The Earlier Work of Titian Part 1

The Earlier Work of t.i.tian.

by Claude Phillips.

INTRODUCTION

There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in art--than that of t.i.tian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any one of these. t.i.tian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the _Entombment_ of the Louvre, the _a.s.sunta_, the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, the _St. Peter Martyr_, to say that he has, take him all in all, been surpa.s.sed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter of the full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to an equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred pa.s.sion must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not necessarily a distortion of truth.

And then as a portraitist--we are dealing, be it remembered, with Italian art only--there must be conceded to him the first place, as a limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements which go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite, will not end--with a sigh perhaps--by according the palm to t.i.tian.

In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned. He had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.

Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had, unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions; and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of the landscape in the great _Pieta_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset in our own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerful all-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at the Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ in the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of the landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well as the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the few well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from such una.s.sailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. It was reserved for t.i.tian to give in his early time the fullest development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of earth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the _Baccha.n.a.l_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back his impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.

Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.

The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be said to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ of the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, the bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the much earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd and Nymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone of quite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final years of t.i.tian's old age.

Thus, though there cannot be claimed for t.i.tian that universality in art and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore, since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Durer; it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than any first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival, in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.

To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be styled the Flemish t.i.tian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who, in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraits d'apparat_ of princes, n.o.bles, and splendid dames--knew no superior, though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some of the stain of earth. t.i.tian, though he was at least as genuine a realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was everywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and pa.s.sion, that distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that is not Italian.

The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of the world's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each city in its different way represented the highest point that modern Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains, the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add to it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm of the people. This is what t.i.tian, supreme among his contemporaries of the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which, in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek for a parallel.

Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselves invariably comparing them to t.i.tian, not t.i.tian to them--taking _him_ as the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be, combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then t.i.tian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of a higher sublimity than t.i.tian reached until he came to the extreme limits of old age. That this a.s.sertion is not a mere paradox, the great _Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent _Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms to the painter of the _a.s.sunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ at Emmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination, a t.i.tanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.

All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of t.i.tian, even though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not dissimilar comparison might be inst.i.tuted between the portraits of Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the golden prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him, while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]

Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of these exquisite productions on the same level as _Le Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _L'Homme en Noir_ of the Louvre, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Bella di Tiziano_, the _Aretino_ of the Pitti, the _Charles V. at the Battle of Muhlberg_ and the full-length _Philip II._ of the Prado Museum at Madrid?

Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that t.i.tian has serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elder Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an art more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper, graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself p.r.o.nounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant colourist of the Venetian school; and the _Dives and Lazarus_ of the Venice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to give solid support to such an a.s.sertion.

In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters such as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri, Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliari dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors, however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural ma.s.ses of a vibrant grey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through with silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegory on the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze di Cana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in one sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, t.i.tian, Palma, and Paris Bordone--const.i.tuting as it does more particularly a further development of painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just a little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the n.o.bler, graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of t.i.tian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto, colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very body and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature.

To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would all the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.

He can rise as high in dramatic pa.s.sion and pathos as the greatest of them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece _The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the too little known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceiling compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful _Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from the sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject, but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties of unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, which are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same time profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with t.i.tian, and those who have been grouped with t.i.tian, the guiding rule of art.

Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetian colourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or to select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to himself.

CHAPTER I

Cadore and Venice--Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of the residence in Padua--New interpretations of Giorgione's and t.i.tian's pictures.

Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di Cadore, a district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice, and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in the valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tiziano would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of t.i.tian known as Tizianello's _Anonimo_, and died at Venice in 1650, was t.i.tian's cousin thrice removed.

Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery in the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be a.s.sumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,--supposed, though without substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,--Caterina, and Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the _Dialogo della Pittura_, or of ten, according to Tizianello's _Anonimo_, t.i.tian was taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point, indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our study of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in what way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally a.s.sumed that t.i.tian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the great _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in a reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi, and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces, Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In the majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts, its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.

How far t.i.tian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah Gilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Might this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd Swiss?" In the getting, t.i.tian was certainly all this, but in the spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his career. Vasari relates that t.i.tian was lodged at Venice with his uncle, an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting, placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his _Dialogo della Pittura_, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first master; next makes him pa.s.s into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and thence into that of the _caposcuola_ Giovanni Bellini; to take, however, the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he becomes the pupil and partner, or a.s.sistant, of Giorgione. Morelli[5]

would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of t.i.tian's artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especially in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's pupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describing themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of Venice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind than that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and Borgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and, indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain cla.s.s, even Alvise Vivarini, the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S.

Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.

Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece of S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in the Ellesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_ in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ at Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour, essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could, faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.

What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of Giorgione and t.i.tian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called _Danae_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of the Louvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art pa.s.ses through successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Pieta_ in the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus (sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of doc.u.mentary evidence, it would even now pa.s.s as such. Next, he becomes the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps t.i.tian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque, that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early training and a.s.sociation, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself, he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the very end of his career.

Giorgione and t.i.tian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be placed about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight years--between 1477 and 1485.

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of t.i.tian_ a revolutionary theory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for the first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and shaped the art of his contemporary t.i.tian, instead of having been influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be found on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset, and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death, if it be not, indeed, already defunct. More and more will the view so forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in many of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon the master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a t.i.tian, or to leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such, Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.

This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in the rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter must, in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of t.i.tian.

It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influence imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time, both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio--issuing, at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age--two or three years at the most, one way or the other--that is to be taken into account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example, operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could be no question of light received back from painters of his own generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with t.i.tian and Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a quite distinctive loveliness. t.i.tian, we shall see, carried the style to its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than Giorgione, t.i.tian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre a terre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of t.i.tian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the important _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the Brunswick Gallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--and the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in t.i.tian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred and Profane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred pieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the Prado Gallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ at Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We notice, too, in t.i.tian's works belonging to this particular group another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing characteristics as these--and others that could easily be singled out--as wholly and solely t.i.tianesque of the early time? If so, we ought to a.s.sume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less subtle shape into which he had already trans.m.u.ted it. But should not such an a.s.sumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main, be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?

That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may roughly serve to ill.u.s.trate. Take, for instance, the friendship that developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: the one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, the frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the P.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _ex cathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapist Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain characteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of which it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated them.

In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_ must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff to ignite and flame like his own.

The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who were excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of flesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take one instance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the n.o.ble Venetian Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty, Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia d.u.c.h.essa ill.u.s.trissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius, the leaflets which, under the t.i.tle _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona d' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice.

From a Photograph by Naya_.]

The most Bellinesque work of t.i.tian's youth with which we are acquainted is the curious _Man of Sorrows_ of the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice, a work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches, among the numerous versions of the _Pieta_ by and ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.

Seeing that t.i.tian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with which we are at present acquainted. This _Man of Sorrows_ itself may well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to form a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is reserved in the future to some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do for the youthful t.i.tian what Morelli and his school have done for Correggio--that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.

Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione, though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the painter himself. The _Virgin and Child_ in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, popularly known as _La Zingarella_, which, by general consent, is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this cla.s.s, is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the colour-chord, in the atmospheric s.p.a.ciousness and charm of the landscape background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already Giorgionesque. Nay, even here t.i.tian, above all, a.s.serts _himself_, and lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione and t.i.tian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the G.o.ddess, while t.i.tian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the everyday world in which both artists lived.

In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a beautiful _Madonna and Child_ in a niche of coloured marble mosaic, which is catalogued as an early t.i.tian under the influence of Giovanni Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest elsewhere[9]--prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is not acquainted with the picture itself--that we may have here, not an early t.i.tian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the most superficial comparison with, for instance, _La Zingarella_ suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and 7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of t.i.tian and evidently from the same hand. These were a _Virgin and Child_ from the collection, so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved _Virgin and Child with Saints_ from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House.

The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of the master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing midway between the young Giorgione and the young t.i.tian--one who, while imitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporaries of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Lowy_.]

The famous _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Chiesa di S. Rocco at Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of t.i.tian given to that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice, and has received more charitable offerings in money than t.i.tian and Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the _Man of Sorrows_ in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents "Christ dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this last--one of the earliest of Giorgiones--still recalls Giovanni Bellini, and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.

In both renderings of the divine countenance there is--or it may be the writer fancies that there is--underlying that expression of serenity and humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister, disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar disproportion is to be observed in another early t.i.tian, the _Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine_ in the Church of SS. Ermagora and Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine t.i.tian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place among the early works.

Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to place the _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.

Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the Antwerp Gallery. The main elements of t.i.tian's art may be seen here, in imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a high relief of cla.s.sic design, of the type which we shall find again in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--an ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of fleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristic portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity, contrast curiously with the less pa.s.sionate absorption of the same _Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-three years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It is the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ of Cobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti, ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.

into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it possible to a.s.sume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless a.s.sume, that the _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art, was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted his Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers (Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.

Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]

It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed account of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and t.i.tian on the facades of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and disconcerting transpositions in the biography of t.i.tian do not predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, t.i.tian being apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully a.s.signed to t.i.tian, and facing the Grand Ca.n.a.l, has been preserved, in a much-damaged condition--the few fragments that remained of those facing the side ca.n.a.l having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgione angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty of some work on the "_facciata di verso la Merceria,_" which in reality belongs to t.i.tian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's _Anonimo_. Of what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have not such stories been told, and--the worst of it is--told with a certain foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved itself from the internal evidence supplied by the _Baptism of Christ_ of Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to t.i.tian and Tintoretto, as to Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman, Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile e part.i.to il mio caro Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of April 1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May G.o.d grant him all happiness and good fortune!")

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome.

From a Photograph by Anderson._]

There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological arrangement of t.i.tian's early works. This is that in those painted _poesie_ of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be found in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with Giorgione, t.i.tian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of t.i.tian, but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed, even in the late time of our master--checking an unveiled sensuousness which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright sensuality--the influence of the master and companion who vanished half a century before victoriously rea.s.serts itself. It is this _renouveau_ of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged t.i.tian that gives so exquisite a charm to the _Venere del Pardo_, so strange a pathos to that still later _Nymph and Shepherd,_ which was a few years ago brought out of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna.

The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation, very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and reserve which informs such creations as the _Madonna of Castelfranco_ and the _Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch_ of the Prado Museum.

Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the _a.s.sunta_, the true pa.s.sion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre _Entombment_, the rhetorical pa.s.sion and scenic magnificence of the _St. Peter Martyr_.

The _Baptism of Christ_, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery of the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from t.i.tian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to t.i.tian. Internal evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must be a.s.signed to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15]

Here t.i.tian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.