the rich to a portrait of Guidobaldo’s child bride Giulia da Varano and (even!) a depiction of Guidobaldo’s mother Eleonora Gonzaga. Rosand judiciously ruled out each of these ludicrous theories by pointing out the first to be the result of a ‘perverse form of Venus-envy’, the second to be chronologically flawed (Giulia was only ten years old when the couple was forcibly married on 12 October 1534 and fourteen when the painting was delivered in 1538) and the third to be an absurd nineteenthcentury fantasy.12 This last theory is more than just a little disturbing, yet Eleonora’s presence is not entirely absent from the painting. For one, it was thought that she paid the balance that Guidobaldo owed to Titian for what the future duke called his ‘nude woman’ (the figure would only be referred to as a ‘Venus’ by Vasari some decades later).13 Second, Titian placed into the corner of the bed, slumbering at the foot of the woman, Eleonora’s little phalène with its distinctive cara­mel patches on the right eye and back.14 What might it have meant to Guidobaldo to receive the much-anticipated donna nuda only to find that a portrait of his mother’s pet dog had sneaked into the composition? Did the Duchess of Urbino request this mischievous insertion as a reminder that a mother’s debt could only be paid back fully with a healthy male heir? Poor Guidobaldo and Giulia must have been haunted by Titian’s gorgeous painting, which demanded of them through this seemingly innocent detail: ‘where are my grandchildren?’ A picture might be worth a thousand words, but those thousand words will be different for different viewers. For some (such as the artist) the painting portrayed an unclothed

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woman being waited upon in a modern palace by attendants, while for others (such as Vasari) it was an image of Venus from some erudite mythological tale. In the context of the aristocratic court, it was meant to hold (at least for Guido­ baldo and Giulia) a ‘higher talismanic function’.15 That function was to bewitch the young couple and to encourage conjugal relations with the aim of perpetuating the Della Rovere bloodline. Titian’s image magic was not always, however, a light touch; on occasion, it could be quite violent. Aretino, for instance, laughed at Il Tribolo and Benvenuto Cellini for gasping out loud before the towering spectacle of the Martyrdom of St Peter: Looking at it turned you and Benvenuto into an image of stupor. Your eyes and the lights of your intellects were fixed on this work, and you understood all the living terrors of death and all the true pains of life in the brow and in the flesh of he who had fallen on the earth, marveling at the cold and the lividness that appeared at the tip of his nose and the extremities of his body. You could not hold in your voice, but let yourself cry out when, in looking at the companion who flees, you recognized in his countenance the pallor of vile fear.16 Likewise, perhaps Titian’s Venus of Urbino was, in the end, simply too much pressure for the young couple. The marriage had been difficult from the start for Guidobaldo, who had been in love with his cousin Clarice Orsini. In a well-known letter, he implored his father: ‘To let me have [Clarice] would give

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me such extreme happiness, and not to have her would cause me infinite sadness, so I beg you with all my heart, if you have any regard for my sanity and health, satisfy and concede me this favour.’17 His parents decided otherwise, and one cannot help but wonder whether the Venus of Urbino was, in this regard, a consolation prize for his filial obedience. Things did not fare any better for Giulia, who died in 1547 in her early twenties without producing the much coveted male heir and, thus, without fulfilling her duty as an aristocratic wife. Titian’s art, once more, vanquished nature. From the grand gesture of Titian’s heroic bodies, we move to the subtle delineation of its parts and, more specifically, to the contradictory quality of hair – its eroticism, its light­ ness, as well as its gravitas. As with fur, Titian was a master painter of hair. Conventional blondes, however, are supplanted more often than not by redheads in Titian’s oeuvre from the Magda­lene to Venus, Flora, Ariadne and even Bacchus (indeed, to this day, fashionable women in beauty salons throughout the world request this very tint as ‘Titian red’). The next section will open with the Penitent Magdalene (illus. 47), now held in the Pitti Gallery, one of the best examples of this Titianesque leitmotif. The painting (or an excellent copy of it) was once said to have been gifted by its owner Vittoria Colonna to her cousin Eleonora Gonzaga, whose son Guidobaldo would eventually hang it in his palace alongside the Venus of Urbino. Two female nudes – one clothed by reli­ gion, the other by myth­ology – were thus brought together in an unexpected conversation by the duke’s curious curation, which stripped the artworks (ever so blithely) of their orig­ inal intentions. Titian’s two figures shared many qualities,

47 Titian, Penitent Magdalene, c. 1533–5, oil on panel.

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but it is the rapturous locks of the repentant Magdalene to which we now direct our attention. l aw less h air The Penitent Magdalene turned out to be a very popular formula, and Titian and his bottega made numerous versions of it. The original design of this large devotional panel, however, was commissioned by Federico Gonzaga in 1531 on behalf of his cousin Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa of Pescara.18 Vittoria was the daughter of the mighty Colonna family in Rome and the Montefeltro/Della Rovere clan in Urbino. Federico’s gift came at the end of an especially rough decade for the Marchesa: her father passed away in 1520; her mother in 1522; her hus­ band Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos in 1525; and in 1526 she was forced to flee to Marino, then Naples, and finally to Ischia from Rome as a storm of mutinous imperial troops advanced towards the city, which would be breached and ravaged in 1527. In these chaotic years of mourning and itinerancy, the meditative saint became a spiritual guide for Colonna. The Pitti Magdalene measures 86 centimetres (3 ft) in height, rendering the figure nearly life size. The image, therefore, functioned as a spiritual, emotional and physical mirror for the widow. Vittoria was famous for her piety. She was active in Cardinal Reginald Pole’s circle of reform-minded spirituali.19 Around 1530 she commissioned a painting of the Noli me tangere from Michelangelo through the intervention of Nicholas von Schomberg, but the execution of the canvas was out­ sourced in the end to Pontormo. A decade later, Michelangelo

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would send the Marchesa a famous presentation drawing of the Virgin mourning her dead son.20 Rendered in the material simplicity of black chalk, Michelangelo’s Pietà was a sum­ mation of their shared spirituality in the years just before the Council of Trent (1545–63) would be called in a final attempt to reconcile the different factions within the Christian Church. In the spring of 1531, however, it was the Venetian painter who satisfied Colonna’s desire for a modern Andachtsbild (medi­­tative image) of the Magdalene, one that would be ‘most beautiful and as tearful as possible’, as the instructions to the painter stipulated, whose lachrymose penitence would wash away the temptations of the flesh and alleviate the pain of Vittoria’s multiple losses; an image of absolute piety, but one intuited through the senses rather than through the dry truths of theological doctrine alone.21 From the start the painter tested out varying designs in search of the perfect formula.22 When Vasari saw it in 1548 in the duke’s collection, he described the saint as ‘all dishev­ elled’ with her ‘hair falling over the shoulders, about the throat, and over the breast’, but added that he was deeply moved ‘not to lust but to compassion’ by the figure’s expres­ sion of penitence.23 Titian returned to the motif numerous times over the course of his career, although in subsequent iterations the Magdalene’s body is usually covered with a variety of veils, shirts, sacks and striped cloths. Different spectators had different expectations, and Titian tried to respond in kind. It probably comes as no surprise that the extremely Catholic Philip ii, king of Spain, had a clothed version. Federico Borro­meo (the archbishop of Milan and cousin of St Carlo Borromeo), in contrast, proudly displayed

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in his collection of sacred paintings a replica of the Pitti panel with the saint’s hair ‘flowing over her body’, which was espe­ cially admirable since even though ‘the artist depicted her nude he was able to maintain her decency’.24 Not all men agreed. Centuries later, Ruskin’s delicate Vic­ torian sensibilities were unhinged by ‘the disgusting Magdalen of the Pitti Palace’, which he described as ‘a stout, redfaced woman, dull, and coarse of feature, with much of the animal in even her expression of repentance – her eyes strained, and inflamed with weeping’, infinitely less preferable to the other interpretations of the saint that Titian had made.25 The super­ nally lovely figure was a delicious contradiction. At the end of his life, when questioned by the Florentine nobleman Baccio Valori about the appropriateness of the penitent saint’s ‘fresh and dewy’ portrayal, the aged Titian replied with char­ acteristic humour that ‘he had painted her on the first day [of her penitence] . . . before she began fasting, in order to be able to paint her as a penitent indeed, but also as lovely as he could, and that she certainly was.’26 Much has been said then and now about the Magdalene’s bare-breasted nudity, but let me shift the focus to the more subliminal though no less powerful eroticism of the saint’s hair that animates the painting both on the surface through its chromatic vibrancy and from within through its hypnotic forms.27 The image was painted quickly, but the abstraction of Titian’s succinct brushstrokes manages nevertheless to convey the immateriality of nocturnal skies on the left and the stonecold hardness of the Magdalene’s grotto on the right. These amorphous grounds then spiral and morph into her mirac­ ulous mane. Fiery, radiant and invoking all the colours of an

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autumn field at once – what did it feel like for Christ to have the Magdalene dry his feet with her smooth and silky, flow­ ing curls, wrapping around his toes and dragging beneath his heels? And what did it feel like for the Magdalene, shivering in the wilderness of her penitent retreat with nothing but her faith and tresses? Renaissance men certainly had many things to say about hair. From a practical perspective, it was an abiding concern for artists: Alberti discussed it in a passage on how to depict movement in inanimate things; Leonardo likened it to the spiral­ling forms that he saw in whirlpools.28 Following Aristo­ t­elian traditions, hair was believed to be an extension of the mind: ‘an evaporation of the superfluous things in the brain’ that became thick and dense as a result of the hot, dry air around it. Agnolo Firenzuola described it as ‘one of the great­ est ornaments’ of a woman’s beauty, lamenting how rare a thing it was to see blowing freely in the wind.29 Titian’s picture, therefore, made a spectacle of a woman’s wild, loose locks – what Federigo Luigini described in 1554 as capelli fuori di legge (lawless hair).30 The seductive appeal of the Pitti Magdalene is further enhanced by the soft, aureate curls that seemed to swirl around her flesh. Curly hair was considered to be very sexy, and var­ ious outlandish recipes involving applications made from daffodils mixed with wine as well as ointments made from pulverized ram horn, hedgehogs, chestnuts and even camel dung promised to give women the kind of ringlets like those in the Penitent Magdalene.31 However, natural curls, it was said, resulted from enflamed humours that forced open the pores of the body, causing hair to twist and turn in response.32 In

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this sense, curly, loose hair was an index of emotional and spiritual energies. Titian previously deployed this motif in the Entombment, and this raises another point about ‘illegal’ hair – if it was an index of passion, it was a sign, too, of mourning, and this brings the image back to the specific requirements of its intended owner. If Vittoria was famous for her piety, she was known, too, for her poetry. The iconography of the Pitti panel is frequently linked to one of her sonnets about the Magdalene that begins, ‘I seem to see a woman of passion and spirit’ (Donna accesa animosa). This is a straight-forward thematic equivalency. From an aesthetic perspective, however, it could be argued that Titian’s startling chiaroscuro provided Colonna with the inspiration for a subsequent poem: 48 Titian, The Vendramin Family Venerating a Relic of the True Cross, c. 1540–45, oil on canvas.

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I wish that the true sun, upon which I eternally call, would send an endless stream of light into my mind, instead of this weak ray, which sometimes barely manages to cast a glow; I wish that the holy fire did not warm my heart only from afar with spent and feeble sparks, but instead that a searing flame would devour my breast without respect for time or place. My spirit is truly mortified by the gentle flames, and my longing is requited by the beautiful light and all within me burning with your fire.33 In these lines, as in Titian’s image, the internal flame of devo­ tion merges with the external fire of the Holy Spirit in one glowing spectacle. Fire and vapour, piety and passion, chiaro and scuro, lightness and weight – hair was always a paradox for women. For men, however, it was an index of maturity, author­ ity and power. The young man’s stubble, daddy’s mustache, grandpapa’s whiskers and the artist’s beard . . . the feeling of hair beneath one’s fingers triggers immediate emotional responses. Beginning with the Vendramin Family from the 1540s (illus. 48), the final section will consider the hirsute landscapes found in Titian’s male portraits. a h air’s br eath On the upper register in the Vendramin Family we find, from right to left, the brothers Andrea and Gabriele accompanied

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by Andrea’s eldest son, Lunardo. The family resemblance is evident in their physiognomies, while age difference is marked by the depiction of hair, beards and robes, moving in rapid succession from youthful and piliferous in shimmering pink to middle-aged and thinning in crimson to bald and white in dark red. Two subsets in the lower register depict the younger members of the clan. The crowded placement of the trio on the left (Lucha, Francescho and Bortalamio) is awkward, but Federico, the youngest Vendramin male seated on the step of the altar at the other end with Filippo and Giovanni, brings an element of spontaneity into the frieze-like composition. Dressed in a gorgeous green jacket offset by his vermilioncoloured socks, the little boy cuddles a phalène (invoking a successful formula from these years). The tender curls of the young boys and the soft fur of the pet draw our attention to the magnificent spotted lynx-fur linings that grace the inner sleeves of their father’s and uncle’s senatorial robes, which they will one day inherit as their birthright. This image is the happy ending that the Venus of Urbino hoped (but failed) to bring about – more than just a group portrait, the painting is a proud declaration of the family’s healthy patrilineal bloodline. These male sitters are the descen­ dants of Andrea Vendramin, the legendary fourteenth-century Guardian of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista who miraculously recovered a sliver of the True Cross that had fallen into the canal during a procession. Titian has placed this precious relic on the altar between the two candles, the flickering flames of which bless the male members of the family. Andrea faces out from behind Titian’s frame (like La Famigliare) to welcome his guests with his seven sons and his

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brother; an appropriate gesture since the portrait once hung in the entrance hall at Ca’ Vendramin. Titian was the master bar none at counterfeiting the dif­ ferentiable sensation of flesh, hair, fur and fabric through the expert modulation of colour, light and line. This was undoubt­ edly part of his appeal as a portraitist. I offer two final examples to underline this point: the portrait of Pietro Aretino (illus. 49) and Titian’s Self-portrait (illus. 50). The former preserved an image of his compare (or pal) and was destined as a gift for Cosimo i de’ Medici in Florence; the latter is a record of the artist, who wished ‘to leave a memory of himself to his sons’.34 The two pictures were never intended in any way to be pen­ dants, but I would like to consider them here in relation to each other. Aretino’s sense of self was larger than life, and Titian painted him thus. Nicknamed the ‘Scourge of Princes’ for his biting satirical tracts, he was a biographer of both saints and prostitutes and the charismatic author of scathing letters of ridicule and rebuke. When he fled from Rome in 1527 following the scandal around the Sonetti lussoriosi (a series of anti-clerical, pornographic poems accompanied by graphic prints of different sexual positions), he became fast friends with Titian, who painted his portrait upon his arrival in Venice and then again on various occasions when Aretino wished to send an image of himself to one of the princely contacts in his carefully curated social network.35 Titian finished the portrait of Pietro Aretino shortly before he made his one and only visit to Rome in the service of the Farnese during the late autumn and winter of 1545. These were busy times for the painter. When Aretino saw his portrait

49 Titian, Pietro Aretino, 1545, oil on canvas.

50 Titian, Self-portrait, 1546–7, oil on canvas.

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in Titian’s studio earlier that spring, he described it proudly as ‘an awesome marvel’ and as a ‘miracle that was issued from the brush of such marvelous spirit’.36 When it was completed in October 1545, however, the grand satirist complained to Cosimo i that if only he had paid a bit more Titian might have bothered to finish painting his clothes.37 But perhaps the non-finito had more meaning here.38 After all, Titian barely sketched in his own hands, which appear as a thin blur of paint in the Self-portrait. Something about the incompletion in each instance seems controlled and deliberate (like an ellipsis waiting for a reply from the absent friend). And even as Aretino carped about the slapdash finish of his picture to its princely recipient, he also missed his dear friend enormously, writing to Titian in Rome that ‘Every hour waiting for your return seems a month’ and telling him to rush back before winter arrived, for he and Jacopo Sansovino (the Florentine sculptor and architect) were eagerly awaiting him.39 In Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura (1550), the personage ‘Aretino’ confesses that ‘the man who talks to [Titian] once is bound to fall in love with him for ever and always.’40 Their relationship was a complicated but devoted one. Aretino was one of his greatest promoters, wrote letters to gently scold the painter’s wayward son Pomponio, negotiated the purchase of luxury items on his behalf, and pined for him whenever he left town (on another occasion, he wrote to Titian to describe a glorious late spring sunset that he wished they could have seen together). In X-rays of the two canvases, it is revealed that Aretino’s portrait was painted on top of an unfinished portrait of a young man, as if the original sitter had matured magically into the

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great Aretine; Titian, in turn, initially portrayed his own face in the Self-portrait as older, wearier and less proud than in the final version where he comes across instead as a slightly younger man of action too busy to sit even for his own self-portrait.41 The former grew older in the successive layers of paint, while the latter grew younger, but both men appear looking off to the right as if suddenly struck by some form of divine inspiration beyond the visible realm of the pictorial space.42 The schematic nature of their bodies heightens the inten­ sity of their gaze, framed in both instances by their glorious beards. In Pietro Aretino the subtlety and sophistication of Titian’s handling of paint is visible in the delicate gold, silver and white hairs picked out by the thinnest of individual brushstrokes that hang against the dark villous mass of the poet’s beard. David Jaffé made the wonderful link to one of the characters in Aretino’s play La Talanta (1542) who complains that his beard had gone grey from stress.43 Indeed, in Titian’s portrait of Aretino these animated lines, curving this way and that, make the surface of the canvas quiver with energy, standing in stark contrast to the way the artist painted his own beard as a majes­ tic, smoky cloud of grey hovering on the lower part of his face. Not all spectators were necessarily pleased with Titian’s un­ canny ability to make his sitters appear as if they were alive and breathing. In 1548 Niccolò Franco, Aretino’s erstwhile friend and secretary and subsequent embittered adversary, pub­l­ished not one but eleven sonnets addressed to Titian about the vari­ ous portraits that he had created of their mutual acquain­tance. What a miracle it was, Franco opined, to see the ‘Prince of Asses’ hold his tongue in silence for once in his life. Even a bardascie (a male prostitute), he mocked, would not wear such

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chains looped around his neck. It was a shame, Franco lamented, that the painter had wasted his art trying to render Aretino so alive when many would have preferred to see him dead.44 In a dialogue on love, the Renaissance poetess, philosopher and courtesan Tullia d’Aragona likened the painter’s colours to the secret herb of Glaucus, which granted the recipient immortal life. Touched as they were by Titian’s miraculous brush, his portraits, Tullia concluded, ‘truly possess in them this ineffability [non so che] that is associated with divinity so that as heaven is the paradise of souls, so God seems to have hidden in his colours the paradise of our bodies, not painted but sanctified and glorified by his hands’.45 There is indeed a certain wordless non so che that ties the portraits of these two friends to each other. Titian seems elsewhere. Was he lost in the memory of Aretino’s portrait that was now informing his own? In this regard, I close with two descriptions of Titian at work that seem to correspond with his own self-made image. The first describes the trance-like ecstasy of artistic creation: when he wanted to draw or paint some figure, and had before him a real man or woman, that person would so affect his sense of sight and his spirit would enter into what he was representing in such a way that he seemed to be conscious of nothing else, and it appeared to those who saw him that he had gone into a trance.46 The second likens Titian to a deus artifex or godly painter: For the final touches he would blend the transitions from highlights to halftones with his finger, blending

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one tint with another, or with a smear of his finger he would apply a dark accent in some corner to strengthen it, or with a dab of red, like a drop of blood, he would enliven some surface – in this way bringing his animated figures to completion.47 The breathing, pulsating spirit of Titian’s subjects also comes across in the way Titian renders hair in these works – glow­ ing, shimmering, misty, all in flux yet captured forevermore on the painted surface by Titian’s touch. The two passages taken together offer us an image of the artist’s flesh-bound body at work, using brushes, hands, fingers and thumbs to conjure for his friend and for himself an immortal life out of thin air. If this chapter has focused on what might be summarized as Titian’s ‘weightless gravity’, the following one will investi­ gate the almost indulgent care Titian took in bringing rubies, pearls and other jewels into being through paint; the manner in which he could craft gold threads and chains out of nothing as if he had accessed the secrets of alchemy; the way he could create the variegated textures of different kinds of textiles, leather and feathery ornaments out of the same basic materials of pigment and oil; and the force by which (to give Aretino the last word here), Titian held ‘the sense of things in his brush’, endowing life to every animal, fish, bird and figure through the miraculous touch of his ‘learned hand’. 48

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O

ne of the most striking descriptions of Titian’s art was written ten years shy of the seventeenth century, by another artist, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo:

As the sun shines among tiny stars, so indeed Titian shines not only among the Italians but among all the painters in the world, as much for his figures as his landscapes, rivaling Apelles, who was the first inven­ tor of thunder, rain, wind, the sun, lightning, and storms. In a most beautiful manner, Titian especially colored mountains, plains, trees, forests, shadows, lights, the flooding of rivers and seas, earthquakes, rocks, animals, and everything else related to land­ scape. As for portraying flesh, he achieved such beauty and grace in the nuances and tints that his renderings seem real and alive, especially the corpulent, tender areas, where he succeeded naturally. He showed the same accomplishment in coloring silk, velvet, and brocade draperies, different kinds of armor, helmets, shields, coats of mail, and other things with such bril­ liant lights that reality was left behind. There is such

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naturalness in his locks of hair, sweat of men and women, old and young, and in the expressions, par­ ticularly of happiness (as seen in his Venus and Adonis and Danae Receiving Gold from Heaven), and ultimately in everything, that nothing more can be expected from the hand and art of man.1 Come sole frà picciole stelle . . . The world created by this sun among tiny stars was so vivid that not only nature but truth itself (la verità in the Italian original) was left behind. This chapter will explore the constellation of things that appear in Titian’s art. As the painter approached the middle of the sixteenth century, his production would be marked by the expansion of his patronage circles to the papal and imperial courts of Rome, Augsburg and Madrid and by an increased reliance upon his workshop as the requests for paintings came flood­ ing in. He was called to Bologna at the end of 1532 to paint the portrait of Emperor Charles v, whom he first met in 1529 and would meet again in Milan in 1541, in Busetto in 1543 and in Augsburg in 1548 and 1550; this period of intense travel would also include in 1545 his only trip to Rome.2 A seem­ ingly endless train of Farnese and Habsburg portraits were churned out. Grander inventions were recycled, repurposed and reinvented. The first section of this chapter will touch upon the Venus and Adonis (see illus. 54); the final will consider the Danaë Receiving the Golden Rain (see illus. 65). Both istorie or poesie (to use Titian’s term) were painted in a first instance for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the grandson of Pope Paul iii, and subsequently for Philip ii, the son of the Habsburg

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Emperor Charles v. Everyone, it seems, wanted a little corner in the sun. leather/feather To Lomazzo’s rich treasury of things, we can add leather, a commodity readily found in the markets of Venice. Giovan­ ventura Rosetti, an employee at the Venetian shipyards, published a small book in 1548 called the Plichto de l’arte de tentori, containing detailed recipes for dyeing fabrics and tan­ ning and colouring leather. As someone who traded at the Arsenale, Rosetti had access to the best raw materials and industrial secrets available in town.3 Leatherwork was a com­ plicated and messy job: hides had to be limed and relimed, defleshed, dehaired, stripped of sinews with an ironscraper, treated in multiple solutions, conditioned, softened, oiled, brushed and buffed. The careful Venetian leather worker, however, could produce supple skins that would be trans­ formed into a wide range of luxury goods including chopines (those vertiginous Venetian platform shoes also known as calcagnetti, pianelle and zoccole) as well as bejewelled belts, painted quivers, gilded wallpapers and perfumed gloves. Titian, like many of his contemporaries, frequently included gloves in his portraits. They were usually a sign of luxury and grace, but in other instances they could also be eloquent philosophical devices. The best example of this latter category is the Man with a Glove (illus. 51). Completed not too long after La Famigliare, it offers another heady meditation about presence, absence and the immortalizing power of art to capture the tactile sensation of different materials, including

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the human body itself. The depiction of flesh in this portrait moves from the blushing vitality of the young man’s face to the delicately articulated veins on his right hand to the dim­ inished pallor of his left wrist. Each of these body parts is framed by a starchy white ruff, but the concealed hand to the right is further highlighted by Titian’s virtuoso rendering of the cream-coloured glove that reveals its own interior in the fashionably slashed detail on the back of the hand. Shrivelled, frayed, curled and greyed from repeated use, this second skin 51 Titian, Man with a Glove, c. 1523, oil on canvas.

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is an index of time’s passing.4 If the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray aged while the protagonist stayed young, in Titian’s painting the sitter has deferred that burden onto the glove so as to remain forever ‘irresistible’ (as Dame Judi Dench once described the young man).5 The chromatic atro­ phy from face to hand to glove finds a final passage in the block of marble that is possibly melancholic in tone, but indisput­ ably memorializing in function, for this is where the artist signed his name. Ontological differences – leather, flesh and stone – collapse into the viscous materiality of yellow earth that has been loosened here with lead white or tightened there with carbon black. Sometimes, however, Titian amplified the thick, desiccated sensation of leather by setting it against the soft, fluttering quality of feathers. Mobilizing his uncanny ability to render both substances, he exposed the tenuous line that separated the pleasure of mastery and control, on the one hand, and the inevitability of metamorphosis and loss, on the other. This is nowhere more beautifully achieved than in the portrait of Giorgio Cornaro (illus. 52). ‘Big George’ (or Zorzon Corner as he was called in Venetian dialect) belonged to one of the most powerful Venetian families whose illustrious members shine forth in the history of Italian art from Caterina Cornaro (1454–1510) – the Queen of Cyprus whose court was the subject of Bembo’s Gli Asolani – to Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653), the patron of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s celebrated St Teresa in Ecstasy in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Later in life, Giorgio would himself commission one of Andrea Palladio’s most influential designs, the Villa Cornaro in Piombino Dese (1551). In 1537, however, aged twenty, he was elected to the

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Maggior Consiglio (Great Council) of Venice. The portrait likely marked this event. But beyond this essentially notarial impulse, what else might this painting tell us about the world beyond its frames? Let us approach. Against a warm field of chestnut-brown, we find a hand­ some man portrayed forevermore with a peregrine falcon tethered to him. His left hand is encased in a leather glove slipped inside a beige gauntlet with gold and red trim, protect­ ing him from the bird’s talons, while his exposed right hand 52 Titian, Giorgio Cornaro, 1537, oil on canvas.

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caresses the animal’s plumage. It is a complex gesture – both tender and commanding. He has removed the delicate red leather hood, allowing the falcon to look out of the frame towards the viewer, the glint of her left eye rendered by a tiny speck of white paint. The golden bell strapped to her ankle sits silent, but will start to jingle and jangle the instant she takes flight. While the jesses that bind man to bird allow for a certain degree of freedom, the parameters of this movement are necessarily limited to the total length of the leather strips held in her master’s gloved hand. In the lower register, the hunting dog on the left and the shimmer of the sword to the right announce the social rank of the sitter. Despite being the grandson of the great Zorzi Corner – hailed in his own time as the ‘richest man’ in Venice – Giorgio was nevertheless an outsider.6 Until 1535 he had spent his whole life on the distant island of Crete, where his father served as the Capitano of Candia and where he raised and sold falcons. Falconry was more than just an attribute, it was also an allegory. The taming process was brutal, but often described as ‘loving’, for the aim aspired ‘towards a union of two wills’.7 The birds used in falconry were always captured from the wild and they were always female (for males were smaller and weaker). The falcon’s eyes were stitched closed until she was fully trained to respond to her master’s voice; her every sleep­ ing and waking moment was manipulated to establish complete obedience. In Shakespearean drama, ‘manning’ and ‘reclaim­ ing’ your bird became a literary trope for a husband’s training of his wife, but in the Italian tradition going back to Dante, the pilgrim’s arrival in Paradise is also likened to the moment of unsealing the falcon’s eyes.8 The peregrine in Titian’s

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portrait undoubtedly served as a metaphor for Giorgio’s social ambition as a patrician from an old and venerable Venetian family, but the language of hawking and the process of man­ ning also function here as an intimidating manifestation of Cornaro power and control (his father, after all, was the head of the elite security unit known as the Council of Ten in the years shortly after Giorgio’s return). In the closed, mono­ chromatic space of Titian’s portrait, Giorgio’s falcon was a formidable geopolitical cipher, representing everything that was at stake in moving from the centre of the Venetian Empire to the periphery and back. The territory of Candia (as Crete was known then) had been under Venetian influence since 1204 when Boniface i de Montferrat sold the island to Venice to secure military support during the Fourth Crusade. Crete was, however, also another world – some 2,000 kilometres (1,250 mi.) separated Candia from San Marco. The sixteenth-century chronicler Antonio Calergi commented in his account of Venetian rule in Crete that ‘one of the major tasks (of a ruler) is to know how to maintain the loyalty of the people and the subjugated cities, how to avoid and resist all the evils that can sometimes incite rebellion.’9 For this reason, members of prominent patrician families such as the Cornaro were sent out as soldier-colonists to institute and uphold Venetian values in the outlying terri­ tories. Giorgio’s ‘homecoming’ from the far-flung shores of Candia, where he was born, to the heart of the empire, where he now assumed public life in adulthood, must have been quite the experience. And here, one thinks of the falcon held so pensively in his left hand. Man and animal form a sympathetic unit – his delicate golden cuff reflects the striated plumage on

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her flank, the dark coverts of her wing mirror the gravitas of his costume, the accessories of falconry bind her to him as he is tied by his sword to his patrician responsibilities. Falconry was a common aristocratic pastime: it was praised by ancient authors such as Aristotle and Pliny and written about by medieval emperors such as Frederick ii, whose De arte venandi cum avibus (1248) circulated in lavish illustrated manuscripts.10 In the fourteenth century, the sport was asso­ ciated with pro-imperial factions and distinguished ‘urban, communal gente nova from the rulers of north Italian courts’.11 The Gonzaga lords, for instance, were aficionados of raptors of all kinds: Equicola observed that they owned some 150 gyrfalcons, falcons, hawks, goshawks and their tercels (and – yes! – they erected tombs for their beloved fallen birds).12 But what is of special interest for our story is that Federico Gonzaga figured among Cornaro’s distinguished clients.13 Perhaps this is how he came into contact with Titian. Perhaps Cornaro also met Titian through Sansovino, who had been commissioned to work on the reconstruction of his grandfather’s palace on the Grand Canal (the Cornaro house had been destroyed in 1532 when a shipment of sugar from Cyprus stored at San Maurizio caught on fire in the intense summer heat).14 The years around Giorgio’s return were especially glorious ones for Venice. As under the leadership of Doge Andrea Gritti (r. 1523–38), who was an enthusiastic patron of the arts, peace was brokered with the Habsburgs, and artists, poets and musicians who had fled from Rome after the Sack of 1527 were welcomed within the Republic. Among these refugees was the Florentine sculptor and architect Sansovino, who would be entrusted with the renovatio of the Piazza San Marco.

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Like Aretino, Sansovino immediately bonded with Titian, and the trio often spent the red-hot hours of summer in the painter’s garden overlooking the lagoon that separated the city from the Terraferma, chatting until night arrived to bring respite from the long days. On one such occasion, during a mid-August dinner party, Titian entertained his friends by showing them the paintings in his house. Drunken arguments over the merits of Latin versus Tuscan composition broke out with Aretino, and as the evening songs of musicians serenad­ ing pretty ladies in gondolas floated up from the waters beyond the house, ‘exquisite meats’, ‘expensive wines’ and ‘delicious fruits’ were served.15 Did Titian and Sansovino discuss the iconography of Venice’s distant territories on such enchanted evenings? In 1537 (the year of Titian’s Giorgio Cornaro), Sansovino was about to embark on the construction of the Loggetta, a small struc­ ture at the bottom of the Campanile where powerful and wealthy Venetians were known to gather to discuss politics and business and to gossip. Completed between 1538 and 1545, the decorative plan on the upper register consisted of three allegorical panels carved from Istrian stone. Proclaiming the territorial reach of the Venetian state, they depicted Jupiter as the Island of Crete (illus. 53), Venice as Justice and Venus as the Island of Cyprus.16 Jupiter is portrayed, in the attic relief, reclining on the shores of Crete where, according to legend, he reigned as king and was ultimately buried. Looking off to the right with his left arm stretched towards his emblematic eagle, the composition reads almost like an amplification of Titian’s Giorgio Cornaro. Was Sansovino inspired by his friend’s invention? Probably not (at least not directly), but there

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remains an undeniable formal and iconographical sympathy between the two images that is established by the specific geographical connection. In both instances, the bearded male figures – sacred and profane – ensure Venetian author­ ity on land and sea, at home and abroad, tethered in one form or another to the Republic of St Mark. Owners often attached their coat of arms to the jesses of their falcons.17 The two heart-shaped pendants (known as varvels) caught between Giorgio’s gloved fingers bear Cornaro stemme with their distinctive half-yellow, half-blue-black design. Thus in Titian’s Giorgio Cornaro the sitter, like his peregrine, wears his noble heart literally on his sleeve in a recursive affirmation of social identity. Even in Titian’s large-scale paintings, the difference between freedom and subjugation is often demarcated by the thinnest of leathery lines. For instance, in the Venus and

53 Jacopo Sansovino, Jupiter as the Island of Crete, 1538–45, marble.

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Adonis (illus. 54), the drama of love and loss hangs by a thread that materializes in the diagonal strap of the hunting horn that cuts across Adonis’ body. The goddess’s desperate hold wraps itself around him like the leather band; but unlike the strap, Venus will not be able to hold on and will lose him in a moment to the hunt. He is bound instead to his dogs – on his left arm the violent tug of the ropes is cushioned by a layer of fine cloth, blushing with passion for new adventures beyond Venus’ leafy copse. But who is that up in the skies monitoring the scene of separation? In subsequent versions of this picture 54 Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1554, oil on canvas.

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(such as the one in the National Gallery, London), she is often identified as Venus, for we see her in her chariot return­ ing to the heavens in accordance with the Ovidian narrative. In the canvas now in the Prado, which was the version sent to Philip ii in London (during his brief marriage to Mary Tudor from 1554 to 1558), this detail is more ambiguous. The celestial figure gestures insistently towards the ominous woods, almost as an incitement rather than an admonition. In 1545 – that is, around the time Titian painted the first version (now lost) for Alessandro Farnese – his friend Dolce had just published La favola d’Adone, a play in which Juno, the vengeful wife of Jupiter and the protectress of conjugal love, engineers Adonis’ death to settle old scores with both Venus and Myrrha (Adonis’ mother).18 Channelling Juno’s powers, Titian stirs up the young man’s hounds. A burst of celestial light and a streak of incandescent colour cuts across the canvas, splinters the dark cloud and crashes down on the earth below, causing the dogs to twist and turn in frenzied excitement. The bright, warm tones in the distant sky beyond the trees seem to smoul­ der and glow, encapsulating the delicate balance between utter beauty and total devastation in the painter’s palette. Titian is a master dialectician, coupling contradictory details together in an almost subliminal mirroring of forms. See, for instance, how Adonis gazes down at Venus. His eyes, however, are unable to recognize her as the object of his immediate desire, much the way the blank stare of the dog in the fore­ ground detaches it from the manic momentum of the pack. In the cool, shady bower on the left, Cupid is fast asleep. He is the ‘anti-Adonis’ in this composition. The boy’s little legs, like the hunter’s shapely calves, are wrapped in gorgeous pink

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leather boots; but while Cupid’s are heavy with insouciant slumber, Adonis’ advance with impatient energy. The ribbon on Cupid’s quiver flutters in the wind, animated by the sudden burst in the landscape beyond, but the pink and golden wings of Venus’ little son lie motionless against the heavy curving tree trunk that swaddles him. Wake up Cupid, wake up! – the spectator wants to shout, but it is too late, and there is nothing more that the goddess of love can do without the magical arrows of her son. Defeated by her knowledge of Adonis’ inevitable end, Venus hollows herself out, pleading with opened mouth, duplicating the expression of the grotesque on the fallen bronze vessel in the lower left-hand corner. In the depiction of Cupid’s silent wings and Adonis’ leather strap, Titian encapsulated the dramatic tension of arrivals and departures, a theme he had explored through different means in the Noli me tangere and Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona. In the 1540s Dolce was also working on the Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the post-Tridentine editions, he would add allegorie (or short interpretive passages) unpacking the moral of each tale. Venus’ ruined love for Adonis was likened to that of the Earth for the Sun, who abandons her every winter, but when the Sun returns in the spring, he would shower the Earth with anemones, the short-lived but beautiful flower that Venus created with the drops of Adonis’ spilled blood.19 In other words, like art and truth, Earth was left to mourn whenever the Sun – come sole frà picciole stelle – moved far away. On the subject of Titian’s feathers, a final note might be made here as a segue to the next section. If one wishes to discover a variety of endearing, resplendent, little wings, one

55 Titian, Tityus, 1548–9, oil on canvas.

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56 Titian, Annunciation, c. 1564–6, oil on canvas.

57 Titian, Annunciation, c. 1535, oil on canvas.

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should look no further than the Worship of Venus (indeed, it was the go-to painting for early modern artists looking for inspiration when painting putti).20 For something more grown-up, however, there was Titian’s Tityus (illus. 55) and Annunciation (illus. 56). The first was part of a decorative cycle made for the summer palace of a reluctant Habsburg queen, Mary of Hungary; the second was commissioned by the Bergamask cloth merchant Antonio Cornovi della Vecchia for his chapel in the Church of San Salvador, which stood off the busy thoroughfare known as the Merceria that connected the commercial district by the Rialto to San Marco. The mythological istoria from the final years of the 1540s portrays the terrifying raptor sent to punish the enchained Tityus for attempting to rape the goddess Latona (mother of Apollo and Diana), while the Christian altarpiece dating to Titian’s penultimate decade allows us to experience the transforma­ tive luminosity of the archangel Gabriel who announces the Holy Spirit as it descends upon the Virgin Mary. The sublime reach of outstretched wings cuts across both compositions even as sin and punishment in the one are redeemed by purity and grace in the other. Both demonstrate Titian’s ability to endow the most light and airy of things with brute force and majestic power: consider how the winged assailant tears out Tityus’ liver, a gaping red hole at the centre of the picture, and compare it with the way Titian wipes clean the tip of his brush on the rockface in the lower right corner, conflating paint with blood and canvas with flesh and stone. Likewise, draw close to the thick valleys of white paint that rise into relief to form the wings of the archangel, the dove and the seraphim in the sky as the build-up of paint creates a portal

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to another dimension. The San Salvador altarpiece might be described as a ‘noisy’ Annunciation and could be contrasted to the ‘quiet’ Annunciation (illus. 57) that Titian painted previously, an image in which the tripartite division of the divine, the inbetween and the everyday is conveyed through three winged creatures: the luminescent dove above, the weightless archangel in front and the humble quail locked to the ground in the per­ spectival grid below. Modern artists such as Gerhard Richter have intuited the supernatural quality of Titian’s light, trans­ forming ‘all that potential beauty and sublimity’ in his image into a blur (illus. 58) as if to admit the failure of human vision before Titian (in Richter’s case) and before God (in Titian’s case).21 The striking difference between the horizontal image of soundless suspension and the physical and psychological inten­ sity of the subsequent Annunciation, a vertical spectacle towering

58 Gerhard Richter, Annunciation after Titian, 1973, oil on canvas.

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at over 3.6 metres (12 ft) in height, might have resulted from residual energies lingering in Titian’s brush after a series of monumental paintings that he completed in these years. Two among these belong to the aforementioned series for Mary of Hungary, which was referred to by contemporaries as the quattro dannati (four damned), pene infernali (infernal punish­ ments) and furias (the ‘condemned’ men that Juno saw in Hades in book iv of Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The first two depict­ ing Tityus and Sisyphus (illus. 59) are in the Prado in Madrid; 59 Titian, Sisyphus, 1548–9, oil on canvas.

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the third and fourth of Tantalus and Ixion were destroyed in 1734.22 The first has been discussed above; below I turn to the second. sticks and stones Sometimes arranged marriages could end in love: Laura and Niccolò, Lucrezia and Alfonso, and now we arrive at the story of Mary and Louis ii of Hungary. Like her grandfather Emperor Maximilian and her brother Emperor Charles v, Mary was a Habsburg and thus born into all the privilege, power and responsibilities that came with such a name. Only six moons had passed after her birth when Maximilian prom­ ised her hand to the future heir of the House of Hungary and Bohemia. At the end of 1520, Mary and Louis, aged fifteen and fourteen, were married and spent six happy years together before being cut short by the king’s death at the Battle of Mohács against the Ottoman armies. Mary was devastated and vowed never to marry again (a promise she kept until her own death in 1558). Widowed at the age of twenty, she begged her brother to let her step down from her official duties; instead Charles v made her the ruler of her late husband’s kingdom and subsequently elevated her as regent of the Spanish Netherlands in 1531 – a duty that led her to complain to her other brother Ferdinand i that she felt as if she had a rope around her neck.23 She was forced to take on the role again in early 1555, but by the time August arrived she had had enough, writing to Charles v once more begging him to release her, explaining that ‘a woman is never so much respected and feared as a man, whatever her position . . . One

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receives all the blows and is blamed for all mistakes made by others, and is reproached if one does not carry out what every­one thinks he can demand.’24 In 1548, between her first and second appointments as the Governor of the Habsburg Nether­lands, Mary met Titian while visiting her brother in Augsburg and commissioned him to paint the furias. Mary was an extraordinary patron of the arts: in 1549 she had the perspicacity to buy Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition from the Crossbowmen’s Guild in Louvain.25 She commis­ sioned nineteen portraits from Titian, including the famous full-length equestrian portrait of Charles v at the Battle of Mühlberg (illus. 60) in which emperor and horse, dressed in red sash and caparison, don the colour of the Catholic faith.26 The canvases he supplied for her hunting lodge at Binche were prepared to celebrate and impress Charles v and his son Philip ii on the occasion of their week-long visit at the end of August in 1549; they were among his largest non-religious works, measur­ ing approximately 2.4 × 2.1 metres (8 × 7 ft) each. Titian, ever the procrastinator, only managed to deliver Tityus and Sisyphus on time, for they are recorded in a drawing that documents the festivities in the Great Hall (illus. 61). Mary is seated on a raised platform with her brother Charles, her sister Eleonora and her nephew Philip, illuminated by the direct light from the large ceiling-to-floor windows that overlooked the garden to the right. Hung between these luminous portals, the tow­ ering canvases were dramatically backlit, enlivened only by the hellish colouristic effects from within. Mary famously said that Titian’s pictures should be seen from a distance with proper lighting, which has often been interpreted (perhaps too hastily) as an affirmation of her

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preference for the tight, licked style of Northern painters.27 Everything has its time and place – the queen understood perfectly how to exploit the affective force of Titian’s broad stroke; and Titian understood perfectly how to please the queen. Fat incrustations of impasto drag and sputter every­ where on the canvas as insides and outsides become blurred. The shadowy crevices on the boulder seem to breathe like the distressed musculature of Sisyphus’ body. His burden is ampli­ fied by the abrupt cropping of the composition so that even the edge of the frame conspires to push down on him, pinning the rock upon his head like the caryatids that flank the paint­ ings in the Great Hall. The animals in the hunting grounds outside morph into the open-jawed, boggle-eyed monsters that twist and hiss in the corner; the brilliant chiaroscuro binds the natural light from the windows with the exploding fires of eternal damnation within the image itself. This cor­ respondence is further dramatized by the way Titian’s brush sculpts and illuminates the silhouette of Sisyphus’ left leg. The iconography of the furias was interpreted from the start as an allegory of the punishment that awaited both Prot­ estant rebels within Habsburg territories and Ottoman forces pushing at the boundaries of the empire.28 The ‘imperial eagle’ that bears down on Tityus is an unequivocal cipher of Habs­ burg­ian might. This is somewhat poignant given that parts of the kingdom were in the process of disintegration, but then art is often brought in to prop up the wounded ego of many a weakened ruler. Beyond the overt political bombast, the cycle might have held a personal significance for Mary as well. The iconography cut both ways. On the one hand, if the encroaching armies of Suleiman the Magnificent had

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taken her beloved husband’s life, in the Great Hall she could displace her sorrow and anger onto those wretched male bodies like Juno at the gates of the Underworld.29 On the other hand, victors and victims were precarious roles in times of war. One must not forget that this was an especially diffi­ cult period for a female ruler, and the task of keeping all the rebellious territories together – the ‘rope’ around Mary’s

60 Titian, Charles v at the Battle of Mühlberg, 1548, oil on canvas.

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neck – must have seemed a burden even heavier than the rock on Sisyphus’ shoulders. As French troops approached her castle in 1554, the canvases were hastily cut out of their frames and smuggled out to Brussels with the queen and eventually to Madrid, when Philip ii inherited his aunt’s paintings as well as her appreciation for Titian.30 In thinking about the cycle at Binche, scholars have pointed frequently to the impact of Michelangelo’s ‘pictorial gigantism’, 61 Unknown artist, Great Hall of Binche Palace during the Celebrations in 1549, 1549, brown ink and watercolour.

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which the Venetian painter would have encountered during his trip to Rome in 1545.31 There is certainly much truth in this. Aretino, for one, warned his friend not to lose himself in the contemplation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.32 In the quattro dannati, it is almost as if he was trying to absorb and work through his encounter with Michelangelo’s sibyls, prophets, ignudi, saints, demons and all the blessed and damned in the Sistine Chapel. It would be nonsensical to deny that Titian was not transformed by the physical and ideo­logical monumen­ tality of the site-specific works he saw in Rome; he was. Yet, as we have seen in the Jealous Husband and the Martyrdom of St Peter, there was always a ferocious streak in Titian’s brush long before he set foot in the Eternal City. His early training as a mosaicist, for one, prepared him from the start to work on large-scale ceiling projects; for another, Giulio Romano’s illusionistic frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti, which he would have seen during his many trips to Mantua, would have demonstrated how to add drama to those colossal bodies. Two examples suffice to drive this point home. First, in the three Old Testament stories portraying David and Goliath, Abraham and Isaac and Cain and Abel (illus. 62), painted between 1542 and 1544 for the ceiling of Santo Spirito in Isola in Venice, we find gigantic foreshortened forms caught in intense cor­ poreal struggle. In the third of these canvases, the spectator gazes heavenwards to find Abel, beaten by his brother, cra­ nium dripping with blood, being kicked out of the stony landscape as Cain towers above him (and the viewer) with a dark, angry fume rising behind him. The Crowning with Thorns (illus. 63), completed shortly before the Roman trip, offers a second useful example. Later

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in life, Titian would repaint the same theme in looser, more schematic strokes (now in the Alte Pinako­thek in Munich), but in the earlier altarpiece for Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan we find a magnificent exploration of Titian’s sense of things, from the shimmering chain mail hugging the figure in the foreground to the manic flapping of fabrics on the left; from the chromatic dissonance of gold with blue and of green with purple to the ferocious chiaroscuro that slices across the panel, illuminating Christ’s agony in extreme light while mask­ ing the impervious expression on Tiberius’ cold marble bust in the shadows above. Three men enter on the right. The sol­ dier in the foreground goads his companion in the scalloped military vest that ripples from pale yellow to a sumptuous green, but the young man does not seem to hear him; he is caught in a moment of incipient conversion. His response is reiterated by the bald man whose neck muscles bulge and stretch in Titian’s raking light; he, too, is a figure of ambiva­ lence, frozen in place as the cruelty before him suddenly snaps into view. Everywhere triangles pierce the composition. The two tormentors with arms raised, like gondoliers steering their boat through choppy waters, struggle with the enormity of their task. Their long sticks criss-cross with the makeshift sceptre that is being handed to Jesus, forming a three-pointed halo against the dark ground behind him. The complex chore­ ography of male bodies creates a vertiginous torsion as the prickly ring of thorns is forced down onto Christ’s head. The compositional intensity spirals around the central figure and ultimately comes to a point in the beautifully foreshortened toe that presses down upon the step above where Titian has inscribed his name in the same classicizing letters as above.

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What the emperor – tiberivus – has taken, the painter – titianvs– returns to the faithful viewer, but not without violence. According to the Spanish ambassador, Francisco de Vargas, Titian allegedly painted with ‘a brush as big as a birch-broom’. When asked why, the painter replied that it was a way to dif­ ferentiate himself from Michelangelo and Raphael.33 While

62 Titian, Cain and Abel, 1542–4, oil on canvas.

63 Titian, Crowning with Thorns, c. 1542, oil on canvas.

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the legitimacy of this anecdote is contested, one cannot help but see, lain upon the surface of the step closest to us in the Crowning with Thorns, a long reed that underlines the artist’s name, but that also (like the gentle hand of La Famigliare) reaches across the stony rubicon, edging into the spectator’s space. Examining Titian’s brushwork in the Louvre painting, Crowe and Cavacaselle commented: ‘The very furia which character­ ises the action is traceable to the artist himself, who seems to have worked off the contours with dash and force, whilst he touched in the flesh with a stroke of surprising breadth and sweep.’34 We find an almost balletic image of Titian, with his mighty brush lancing forward as an extension of his hand now caressing the face of Christ with light, now piercing His temple with drops of red paint, creating with furia until all the bristles of his brush were spent and deposited into his art like the creative energy in his body. Napoleon was so taken by the painting that he took it back with him to Paris in 1797 and even when the other looted works were eventually returned to their Italian owners in the nineteenth century, the Crowning with Thorns remained in the Louvre where it can be found today on the wall to the right of the crushing mob in the Mona Lisa room. The seventeenth-century Venetian art writer Marco Boschini often referred to paintings as zogie (gems) and as tesori (treasures) to be mined, guarded, inherited, stolen, retrieved and cherished.35 Titian’s jewels, both metaphorical and literal, figure as the topic of the next and final section in this chapter.

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family jew els On 9 November 1947, at the inauguration of the Mostra delle opere d’arte recuperate in Germania (Exhibition of Art Works Recovered in Germany), Rodolfo Siviero gave an emotional speech to the crowd that had assembled at the Villa Farnesina in Rome about the restitution of countless masterpieces that had been plundered by Hermann Göring and the Nazis from Italian lands during the war: ‘it would take too long to under­ line the importance of each of these for the national artistic patrimony’, he began, but ‘it is enough, first of all, to cite the Danae.’36 Shortly before it was transferred back to the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Siviero had himself photographed contemplating the precious canvas (illus. 64). Napoleon and Göring certainly were not the only men in Europe to covet Titian’s paintings. The story of Titian’s Danaë stems, in fact, from just such a longing that had occurred some five hundred years earlier. Sometime between 1543 and 1544, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese called in at the court of Guido­ baldo ii della Rovere, where he fell in love with the duke’s prized Venus of Urbino. His agents in Venice approached Titian, who had only just recently painted the portrait of the cardi­ nal’s younger brother Ranuccio (see illus. 40). For Alessandro, the artist would then produce the Danaë (illus. 65), which would become the first in a string of reclining female nudes to come out of Titian’s workshop in the 1550s and 1560s. Patrons did not always seem to mind the repetition, although there was inevitably a degree of internal competition. For instance, it was reported back to the cardinal that his nude was much sexier than the one that he had seen in Pesaro, which

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looked now like a ‘pious frump’ in comparison.37 X-rays reveal Titian’s initial struggle to out-do himself.38 In the earlier iter­ ation, he re-used the domestic servant and Renaissance cassone from the Venus of Urbino; at a later stage, however, a less con­ temporary and more classical theme (represented by the startled Cupid standing before the column) was adopted. The end result rendered the conceit similar but different: if Guido­ baldo ii saw Alessandro’s imitative desire in the thematic similarities, the cardinal undoubtedly hoped the duke would also see the ways in which his Titian nude was both new and improved. It was a polite but pointed rivalry; these men were social equals after all (in fact, Alessandro’s sister Vittoria later became Guidobaldo’s second wife when the first Duchess of Urbino passed away in 1548). Possessing the superior painting was a matter of public pride, but artworks could be a repository for more intimate memories as well. 64 Rodolfo Siviero admiring Titian’s Danaë in Rome, November 1947.

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The historian is prompted to ask once more: what might this picture have signified for this patron at this time? Roberto Zapperi paints a touching portrait of fourteen-year-old Alessandro being pulled out of law school in Bologna and forced into the priesthood by his grandfather Pope Paul iii. As it turned out, the young man was ill-fitted for such a call­ ing, eventually preferring the company of courtesans to that of religious folk. The heart wants what the heart wants. For this reason, some have suggested that the woman in the paint­ ing, commissioned when Alessandro was in his mid-twenties, was based on his lover, a Roman courtesan named Angela, and that the picture was an allegory of the cardinal’s ‘mercenary love’ for her.39 The shower of gold coins raining from the cloud and Danaë’s earring, bracelet and pinkie ring make such

65 Titian, Danaë Receiving the Golden Rain, 1544–6, oil on canvas.

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a reading very appealing. Whether it is an actual likeness or not is debatable. The psychoanalyst might be inclined to con­ clude that this painting possessed a significant compensatory function for its owner (as the Venus of Urbino might have had for Guidobaldo). Beyond the questions and answers of historians and ana­ lysts, an artist might value these pictures for entirely different painterly reasons. Standing up close and far away, what cannot be denied is that Titian loved to paint jewellery of all kinds: heavy pearls drooping down from an earlobe; rubies, sapphires and emeralds caught in delicate gold links; a single gem set on its own. In large-scale pictures such as the Sacred and Profane Love, Worship of Venus and Venus of Urbino, as well as in portraits such as La Famigliare, Filippo Archinto, Federico Gonzaga, Clarissa Strozzi and Eleonora Gonzaga, these glistening accumulations of pigment and oil coagulate on the surface of Titian’s canvases and panels, transforming nature’s raw resources into priceless treasures. In Della pittura (1435), Alberti asserted that ‘Ivory, gems, and all other similar precious things are made more valuable by the hand of the painter. Gold too, when embellished by the art of painting, is equal in value to a far larger quantity of gold.’40 What would the fifteenth-century writer have thought of Titian’s extraordinary portrait of Philip ii (illus. 66), the future King of Spain, clad from head to toe in imperial finery made of paint? Painted around 1550 by Titian in Augsburg, Philip stands proud as the heir apparent to the imperial throne (he would eventually be passed over as Holy Roman Emperor in favour of his uncle Ferdinand i). Titian has made every effort not only to capture the future king’s likeness, but to

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document the splendour of his field armour. Philip’s portrait is, in a sense, a double portrait, for the delicate damascened gold patterns are so accurately rendered that scholars have been able to identify them as belonging to the ‘Flower-Pattern Armour’ etched, embossed and gilt by Desiderius Helmschmid, which is preserved in the Royal Armoury in Madrid.41 Sitters often sent Titian their own possessions (dresses, armour and so on) to be included in their portraits. These personal effects were undoubtedly seen as an extension of the individual, the keepsakes that members of the family recognized as indices of the person portrayed. Unfortunately, Alberti did not live to see what Titian’s hand would be able to accomplish, but Titian’s friend Dolce did. In the Dialogo della pittura (1557), he has Aretino’s character say: ‘I would add, however, that there is nothing that habit­ ually draws attention to itself and feasts the beholder’s eyes to the same degree as painting does – not jewelry nor gold itself.’42 On the one hand, this is a delightful guide to how one might appreciate not only Titian’s paintings, but his painting of jewellery and gold (again, we are in the territory of the meta-painting that calls attention to its own facture). On the other hand, this is a curious statement given that Dolce was also the author of a treatise on the magical powers (or virtù) of gemstones in which he further expounds: Stones contain diverse powers. Some allow people to gain favours from lords; some make things fire resist­ ant; some enable men to be loved; others wise; others invisible; others repel lightning; some extinguish poisons; some preserve and some augment treasures;

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others make husbands love their wives; some calm sea storms; others cure illnesses; others protect the head and the eyes. To conclude, everything that can be imagined by man can be performed by the power of stones.43 Like herbs and flowers, precious stones had curative proper­ ties, and Venice was one of the key European markets for gems (one need only be reminded here of the 1,927 gems that decorated the Pala d’Oro on the high altar of the Basilica of San Marco).44 What then did it mean for a Venetian artist to paint jewellery and gold with such exquisite care? And what kind of magic (white or black) was being performed? To say that Titian’s portraits made the absent present and the dead alive (as Alberti had claimed painting could do) is hardly an overstatement in the necromantic image culture of the past. When Philip ii was born on 21 May 1527, Charles v was overjoyed, throwing lavish banquets for his son in the very first months of his life; however, the events that precip­ itated the Sack of Rome soon sent him away, and he would not return to Spain until 1533.45 In other words, until the age of five or six, Philip knew of his father’s face primarily through the portraits on the walls of the royal palace. From this per­ spective, one might also think of how the portrait of his beautiful and beloved mother Isabel would have haunted him in the years after her early death on 1 May 1539, when the prince was not yet a teenager. The emperor was devastated, withdrew in mourning for seven weeks and never remarried; when Charles v died in 1558, he clutched Isabel’s crucifix to his heart. 46 It is through the mournful melancholia of the

66 Titian, Philip ii, 1551, oil on canvas.

67 Titian, Empress Isabel of Portugal, 1548, oil on canvas.

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uxorious emperor, therefore, that we should read Titian’s Empress Isabel of Portugal (illus. 67). Painter and empress had never met in life. In fact, the painting was based upon an earlier work by another artist, described by Aretino (in his inimitable way) as a ‘trivial brush’. 47 Titian’s portrait, however, was especially dear to Charles and accompanied him frequently on his travels. 48 For the emperor, Titian also created a double portrait (now lost, but recorded in a copy made by Rubens) reuniting Charles with Isabel.49 In this regard, he was, by all means, bringing the dead back to life through his art. Because Titian’s is a post­ humous portrait, some scholars have noted Isabel’s deathly pallor; others pointed out that she feels somewhat distant. These are perfectly legitimate observations, but what always catches my eye is her jewellery: the elaborate pearl and ruby bordure she wears at the peak of her hairline; the large tear­ drop pearls that hang from her ears; the incredible emerald and ruby pectoral mounted in gold and adorned with pearls that sits on her chest; the plenteous field of small gold and pearl ornaments that embellish her red velvet dress; and the pale blue stone on her slender right hand. Everywhere one looks, the body of the empress seems to palpitate with light and colour. It is not Titian’s forgery of flesh that renders her alive, but the vitalistic energy that seems to be emanating from these gems, fashioned by the painter’s hand. Jewellery was worn as an index of individual wealth, but also for its apotropaic powers. Rubies were believed to be good for clearing pestilential air, keeping the body healthy, preventing wicked thoughts, strengthening the bonds of friendship and increasing one’s wealth.50 Emeralds fostered

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chastity, drove away demonic hallucinations and tempests, and restored tired vision; they comforted their owner and strengthened the memory.51 Pearls, however, not only shared many of these benefits but were associated with the power to revive: aqua perlata (a tonic consisting of pulverized pearl powder) was frequently administered ‘for those who are sad or timid, and in every sickness which is caused by melancho­ lia’; it purified the blood and was ‘most excellent for restoring the strength and almost for resuscitating the dead’.52 Pearls were, also, one of the most profitable commodities (like gold) from New Spain to enrich Habsburg coffers in the sixteenth century, and the sheer number of large and small pearls in Isabel’s costume – little luscious daubs of white paint skip­ ping off the tip of Titian’s brush – celebrates this indisputable economic fact.53 But money and facts are nothing compared to art and magic. Dolce professed that the sapphire not only made its owner calm, loveable, devout, charitable and true, but that it was ‘also much used in the magical arts; it is said to lend great efficacy in necromancy’.54 While some scholars describe Isabel’s blue eyes in the portrait as pale and vacant, there is nevertheless a glint of white paint to the left of her pupils. Like the luminous blue glow of her ring, this reflection hints at an inner life struggling to flicker on. The emperor, it is safe to conclude, would have agreed. Although the medicinal use of stones can still be found today, lithotherapy was a far more common practice in the centuries before modern mineralogy rendered things cold, scientific and rational. But even gems, to quote one Renais­ sance authority, can ‘get sick, [grow] old, and die’.55 Paintings, however, do not. In other words, things are often in themselves

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friable, mortal and finite. Titian’s art, however, preserves in them a sense of things that remains intact and is immortal, and whose possibilities are infinite beyond the life of the sitter, the patron and even the artist. ‘What is preserved – the thing or the work of art’, to repeat Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.’ Every now and then – as when Charles v gazed upon Isabel’s portrait in the late 1550s before his own passing or when Siviero recovered Titian’s Danaë and brought it back to Italy in 1947 – the frisson experienced by the viewer comes from the sudden proximity that is felt, through the mediation of the artwork, to the ghosts of the past. This bewitched senso de le cose is what Titian held in his miraculous brush.

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I

n 1574, two years before he left this world, Titian sent Philip ii a list of fourteen paintings for which he had yet to be paid. The register was ‘only a part and not all’ of the outstanding works, for he could no longer ‘remember them all’.1 While it might seem ballsy for a serial procrastinator to hound his high-born patron for payment, Titian was also the frequent victim of circumstance. He was forced to sue the Confraternity of St Peter Martyr over a year after the installation of their altarpiece for failure to pay; a partial settlement, including a piece of cheese valued at four ducats, was paid out, but as late as 1540 court records indicate that Titian was still owed a substantial amount of money.2 He was obliged to launch a similar lawsuit against Santo Spirito in 1552 when the church refused to settle their debt for the ceiling paintings that he had delivered.3 And, most famously, when Titian sent his son to Milan in 1559 to col­ lect the pension owed to him by the Habsburgs, Orazio was nearly murdered in a botched robbery attempt by the border­ line sociopath Leone Leoni (imperial sculptor to Charles v and Philip ii).4 The second half of the sixteenth century would be an especially stormy period in European history as

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religious wars threatened Christendom from within and without, culminating in the irreversible schism between Cath­ olics and Protestants following the closure of the Council of Trent in 1563 and in the defeat of the Holy League by Turkish forces in the 1570s. If Titian’s career began under the black cloud of the Italian Wars, it would end in the smoke and horror of the Ottoman–Venetian War. While there is no doubt that Titian was obsessed with his finances, against these larger his­ torical circumstances, one could hardly blame the old man for thinking about money, legacy and the future. As it turned out, these concerns weighed heavily upon the Spanish king, too. in deep water Between the autumn of 1548 and the summer of 1550, Philip ii was ordered by his father Charles v to go on a diplomatic junket that brought him to Montserrat, Barcelona, Genoa, Milan, Cremona, Mantua, Trent, Innsbruck, Munich, Brussels, Maastricht, Augs­burg, Heidelberg, Luxembourg, Rot­­ter­­­dam, Antwerp, Louvain, Ulm, Aachen, Cologne, Bonn, Mainz and Speyer, among other places. On 24 August 1549, at the end of the first half of Philip’s two-year tour, he called in at his aunt’s hunting lodge at Binche. It was a welcome break from his gruelling schedule. Mary of Hungary not only commissioned the furias to impress him, but brought him out to her castle at Mariemont, where she staged a sumptuous banquet at which the servers were attired as nymphs and huntresses.5 Mary and Philip shared a passion for hunting and art. When Philip saw Titian in Augsburg in 1550, the painter would immortalize the prince dressed in his armour (see

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illus. 66), and the prince would immortalize Titian by commis­ sioning from him a series of mythological paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As many as ten poesie might have been planned for Philip, but only six were delivered in the end: the first two were replicas based on the Danaë and Venus and Adonis previously designed for Cardinal Farnese; the next pair, both seascapes, featured Perseus and Andromeda (illus. 68) and the Rape of Europa; and the last two, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (illus. 69), depicted what one scholar described as ‘excessive and undeserved punishments’, reminding us not only of Mary’s pene infernali but of the imperial burdens that Philip shoul­ dered with his aunt.6 Charles v had hoped to canvass enough support within his family and among the German nobility to enable Philip to inherit his role after his abdication. In Augsburg, however, things turned out differently. Charles’s more experienced brother, Ferdinand, won the fight, and Philip’s future had to be rewritten. On 25 July 1554, having travelled with a royal flo­ tilla from Coruña across choppy waters to the Isle of Wight, the young Habsburg prince was married off to Mary Tudor at Winchester Cathedral. It was a purely political union. One of the emperor’s chroniclers wrote: ‘Though the queen was a saint, she was ugly and old, and the king handsome and young’, adding that ‘he acted in this like Isaac, letting himself be sacrificed to the will of his father.’7 The first of Titian’s mythological paintings – the Danaë – was received in the summer of 1554; the second – the Venus and Adonis – was shipped to London, shortly after Philip’s arrival. If the downpour of coins could symbolize a cardinal’s love for his mistress, did the gold in Philip’s version signify the might

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of the Habsburgs over the Tudors? Likewise, when the king left for Brussels to confer with the emperor about political matters, did Mary’s grief over his departure remind him of Venus’ response to Adonis?8 The queen was smitten by her young husband, but their marriage was as brief as it was cour­ teous, and she died three years later (just weeks after the death of Charles v). Titian’s beloved poesie, in contrast, would remain with Philip for always, returning home with him in 1558 first to Brussels and then on to Spain. The remaining two poesie would be delivered to the king in Toledo in late 1559. By this time, the political landscape had 68 Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1554–6, oil on canvas.

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shifted dramatically: a Protestant queen was on the English throne; German and Dutch princes were revolting against Habs­burg hegemony; colonial commanders in New Spain were fighting each other over slaves; conversos and moriscos (con­ verted Jews and Muslims) were being persecuted; the Spanish Inquisition went into overdrive in a preemptive push to root out other forms of sedition within the empire; and the king had a new queen, Elisabeth of Valois, a union which tempor­ arily brought peace between Spain and France, but which also precipitated the bloody French religious wars to come when her father Henry II (King of France) died in a jousting 69 Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556–9, oil on canvas.

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accident during the wedding festivities. Did these momentous, world-changing events hang heavily on Titian’s mind as he created his final works for the Habsburgs? Or rather, what can the paintings themselves tell us about the world in which they were conceived? Much has been written about the poesie; here I would like to look more closely at the Perseus and Andromeda.9 For one, it is rarely a favourite among scholars; even Titian enthusiasts from Lucian Freud to Mark Wallinger have praised instead (with much insight, to be sure) the Diana paintings.10 For another, it is of interest to me because it was an afterthought in Titian’s scheme: he had intended to pair the Rape of Europa with a scene about Jason and Medea, but Perseus’ heroism undoubtedly offered a more appropriate moral lesson for the Catholic king than the sexual exploits of a perfidious, deadbeat lover. Dolce described Perseus as the ultimate ‘valorous man who vanquishes every difficulty with prudence and wisdom’.11 There was also a long iconographical tradition in which Perseus’ defence of Andromeda against the dragon was compared with Christ defending the soul against the Devil.12 Allegory uses a story to explain or comment on another situation, and Titian was a master in the construction of such inventions. Take, for instance, the way Titian painted Androm­ eda’s earring – a pendulous, aqueous, red drop – so as to evoke the spilled blood of Medusa, which metamorphosizes at the bottom of the image into coral (a material also associ­ ated with Christ). The inhospitable rocky environment stands in stark contrast to Andromeda’s and Perseus’ weightlessness. Like her translucent veil and his fluttering red sash, their bodies float effortlessly above the mayhem. All of the violence

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is focused instead on the grotesque forms of the open-jawed dragon. Perseus seems to be pushing the monster down into the water, by some invisible force, drowning it beneath the horizon line. The tides foment all around its writhing, thrash­ ing, screeching body, as if the waters had suddenly begun to boil in this ‘exorcism’ at sea. Beyond the immediate pagan and Christian interpretations, however, one cannot help but wonder whether all the stormy voyages back and forth across the English Channel in these volatile years had an effect on the king’s imagination. Water is elemental and, therefore, unpredictable. Titian’s meticulous layering and modulation of excited brushwork and pure white impasto narrate the inner turmoil of his char­ acters through the changeable stillness and agitation of watery surfaces. The foam of the waves, the carapace of the creature and the shells in the foreground have been rendered with a mineral materiality – like crumbly saline crystals they evoke the taste of salty sea air in the spectator’s mouth. Did Philip identify with Perseus, the virile hero come to save the prin­ cess from her gloomy, watery isle, or did he see himself instead as Andromeda, praying for salvation from the jaws of reli­ gious dissent? Perhaps Perseus on Monday, but Andromeda by Friday. As with all speculative propositions, it is impossible to say for sure. This does not rule out the fact that Titian’s picture opens up this possibility by encouraging the viewer to draw a series of hermeneutic parallels. If beautiful bodies could generate moral thoughts, perhaps moral thoughts could also generate beautiful bodies. As we saw with Vittoria Colonna’s Penitent Magdalene, Titian’s female saints were often gorgeous,

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valiant protagonists whose alluring sensuality only seemed to amplify their virtue. In this regard, let us look again at Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda against the St Margaret (illus. 70), also painted for Philip in the 1550s. Both canvases measure around 2 × 2 metres (6.5 × 6.5 ft), but they have more than their patrons, dates and dimensions in common.13 70 Titian, St Margaret, c. 1555, oil on canvas.

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Andromeda was the beautiful daughter of an Ethiopian king with a braggart for a wife; Margaret of Antioch was raised by her nurse after her mother died and her father disowned her for becoming a Christian. The most exciting moments of their young lives took place at sea: two damsels, trapped on a rock, praying for deliverance while besieged by a dragon. Both were victims of parental carelessness. Androm­ eda’s mother boasted that her daughter’s allure surpassed even that of the Nereids. Poseidon took offence, and the king was forced to offer up his beauteous daughter as a sacrifice. Fortunately, however, Perseus was nearby. Triumphant from his recent defeat of Medusa, extinguishing one more mon­ strous creature had become routine for the hero. The virgin saint, by contrast, had to fight her own battles. It is said that she was swallowed alive by a demonic dragon, but that the crucifix she clasped in her hand enabled her to escape out of the monster’s entrails. In Titian’s canvas, the violence of her return is also expressed in the broken waves that cut across the bay in the background. If Margaret’s expression – at once beautiful, defiant and exhausted – does not fully convey the sentiment ‘I’ve been to hell and back,’ the human skull gazing heavenward with blind sockets in the lower right-hand corner and the burning city lost in the manic brushwork on the horizon do. In a chapter on the qualities that make an effective image, Giovan Battista della Porta argued that ‘terrible and frightful things make us remember because the horror of the act lin­ gers for some time in the stunned and frozen mind, and we remember more those who die through the force of justice in all its immense atrocity than those who die from fevers and

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other illnesses.’14 Michelangelo and Titian were signalled out as masters towering above the rest in this regard. Andromeda and Lucretia, moreover, were noted as especially compelling figures for such mnemonic exercises.15 Titian’s portrayal of the former has been discussed above; let us turn now to the latter. tea rs of eros One evening during the siege of Ardea in 509 bc, the highborn sons of the Roman legion were boasting about the virtue and beauty of the wives they left at home. Collatinus, how­ ever, was the most insistent. Fired up by their recent military victories and drunken competitiveness, the men decided to ride off to Rome where they, indeed, found the chaste and opa­lescent Lucretia weaving a robe for her absent husband. Overcome by jealousy and desire, later that evening Tarquin – the king’s youngest son – forced his way into her chamber, pleaded with her, threatened her and raped her. Shamed by the assault, Lucretia took her own life. When the truth was unveiled, Brutus vowed to fight the royal house of Tarquin, thus ending the tyranny of the Etruscan kings and paving the way for him to found the first Republic of Rome. Writing about Lucretia in the City of God, St Augustine launched what became a tradition of victim blaming with the line: ‘If she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?’16 Niccolò Machiavelli commented on Livy’s account of the myth in a discourse entitled ‘How Women Are a Cause of the Ruin of States’ (iii.26). Shake­speare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), in contrast, offered one of the first

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sympathetic characterizations cut in print since antiquity of the Roman heroine, opening up ‘a new interior world of shift­ ing doubts, hesitations, anxieties, antici­pations, and griefs’.17 His was an ambivalent but nuanced character study. In the moment after ‘lust-breathed’ Tarquin’s failed seduction and extortions were about to give way to irretrievable violence 71 Titian, Rape of Lucretia, 1571, oil on canvas.

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against ‘this earthly sainct’, we find their fates ensnared in a spine-tingling hawking metaphor: This said, hee shakes aloft his Romaine blade, Which like a faulcon towering in the skies, Cowcheth the fowle below with his wing’s shade, Whose crooked beake threats if he mount he dies: So under his insulting fauchion lies Harmlesse Lucretia, marking what he tells With trembling feare: as fowl hear faulcons’ bels.18 Even in this short excerpt the reader is seized by the intense terror of the two protagonists. While there is no quibbling over Shakespeare’s poetic might and psychological portraits, even he (alas) must give way to Titian. In the Rape of Lucretia (illus. 71), the surface of the canvas is charged like a field hit by a bolt of lightning. This effect is boosted by Titian’s crystalline rendering of jewellery. Gem­ stones, as we heard previously, were believed to promote chastity and drive out wicked thoughts, and Renaissance viewers might have thought that the extraordinarily large jewel hanging from Lucretia’s ear might ward off her rapist. Indeed, the glowing viridian gem as well as the loops of pearls and rubies around the victim’s neck and wrists and the wedding ring on her left hand look as if they are straining, widening and multiplying themselves to full capacity, but to no avail as their prophylactic energies are overpowered by Tarquin’s bloodlust. Even the sheets swell into a ‘fabric knot’ in an attempt to repel his offending touch.19 The intricate web of golden lines that race and twist across his chest approach

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Lucretia like Medea’s dress, Nessus’ shirt and other poisonous garments from mythology, which annihilated their victims upon contact. Raging from head to toe in red, even his beard appears to be aflame. The inescapable confrontation of the two bodies is rendered all the more violent by Titian’s stab­ bing, skittering and dragging brushstrokes. Colour, too, contributes to the horror. Red and green are contrasting colours on the artist’s palette; when mixed together they destroy each other into a muddy brown-grey (we have seen Titian do this before in the Noli me tangere, where the Magdalene’s passion desiccated the fields beneath her). The stip­­pled brushwork, which depicts the raised velvet on the left, gives the impression of a burning, acidic corrosion bubbling up on the surface of the paint. The green curtains and bed coverings, which bear the brunt of Tarquin’s weight, begin to yellow and darken before our very eyes. Soon, the entire surface will be the colour of cooked flesh like the offending knee that has broken free of its stocking as the madman’s rutilant frenzy scorches everything around him. Titian’s antihero is not entirely beyond redemption, how­ ever. He is aware (like Shakespeare’s Tarquin some decades later) that ‘if he mount he dies’. The tragedy lies in his failure to do the right thing. To be sure, neither painter nor poet serve as an apologist for the rapist; rather, their complex psy­ chological portrayals remind the audience that Lucretia (like Andromeda) was ultimately the victim of another person’s hubris. The madness of the unhinged prince is less the result of the wife’s innocent charm than of her husband’s vain­ glorious pride. Titian paints Tarquin’s unseeing eye as a lost black hole staring into the void before him, suggesting that

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he is well beyond himself. Lucretia’s servant on the left has arrived all too late, and his view within the scene is obstructed by the blind inferno rampaging across the bed. The spectator, however, witnesses the crime straight on, but like Shakespeare’s heroine, ‘wrapt and confounded in a thousand feares, like to a new kil’d bird, shee trembling lies’, we, too, are powerless before the wretched spectacle before us.20 Scholars who take a wide range of approaches have often commented on the eroticism of Titian’s rendering of Lucretia. I would like to challenge such readings. Her body, not to mention her toppled pose, is like that of Callisto (see illus. 69). Tripped up and stripped down, flailing and wailing – these female figures have less in common with Andromeda than with the sea monster. When Callisto was found to be preg­ nant and expelled from Diana’s coterie, Jupiter turned her into a bear and eventually into a constellation (Ursa Major). There is, in fact, something ursine about Lucretia’s body as well. Her torso is bloated, her arms too meaty, her hands and feet too large, her fingers and toes rendered with little charm. The most powerful part of her body is her face: her protest­ ing mouth, her cheek alight with fear, and her eyes drowning in a pool of tears created from white lead. The rest, if one is truthful, is a mess – as if her frantic movements have made her go out of focus. Eugène Delacroix would describe the painting most accur­ ately as ‘clumsy and magnificent!’21 The clumsiness, however, is considered and strategic. Paint layers thicken in one instance, like blood rushing to the face, and then turn pale, thin and anaemic elsewhere. The effect mimics for the viewer the gesture of the ‘presbyopic painter putting on and removing

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his spectacles’.22 The female nude becomes dematerialized and disembodied in the patchy field of brushstrokes, and this serves, in turn, to amplify Lucretia’s virtue, for if she fails in her battle against her aggressor inside the narrative she suc­ ceeds nevertheless in blocking and blurring the form of her breasts and sex from the purview of the spectator outside. She is (to borrow Rebecca Zorach’s description of Callisto) a body ‘rendered abject’ and ‘becoming distinctly unlovely’.23 All attention is diverted instead to her facial expression – lachrymose, pleading, forevermore chaste. Titian was extremely proud of the Rape of Lucretia, writing to Philip to say that he made it ‘with greater labour and arti­ fice than anything, perhaps, that I have produced for many years’.24 The Rape of Lucretia can, in many ways, be considered as a conceptual and figural pendant both to the religious painting portraying the Martrydom of St Lawrence (illus. 72), which was shipped to Spain in 1567 to be placed on the high altar at the Escorial, and to the mythological scene depicting the Death of Actaeon (illus. 73), which might have been part of the poesie but remained in a state of limbo in Titian’s studio upon his death.25 Was Titian thinking about the struggle of the flesh in the flick­ ering light of the nocturnal execution scene of the saint when he staged a few years later the confrontation between Tarquin and Lucretia and between Diana (the goddess of the hunt and of chastity) and her hapless victim Actaeon (a prince of Thebes who stumbles upon her, is turned into a stag, and devoured by his dogs)? Did he feel equal sympathy for each of these violated, sinking bodies regardless of their gender and status? Was he reusing the chromatic acidity of the bedding from the Rape of Lucretia in the abstract splashing of foliage in

72 Titian, Martyrdom of St Lawrence, 1564–7, oil on canvas.

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the foreground shrubs of the Death of Actaeon as he continued to rework the canvas? Did he mean to repeat the smooth ren­ dering of Lucretia’s face and jewellery when painting Diana? Was he moved in his twilight years by the desperate vitality of these characters? This brings us to a question that many have posed about Titian in old age: did he become more tragic?26 In some sense, yes, especially if we look at Lucretia, St Lawrence and Actaeon. Their hands, raised in protest and fear, call out not only to the characters within the painting, but to the viewer on the other side of the picture plane as well. Stop! Look! Be instructed! Be delighted! Be moved! Yet, Lucretia’s is also the gesture Titian deployed in his portrayal of the wife fighting 73 Titian, Death of Actaeon, c. 1559–75, oil on canvas.

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off her jealous husband, of Ariadne desperately waving at Theseus’ ship, and of both St Peter of Verona and Tityus, try­ ing and failing to stave off the onslaught of their assailants. ‘There is more imagination in the way Titian paints a hand’, Rudolf Arnheim once remarked, ‘than in hundreds of surreal­ ist night­mares depicted in a dull, conventional manner.’27 Indeed, but those sublime hands were always already there in the early works; Titian may simply have become better at painting them with time. Old age, however, was no fun. Despite being universally feted as one of the greatest artists of his day, Titian spent a con­siderable amount of time moaning about having to pay income taxes (for the first time in his career in 1566), fighting with his son Pomponio (whose ‘capricious protest’ caused nothing but ‘shame and ruin’), squabbling with the Deputies of Brescia over the delayed completion of a series of paintings for their town hall (he actually writes to them with the lame excuse that the varnish is ‘drying in the sun’), and chasing after his patrons over unpaid debts.28 When he broached this topic with Philip ii in 1571 (three years before the letter with which this chapter began), he referred to himself as being in questa ultima mia età (my final old age), alleging at that time to be 95 and living through the ‘calamity of the present times in which everyone suffers on account of endless wars’.29 When Titian passed away it is possible that even he did not know how old he truly was. His death certificate recorded his age as 103, although he was more likely to be in his eighties. In any case, Titian was old. Every painting that he began in the 1570s must have seemed to him as though it could be the last. And while he had always been an inveterate procrastinator, old

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age probably made certain things seem more urgent. The closing section considers four paintings in which violence and despair vie with hope and faith, and the desperate vitality of Titian’s touch can be found vibrating across the surface. desper ate vita lity In some instances Titian’s handling of the female nude was visibly erotic (as in the numerous pictures of reclining god­ desses), but in other instances such women could represent symbols of truth revealed by time (as in the Sacred and Profane Love and the Rape of Lucretia). In the ideologically charged Spain Succouring Religion (illus. 74), made twice for the Habs­ burgs, nudity was an index of vulnerability and virtue.30 The elaborate, self-congratulatory, political painting was made to commemorate the Battle of Lepanto, a key victory in the on­ going war against the Ottoman Turks. It was commissioned after the event on 7 October 1571, but by the time it was delivered in 1576 the military advances of that earlier moment had been lost, and the world was again a very different place. The paradoxical elation of victory and disappointment of defeat are reflected in the composition, too. The teary, redeyed personification of Religion is (like Lucretia) an unlovely mess. Hunched over in exhausted gratitude before the armed figures of Spain and Justice (accompanied by a man often identified as Philip’s half-brother Juan of Austria), she can hardly stand up to greet her saviours as they arrive in a thun­ derous burst of colour and light. Her Ottoman and Protestant assailants are represented by the turbaned figure on the char­ iot driven by two seahorses to the left and the knot of snakes

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to the right. The contrasting stances of triumph and despair are twice inscribed in the body language of Spain and Religion and in the placement of the upright tree next to the dead trunk from which the vipers self-generate. The overturned chalice and the abandoned crucifix lie forlornly at Religion’s feet. In the distance the billowing sails of warships remind the viewer that Fortune was fickle and, indeed, it was. Growing old was no easier for the King of Spain, and there is ample reason why paying the Old Master was low on his list of things to do. Philip had inherited tremendous debts 74 Titian, Spain Succouring Religion, 1572–5, oil on canvas.

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from his father’s many wars and faced numerous rebellions from the Dutch Revolt to the War of the Alpujarras; on Christ­mas 1567 he was forced to confine Don Carlos, his only surviving son (from his first marriage), who went mad and died the next summer. The king, it was reported, ‘wept three days for his son’.31 Not even three months would pass before his beloved Elisabeth would die after giving birth to their still-born daughter. Both his heir apparent and his queen were in their early twenties, and the premature loss was deva­ stating. The king was given little time, however, to mourn. Towards the end of 1569, in an attempt to unite the Spanish and German branches of the house of Habsburg, Philip mar­ ried his niece Anna of Austria (the daughter of Emperor Maximilian ii and Philip’s younger sister Maria). To everyone’s joy and relief, the union was a success, and a new male heir was born in the final month of 1571, which had been a dramatic year for Spain and Venice. A few historical details should be sketched out here before we return to Titian’s paintings. The unfolding of events can be summarized in three acts: the loss of Famagusta and the execution of Marcantonio Bragadin; the victory at the Battle of Lepanto; and the birth of Ferdinand. Act One: August 1571. Horrific rumours had already been circulating from the far-flung shores of the eastern colonies towards the end of the summer, but confirmed reports of Bragadin’s bewildering and brutal execution had reached Venice by September: the Capitano of the defeated Venetian territory of Cyprus had surrendered himself and the city of Famagusta to the Turkish forces of Lala Mustafa Pasha, who tortured, imprisoned and then flayed Bragadin alive.32 His corpse was quartered, the fleshy fragments divided among

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the Ottomans (like Christ’s robe after the crucifixion), and his skin stuffed with straw and paraded in the streets of Fama­ gusta on the back of an ox before being delivered to Sultan Selim ii as a gruesome war trophy. Some years later, it would be stolen from Constantinople and brought back to Venice by Girolamo Polidoro where it was interred in an urn that stands today atop a monument across the nave, rather appro­ priately, from Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona in SS Giovanni e Paolo.33 Act Two: October 1571. When the combined forces of the Holy League – convened by Pope Pius v and commanded by Philip ii’s half-brother Juan of Austria in coordination with Sebastiano Venier (who would become doge in 1577) and Marcantonio Colonna (who was among other things Vittoria Colonna’s nephew) – defeated Ali Pasha’s forces in the Battle of Lepanto, it was seen as an act of divine retribution for Bragadin’s ignoble death. It took twelve days for the news to reach Venice, but once received people rushed to San Marco to celebrate with banners, tapestries, candles, music, fireworks, floats, procession and prayers.34 The victory, however, was short lived: Venice eventually lost Cyprus to Selim ii in 1573, and Spain lost Tunisia in 1574. Despite the grim realities of the larger picture, Lepanto was celebrated for years to come as a decisive victory. Once more, art was called upon by politics to rewrite history for posterity. This brings us to Act Three: December 1571. We might compare Spain Succouring Religion to Philip ii Offering the Infante Don Ferdinand to the Heavens (illus. 75). The two works – Titian’s final works for Philip – were delivered together, so it would be plausible to read the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the

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one in the other.35 The former communicated through per­ sonifications, and the latter spoke more directly through portraiture; both were political in tone, while also being votive in intention. In the portrait, Philip proudly raises the young Ferdinand to the heavens in thanksgiving for the double 75 Titian, Philip ii Offering the Infante Don Fernando to the Heavens, 1573–5, oil on canvas.

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victory of Lepanto and of dynastic succession after the tragic loss of Don Carlos. A somewhat graceless angel nosedives out of the sky to welcome the Infante, informing him that greater things await him (maior tibi). The Battle of Lepanto is re-enacted through a dizzying symphony of brushstrokes, obscuring the horizon line to the left. A Turkish captive is cornered in the foreground beneath the edge of the balustrade and the side of the table covered by the emblematic red colour of the Catholic king. It is an odd but efficient image. On the one hand, well . . . where does one begin? What is going on with the placement of Philip’s peg-like feet? For an artist so capable of painting children, how can we explain Ferdinand’s elongated torso and squashed face? And that contorted angel! Does it not resemble a flimsy rip-off of the figure of St Mark from Jacopo Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave in the Scuola Grande di San Marco? On the other hand, Philip was extremely pleased with it and hung it next to the magnificent Charles v at Mühlberg (see illus. 60).36 Three generations of Habsburg men were thus united through Titian’s art. The ‘extremely dull character of this allegorical machine’ has led some to question the extent of Titian’s input.37 The painter, it has been suggested, was not entirely thrilled about the commission: a preliminary design as well as a portrait of the king, whom he had not seen since 1551, had been sent to him by the Habsburg court painter Alonso Sánchez Coello.38 It must have been quite trying for the maestro to receive instructions in old age from a lesser artist. In this regard, one cannot help but notice the attentive and excited little spaniel on the right: with its bright red tongue and gorgeous bush of a tail, it tries to draw the attention of the king and

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the spectator to his master’s signature on the cartellino above, registering Titian’s presence in this pastiche. It has also been suggested that the Turkish prisoner was painted by a subsequent hand when the canvas was enlarged to match the dimensions of Charles v’s equestrian portrait.39 If true, this would be almost an unbearable disappointment, given that he is the most beautiful figure in an assembly of otherwise unusually awkward bodies. Stripped and shackled, head bared and eyes downcast – how different this subju­ gated body is from the prisoner in the Madonna of the Pessaro Family (see illus. 32) painted so many wars ago. Even in the aftermath of Lepanto, however, Titian exhibited great reserve in representing the enemy. The Turk is neither a monster nor a caricature. 40 In fact, he has been painted in such a gentle way as to lend him a quiet sense of dignity that inspires mercy in the mind of the viewer. This response is entirely appro­ priate here since the painting is ultimately a celebration of new beginnings. The militaristic triumphalism in the allegory of Spain and Religion gives way instead to an unfathomable desire for life, even if that life belongs to the enemy. There is something pitiful that ties the slave to the other villains, anti-heroes and hapless fools that dwell in Titian’s world – the jealous husband, the bravo, Carino da Basalmo, Tityus, Sisyphus, Christ’s torturers, Cain, Tarquin and Actaeon. To this motley, tragic cast we should add Marsyas. In Le trasformationi, Dolce’s famous compilation of Ovidian tales dedicated to Charles v, Marsyas appears in the thir­ teenth chapter, which features three tales about divine justice that have to do in one way or another with Apollo. The first is about Niobe, the haughty Theban queen who refused to

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worship at the altar of Latona, causing her son and daughter (Apollo and Diana) to strike down the queen’s seven sons and seven daughters in a storm of arrows. The second is about how the miserly inhabitants of Lycia would not allow Latona to drink from their waters so she transformed them into frogs. The third is the tale of Marsyas, the misguided satyr who challenged Apollo to a flute contest, lost, and was flayed for his hubris. Many have been the interpretations of the magnificent, raw and emotive Flaying of Marsyas (illus. 76). 41 Jaromír Neumann suggested that Titian gave the myth ‘a flavour of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice’ by turning the satyr upside down like St Peter and St Andrew.42 Daniela Bohde compared Marsyas with the tradition of pitture infamanti (pictures of punishment).43 Hans Ost placed its articulation of history’s ‘fears and hopes’ on a par with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.44 Christopher Hitchens read Marsyas as a metaphor for Cyprus and colonialism. 45 And, most controversially, Sydney Freedberg saw the fate of Bragadin reflected in the gruesome staging of this tragic story.46 Not all Titian scholars are on board with Freedberg’s theory.47 While it is true that there is little evidence beyond circumstantial co­ incidences to link Marsyas with Bragadin, it would be even more difficult, in my opinion, to accept that Titian was a dis­ interested aesthete so cut off from the world as to be completely untouched by its misery. The towering, tortured multilayered Flaying of Marsyas was conceived, commenced and completed over the course of a decade that was defined by its own denizens as apocalyptic.48 And it was not just Bragadin and the War of Cyprus – these were dark times. A series of portentous disasters fell

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upon Venice between 1569 and 1576, Titian’s final year: there was a ruinous fire at the Arsenale on 13 September 1569, described by one eyewitness to be as if the ‘last judgment’ had arrived; a fire in SS Giovanni e Paolo on 18 June 1570; an earthquake on 17 November 1570; a fire in the Merceria on 22 March 1574; a fire in the Palazzo Ducale, destroying artworks in the Sala del Collegio and Sala del Senato on 11 May 1574; and a flood on 12 October 1574, which contaminated the 76 Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, 1570–76, oil on canvas.

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city’s wells and precipitated the great plague (1575 to 1577) during which Titian, his son Orazio, and nearly one-third of the population perished.49 For a man who had by this date lost many of his closest friends (Dolce died in 1568 and Sansovino in 1570) and who had travelled throughout the capitals of Christendom and interacted with its most powerful rulers, it is impossible to imagine that Titian would not have been moved and that his art would not have been altered by such pitiful, world-shattering events. This is not to say that the Flaying of Marsyas was a literal response. Rather, this larger-than-life painting, a canvas with which Titian spent his final decade, was a place, as Stephen Campbell so pithily put it, ‘where Titian goes to think’.50 In a passage well-known to Titian scholars, the seventeenthcentury art critic Marco Boschini described Titian’s old-age practice: He turned the pictures to the wall and left them there, without looking at them, sometimes for several months. When he later returned to them, he scrutinized them as though they were his mortal enemies, in order to discover any faults; and if he did find anything that did not accord with his intentions, like a surgeon treating a patient he would remove some swelling or excess flesh, set an arm if the bone were out of joint, or adjust a foot if it were misshapen, without the slightest pity for the victim. By thus operating on and re-forming these figures, he brought them to the highest perfec­ tion . . . and then, while that picture was drying, he turned to another. And he gradually covered with living

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flesh those bare bones, going over them repeatedly until all they lacked was breath itself.51 This description would put Titian very close to the posi­ tion of Apollo in the painting. However, it is (as always with Titian) more complicated than just that simple identification, for if the artist is like Apollo, a metaphor for the deus artifex absorbed in the godly task before him and oblivious to the world beyond, he is also the melancholic King Midas (pre­ sumed by Neumann to be a veiled self-portrait) meditating upon the fleeting achievements of mortals, and Marsyas who simultaneously looks into himself while staring out towards the viewer and asks ‘why do you tear me from myself?’52 We might imagine Titian pacing back and forth in his studio between these two great canvases – the Flaying of Marsyas and the Death of Actaeon – catastrophic tales of divine retribu­ tion carried out upon pitiful creatures by Apollo and Diana (those relentless guardians of rationality and purity). But where did Titian’s sympathies lie? In revealing Diana’s body, he grants the spectator a clear view of the very thing that caused Actaeon’s downfall. In applying layer upon layer of paint over Marsyas’ body, he makes Apollo’s task of removing the skin ever more impossible.53 And for what exactly does he search? Judging from images of the body as it was mapped out in Renaissance anatomical illustrations (illus. 77), it appears as if his knife is slowly and attentively carving away at the flesh that covers the liver, an organ that regulates what we encountered in Chapter One as the ‘musicality of the pulse’.54 Described as a ‘blood factory’, the liver was believed to be the

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‘concupiscible part of the soul’ that could ‘be moved or restrained by rational force’.55 It was in charge of the desider­ ative or appetitive drives (in modern psychoanalytic terms, one might draw a parallel to the Freudian ‘id’ that contains all that is instinctual, sexual and aggressive and the ‘superego’ that attempts to control it). Is Apollo – the god of music, harmony and order – Marsyas’ torturer or is he his musical healer? Reading the viscera for sources of discordance, does he not attempt through bloodletting to purge the satyr’s bestial urges and through art to restore to him his humanity? 77 Detail of Marysas with an inverted overlay from Andreas Vesalius’ anatomical treatise De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543), with the liver highlighted in pink.

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Many viewers have felt perplexed, disturbed and disgusted before Titian’s painting.56 The Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch, however, loved it so much so that it appears in the background of her portrait, painted by Tom Phillips, in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her attachment to the image enabled her to see beyond the surface brutality in order to understand the transcendental nature of Marsyas’ lot that is being explored in the work: Religion is about the death of the ego. The ego disap­ pears and you see the world with absolute vividness and clarity. I felt this when I saw the picture by Titian . . . this clearly had a significance for the people of the Renaissance as an image of the death of the self – that the god flays you, that you lose your egoism in this sort of agony, which is also ecstasy.57 This conforms with Renaissance interpretations of the macabre story, for the fates of Niobe, the Lycian peasants and Marsyas, as Dolce explained, warn us against ‘the audacity of those who think too highly of themselves’ and call us to be vigilant against such pride.58 Life as it came face to face with death was terrifying and full of regrets for Marsyas, existential and introspective for Midas, and ultimately impenetrable even for Apollo. For Titian, it was all three. Beyond the painting’s iconographical specificities, it was an old-age testament. Working and reworking the Flaying of Marsyas – and the same could be said of the Death of Actaeon – provided the octogen­ arian painter the stage upon which to rehearse his own final curtain call.

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Some scholars wondered whether the Flaying of Marsyas might not have been intended as part of Mary of Hungary’s furias, but was then abandoned when it could not be finished in time.59 It’s possible, but what we know for certain is that on 19 June 1559 Titian wrote to Philip about two new poesie, one of which was described as ‘Actaeon lacerated by his dogs’.60 This brings us to a final hypothesis. Might the Death of Actaeon and the Flaying of Marsyas have been destined for Philip as part of the poesie? They would have made a logical pairing in many ways: part man, part animal, both Actaeon and Marsyas are defined by their hybridity and destroyed for their accidental hubris. At the same time, it could be argued that the Flaying of Marsyas was much larger than the other poesie and the Death of Actaeon would have been redundant given that he was already pictured elsewhere. Moreover, by the 1570s, these themes would probably have been too grim to send to the longsuffering Spanish king. Perhaps, too, Titian felt a particular attachment to them. The two paintings contain within them three of Titian’s favourite themes: beauty, drama and dogs. The detail that so disgusted Erwin Panofsky in the Flaying of Marsyas is the small pup in the foreground obliviously drinking the stream of blood slowly draining out of Marsyas’ flayed body. With its eyes closed and white tail cheerfully wagging away, it is the oppo­ site of the satyr who is left with eyes wide open to mediate between the animal and human worlds. We might turn again to Murdoch in defence of Titian. In a passage from her final novel Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), the characters engage in a heated debate about redemptive suffering. Citing as evidence Shakespeare’s great protagonists – Prospero, Othello, Macbeth

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– one of the interlocutors concludes that Shakespeare surely must have felt great remorse of his own, to which another speaker affirms: ‘Artists know all about it . . . How Titian must have felt it, when he was very old, The Flaying of Marsyas – the pain, the pain, the old man must have felt it deeply at the end.’61 And how! This brings us, in closing, to the thaumaturgic efficacy of the enigmatic Boy with Dogs in a Landscape (illus. 78). In this late work, we are confronted by the vigilant gaze of a black shedog nursing two pups. A little boy arrives on the right with his arms wrapped around another dog. Little is known about when or how the painting arrived in the Serbelloni collection 78 Titian, Boy with Dogs in a Landscape, c. 1565, oil on canvas.

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in Milan; what scholars agree upon, however, is that it was completed in the final years of Titian’s life.62 Was this a ricordo, a note-to-self, jotted down on an unused swatch of canvas, of an invention that Titian wanted to keep for future com­ positions?63 This would explain why the finish is so loose and why the four sides of the canvas have been trimmed. Perhaps these four dogs and the little boy that they have taken in were left behind at Biri Grande with the small spaniel and the salt-and-pepper retriever in the Flaying of Marsyas and the torrent of hunting hounds in the Death of Actaeon to mourn their master’s death on 27 August 1576. Reflecting on this work, John Berger wondered whether ‘Perhaps it sometimes happened that whilst painting with his right hand, with his left hand he ferociously stroked one of his dogs. The fur as company for his fingers, and the dog shifting its weight as his arm moved!’64 Berger’s reverie projects a wonderful image of the painter in the studio surrounded by paintings and dogs, channelling the animal’s energy into his art through the touch of his hand. This might strike some readers as romantic nonsense, but Renaissance commentators would have sided with Berger. Puppies, we are told by more than one venerable authority, are born blind, but acquire their sense of sight as they begin to suckle, for their mother’s milk and spirit nurture their minds and bodies.65 In ancient animal lore, dogs were believed to possess the power to assuage their master’s illness and to absorb the pain as their own; their blood was thought to be a remedy for poison; their vomit could cure swelling and infection; and puppies, in particular, were vital in all sorts of purification ceremonies.66 Persons in need of cleansing were encouraged to rub, stroke and embrace

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them – the Greeks, Plutarch pointed out, called this form of puppy therapy periskylakismos or ‘puppifrication’.67 As his eyesight began to fail him, Titian undoubtedly began to rely more on his sense of touch and, perhaps too, on his canine companions both real and painted. As the plague raged on in the city, as the sick were quarantined and sent off to the lazaretti (pest houses) to die, we can picture Titian holed up inside his house, thinking of the friends he had lost, of the sons and studio he would leave behind, of the money he was owed, of the works he needed to complete and those of which he had yet to dream. There in the refuge of his art, could he have passed these final days, bringing to life the magnificent animals in the Boy with Dogs in a Landscape? Was this the ‘moment of grace between life and death’ of which the philosophers spoke? Did our master dialectician gaze upon this noble pair – one dark, one light – and name them ‘Chiaro’ and ‘Scuro’? If on the first day of Creation, God separated light from dark­ ness, Titian here coupled them together instead. If the painter’s furry friends were able indeed to absorb his anxieties, ail­ ments and misery, he did not retain their energy for his own survival, however. Instead Titian transferred this desperate vitality back into his art. Amid death and chaos, life and hope were thus born, generated in a vertiginous swirl of brush­ strokes on the canvas, nursed to health by Titian’s touch.

Coda: Gold Dust

E

ven in his death Titian hovered somewhere between reality and fiction. On his death certificate, it stated that he died of ‘fever’. Beneath this entry, in what seems to be different handwriting, the Old Master was declared licentiato, indicating that he was cleared for burial.1 It is uncertain whether the painter died of a febre induced by illness and old age or whether he fell victim to the plague. In 1584 Raffaello Borghini reported that it had been the former – di vecchiezza.2 Yet in 1648 when Carlo Ridolfi wrote about Titian’s end, he asserted that ‘at the age of ninety-nine he ended the voyage of his life, struck down by pestilence in 1576, and although funerals were forbidden to everyone, the higher authorities granted him the honor of a proper burial.’ To this, he then added: ‘in the Church of the Frari at the foot of the Altar of the Crucifix, as he had arranged during his lifetime and in the most suitable manner that those times permitted, he was buried with the regalia of his knighthood.’3 The embellishments introduced by Ridolfi’s account, while uncorroborated, nevertheless became the foundation for future interpretations. The nineteenth-century French painter Alex­ andre Hesse, for instance, transformed the Venetian biographer’s

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potential truths into the evidentiary eloquence of the Funeral Honours to Titian, Deceased in Venice during the Plague, 1576 (see illus. 80). The melodramatic painting, with its attentiveness to his­ torical costume and locale, was Hesse’s successful debut entry at the Salon of 1833 in Paris. Laid out on a sombre bier, Titian’s corpse is indeed dressed in knightly regalia. The scene unfolds in the Piazzetta of San Marco; directly on the vertical axis above Titian’s head we can make out the roundel of Venetia (see illus. 22) watching over the occasion. Senators in their red robes have assembled with members of Titian’s family and friends as they begin the journey to the Frari. In the corners to either side we see other victims of the plague: the collapsed body of a man, which causes a senator to raise his arms in sorrow and fright, interrupts the solemn flow of the funeral procession; a woman whose green dress has come undone sits defeated on the ground unable to leave her companion’s side; and the body of a deceased woman in a shimmering blue dress is being hoisted onto a litter to be disposed of in a plague pit. The dif­ ference between the passing of these nameless nobodies and the great Titian is rendered in poignant contrast in Hesse’s theatrical design. In a review of the Salon of 1833, an anony­ mous author explained that the ‘severe rules of the medical police commanded the immediate destruction of plaguestricken cadavers, but an exception was made by the Senate in Titian’s favour’.4 History was thus rewritten by fiction; myth rendered factual by art. When Titian was laid to rest the day after his death, 23 people, including three members of the clergy, attended the funeral. It was a respectable but modest affair that cost 37 lire.5 Some sources claim that the painter had decided in the

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end to be interred in his family chapel in Pieve di Cadore, but that his body could not be moved from the pestiferous city; others assert that he had always intended to be buried in the Frari, in the Chapel of the Crucifix, beneath the Pietà (illus. 79) that he had prepared for his final resting place. The votive tablet nestled in the lower right corner of the composition functions like what has been referred to as a ‘feedback loop’, transforming the larger painting into both a prayer for what is to come and an expression of thanksgiving for that which has already been given.6 Portrayed on this small image-withinan-image is what has often been identified as a portrait of

79 Titian, Pietà, 1570–76, oil on canvas.

80 Alexandre Hesse, Funeral Honours to Titian, Deceased in Venice during the Plague, 1576, 1832, oil on canvas.

81 Titian, Assuntà, 1515–18, oil on panel.

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Titian and his favourite son Orazio kneeling before the vision of the Pietà, which is of course also the subject of the primary painting. Recent studies have questioned whether this is meant to be the two Vecellio men (both of whom would die in 1576) or whether this might have been a generic ex-voto attesting to the miraculous claims of Titian’s art.7 Either way, it is a detail, much like the portrait-within-the-portrait in La Famigliare (see illus. 2) that demonstrates the artist’s resilient self-reflexive stance towards his own art right down to the end. Tucked in the shadows behind this small visual prayer is Titian’s coat of arms, a chevron topped by the imperial eagle, a sign of the knighthood conferred upon him by Charles v. This awesome painting – a drama of death and redemp­ tion pieced together over time from seven uneven strips of canvas – was installed briefly in the Frari before it was fin­ ished, but then removed by the artist himself sometime in early 1575.8 In the end, even for his own tomb, Titian missed his final deadline. The canvas was eventually acquired and the composition completed by Palma Giovane and it is in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice today. The reason for the removal is often attributed to concerns expressed by the friars that Titian’s art was distracting from the worship of the crucifix to which the chapel was dedicated.9 Indeed, the grandiloquent gesture of the Magdalene on the left directs the attention of the viewer outward, beyond the pictorial space of the altarpiece to the other end of the Frari where the Assuntà (illus. 81) occupied the high altar.10 No discussion of Titian would be complete without mentioning this remark­ able work. The explosive vision of the Virgin’s assumption had been the young artist’s first major public success in Venice,

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completed within the span of two years on the surface of 21 horizontal wood panels held together by dovetails.11 It was, in this regard, the alpha to the omega of the Pietà. In some ways, it could be argued that Titian’s official career began with a risen body and ended with a fallen one. A woman and a man who were at once mortal and immortal and whose bodies did not remain behind when their souls left this world. What remained instead was Titian’s spectacle of their mystical passages, and both paintings demonstrate the artist’s ability to paint gold and conjure celestial light through the magic of his brush out of virtually nothing at all. In the Assuntà the naturalism of a supernatural event is rendered through the exquisite field of aureate colour and light; in the Pietà Titian took this ambition to the next level by reducing the heavens into a shimmering golden mosaic in the apse above the Virgin and Christ. Thus, if in his youth he copied the skies as God made them, in his wise old age, he depicted them as Titian created them – an image of an image of God’s

82 Detail of the pelican mosaic in the Pietà (illus. 79).

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skies. On the one hand, portraying mosaics in a painting was hardly an original idea in the Venetian Renaissance (Giovanni Bellini’s S. Giobbe Altarpiece offers one of the most famous exam­ ples of this). On the other hand, as Paul Hills reminds us, Titian’s apprenticeship in the mosaic workshop of the Zuccati enabled him to understand from the start how to think of colour as ‘individual chips or tesserae’.12 Art was always more powerful than nature. To complicate matters further, into this contradictory space (illus. 82), which seems concave but is in fact flat and which suggests the hard reality of an architectural structure but dema­terializes into a painterly mess, Titian painted a pelican with a few quick brushstrokes. Plucking the flesh from its own breast in order to feed its young, the self-sacrificing bird was a common Christological symbol, which would have been appropriate to the propitious intention of the altarpiece. In visual terms, however, the image of the pelican mosaic is also a philosophical thesis about the nature of representation and reality. Detaching itself from the architectural support upon which it is supposed to appear, it seems to float in another time-space continuum altogether. Like so many of the details that we have come across in Titian’s art, it calls attention to its own constructedness, its own viscous materiality, and its own condition as a meta-fiction. This incandescent field of paint beckons the viewer to come closer – like the way St Jerome approaches the body of Christ (or the way Apollo approached Marsyas) – in order to catch a glimpse, in this nebulous in-between, of the miracle that is Titian’s art.

references

Introduction: Abracadabra 1 Carlo Ridolfi, The Life of Titian Vecellio from Cadore, Painter and Knight, 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (University Park, pa, 1996), p. 58. Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavacaselle, Titian: His Life and Times (London, 1877), vol. i, p. 41. Dominicus Lamponius quoted in Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli xiv. xv. xvi (Florence, 1840), vol. iii, p. 243: ‘dove, dovunque mette V. S. la sua mano dà vita et spirito ad ogni cosa’; Aretino quoted in Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan, 1957), vol. ii, p. 436: ‘e Tiziano, Il senso de le cose ha nel penello’. Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith, ‘Spending Time on Art’, Empirical Studies of the Arts, xix/2 (2001), pp. 231, 234. Vecellio quoted in Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni: The Clothing of the Renaissance World. Europe. Asia. Africa. The Americas (London, 2008), p. 58. Vasari quoted in Jill Dunkerton and Marika Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique before c. 1540: National Gallery Technical Bulletin, xxxiv (London, 2013), p. 52. Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, md, 2000), pp. 112–14. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Venice, 1612), p. 590: ‘colore tra azzuro, e nero, forse detto dal colore delle penne del paone.’ Stella Mary Newton, The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 19–24.

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References

1 0 Dunkerton and Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique before c. 1540, pp. 61, 128, n. 14.

11 David Rosand, ‘“Most Musical of Mourners, Weep Again!”: 12 13

14 15

16

17

18 19

Titian’s Triumph of Marsyas’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, xvii/3 (2010), p. 24. Marin Sanudo, Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White (Baltimore, md, 2008), pp. 305–6. Priuli quoted in Patricia Labalme, Laura Sanguineti White and Linda Carroll, ‘How to (and How Not to) Get Married in Sixteenth-century Venice (Selections from the Diaries of Marin Sanudo)’, Renaissance Quarterly, lii/1 (1999), pp. 47, 64. Firenzuola cited in Elizabeth Cropper, ‘On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style’, Art Bulletin, lviii/3 (1976), p. 384. Nicholas Penny, Titian, exh. cat., The National Gallery, London (2003), p. 80, for instance, suggested that it was ‘a painting made by Titian to encourage such commissions’ based on a ‘model in the artist’s household’. On Titian’s marriage see Gustav Ludwig, ‘Neue Funde im Staatsarchiv zu Venedig’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preußischen Kunstsammulngen, xxiv (1903), pp. 110–18; on Titian’s family see Charles Hope, ‘Titian’s Family and the Dispersal of His Estate’, in Der späte Tizian und die Sinnlichkeit der Maleri, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna and Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (2007), pp. 409–16. The rings resemble those portrayed in Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Jeweler (formerly in the J. Paul Getty Museum). On Renaissance rings see Diana Scarisbrick, Rings: Symbols of Wealth, Power and Affection (London, 1993), pp. 17–19; on ‘ring ceremonies’ see Cecilia Cristellon, Marriage, the Church, and Its Judges in Renaissance Venice, 1420–1545, trans. Celeste McNamara (Cham, 2017), pp. 54–6. Barbaro quoted in Brian D. Steele, ‘Water and Fire: Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” and Ancient Marriage Customs’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, xv/4 (1996), p. 25. Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (London, 2001), p. 214.

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2 0 Dunkerton and Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique before c. 1540,

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p. 59; Cecil Gould, ‘New Light on Titian’s “Schiavona” Portrait’, Burlington Magazine, ciii/701 (1961), p. 337 for a reproduction of restoration photo. 21 Filippo Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings (London, 2001), p. 31. On Titian’s houses see Neri Pozza, ‘La casa di Tiziano a Biri Grande’, in Tiziano e Venezia (Vicenza, 1980), pp. 35–7; Jürgen Schulz, ‘The Houses of Titian, Aretino, and Sansovino’, in Titian: His World and Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), pp. 73–118. 2 2 Monika Schmitter, ‘The Quadro da Portego in Sixteenth-century Venetian Art’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxiv/3 (2011), pp. 693–751. 23 Flaminio Gualdoni, Trompe l’oeil (Milan, 2008), p. 11; Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London, 1990), p. 23. 2 4 Attributed to Seneca the Orator in Stephen Bann, True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge, 1989), p. 32. 25 Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ‘VV and Related Inscriptions in Giorgione, Titian, and Dürer’, Art Bulletin, lvii/3 (1975), pp. 346– 56; Giancarlo Fiorenza, ‘Pandolfo Collenuccio’s Specchio d’Esopo and the Portrait of the Courtier’, I Tatti Studies, ix (2001), pp. 63–87. 2 6 Luba Freedman, ‘The Schiavona: Titian’s Response to the Paragone between Painting and Sculpture’, Arte veneta, xli (1987), pp. 31–40; Fabio Barry, ‘Sculpture in Painting/Painting in Sculpture (Italy, c. 1485–c. 1660)’ in Sculpture in Painting, ed. Penelope Curtis (Leeds, 2009), pp. 13–19. 27 Mary D. Garrard, ‘“Art More Powerful than Nature”? Titian’s Motto Reconsidered’, in The Cambridge Companion to Titian, ed. Patricia Meilman (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 241–61. 2 8 Translation by Ted Hughes in Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses, trans. Ted Hughes (London, 1997), p. 147. 2 9 Discussed in Fabio Barry, ‘Painting in Stone: The Symbolism of Colored Marbles in the Visual Arts and Literature from Antiquity until the Enlightenment’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2011, p. 58. 3 0 On Titian and ‘breathing marbles’ see Joris Van Gastel, Il Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-century Rome (Chicago, il, 2013), pp. 137–40.

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References

31 Freedman, ‘The Schiavona’, p. 31. 32 Bernard Berenson cited in Inganni ad arte. Meraviglie del trompe-l’oeil

dall’antichità al contemporaneo, ed. Amanda Giusti (Florence, 2009), p. 114; Richard J. Betts, ‘Titian’s Portrait of Filippo Archinto in the Johnson Collection’, Art Bulletin, xlix/1 (1967), pp. 59–61; James Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left–Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford, 2008), pp. 115–22, respectively. 33 Paul Hills, ‘Titian’s Veils’, Art History, xxix/5 (2006), p. 772. 34 Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, ‘Apelles Redivivus’, in Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann, ed. Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York, 1964), p. 168. 35 In its frame, it measures 149.2 × 122.6 cm compared to the Met portrait at 118.1 × 94 cm. 36 Bann, True Vine, p. 34; Helen Morales, ‘The Torturer’s Apprentice: Parrhasius and the Limits of Art’, in Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jaś Elsner (Cambridge, 1996), p. 186. 37 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. ix: Books 33–35, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 310–11.

1 Touch Me! Touch Me Not! 1 Marin Sanudo, Venice. Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance 2

3 4 5 6

Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White (Baltimore, md, 2008), p. 174. Noted by Rona Goffen, ‘Wives and Mothers: Adultery, Madness, and Marital Misery in Titian’s Paduan Frescoes’, in Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto, 1996), p. 232. Antonio Morassi, Tiziano: Gli affreschi della Scuola del Santo a Padova (Milan, 1956), p. 18, n. 1; Creighton Gilbert, ‘Some Findings of Early Works of Titian’, Art Bulletin, lxii/1 (1980), pp. 71–3. Sergio Rossetti Morosini, ‘New Findings in Titian’s Fresco Technique at the Scuola del Santo’, Art Bulletin, lxxxi/1 (1999), pp. 163–4. Sicco Polentone (c. 1435) in Goffen, ‘Wives and Mothers’, p. 238, n. 4. Stella Mary Newton, The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (Aldershot, 1988), p. 142.

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7 On istoria, see Anthony Grafton, ‘Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s

Terminology in Context’, I Tatti Studies, viii (1999), pp. 37–68.

8 According to legend, these imperial foot soldiers originally wore

9 1 0 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

the tattered clothes of their defeated enemies as trophies before the look became incorporated as a stylistic feature (see John Richards, Landsknecht Soldier, 1486–1560 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 30–50). Discussed in Una Roman d’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge, 2005), p. 20. Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (London, 2001), p. 175. Aretino quoted in D’Elia, The Poetics, p. 197, n. 79: ‘che havarebbe potuto movere a piangere le herbe e le piante’. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irvin Lavin (Cambridge, 1997), p. 96. See Iain Fenlon, ‘Petrucci between Venice and Fossombrone’, in Venezia 1501: Petrucci e la stampa musicale, ed. Iain Fenlon and Patrizia dalla Vecchia (Venice, 2001), pp. 26–7; Joël Dugot, ‘The Correr Collection and Instrument Manufacture in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Venice’, Art and Music in Venice from the Renaissance to the Baroque, exh. cat., Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal and Portland Art Museum, Portland (New Haven, ct, 2013), pp. 142–3; Patricia Egan, ‘“Concert” Scenes in Musical Paintings of the Italian Renaissance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xiv/2 (1961), pp. 184–95; Mina Tieri, ‘Presenze musicali nelle opera di Tiziano’, Tiziano Cadorinus: Celebrazioni in onore di Tiziano, Pieve di Cadore, 1576–1976: Atti di congresso, ed. Ugo Fasolo and Michelangelo Muraro (Vicenza, 1982), pp. 165–70. Judith Dundas, ‘A Titian Enigma’, Artibus et Historiae, vi/12 (1985), pp. 39–55. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York, 1994), pp. 1–2. W. H. Auden, ‘The Price’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, 2007), pp. 154–5. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London, 1987), p. 310. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, ca, 2004), pp. 85–7.

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References

19 Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried (Bloomington,

in, 1954), p. 140; for the Italian original: Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani (Venice, 1553), p. 82. 2 0 On this imagery and on the term fistula, see Iain Fenlon, ‘Music in Italian Renaissance Paintings’, in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. David Fallows and Tess Knighton (London, 1992), p. 194; Patricia Simons, ‘Visual Humor in a Tale by Poggio Bracciolini: Another View’, Sources: Notes in the History of Art, xxviii/3 (2009), p. 2. 21 Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. iii: The Mythological and Historical Paintings (London, 1975), p. 18, n. 99. 2 2 Franchino Gaffurio, The Theory of Music, trans. Walter Kurt Kreyszig (New Haven, ct, 1993), p. 5. 23 Ibid., p. 15. 2 4 See Nancy Siraisi, ‘The Music of Pulse in the Writings of Italian Academic Physicians (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries)’, Speculum, l (1975), pp. 689–710; Dale Bonge, ‘Gaffurius on Pulse and Tempo: A Reinterpretation’, Musica Disciplina, xxxvi (1982), pp. 167–74; Ephraim Segerman, ‘Tempo and Tactus after 1500’, in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows, pp. 337–44; Jacomien Prins, ‘The Music of the Pulse in Marsilio Ficino’s Timaeus Commentary’, in Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King and Claus Zittel (Leiden, 2012), pp. 393–413. 25 Nancy Siraisi, Medicine and the Italian Universities: 1250–1600 (Leiden, 2001), p. 121. 2 6 Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia (Milan, 1990), p. 238. 27 Dundas, ‘A Titian Enigma’, p. 52 (on Poussin) and pp. 41–3 (on Eros and Thanatos). 2 8 Katelijne Schiltz, Music and Riddle Culture in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2015), p. 43. 2 9 Mario Brunetti, ‘Una strana interpretazione del Concerto della Galleria Pitti’, Rivista di Venezia, xiv (1935), pp. 119–24. 3 0 Hilliard T. Goldfarb, ‘Some Observations on The Interrupted Concert by Titian and Developments in His Art about 1511–12’, Art and Music in Venice from the Renaissance to the Baroque, exh. cat., Montréal

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31

32 33

34

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Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal and Portland Art Museum, Portland (New Haven, ct, 2013), p. 120; Antonio Mazzotta, ‘Gabriele Veneto e un ritratto dimenticato di Giovanni Bellini’, Prospettiva, cxxxiv–cxxxv (2009), p. 10. For a summary of interpretations see David Alan Brown, ‘Portraits of Men’, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (New Haven, ct, 2006), pp. 264–7. Jane Hatter, ‘Col tempo: Musical Time, Aging and Sexuality in 16th-century Venetian Paintings’, Early Music, xxxix/1 (2011), p. 6. Titian’s ‘musical paintings’ emerge from the same experimental milieu as Adrian Willaert and Gioseffo Zarlino, who were instrumental in the development of polyphonic and contrapuntal composition in Venice during the 1520s and 1550s. A parallel might be drawn, too, between the cross-fertilization of trends in poetry and music in this period. See Rebecca Edwards, ‘From Aaron to Zarlino: Music Theorists in the Social and Cultural Matrix of Sixteenth-century Venice’, in A Companion to Music in Sixteenth-century Venice, ed. Kathelijne Schiltz (Leiden, 2018), pp. 345–68; Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, ca, 1995). Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 163–4 (emphasis in original).

2 Possessing Nature 1 For a summary of the inconclusive literature on this painting see

Maria Grazia Bernardini, ‘L’Amor Sacro e Profano nella storia della critica’, Tiziano. Amor Sacro e Amor Profano, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (Milan, 1995), pp. 35–51. 2 Chronicled in Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630, ed. David S. Chambers, Jennifer Fletcher and Brian S. Pullan (Toronto, 2001), pp. 89–90. 3 Pietro Bembo, History of Venice, trans. Robert W. Ulery Jr (Cambridge, 2008–9), vol. ii, p. 273. 4 Luigi da Porto, Lettere storiche scritte dall’anno 1509, al 1512, da L. da Porto, Vicentino, primo autore della celebre novella Giulietta e Romeo (Venice, 1832), p. 133: ‘Vedevansi le loro donne, come più degli uomini tenere

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e dilicate, essere dal dolore d’una in un’altra agonia trasportate e risentite, scapigliarsi, battersi gl’innocenti petti, e con sì pietose voci gridare che arebbono ad aver di loro pietà mosso qual più crudel core avesse orso o tigre giammai; molte delle quali aveva io poc’ anzi per molto oro lucenti ed adorne in Padova come gran matrone vedute.’ 5 Marin Sanudo, Venice. Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White (Baltimore, md, 2008), pp. 124–5. 6 Cited in Antonio Bonardi, ‘I Padovani ribelli alla Repubblica di Venezia (a. 1500-1530)’, Miscellanea di storia veneta, ii/8 (1902), p. 401. 7 Bembo, History of Venice, vol. iii, pp. 60–61: ‘this act was regarded by many as rather too severe [aliquanto acerbior] and foreign to the temper of the times.’ 8 Da Porto, Lettere, p. 131: ‘Ma io non posso fare a meno di scrivervi parte a parte l’ordine della infelicissima morte de’ quattro Padovani, acciò che il cuore di Vostra Signorìa senta di quella pietà che ha trafitto il mio.’ 9 Ibid., pp. 129, 134: ‘Sono molti che dicono, questi nobili padovani essere morti a torto’; ‘Spettacolo agli occhi di ciascun riguardante sì miserabile e lagrimoso che, non che degli altri, ma gli stessi occhi de’ Viniziani riguardandolo non potevano rattenere le lagrime.’ 1 0 Ibid., p. 135. 11 Beverly Louise Brown, ‘Picturing the Perfect Marriage: The Equilibrium of Sense and Sensibility in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love’, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, 2008), p. 239; Rona Goffen, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love: Individuality and Sexuality in a Renaissance Marriage Picture’, in Titian 500: Studies in the History of Art, ed. Joseph Manca (Hanover, nh, 1993), p. 143, n. 47. 12 Tommaso Garzoni cited in Doretta Davanzo Poli, ‘L’abbigliamento femminile Veneto nel primo Cinquecento’, Tiziano. Amor Sacro e Amor Profano, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (Milan, 1995), p. 157. 13 Robert Freyhan, ‘Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,

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xi (1948), pp. 68–86. On the colour symbolism of the costumes, see Davanzo Poli, ‘L’abbigliamento femminile’, pp. 158–9. 14 Marin Sanudo, I Diarii di Marino Sanuto (Bologna, 1837), vol. xviii, p. 199: ‘Non voglio restar di scriver una cossa notanda: come Nicolò Aurelio secretario dil Consejo di x è maridado in una fia fo dil Bertuzi Bagaroto, che fo apichato, vedoa, fo moglie di Francesco Lombardo [sic], qual à bona dota, et par habi auto licentia dal Principe, Consieri e Cai di x; tamen di questo molto se parloe.’ 15 Alice Wethey thought she saw the Bagarotto stemma at the centre of the silver fluted bowl (Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. iii: The Mythological and Historical Paintings (London, 1975), p. 177), but this identification was called into question after the painting was cleaned (Bernardini, ‘L’Amor Sacro e Profano’, p. 35). 16 Goffen, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love’, p. 132. 17 Ibid., p. 124. 18 Aurelio quoted ibid., p. 133 (see also pp. 133–8 for a transcription of the three wills). 19 Furthermore, he detailed that his father had wanted to leave Padua when the imperial forces arrived, but that he had been instructed by the Venetian government to stay in the city and report on enemy movements, which caused Bertuccio great sorrow (Bonardi, ‘I Padovani ribelli’, pp. 602–4). 2 0 Maria Luisa Ricciardi, ‘L’Amor sacro e profane. Un ulteriore tentativo di sciogliere l’enigma’, Notizie da Palazzo Albani, xv/1 (1986), p. 41; Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (London, 2001), p. 187. 21 Giles Robertson, ‘Honour, Love and Truth, an Alternative Reading of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love’, Renaissance Studies, ii/2 (1988), p. 279. 2 2 Ibid., pp. 275, 279. 23 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Siena, 1613), p. 346. 2 4 On the iconography of Justice see David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, nc, 2001), pp. 26–36. 25 Rebecca Zorach, ‘Despoiled at the Source’, Art History, xxii/2 (1999), p. 246. 2 6 Brown, ‘Picturing the Perfect Marriage’, p. 240.

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27 Ovid, Fasti, trans. Sir James George Frazer (Cambridge, 1989), p. 197.

2 8 In August 1523 Aurelio would be appointed Canzelier Grande, the

highest post that could be held by a cittadino. He was immediately embroiled in a scandal the following summer and was exiled to Treviso in 1524. After Aurelio’s death in 1531 Laura remained unmarried (as Aurelio had wished in his will) and returned to live in Padua (Goffen, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love’, p. 143. n. 53). 2 9 Diario Ferrarese dall’anno 1409 al 1502 di autori incerti, ed. Giuseppe Pardi (Bologna, 1937), p. 276. 3 0 Discussed in Christine Shaw, ‘Alexander vi, Lucrezia Borgia, and Her Marriage to Alfonso d’Este’, jacobus, xxix–xx (2005), p. 225. 31 Bernardino Zambotto in Diario Ferrarese dall’anno 1476 sino al 1504, ed. Giuseppe Pardi (Bologna, 1937), p. 313. 32 Bernardino Zambotto and Niccolò Cagnolo quoted in Laura Laureati, ‘Da Borgia a Este: due vite in quanant’anni’, in Lucrezia Borgia, ed. Laura Laureati (Ferrara, 2002), p. 39. 33 Paolo Giovio, La vita di Alfonso da Este Duca di Ferrara (Florence, 1553), p. 161, makes this point in describing Lucrezia as ‘assai felicemente feconda’. 34 Catullus quoted in Rebecca Armstrong, Cretan Women: Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 217–18. 35 Catullus quoted in Armstrong, Cretan Women, pp. 203–4. 36 Knox’s commentary in Ovid, Heroides: Selected Epistles, ed. Peter E. Knox (Cambridge, 1995), p. 235. 37 On the bacchanals see Charles Hope, ‘The “Camerini d’Alabastro” of Alfonso d’Este’, Burlington Magazine, cxiii (1971), pp. 641–50, 712–21; Dana Goodgal, ‘The Camerino of Alfonso i d’Este’, Art History, i (1978), pp. 162–90; Görel Cavalli-Björkman, ‘Camerino d’Alabastro: A Renaissance Room in Ferrara’, Bulletin of the Nationalmuseum Stockholm, xi (1987), pp. 69–90. 38 Ovid, Ovid’s Heroines, trans. Clare Pollard (Tarset, 2013), p. 69. 39 Correspondence discussed in Cecil Gould, The Studio of Alfonso d’Este and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne: A Re-examination of the Chronology of the Bacchanals and of the Evolution of One of Them (London, 1969). 4 0 Noted in Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times (London, 1877), vol. i, pp. 258–9.

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41 Alfonso and Prosperi quoted in Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (London, 2004), p. 365.

4 2 The Portrait of Laura de’ Dianti from the early 1520s is now in the H. Kisters Collection, Kreuzlingen.

43 The duke’s librarian Agostino Mosti quoted in Tim Shepherd, Echoing Helicon: Music, Art, and Identity in the Este Studioli, 1440–1530 (Oxford, 2014), pp. 111–12. 4 4 Jill Dunkerton and Marika Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique before c. 1540: National Gallery Technical Bulletin (London, 2013), p. 76. 45 On the Renaissance classification of large cats, see Warren Tresidder, ‘The Cheetahs in Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”’, Burlington Magazine, cxxiii/941 (1981), pp. 481–5. 4 6 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London, 1906), vol. i, pp. xli–xlii (preface to the second edition). 4 7 On medical botany see Agnes Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution. A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670 (Cambridge, 1912); Frank J. Anderson, An Illustrated History of Herbals (New York, 1977); Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Tradition (London, 2000). 4 8 On medical botany in the Veneto see the collected essays in Di Sana pianta. Erbari e taccuini di sanità. Le radici storiche della nuova farmacologia, ed. Rolando Bussi, exh. cat., Abbazia Benedettina di Praglia, Padua (Modena, 1988); Cathleen Hoeniger, ‘The Illuminated Tacuinum sanitatis Manuscripts from Northern Italy ca. 1380–1400: Sources, Patrons, and the Creation of a New Pictorial Genre’, in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550, ed. Jean Ann Givens, Karen Reeds and Alain Touwaide (Farnham, 2006), pp. 51–82. 4 9 Herbarium apulei 1481 / Herbolario volgare 1522, ed. Erminio Caprotti and William T. Stearn (Milan, 1979), vol. i, pp. 73–4. 5 0 Marcel de Cleeve and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe (Ghent, 2003), vol. i, pp. 645–51. 51 Mattioli quoted ibid., vol. ii, p. 189. 52 Regarding the pharmacological symbolism of Titian’s flowers, see also Anthony Colantuono, Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola’s Seasons of Desire (Farnham, 2010), pp. 75–9; Colantuono sees the Bacchus and Ariadne as an image of the Duke falling in love with his new mistress.

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53 De Cleeve and Lejeune, Compendium, vol. ii, p. 283. 54 Celia Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (London, 2011), p. 50;

Jan de Konig, ‘Lo sviluppo della botanica nel xvi secolo’, in L’Orto botanico di Padova, 1545–1995, ed. Alessandro Minelli (Venice, 1995), p. 18 notes that African plants were being brought back to botanical collections by 1487, Japanese species had reached Italy by 1542, and from the 1550s onward European naturalists had access to ‘una flora mondiale’. 55 Peter Murray Jones, ‘Image, Word, and Medicine in the Middle Ages’, in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, ed. Givens, Reeds and Touwaide, p. 15. 56 Oreste Mattirolo’s classification discussed in Guido Moggi, ‘Le piante nella pittura italiana dei secoli xv e xvi: problem e metodi di identificazione botanica’, in Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfram Prinz and Andreas Bayer (Weinheim, 1987), p. 62. 57 David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven, ct, 1994), pp. 245–59. 58 Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘Image and Text in Natural History, 1500–1700’, in The Power of Images in Early Modern Science, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre, Jürgen Renn and Urs Schoepflin (Basel, 2003), p. 143 (emphasis mine). 59 See Sashiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago, il, 2012), chapters 5–6. 6 0 Discussed in Richard Palmer, ‘Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. A. Wear, R. K. French and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 112–13. 61 Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, il, 2006), pp. 30–34. 62 Sansovino cited in Tudy Sammartini and Giulia Volpato, Il giardino di Tiziano (Venice, 2013), p. 9. 63 See Palmer, ‘Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice’, pp. 100–117; Louisa C. Matthew, ‘“Vendecolori a Venezia”: The Reconstruction of a Profession’, Burlington Magazine, cxliv/1196 (2002), pp. 680–86; Barbara H. Berrie and Louisa C. Matthew, ‘Venetian “Colore”:

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Artists at the Intersection of Technology and History’, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Washington, dc (New Haven, ct, 2006), pp. 301–9; Louisa C. Matthew and Barbara H. Berrie, ‘Memoria de colori che bisognino torre a vinetia: Venice as a Centre for the Purchase of Painters’ Colours’, in Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700, ed. Jo Kirby, Susan Nash and Joanna Cannon (London, 2010), pp. 245–52. 64 Collenuccio quoted in Palmer, ‘Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice’, pp. 102–3. See also Filippo de Vivo, ‘Pharmacies as Centres of Communication in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, xxi/4 (2007), pp. 505–21. 65 Berrie and Matthew, ‘Venetian “Colore”’, p. 302. 6 6 Concerning pigments in this painting see Arthur Lucas and Joyce Plesters, ‘Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, ii (1978), pp. 40–42; Dunkerton and Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique before c. 1540, pp. 72–6. 6 7 Riley quoted in Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art (London, 1995), p. 23. 6 8 Alberti quoted in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy: A Primer in the Social history of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1988), pp. 16–17, who would refer to this transition as the decisive switch in the history of painting from gold to brush. 6 9 Anna Jameson, Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals (New York, 1846), p. 8.

3 Babies and Fur 1 Paul Gsell quoted in Ayers Bagley, ‘“Miniature Adults” or Portraits of an Educational Ideal?’, Educational Studies, ix/4 (1979), p. 368; see https://uglyrenaissancebabies.tumblr.com. 2 Aretino quoted in Joris Van Gastel, Il Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-century Rome (Chicago, il, 2013), p. 137. 3 Anthony Colantuono, ‘Titian’s Tender Infants: On the Imitation of Venetian Painting in Baroque Rome’, I Tatti Studies, iii (1989), pp. 211–15. 4 Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavacaselle, Titian: His Life and Times (London, 1877), vol. i, p. 340.

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5 For a summary of the interpretations see Lisa Zeitz, Tizian, Teurer Freund: Tizian und Federico Gonzaga, Kunstpatronage in Mantua im 16. Jahrhundert (Petersberg, 2000), pp. 50–51. 6 Filippo Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings (London, 2001), p. 147. 7 Yvonne Hackenbroch, Renaissance Jewellery (New York, 1979), p. 17. 8 Federico quoted (in Italian) in Diane H. Bodart, Tiziano e Federico ii Gonzaga. Storia di un rapporto di committenza (Rome, 1998), pp. 259, 326; 298; 305, 295. 9 Bodart, Tiziano e Federico ii Gonzaga, p. 255; Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. i: The Religious Paintings (London, 1969), p. 17. 1 0 Mario Equicola, Dell’historia di Mantova (Mantua, 1610), p. 207. 11 Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 28–31, 125, n. 42. 12 Giacomo Calandra cited ibid., pp. 33–4. 13 Discussed in Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, pp. 34–6. 14 Rodolfo Signorini, ‘A Dog Named Rubino’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xli (1978), p. 318, n. 14. 15 John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges: The Diversities, the Names, the Natures, and the Properties (London, 1576), pp. 20–21: ‘These dogges are litle, pretty, proper, and fyne, and sought for to satisfie the delicatenesse of daintie dames, and wanton womens wills, instruments of folly for them to play and dally withall, to tryfle away the treasure of time, to withdraw their mindes from more commendable exercises, and to content their corrupted concupiscences with vaine disport (A selly shift to shunne yrcksome ydlnesse). These puppies the smaller they be, the more pleasure they prouoke, as more meete play fellowes for minsing mistrisses to beare in their bosoms.’ 16 Cecil Gould, Titian As Portraitist (London, 1976), p. 12. 17 On Giulio, Aretino and Mantua, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, nj, 1999). 18 Gould, Titian as Portraitist, p. 13. 19 Patrick Reuterswärd, ‘The Dog in the Humanist’s Study’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, l/2 (1981), pp. 53–69. 2 0 On zibellini see Hackenbroch, Renaissance Jewellery, pp. 29–30; Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, ‘Weasels and Pregnancy in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies, xv/2 (2001), pp. 172–87. Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park,

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pa, 1995), p. 88 suggests the zibellino in the image may have been ‘a jeweler’s “portrait”’ of the duchess’ pet. 21 Reynolds quoted in David Rosand, ‘Titian and the Critical Tradition’, in Titian: His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), p. 34. 2 2 Aretino quoted in Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, vol. i, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan, 1957), p. 218: ‘la natura è per giurare che tale effigie non è finta, se l’arte vuol dire, che ella non sia viva. Lodarei il cagnuolo accarezzato da lei se lo exclamar la prontezza, che lo move, bastasse. E la conchiudo ne lo stupore che, circa ciò, mi toglie le parole di bocca.’ 23 Régine Gautier and Fernande Harnist, L’Épagneul nain continental. Chien des Rois (Martisserre, 1996), p. 21. 2 4 Noted in Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. ii: The Portraits (London, 1971), p. 142. 25 Luba Freedman, ‘Titian’s Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi: The State Portrait of a Child’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, xxxi (1989), pp. 165–80. 2 6 Laurel Reed, ‘Art, Life, Charm and Titian’s Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi’, in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin, 2005), p. 368; Brian D. Steele, ‘Titian’s Clarissa Strozzi: The Infant as Ideal Bride’, in The Early Modern Child in Art and History, ed. Matthew Knox Averett (London, 2015), p. 156; David Jaffé in Tiziano, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2003), p. 370. 27 Freedman, ‘Titian’s Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi’, p. 179. 2 8 Cicero, De Philosophia (Venice, 1541), pp. 71–2. 2 9 These concepts were developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923). 3 0 David Rosand, Titian (New York, 1978), pp. 112–13. 31 In a letter dated 6 August 1530 between two secretaries, Benedetto Agnello and Giacomo Calandra, Titian was described as bereft and unable to work: ‘Il nostro maestro Ticiano è tutto sconsolato per la morte di sua moglie che fu sepelita hieri, lui m’ha detto che per il travaglio in che l’è stato per la infirmità de ditta sua moglie, non ha potuto lavorare al retratto de la signora Cornelia, né al quadro delle nude, ch’el fa per il nostro Illustrissimo Signor, qual serà una bella

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References

cosa et crede di haverlo fornito per tutto il presente mese’ (Bodart, Tiziano e Federico ii Gonzaga, p. 218).

4 Lightness and Weight 1 The Entombment measures 148 × 212 cm, larger, for instance, than the

Noli me tangere (110.5 × 91.9 cm) and Madonna of the Rabbit (71 × 87 cm).

2 Katz quoted in Reading Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (New York, 2012), p. 187.

3 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh 4

5 6

7 8

9 1 0 11 12

(London, 1996), pp. 10, 7, 12. Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. i: The Religious Paintings (London, 1969), p. 127; Bruno Passamani, ‘Tiziano, Averoldi Brescia. Il polittico di San Nazaro tappa nodale nell’arte di Tiziano e polo catalizzatore per la pittura bresciana del primo Cinquecento’, in Il polittico Averoldi di Tiziano restaurato, exh. cat., Monastero di San Salvatore-Santa Giulia, Brescia (1992), p. 10. On Michelangelo’s signature see Eileen June Wang, ‘Michelangelo’s Signature’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xxxv/2 (2004), pp. 447–73. The copy in SS Giovanni e Paolo is attributed now to Nicolò Cassana; see Giuseppe Pavanello, La Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo: pantheon della Serenissima (Venice, 2013); Patricia Meilman, Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, 2000), appendix iv. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston de Vere (London, 1996), vol. ii, p. 787. Turner quoted in David Blayney Brown, ‘Commentary on Titian’s “St Peter Martyr” (inscription by Turner) 1802’, J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours (London, 2012), www.tate.org. uk/art. Carlo Ridolfi, The Life of Titian, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (University Park, pa, 1996), p. 78. Giuseppe Cadorin, Dello amore ai veneziani di Tiziano Vecellio (Venice, 1833), p. 30. David Kim, ‘Introduction’, in Matters of Weight: Force, Gravity, and Aesthetics, ed. David Kim (Berlin, 2013), pp. 9–10. David Rosand, ‘So-and-so Reclining on Her Couch’, Titian 500: Studies in the History of Art, ed. Joseph Manca (Hanover, nh, 1993),

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pp. 109–10, 105, 107; see also Antonio Paolucci, ‘La “donna nuda” e altre storie sulla commessa della Venere di Urbino’, Venere svelata. La Venere di Urbino di Tiziano, exh. cat., Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2003), p. 62. 13 See letters (from March to May 1538) between Guidobaldo and his mother in Georg Gronau, Documenti artistici urbinati (Florence, 1936), pp. 93–4. 14 Rona Goffen, ‘Sex, Space, and Social History’, in Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’, ed. Rona Goffen (Cambridge, 1997), p. 68 also notes the resemblance of the dogs in the two paintings. 15 Rosand, ‘So-and-so’, p. 109. 16 Aretino quoted in Una Roman d’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge, 2005), p. 66. 17 Della Rovere quoted in Andrea Bayer, ‘From Cassone to Poesia: Paintings of Love and Marriage’, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, 2008), p. 232. 18 While scholars are in disagreement as to whether the Pitti painting is in fact Colonna’s panel, they agree that the ‘Pittitype’ corresponds with the ‘Colonna-type’; see Margaret Binotto, in Tiziano, exh. cat., Scuderie del Quirnale, Rome (Cinisello Balsamo, 2013), pp. 150–53. Gonzaga contacted Titian regarding the painting, but Marjorie Och, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Commission for a Mary Magdalene by Titian’, in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, mo, 2001), pp. 193–223, has argued that the Duke was acting as Colonna’s mundualdus (a male intermediary in business matters). 19 See Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (London, 2016). 2 0 See Lisa M. Rafanelli, ‘Michelangelo’s Noli me tangere for Vittoria Colonna, and the Changing Status of Women in Renaissance Italy’, in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, ed. Michelle Erhardt and Amy Morris (Leiden, 2012), pp. 223–48; Christian Kleinbub, ‘To Sow the Heart: Touch, Spiritual Anatomy, and Image Theory in Michelangelo’s Noli me tangere’, Renaissance Studies, lxvi/1 (2013), pp. 81–129; Alexander

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References

Nagel, ‘Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna’, Art Bulletin, lxxix/4 (1997), pp. 647–68. 21 Gonzaga in a letter to Titian (5 March 1531) quoted in Monika Ingenhoff-Danhäuser, Maria Magdalena: Heilige und Sünderin in der italienischen Renaissance (Tübingen, 1984), p. 86. 2 2 Benedetto Agnello in a letter to Federico Gonzaga (11 March 1531) quoted in Ingenhoff-Danhaäuser, Maria Magdalena, p. 86 ‘Esso M. Ticiano dice voler fare la detta Sta Ma Magdalena differente da quella che l’ha principiato.’ 23 Vasari, Lives, vol. ii, p. 795. 2 4 Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting/Museum, trans. Kenneth Rothwell Jr (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 179–81. On the variants, see Andrea Rothe, ‘Titian’s Penitent Magdalen in the J. Paul Getty Museum’, Studi Tizianeschi, i (2003), pp. 39–42. 25 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London, 1906), vol. ii, p. 274 and vol. v, p. 219. 2 6 Valori quoted in Och, ‘Vittoria Colonna’, p. 205. 27 Bernard Aikema, ‘Titian’s Mary Magdalene in the Palazzo Pitti: An Ambiguous Painting and its Critics’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lvii (1994), pp. 48–59 addresses this point from the perspective of a male viewer; Och, ‘Vittoria Colonna’ and Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, ‘Vittoria Colonna and Titian’s Pitti “Magdalene”’, Women’s Art Journal, xxiv/1 (2003), pp. 29–33 in contrast, consider the intended female viewer. 28 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (Middlesex, 1991), pp. 80–81: ‘Let [hair] twist around as if to tie itself in a knot, and wave upwards in the air like flames, let it weave beneath other hair and sometimes lift on one side and another.’ Leonardo quoted in Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci on Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A). Resassembled from the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270 and from the Codex Leicester (Berkeley, ca, 1964), p. 13: ‘Observe the motion of the surface of the water, which resembles that of hair, which has two motions, of which one depends on the weight of the hair, the other on the direction of the curls; thus the water forms eddying whirlpools, one part of which is due to the impetus of the principal current and the other to the incidental motion and return flow.’

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2 9 Johannes Indagine, Chiromance and physiognomie par le regard des membres

de l’homme (Lyon, 1549), p. 131: ‘Les cheveux ne sont autre chose, sinon une vapeur chaude et seiche, espaisse, serrée et seichée par l’air qui est autour, et à l’environ’; Agnolo Firenzuola, Dialogo della bellezza delle donne (Venice, 1552), p. 25: ‘io non gli vidi molto spiegare à venti ad alcuna, che è una malfatta cosa, percioche e sono un grandissimo ornamento della belleza, e da natura sono creati per una evaporatione delle cose superflue del celebro, & delle altre parti del capo.’ 3 0 Luigini quoted in Mary Rogers, ‘The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-century Painting’, Renaissance Studies, ii/1 (1988), p. 63. 31 Giovan Battista della Porta, Natural Magick (London, 1669), p. 238. 32 Indagine, Chiromance, p. 132: ‘Aussi les Coleriques sont veluz, & cheveluz, pour cause de leur chaleur & humeurs adustes: sinon en ceaux esquelz abonde trop grande chaleur. Aucuns cheveux sont crespes & retors, laquelle chose les Medecins attribuent aux pores du corps: lesquelz rompuz & ouverts, disposent en tel ordre la chevelure.’ 33 Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Abigail Brundin (Chicago, il, 2005), pp. 74–5. 34 Vasari quoted by Miguel Falomir Faus in Der späte Tizian und die Sinnlichkeit der Maleri, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (2007), p. 477. 35 See Wilhelm Suida, ‘Titian’s Earliest Portrait of Aretino’, Burlington Magazine, lxxv/436 (1939), pp. 112–15; Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, pa, 1995), Chapter Two in particular. 36 Aretino quoted in Freedman, Titian’s Portraits, p. 67. 37 Aretino cited in Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500–1800 (New Haven, ct, 2007), p. 91. 38 See Augusto Gentili, ‘Tiziano e il non finito’, Venezia cinquecento, ii/4 (1992), pp. 93–127; Augusto Gentili, ‘Problemi dell’ultimo Tiziano: Finito e non finito tra variazioni e perdite di senso’, Tiziano: L’ultimo atto, exh. cat., Palazzo Crepadona, Belluno and Palazzo della Magnifica Comunità, Pieve di Cadore

261

References

(Milan, 2007), pp. 135–43; Paula Carabell, ‘Finito and Non-finito in Titian’s Last Paintings’, res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, xxviii (1995), pp. 78–93. 39 Aretino quoted in Fritz Saxl, Lectures (London, 1957), vol. i, p. 168. 4 0 Dolce quoted in Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto, 2000), p. 195. 41 Lodovico Mucchi, ‘Radiografie di opere di Tiziano’, Arte veneta, xxxi (1977), p. 303. 4 2 Luba Freedman, Titian’s Independent Self-portraits (Florence, 1990), pp. 73–7 compares this pose to images of the Evangelist, the Church Fathers and the ‘inspired scholar’. 43 Jaffé in Tiziano, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2003), p. 374. 4 4 Niccolò Franco, Delle rime di M. Nicolo Franco contro Pietro Aretino (London, 1887), pp. xxii–xxv. 45 Sperone Speroni, Dialoghi (Venice, 1560), p. 24. 4 6 Antonio Persio quoted in Charles Hope, Titian (London, 1980), p. 170. 4 7 Marco Boschini quoted in Jodi Cranston, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings (University Park, pa, 2010), p. 8; see also Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 110–14 on the depiction of Titian’s hands. 4 8 Aretino quoted in Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan, 1957), vol. iii, p. 436: ‘e Tiziano/ Il senso de le cose ha nel pennello./ Forma paesi in rilievo sì bello,/ Che ne stupisce il d’apresso, e il lontano,/ Fa vivi, e pronti la sua dotta mano/ Ogni animale, ogni pesce, ogni uccello./ Le linee poi, ne i lor’ propri giri/ Sì ben’ tondeggia, che il Dose dipinto/ Par’ che parli, che pensi, & che respiri.’

5 The Sense of Things 1 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Idea of the Temple of Painting, trans. Jean Julia

Chai (University Park, pa, 2013), p. 85; Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del tempio della pittura (Milan, 1590), pp. 50–51. 2 Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. i: The Religious Paintings (London, 1969), pp. 21–32. Their first meeting took place in the

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9 1 0

11 12 13 14

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autumn of 1529 in Parma, but the emperor did not sit for a portrait at that time. Franco Brunello, The Art of Dyeing in the History of Mankind, trans. Bernard Hickey (Vicenza, 1973), pp. 182–94. Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’, Critical Inquiry, xxviii/1 (2001), pp. 121–3. Dench chose the painting as her one luxury item on bbc Radio 4: Desert Island Discs, www.bbc.co.uk, 17 April 1998. Francesco Sansovino, Sansovino’s Venice: A Translation of Francesco Tatti da Sansovino’s Guidebook to Venice of 1561, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, ct, 2017), p. 225. Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge, 2001), p. 101. On Shakespeare see Sean Benson, ‘“If I Do Prove Her Haggard”: Shakespeare’s Application of Hawking Tropes to Marriage’, Studies in Philology, ciii/2 (2006), pp. 186–207; on Dante (Paradiso, xix.34–6 and Purgatorio, xiii.70–72 and xix.64–9) see Daniela Boccassini, ‘Falconry as a Transmutative Art: Dante, Frederick ii, and Islam’, Dante Studies, cxxv (2007), pp. 157–82 and Matthew Knox Averett, ‘Becoming Giorgio Cornaro: Titian’s Portrait of a Man with a Falcon’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, lxxiv/4 (2011), p. 566. Calergi quoted in Maria Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, 2001), p. 15. See Hans J. Epstein, ‘The Origin and Earliest History of Falconry’, Isis, xxxiv/6 (1943), pp. 497–509; Federico ii. De Arte Venandi cum Avibus. L’art de la Chace des Oiseaus. Facsimile ed edizione critica del manoscritto fr. 12400 della Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Naples, 1995); Helen MacDonald, Falcon (London, 2016). Boccassini, ‘Falconry as a Transmutative Act’, p. 161. Giancarlo Malacarne, I signori del cielo: la falconeria a Mantova al tempo dei Gonzaga (Mantua, 2003), p. 156. The sale of falcons to Federico in 1534 and 1536 is noted in Averett, ‘Becoming Giorgio Cornaro’, p. 565 n. 34. On the Ca’ Corner della Ca’ Grande see Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, ct, 1975), pp. 132–46; Giandomenico Romanelli, Ca’ Corner della Ca’ Grande. Architettura e commitenza nella Venezia del Cinquecento

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(Venice, 1993); Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven, ct, 2004), pp. 37–40. 15 Such soirées were recounted in a letter from Francesco Priscianese to his friends in Rome; see Giorgio Padoan, ‘A casa di Tiziano, una sera d’agosto’, in Tiziano e Venezia (Vicenza, 1980), pp. 357–65; for an English translation of the letter see Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavacaselle, Titian: His Life and Times (London, 1877), vol. ii, pp. 40–41. 16 For the iconography of this monument see Sansovino, Sansovino’s Venice, p. 117. 17 Benson, ‘“If I Do Prove Her Haggard”’, p. 203. 18 La favola d’Adone is discussed in Carlo Caruso, Adonis: The Myth of a Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (New York, 2013), pp. 32–4. 19 Lodovico Dolce, Le trasformationi (Venice, 1570), p. 113: ‘Per Venere che ama Adone, puossi, secondo il Pontano, intender la terra che amando il Sole, si duole che da lei allontandosi vada al sottoposto Hemispero, di donde viene il verno che a guisa di cinghiale horrido e pieno di discontentezza, occide il suo Adone, cioè le sue amate bellezze. Il quale nel fine è converso in fiore, cioè al ritorno del Sole, ritornando i suoi ornamenti che apporta la Primavera.’ 2 0 Anthony Colantuono, ‘Titian’s Tender Infants: On the Imitation of Venetian Painting in Baroque Rome’, I Tatti Studies, iii (1989), pp. 214–15. 21 Richter quoted in Robert Storr and Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York, 2002), p. 65. Richter made five versions after Titian’s Annunciation: the first in dc is the least decomposed; the subsequent four in the Kunstmuseum in Basel are rendered in various states of complete formal and chromatic disintegration. 22 Lucia Collavo, ‘Vincenzo Scamozzi a casa di Tiziano’, Tiziano: L’ultimo atto, exh. cat., Palazzo Crepadona, Belluno and Palazzo della Magnifica Comunità, Pieve di Cadore (Milan, 2007), pp. 77–8, and Miguel Falomir Faus, Las Furias: Alegoria política y desafío artistico, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2014), pp. 161, 168, point out that Titian painted Tityus at least three times (Mary’s original version was lost in the late eighteenth century, the Prado version is an autograph replica that belonged previously to the

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Duke of El Infantado, and a third was seen by Vincenzo Scamozzi and Alessandro Vittoria in Titian’s studio on 13 July 1574); the composition of Tantalus is recorded in an engraving by Giulio Sanuto. 23 H. G. Koenigsberger, Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 2001), p. 125. 2 4 Mary of Hungary quoted in Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2002), p. 102. 25 Bob van den Boogert, ‘Macht en pracht: Het mecenaat van Maria van Hongarije’, in Maria van Hongarije : koningin tussen keizers en kunstenaars, 1508–1558, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent, Utrecht and Noordbrabants Museum, ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Zwolle, 1993), p. 285. 2 6 Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, pa, 1995), p. 125. 27 Mary cited in Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting (London, 2005), p. 79. 2 8 Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting, pp. 89–94; Falomir, Las Furias, pp. 159–62. 2 9 Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting, p. 95. 3 0 Van den Boogert, ‘Macht en pracht’, p. 337. 31 Jesus Urrea, Titian Prince of Painters, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Venice, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (Munich, 1990), p. 284. 32 Discussed in Fritz Saxl, Lectures (London, 1957), vol. i, p. 168. 33 Vargas quoted in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times, vol. i, p. 329. Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London, 2013), p. 152 is correct to question the authenticity of this anecdote, which is repeated always with slight differences by various sources. 34 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times, vol. ii, p. 265. 35 See, for instance, Marco Boschini, La Carta del navegar pitoresco, ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice, 1966), pp. 192–6, describing Titian’s Santo Spirito paintings and the Ferrarese Bacchanals. 36 Rodolfo Siviero, ‘Sulle opera d’arte italiane recuperate in Germania’, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, iii/1–2 (1948), p. 35: ‘Il 15 luglio

265

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scorso, concluse le trattative, ci fu ufficialmente annunziato dagli Alleati che una parte delle opere d’arte asportate dall’Italia, che sono quelle qui esposte, veniva restituita. Tra queste, come sapete, figurano molti capolavori: troppo lungo sarebbe sottolineare l’importanza di ciascuno per il patrimonio artistico nazionale. Basterà, prima di tutto, citare la Danae.’ 37 Cited in Roberto Zapperi, ‘Alessandro Farnese, Giovanni della Casa and Titian’s Danaë in Naples’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, liv (1991), p. 163; the original Italian is ‘una teatina’ (or a Theatine nun). 38 Lodovico Mucchi, ‘Radiografie di opere di Tiziano’, Arte veneta, xxxi (1977), pp. 300–301. On the repetition of Titian’s nudes see Maria H. Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles, ca, 2007), Chapter Two. 39 Zapperi, ‘Alessandro Farnese’, p. 166. 4 0 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (Middlesex, 1991), pp. 60–61. 41 Álvaro Soler del Campo, The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (Madrid, 2009), pp. 170–73. 4 2 Dolce quoted in Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto, 2000), pp. 114–15. 43 Lodovico Dolce, Libri tre di M. Lodovico Dolce ne i quali si tratta delle diverse sorti delle gemme (Venice, 1565), p. 19. 4 4 Blake de Maria, ‘Multifaceted Endeavors: Jewelry and Gemstones in Renaissance Venice’, in Reflections on Renaissance Venice: A Celebration of Patricia Fortini Brown, ed. Blake de Maria and Mary E. Frank (New York, 2013), p. 121. 45 Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, ct, 1997), pp. 2–3. 4 6 Ibid., pp. 7, 65. 4 7 Aretino quoted in Miguel Falomir Faus, Tiziano, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2003), p. 378. 4 8 Alfred Scharf, ‘Rubens’ Portraits of Charles v and Isabella’, Burlington Magazine, lxvi (1935), p. 259; Falomir, Tiziano, p. 378. 4 9 Now in the Fundación Casa de Alba, Madrid. 5 0 Dolce, Libri tre di M. Lodovico Dolce, pp. 60, 35. On early modern gemology in Italy see Annibale Mottana, ‘Italian Gemology during

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the Renaissance: A Step Toward Modern Mineralogy’, in The Origins of Geology in Italy, ed. Gian Battista Vai and W. Glen E. Caldwell (Boulder, co, 2006), pp. 1–21. 51 Dolce, Libri tre di M. Lodovico Dolce, p. 61; Albertus Magnus, The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, ed. Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman (Oxford, 1973), p. 44. 52 Alfonso x and Anselmus de Boot quoted in George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science, and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York, 1908), p. 311. 53 Kunz and Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl, pp. 23–4: Venice benefited from Eastern pearl trade in the Middle Ages, but the Habsburgs became wealthy from New World pearls, which ‘exceeded that of all other exports combined’. 54 Dolce, Libri tre di M. Lodovico Dolce, p. 60. 55 Girolamo Cardano cited in Mottana, ‘Italian Gemology’, p. 12.

6 Blood, Sweat and Tears 1 Original in Matteo Mancini, Tiziano e le corti d’Asburgo nei documenti degli archivi spagnoli (Venice, 1998), p. 402. 2 Original in Patricia Meilman, Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, 2000), p. 189.

3 Charles Hope cited in Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo,

4 5 6 7 8

Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven, ct, 2004), p. 463, n. 195; see also Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavacaselle, Titian: His Life and Times (London, 1877), vol. ii, p. 73. Kelley Helmstutler di Dio, Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (Farnham, 2011), pp. 81–2. Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, ct, 1997), p. 42. Jane E. Nash, Veiled Images: Titian’s Mythological Paintings for Philip ii (Cranbury, nj, 1985), p. 39. Francisco Tello de Sandoval quoted in Kamen, Philip of Spain, pp. 59, 325, n. 45. Quoted ibid., p. 63, a contemporary reported: ‘Placing herself at a window which overlooks the river [Mary] gave free rein to her grief by a flood of tears, nor did she once quit the window as long as [Philip] was in sight.’

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9 See Nash, Veiled Images regarding the cycle; Charles Fitzroy, The Rape

of Europa: The Intriguing History of Titian’s Masterpiece (London, 2015); Miguel Falomir Faus and Paul Joannides, ‘Dánae y Venus y Adonis: origen y evolución’, in Dánae y Venus y Adonis, las primeras «poesias» de Tiziano para Felipe ii, ed. Miguel Falomir Faus (Madrid, 2014), pp. 16–51, 60–74; and Jill Dunkerton and Marika Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique from 1540: National Gallery Technical Bulletin (London, 2015), pp. 64–87, for the Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. 1 0 Freud in Martin Gayford, ‘Artists on Art: Freud on Titian’, Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk, 22 December 2001: ‘I love many things about them. I like the way that the more you look at them, the more dogs you seem to find . . . These two Titians are intimate yet also grand’; Wallinger in Titian: Metamorphosis, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Art, London (2013), p. 28: ‘Titian tells the story with such wonderful economy in that the pictures have this flipping motion in which the two protagonists swap places, compositionally speaking, but certain things remain common. So Diana’s pose of raised arm and her coy-becoming-aggressive look is exactly the same as Actaeon’s gesture as he’s being turned into a stag.’ 11 Lodovico Dolce, Le trasformationi (Venice, 1570), p. 54. 12 Nash, Veiled Images, p. 34. 13 Perseus and Andromeda (183 × 199 cm), delivered to Philip in 1556; St Margaret and the Dragon (242 × 182 cm), commission first mentioned in 1552. 14 Giovan Battista della Porta, Ars Reminiscendi aggiunta L’Arte del Ricordare, ed. Raffaele Sirri, trans. Dorandino Falcone da Gioia (Naples, 1996), p. 79. 15 Ibid., pp. 72–3. 16 Augustine quoted in Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982), p. 29. 17 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 44. 18 William Shakespeare, The Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. Frederick S. Ellis (London, 1893), pp. 57, 60, 75. 19 Nicola Suthor, Augenlust bei Tizian: Zur Konzeption sensueller Malerei in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2004), p. 102. 2 0 Shakespeare, The Poems, p. 74.

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21 Eugène Delacroix, Journal of Delacroix, trans. Hubert Wellington (London, 1951), p. 67.

2 2 Dunkerton and Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique from 1540, p. 32. 23 Rebecca Zorach, ‘Despoiled at the Source’, Art History, xxii/2 (1999), p. 245.

2 4 Titian quoted in Dunkerton and Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique from 1540, p. 32.

25 Philip’s altarpiece was an adapted replica, commissioned around

1564 and completed in 1567, of an original that was painted for the Church of the Crocifieri in Venice (now the Gesuiti). 2 6 See Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500–1800 (New Haven, ct, 2007), pp. 92–4 for a survey of this literature. 27 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley, ca, 2004), p. 142. 2 8 See letters from Titian to Dieci Savi sopra alle Decime (28 June 1566), Pomponio (26 June 1568) and the Deputies of Brescia (31 July 1568) in Tiziano. L’epistolario, ed. Lionello Puppi (Florence, 2012), pp. 281–4, 307–8, 311–12. 2 9 Original in Mancini, Tiziano e le corti d’Asburgo, pp. 366–7. 3 0 The first (lost) version was for Maximilian ii; the second (now in the Prado) was made for Philip ii. 31 Pérez quoted in Kamen, Philip of Spain, p. 122. 32 See Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (Middlesex, 1983), pp. 472–80; Kelly de Vries, ‘A Tale of Venetian Skin: The Flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin’, in Flaying in the Pre-early World: Practice and Representation, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 62–7. 33 De Vries, ‘A Tale of Venetian Skin’, p. 51 notes that the material remains were confirmed when the urn was opened in 1961. 34 Iain Fenlon, ‘Lepanto: Le arti della celebrazione nella Venezia del Rinascimento’, in Crisi e rinnovamenti nell’autunno del Rinascimento a Venezia, ed. Vittore Branca and Carlo Ossola (Florence, 1991), p. 387. 35 They are listed by Diego Guzmán de Silva in a letter to Philip ii on 24 September 1575 (Mancini, Tiziano e le corti d’Asburgo, p. 422). 36 Miguel Falomir Faus in Tiziano, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2003), p. 411 notes that men of power such as

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Guidobaldo della Rovere and Antonio Pérez were impressed by the pomp and bombast and ordered replicas of the painting for their own collections. 37 Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. ii: The Portraits (London, 1971), p. 132. 38 Falomir, Tiziano, p. 411. 39 Moreno Villa cited in Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. ii, p. 132. 4 0 Concerning representations of the ‘Turk’ see Bronwen Wilson, ‘Reflecting on the Turk in Late Sixteenth-century Venetian Portrait Books’, Word and Image, xix/1–2 (2003), pp. 38–58; for the heterogeneous accounts of Lepanto see Christina Strunck, ‘The Barbarous and Noble Enemy: Pictorial Representations of the Battle of Lepanto’, in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, ed. James G. Harper (London, 2017), pp. 217–40. 41 For an overview of the interpretations see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, in Der späte Tizian und die Sinnlichkeit der Maleri, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (2007), pp. 500–501; Jutta Held, ‘Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: An Analysis of the Analyses’, Oxford Art Journal, xxxi/2 (2008), pp. 179–94. 4 2 Jaromír Neumann, Titian: The Flaying of Marsyas (London, 1962), p. 11. 43 Daniela Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe: Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians (Emsdetten, 2002), p. 300. 4 4 Hans Ost, Tizian-Studien (Cologne, 1992), p. 170. 45 Christopher Hitchens, Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger (London, 1997), p. 2. 4 6 Sydney Freedberg, ‘Il musicista punito’, fmr, xlv (1986), pp. 139–42. 47 Two notable exceptions are Daniela Bohde ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento’, in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 10–47 who considers it from the visual culture of anatomical representations and De Vries, ‘A Tale of Venetian Skin’ who situates it within military history. 4 8 See Benjamin Paul, ‘“And the Moon Has Started to Bleed”: Apocalypticism and Religious Reform in Venetian Art at the Time

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of the Battle of Lepanto’, in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, ed. James G. Harper (London, 2017), pp. 67–93 on ‘apocalyptic eschatology’. 4 9 Francesco Molino quoted in Paolo Preto, ‘Le Grandi paure di Venezia nel secondo ’500. Le Paure narurali (peste, carestie, incendi, terremoti)’, in Crisi e rinnovamenti nell’autunno del Rinascimento a Venezia, ed. Vittore Branca and Carlo Ossola (Florence, 1991), pp. 188–9: ‘e ciò dico per mostrare la sua veemenzia, che spezzati i catenacci o torti, non s’aprissero con infinita ruina di vetriale; ruppe eziando altre fabbriche; molte città vicine si risentirono a tale strepito e fino a Verona si vedeva il foco che brandiva per l’aere . . . m’imaginai esser giunto il giudizio universale.’ 5 0 Stephen Campbell, ‘Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: Thresholds of the Human and the Limits of Painting’, in Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (Oxford, 2016), p. 71. 51 Boschini quoted in David Rosand, ‘Titian and the Critical Tradition’, in Titian: His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), p. 24. 52 Ovid, Metamorophoses. Books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, 1916), vol. i, p. 315. 53 For a reading of paint as skin see especially: David Rosand, ‘Titian and the Eloquence of the Brush’, Artibus et Historiae, ii/3 (1981), pp. 85–96; Daniela Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe: Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians (Emsdetten, 2002); Jodi Cranston, ‘Theorising Materiality: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas’, in Titian: Materiality, Likeness, Istoria, ed. Joanna Woods-Marsden (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 5–15. 54 On the liver and music therapy see Jacomien Prins, ‘The Music of the Pulse in Marsilio Ficino’s Timaeus Commentary’, in Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King and Claus Zittel (Leiden, 2012), pp. 408–10. 55 Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book v: The Organs of Nutrition and Generation, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman (Novato, 2007), pp. 108, 113. 56 Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic (London, 1969), p. 171, n. 85 was appalled by its ‘gratuitous brutality’ and

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References

uncharacteristic ‘horror vacui’; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, 2003), p. 42 confessed: ‘I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting’; Arthur C. Danto, Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Berkeley, ca, 1997), p. 299 asserted: ‘very few can have seen Titian’s terrifying Flaying of Marsyas . . . and slept peacefully afterward.’ 57 Murdoch quoted in Jeffrey Meyer ‘Iris Murdoch’s “Marsyas”’, New Criterion, xxxi/6 (2013), p. 33. 58 Dolce, Le trasformationi, p. 70. 59 Ost, Tizian, pp. 155–9. 6 0 Titian quoted in Mancini, Tiziano e le corti d’Asburgo, pp. 246–7. 61 Iris Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (London, 1995), p. 64. 62 The white dog appears in the Kassel Cavalier, which Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. iii, p. 129, suggested was a portrait of Agabrio Serbelloni (d. 1580), a military architect for the Habsburgs; Ost, Tizian, pp. 49–66 proposed Gabriele Serbelloni, a soldier and military engineer. 63 On ricordi see Terisio Pignatti, ‘Abbozzi and Ricordi: New Observations on Titian’s Technique’, Titian 500: Studies in the History of Art, ed. Joseph Manca (Hanover, nh, 1993), pp. 72–83. 64 John Berger and Katya Andreadakis, ‘Titian as a Dog’, Threepenny Review, liv (1993), p. 7. 65 Statements to this effect appear in Aelian, On Animals. Books 6–11, trans. A. F. Scholfield (Cambridge, 1959), vol. ii, p. 341; Aristotle, History of Animals. Books 4–6, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, 1970), vol. ii, p. 311; Columella, On Agriculture. Books 5–9, trans, E. S. Forster and Edward H. Heffner (Cambridge, 1954), vol. ii, p. 315; Pliny the Elder, Natural History. Books 8–11, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, 1940), vol. iii, p. 107. 6 6 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. iii, pp. 319, 221, 345; Galen, Method of Medicine. Books 5–9, trans. Ian Johnston and G.H.R. Horsley (Cambridge, 2011), vol. ii, p. 305. 6 7 Plutarch, Moralia: The Roman Questions, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, 1936), p. 105.

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Coda: Gold Dust 1 Charles Hope, ‘A New Document about Titian’s Pietà’, in Sight and 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 11 12

Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians (London, 1994), p. 154. Raffaelo Borghini, Il Riposo (1584), ed. Mario Rosci (Milan, 1967), p. 529. Carlo Ridolfi, The Life of Titian Vecellio from Cadore, Painter and Knight, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (University Park, pa, 1997), pp. 137–8. ‘Le Salon de 1833’, Revue de Paris, xlix (1833), p. 55. Hope, ‘A New Document’, p. 154 underlined that funerals were not uncommon at the time despite Ridolfi’s claims. Christopher Nygren, ‘Titian’s Miracles: Artistry and Efficacy between the San Rocco Christ and the Accademia Pietà’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischesn Institutes in Florenz, lvii/3 (2015), pp. 328–31. For this discussion, see ibid. Hope, ‘A New Document’, p. 155. Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London, 2013), p. 9. Nygren, ‘Titian’s Miracles’, p. 339. Filippo Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings (London, 2001), p. 116. Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1550 (London, 1999), p. 207.

bibliographY

The bibliography on Titian is extensive. Full details of the scholarly studies consulted have been included in the References section. The following offers a representative list of key biographies and sources, exhibition catalogues, monographs, edited volumes and technical reports for further reading on Titian.

Biographies and Sources Boschini, Marco, La Carta del navegar pitoresco, ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice, 1966) Cadorin, Giuseppe, Dello amore ai veneziani di Tiziano Vecellio (Venice, 1833) Crowe, Joseph Archer, and Giovanni Battista Cavacaselle, Titian: His Life and Times, 2 vols (London, 1877) Hale, Sheila, Titian: His Life (London, 2012) Ridolfi, Carlo, The Life of Titian Vecellio from Cadore, Painter and Knight, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (University Park, pa, 1996) Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto, 2000) Tiziano: Le lettere, ed. Celso Fabbro (Pieve di Cadore, 1989) Tiziano: L’epistolario, ed. Lionello Puppi (Florence, 2012) Tizianello, Breve compendio della Vita di Tiziano Vecelli di Cadore (Venice, 1622) Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols, trans. Gaston de Vere (London, 1996)

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Exhibition Catalogues Agostini, Grazia, et al., eds, Tiziano nelle gallerie fiorentine: mostra documentaria e di restauro, exh. cat., Palazzo Pitti, Florence (1978) Biadene, Susanna, and Mary Yakush, eds, Titian Prince of Painters, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and Palazzo Ducale, Venice (Munich, 1990) Brown, David Alan, ed., Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (New Haven, ct, 2006) Falomir Faus, Miguel, ed., Tiziano, exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2003) Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, ed., Der späte Tizian und die Sinnlichkeit der Maleri, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (2007) Fogolari, Gino, ed., Mostra di Tiziano, exh. cat., Museo d’arte moderna Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (1935) Hope, Charles, and Jaffé, David, eds, Titian, exh. cat., The National Gallery, London (2003) Humfrey, Peter, Timothy Clifford, Aidan Weston-Lewis and Michael Bury, eds, The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections, exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (2004) Ilchman, Frederick, ed., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Musée du Louvre, Paris (New York, 2009) Laclotte, Michel, and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, eds, Le siècle de Titien: L’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris (1993) Muraro, Michelangelo, and David Rosand, eds, Tiziano e la silografia veneziana del Cinquecento, exh. cat., Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (Vicenza, 1976) Nitti, Patrizia, Tullia Carratù and Morena Costantini, Titien: Le pouvoir en face, exh. cat., Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (2006) Puppi, Lionello, ed., Tiziano: L’ultimo atto, exh. cat., Palazzo Crepadona, Belluno, and Palazzo della magnifica Comunità, Pieve di Cadore (Milan, 2007) Villa, Giovanni Carlo Federico, ed., Tiziano, exh. cat., Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (Cinisello Balsamo, 2013)

275

Bibliography

Monographs Bodart, Diane H., Tiziano e Federico ii Gonzaga: Storia di un rapporto di committenza (Rome, 1998) Bohde, Daniela, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe: Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians (Emsdetten, 2002) Checa Cremadas, Fernando, Tiziano y las cortes del Renacimiento (Madrid, 2013) Colantuono, Anthony, Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola’s Seasons of Desire (Farnham, 2010) Cranston, Jodi, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings (University Park, pa, 2010) D’Elia, Una Roman, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge, 2005) Freedman, Luba, Titian’s Independent Self-portraits (Florence, 1990) —, Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, pa, 1995) Gentili, Augusto, Da Tiziano a Tiziano: Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento (Milan, 1980) —, Tiziano (Milan, 2012) Goffen, Rona, Titian’s Women (London, 1997) Gould, Cecil, Titian As Portraitist (London, 1976) Hope, Charles, Titian (New York, 1980) Humfrey, Peter, Titian (New York, 2007) Joannides, Paul, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (London, 2001) Loh, Maria H., Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles, ca, 2007) Mancini, Matteo, Tiziano e le corti d’Asburgo nei documenti degli archivi spagnoli (Venice, 1998) Meilman, Patricia, Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, 2000) Nash, Jane E., Veiled Images: Titian’s Mythological Paintings for Philip ii (Philadelphia, pa, 1985) Nichols, Tom, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London, 2013) Ost, Hans, Tizian-Studien (Cologne, 1992) Pallucchini, Rodolfo, Tiziano, 2 vols (Florence, 1969) Panofsky, Erwin, Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic (London, 1969) Pedrocco, Filippo, Titian: The Complete Paintings (London, 2001)

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Puttfarken, Thomas, Titian and Tragic Painting (London, 2005) Rosand, David, Titian (New York, 1978) Suthor, Nicola, Augenlust bei Tizian: Zur Konzeption sensueller Malerei in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2004) Tagliaferro, Giorgio, Bernard Aikema, Matteo Mancini and Andrew John Martin, Le botteghe di Tiziano (Florence, 2010) Tietze, Hans, Titian: The Paintings and Drawings (New York, 1950) Von Rosen, Valeska, Mimesis und Selbstbezüglichkeit in Werken Tizians (Emsdetten, 1998) Wethey, Harold E., The Paintings of Titian, vol. i: The Religious Paintings (London, 1969) —, The Paintings of Titian, vol. ii: The Portraits (London, 1971) —, The Paintings of Titian, vol. iii: The Mythological and Historical Paintings (London, 1975) —, Titian and His Drawings with References to Giorgione and Some Close Contemporaries (Princeton, nj, 1986) Wolf, Norbert, I, Titian (Munich, 2006) Zapperi, Roberto, Tiziano, Paolo iii e i suoi nipote (Turin, 1990) Zeitz, Lisa, Tizian, Teurer Freund. Tizian und Federico Gonzaga, Kunstpatronage in Mantua im 16. Jahrhundert (Petersburg, 2000)

Edited Volumes Bortolatto, Luigina, and Giuseppe M. Pilo, eds, Tiziano dopo Tiziano: Induzioni e deduzioni dagli Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Treviso, 1991) Fasolo, Ugo, and Michelangelo Muraro, eds, Tiziano Cadorinus. Celebrazioni in onore di Tiziano, Pieve di Cadore, 1576–1976: Atti di congresso (Vicenza, 1982) Goffen, Rona, ed., Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ (Cambridge, 1997) Manca, Joseph, ed., Titian 500: Studies in the History of Art, xlv (Hanover, 1993) Meilman, Patricia, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Titian (Cambridge, 2004) Pallucchini, Rodolfo, ed., Tiziano e il Manierismo europeo (Florence, 1978) Rosand, David, ed., Titian: His World and His Legacy (New York, 1982) Tiziano Vecellio. Convegno indetto nel iv centenario dell’artista (Rome, 1977)

277

Bibliography

Tiziano e Venezia. Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Vicenza, 1980) Woods-Marsden, Joanna, ed., Titian: Materiality, Likeness, Istoria (Turnhout, 2007)

Technical Reports Checa Cremadas, Fernando, and Matteo Mancini, eds, Tiziano: Técnicas y restauraciones (Madrid, 1999) Donati, Andrea, Tiziano: Indagine sulla pittura (Rome, 2016) Dunkerton, Jill, and Marika Spring, Titian’s Painting Technique before c. 1540: National Gallery Technical Bulletin (London, 2013) —, Titian’s Painting Technique from 1540: National Gallery Technical Bulletin (London, 2015) Pavanello, Giuseppe, ed., Tiziano: Restauri, techniche, programmi, prospettive (Venice, 2005)

acknowledgements

This book was begun while I was still at University College London, continued during my first year at Hunter College, and completed at the Villa I Tatti. I have accrued too many debts during this project to thank everyone individually, but I would like to acknowledge Michael Leaman and François Quiviger for inviting me to write for the Renaissance Lives series, and Dorothy Habel, Matt Hayes, David Joselit, Ladislav Kesner, Jeanette Kohl, Tanja Michalsky, J. P. Park, Alina Payne, Caitlin Play, Rose Marie San Juan, Howard Singerman, William Tronzo, Tristan Weddigen, Laura Weigert, Bronwen Wilson and Suzanne Wright for providing me with the opportunity to test out some of my Titian material at their insti­ tutions. I wish finally to thank Caspar Pearson who not only read various drafts of this book, but drove me in a Fiat Spider convertible up to Pieve di Cadore one beautiful September day in search of Titian.

Permissions W. H. Auden, ‘The Price’, Collected Poems. Copyright © 1937 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. ‘The Price,’ copyright 1937 and © renewed 1965 by W. H. Auden; from collected poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House llc. All rights reserved.

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interests of brevity: Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels: 61; Ca’ d’Oro, Venice: 25; Church of the Eremitani, Padua: 7; from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499): 16; from Anton Francesco Doni, Dialogo della Musica (Venice, 1544): 17; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: 71; from Franchinus Gaffurius, Practica musicae (Milan, 1496): 19; Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice: 79, 82; Galleria Borghese, Rome: 21; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence: 23, 33, 34, 38, 46; Galleria Palatina, Florence: 18, 36, 47, 49; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin: 39, 50; © Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, museum purchase 1942.3: 52; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: 12; Kunstmuseum Basel/ photo Martin P. Bühler: 58; from Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, Herbarium Apulei (Rome, 1484): 28; Loggetta of the Campanile, Piazza San Marco, Venice: 53; Maria H. Loh: 1, 77; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Open Access): 10; Monasterio de El Escorial, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid: 72; Musée du Louvre, Paris: 31, 42, 43, 51, 63, 80; Museo di Capodimonte, Naples: 41, 65; © Museo Casa Siviero di Firenze, Florence: 64; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid: 30, 35, 37, 54, 55, 59, 60, 66, 67, 70, 74, 75; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam: 78; © The National Gallery, London: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 20, 27, 29, 48, 69, 73; © National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (Samuel H. Kress Collection 1952.2.11): 40; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh: 15; from Jacob Obrecht, Missa Fortuna desperata (Venice, 1503): 14; Palace of Kroměříž, Archbishopric Olomouc, Moravia: 76; Palazzo della Ragione, Padua: 26;

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Palazzo Ducale, Venice: 22; © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (John G. Johnson Collection, cat. 204): 9; San Salvador, Venice: 56; Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice: 32, 81; Santa Maria della Salute, Venice: 62; Scuola del Santo, Padua: 11; Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice: 57; Scrovegni Chapel, Padua: 24; SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice: 45; SS Nazaro e Celso, Brescia: 44; Wallace Collection, London: 68.

index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics Actaeon 200, 212, 214, 222, 226, 229 Adonis 157, 167–9, 200–201 Agamben, Giorgio 53, 57 Agnadello, Battle of 36, 72 Alberti, Leon Battista 40, 95, 145, 190–92 Andromeda 200–201, 203–7, 210–11 Apelles 129, 157 Apollo 174, 222–3, 226–8, 241 April, personification of 76, 79–80 Aragona, Tullia d’ 154 Aretino, Pietro 8, 45, 62, 92, 99, 111, 118, 139, 149–50, 152–5, 165, 182, 191, 195 Ariadne 64–5, 81–6, 91, 94–5, 98, 140, 215 Arnheim, Rudolf 215 Auden, W. H. 52–3 Augsburg 157, 178, 190, 199–200 Aurelio, Niccolò 64, 69, 70, 72, 74, 81, 177 Averoldi, Altobello 129–32

Bacchus 65, 83–5, 88, 95, 140 Bagarotto family Bertuccio Bagarotto 64, 67, 68, 69, 81 Laura Bagarotto 64, 69–70, 72, 74–82, 177 Pietro Bagarotto 74 Bellini, Giovanni 88, 241 workshop of 8 Bembo, Pietro 50–51, 53, 59, 63, 69, 81, 86, 108, 160 Bergamo 29, 88 Berger, John 231–2 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 160 Binche 178–81, 199 Bologna 157, 189 Borghini, Raffaello 233 Borgia, Lucrezia 64, 81–3, 86–7, 91, 177 Borromeo, Federico 143 Borromeo, Francesco 64, 69 Boschini, Marco 186, 225 Bragadin, Marcantonio 218–19, 223 Brescia 129, 215

titian’s touch

Bronzino, Agnolo 111, 137 Brussels 181, 199, 201 Calendario, Filippo 68, 77–8, 234 Callisto 211–12 Calvin, John 59, 118 Calvino, Italo 128–30 Cambrai, War against the League of 36 Caravaggio 132, 134 Catullus 83–5 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista 9, 101, 186 Cellini, Benvenuto 139 Cézanne, Paul 95 Christ 42–3, 45, 47, 100, 103–4, 125–30, 145, 182–3, 186, 203, 219, 222, 240–41 Cicero 119 Colonna, Francesco 50–51, 16 Colonna, Vittoria 140, 142–3, 146–7, 204, 219 Cornaro family Caterina Cornaro (Queen of Cyprus) 12, 50, 160 Federico Cornaro (Cardinal) 160 Giorgio Cornaro (also Zorzon Corner) 160–66, 52 Zorzi Corner 162 Crete (also Candia) 55, 94, 162–3, 165–6 Crivelli, Carlo 39 Crowe, Joseph Archer 9, 101, 186 Cupid 56, 71, 99, 104, 168–9, 188 Cyprus 12, 94, 160, 164–5, 218–19, 223

282

Da Porto, Luigi 68, 69, 81 Da Varano, Giulia 138–40, 188 Delacroix, Eugène 211 Deleuze, Gilles 52, 57, 62, 197 Della Porta, Giovan Battista 206 Della Rovere family 104, 139, 142 Francesco Maria i della Rovere 105, 109, 34 Guidobaldo ii della Rovere 19, 105, 111, 136–40, 187–8, 190, 36 Deucalion 26 deus artifex 154, 226 Diana 174, 203, 211–12, 214, 223, 226 Dolce, Lodovico 225, 228 Dialogo della pittura 152, 191 La favola d’Adone 168 Le trasformationi 169, 203, 222 Libri tre . . . delle gemme 191, 196 Doni, Anton Francesco 57, 17 Dürer, Albrecht 92–3 Elisabeth of Valois (Queen of Spain) 202, 218 Equicola, Mario 98, 108, 164 Este family Alfonso d’Este 64, 82–3, 86–7, 90–91, 97–8, 100, 104, 177 Ercole d’Este 82 Isabella d’Este 87, 90, 98, 104, 108 Farnese family 149, 157 Alessandro Farnese (Cardinal) 120, 157, 168, 187–9, 200, 41 Ottavio Farnese 120, 41 Pierluigi Farnese 121

283



Ranuccio Farnese 120–23, 187, 40 Vittoria Farnese 188 Ferrara 64, 82–3, 86–8, 97, 104 Duke of see Este family (Alfonso d’Este) Firenzuola, Agnolo 18, 145 Florence 149 Pitti Gallery 140, 142, 144–6 Fra Bartolomeo 88 Franco, Niccolò 153–4 Freud, Lucian 203 Freud, Sigmund 119 furias (also pene infernali, quattro dannati) 176–82, 199–200, 229 Gafurrio, Franchino Pratica musicae 60 Theorica musicae 54–5 Giorgione 8, 12, 36, 62, 88 Giotto Charity 22, 7 Iniustitia 76, 80–81, 24 Giovane, Palma 239 Gonzaga family 104, 164 Eleonora Gonzaga 105, 113–15, 118, 138, 140, 33, 38 Federico Gonzaga 86, 100, 104–14, 142, 164, 35, 37 Francesco i Gonzaga (Cardinal) 90 Francesco ii Gonzaga, 90 Gritti, Andrea (Doge) 164 Guattari, Félix 52, 57, 62, 197 Habsburgs 107, 157, 164, 177–9, 196, 198, 200–203, 218, 221

Index

Anna of Austria 218 Charles v (Holy Roman Emperor) 107, 118, 157–8, 177–8, 192, 195–201, 222, 239, 60 Don Carlos (Prince of Asturias) 218, 221 Don Fernando (also Ferdinand) 218–19, 220–21, 75 Eleonora of Austria 178 Ferdinand i (Holy Roman Emperor) 177, 190, 200 Isabel of Portugal (Holy Roman Empress) 192, 195–7, 67 Juan of Austria 216, 219 Maria of Austria 218 Mary of Hungary (Regent of the Spanish Netherlands) 174, 176–81, 199–200, 229 Maximilian i (Holy Roman Emperor) 36, 40, 68, 177 Maximilian ii (Holy Roman Emperor) 218 Philip ii (King of Spain) 30, 143, 157, 168, 178, 181, 190–92, 198–205, 212, 215–21, 229, 66 Helmschmid, Desiderius 191 Hesse, Alexandre 233–4 Holy League 199, 219 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili see Colonna, Francesco Iniustitia (Injustice), personification of 75–6, 80–81 istoria 35, 40, 46, 63, 157, 174 Italian Wars 7, 104, 199

titian’s touch

Iustitia (Justice), personification of 66, 76–8, 165, 216 Jameson, Anna 95 Judith 76–7, 80 Juno 168, 176, 180 Jupiter 165–6, 168, 211 Katz, Alex 128 Laocöon and His Sons 129 Latona 174, 223 Leonardo 145 Mona Lisa 12, 124, 186 Leoni, Leone 198 Lepanto, Battle of 216, 218–19, 221–2 Licino, Bernardo 12 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 156–8 Lombardo, Pietro 24 London 12–13, 95, 168, 200, 228 Lotto, Lorenzo 88 Lucretia 207–12, 214, 216 Luigini, Federico 145 Luther, Martin 59, 118 Machiavelli, Niccolò 207 Madrid 107, 157, 168, 176, 181, 191 Mantua 87, 104, 106, 108, 111, 125, 182, 199 Manuzio, Aldo 51 Marsyas 222–3, 226–9, 241 Mary, Virgin 91, 100, 103–4, 126, 130, 143, 174, 239–40 Mary Magdalene 35, 42–3, 45, 47, 62, 126–7, 140–47, 210, 239

284

Mary Tudor, Queen of England 168, 200–201 Medea 203, 210 Medici family Cosimo i de’ Medici 149, 152 Lorenzo de’ Medici (il Magnifico) 117 Maddalena de’ Medici 117 Medusa 203, 206 Michelangelo 129–30, 142–3, 181–2, 184, 207 Midas (King) 226, 228 Milan 28–9, 143, 157, 183, 198–9, 230–231 Monet, Claude 52 Murdoch, Iris 228–9 Mustafa Pasha, Lala 218 Myrrha 168 Naples 50, 142, 187 Naxos 81, 84 Nereids 206 Nessus 210 New Spain 196, 202 Niobe 222, 228 Obrecht, Jacob 61 Orsini family Clarice Orsini 139 Girolama Orsini 121 Ottomans 177, 179, 199, 216, 219 Ovid Fasti 79 Heroides 84–5 Metamorphoses 24–5, 79, 168–9, 176, 200, 222

285

Padua 8, 27, 56, 67, 69, 72, 90 Palazzo della Ragione 79 San Matteo 70 Scrovegni Chapel 22, 76 Scuola del Santo 36–7, 40, 42 Paleologa family 105, 109 Palladio, Andrea 160 Panofsky, Erwin 46, 229 paonazzo 13, 15–16 paragone 24, 46, 88, 99 Paris 104, 124, 129, 186, 234 Parrhasius 32 Perseus 128, 203–4, 206 Petrucci, Ottaviano 46, 61 Phillips, Thomas 228 Philostratus 88, 97 Picasso, Pablo 223 Pietro d’Abano 56, 90 Pieve di Cadore 7, 19, 123, 234 Pliny the Elder 23, 32, 91, 129, 164 Plutarch 232 poesie 30, 157, 200–201, 203, 212, 229 Polykleitos 129 Pontormo, Jacopo 142 Popes Alexander vi (Borgia) 81–2 Julius ii (Della Rovere) 36, 86, 104 Julius iii (Del Monte) 28 Paul iii (Farnese) 27, 120, 157, 189, 41 Paul iv (Carafa) 28 Pius v (Ghislieri) 219 Poseidon 206 Poussin, Nicolas 57 Priuli, Girolamo 17, 69, 81

Index

Protestants 7, 199, 202, 216 Provedadori sora le pompe de le donne 17 Pygmalion 24–6 Pyrrha 26 Raphael 18, 87, 99, 184 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 117 Richter, Gerhard 175 Ridolfi, Carlo 233 Riley, Bridget 95 Ripa, Cesare 76, 78, 80 Romano, Giulio 108, 182 Rome 27, 82, 88, 108, 120, 142, 149, 152, 157, 182, 207 Contarelli Chapel 134 Cornaro Chapel 160 Mostra della opera d’arte recuperate in Germania 187 Sack of 111, 164, 192 Villa Farnesina 187 Rosand, David 9, 16, 138 Rosetti, Giovanventura 158 Rubens, Peter Paul 195 Ruskin, John 89–90, 95, 144 saints Andrew 223 Anthony of Padua 36–7, 39 Augustine 207 Catherine 100, 103 Celsus 130 Jerome 241 Joseph 103 Lawrence 212, 214 Margaret of Antioch 206 Mark 66, 166, 221 Nazarius 130

titian’s touch

286

Peter 223 Peter of Verona 134–5, 215 Sebastian 129–30 Theodore 66 Sánchez Coello, Alonso 221 Sannazaro, Jacopo 50, 56 Sansovino, Francesco 94 Sansovino, Jacopo 152, 164–5, 225 Sanudo, Marin 17, 36, 69, 72 Savelli family 120 Sebastiano del Piombo 88 Selim ii (Sultan) 219 Shakespeare, William 162, 229 Merchant of Venice 74, 78 Rape of Lucrece 207–11 Richard iii 74 Romeo and Juliet 74 Sisyphus 176, 178–9, 181, 222 Siviero, Rodolfo 187–8, 197, 64 Strozzi, Roberto 117–18 Suleiman the Magnificent (Sultan) 179



Tarquin (also Sextus Tarquinius) 207–12, 222 Theseus 81, 84–5, 215 Tiberius (Emperor) 183–4 Tintoretto, Jacopo 88, 221 Titian, family of see Vecellio Titian, works by Abraham and Isaac 182 Annunciation (San Salvador) 174–5, 56 Annunciation (Scuola Grande di San Rocco) 175, 57 Archbishop Filippo Archinto 9, 27–32, 190, 9, 10









Assuntà 239–41, 81, 82 Bacchanal of the Andrians 83 Bacchus and Ariadne 64–5, 81, 83–6, 88–91, 94–6, 103, 215, 20, 27, 29 Boy with Dogs in a Landscape 230–32, 78 Bravo 40, 62, 134, 222, 12 Cain and Abel 182, 222, 62 Charles v at the Battle of Mühlberg 178, 221–2, 60 Clarissa Strozzi 116–21, 123, 190, 39 Crowning with Thorns 182–4, 186, 63 Danaë Receiving the Golden Rain 157, 187–90, 197, 200, 64, 65 David and Goliath 182 Death of Actaeon 212, 214, 226, 228–9, 231, 73 Diana and Actaeon 200 Diana and Callisto 200, 211–12, 69 Eleonora Gonzaga 105, 113–16, 118, 190, 33, 38 La Famigliare (Portrait of a Lady, La Schiavona) 9–22, 27, 30, 32, 38, 148, 158, 186, 190, 239, 2, 4, 6, 8 Federico Gonzaga 107–12, 114, 190, 35, 37 Flaying of Marsyas 223, 225–31, 241, 76, 77 Flora 71, 140, 23 Giorgio Cornaro 160–66, 52 The Interrupted Concert 46, 57, 59–60, 62, 103, 118, 120, 18

287







Index

Isabel of Portugal 192, 195–7, 67 Ixion 177 Judith 76, 80, 25 Madonna of the Pesaro Family 103–4, 222, 32 Madonna of the Rabbit 100–101, 103, 109, 31 Man with a Glove 158–60, 51 Man with a Quilted Sleeve 12, 3, 5 Martyrdom of St Lawrence 212, 72 Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona 40, 132, 139, 169, 182, 215, 219, 45 Miracle of the Jealous Husband 35, 37–8, 40, 45–6, 62, 134, 182, 215, 222, 11 Miracle of the Reattached Foot 37 Miracle of the Speaking Babe 37 Noli me tangere 35, 42, 45, 62, 103, 120, 169, 210, 13 Penitent Magdalene 140, 142–6, 204, 47 Perseus and Andromeda 200–201, 203–6, 211, 68 Philip ii 190–91, 200, 66 Philip ii Offering the Infante Don Ferdinand to the Heavens 219–22, 75 Pietà 239–40, 79 Pietro Aretino 149, 152–5, 49 Ranuccio Farnese 120–23, 187, 40 Rape of Europa 200, 203 Rape of Lucretia 207–12, 214, 216, 222, 71 Resurrection 129–32, 44 Sacred and Profane Love 64, 70, 74–6, 78, 81, 100, 190, 216, 21 St Margaret 205–6, 70



Self-portrait 149, 152–3, 50 Sisyphus 176, 178–9, 181, 222, 59 Spain Succouring Religion 216–17, 219, 74 Tantalus 177 Three Ages of Man 46–7, 51–3, 57, 59–60, 62, 103, 120, 15 Tityus 174, 176, 178–9, 215, 222, 55 The Vendramin Family Venerating a Relic of the True Cross 147–9, 48 Venus and Adonis 157, 166–9, 200–201, 54 Venus of Urbino 19, 27, 105, 113, 135–40, 148, 187–8, 190, 46 Worship of Venus 83, 86, 97–100, 103, 118, 174, 190, 30 Tityus 174, 178–9, 215, 222 Trent, Council of 27, 143, 199 Il Tribolo 139 Turner, J.M.W. 52, 134 Urbino 142, 188 Duke of see Della Rovere, Guidobaldo ii Valori, Baccio 144 Van der Weyden, Rogier 178 Vargas, Francisco de 184 Vasari, Giorgio 132, 138–9, 143 Vecellio family Cecilia (wife of Titian) 18–19, 123 Cesare Vecellio (cousin of Titian) 12 Gregorio di Conte Vecellio (father of Titian) 7, 36

titian’s touch



Orazio Vecellio (son of Titian) 18, 123, 198, 225, 239 Orsa Vecellio (sister of Titian) 123 Pomponio Vecellio (son of Titian) 18, 101, 107, 123, 152, 215 Vendramin family 147–8 Venetia 66 see also Calendario, Filippo Veneziano, Domenico 62 Venice Arsenale 158, 224 Biri Grande 118, 231 Ca’ Vendramin 149 Campanile 165 Council of Ten 70, 74, 163 Fondaco dei Tedeschi 36, 76 Gallerie dell’Accademia 239 Grand Canal 22, 66, 148, 164 Loggetta 165 Maggior Conisglio (Great Council) 161 Merceria 174, 224 Palazzo Ducale 66, 68, 78, 224 Pala d’Oro 192 Rialto 36, 174 San Canciano 118 San Fantin 65 San Giovanni dei Forlani 121 San Marco 66, 69, 81, 163–4, 174, 192, 219, 234 San Maurizio 164 San Polo 22 San Salvador 174–5 San Samuele 22 Santa Croce 66

288

Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari 104, 233–5, 239 Santi Giovanni e Paolo 132, 219, 224 Santo Spirito in Isola 182, 198 Scuola di San Pietro Martire 132, 198 Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista 148 Scuola Grande di San Marco 221 Venier, Sebastiano 219 Venus 26, 79, 98, 138–40, 167–9, 201 Veritas (Truth), personification of 76, 78, 80 Veronese, Paolo 88, 124 Verrocchio, Andrea 24 Virgil 117

Wallinger, Mark 203 Weiditz, Hans, the Younger 92 Wethey, Harold E. 9, 54 Wilde, Oscar 160 Wollheim, Richard 53 X-rays 22, 103, 152, 188, 6 Zeuxis 23, 32 zibellino 115 Zuccato, Sebastiano 8, 241