The Earlier Work of Titian Part 3

The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which t.i.tian finished in 1526, after having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the Frari, the _a.s.sunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages, it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its cla.s.s. And yet, apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole, many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.

It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's _Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a decorative ensemble of the higher order. To a.n.a.lyse the general scheme or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is an unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces the spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, t.i.tian went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virgin and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally pa.s.ses for the preliminary sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a like original study for the kneeling Baffo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO. ALBERTINA, VIENNA.

_From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving by Henri Laurent.]

By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing of t.i.tian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on the altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.

Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On the 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for the lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression may, under the circ.u.mstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape, in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore, with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing, notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the pa.s.sing influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, pa.s.sed some months at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who, returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of pa.s.sion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to consider the n.o.bility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_ and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The _Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpa.s.sable majesty if we take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.

Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all fluttering in the storm-wind, is in att.i.tude and gesture based on nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied att.i.tude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by t.i.tian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_ of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.

Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic of the painter _par excellence_ would a.s.sert itself. Very curiously it is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable subst.i.tute for the original, at SS.

Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that t.i.tian in the original would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware, to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which hangs in the great hall of the ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even through this recent repet.i.tion the beholder divines beauties, especially in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without further carping, to accept t.i.tian as he is. A little more and, criticism notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who, perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la piu compiuta, la piu celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.]

It was after a public compet.i.tion between t.i.tian, Palma, and Pordenone, inst.i.tuted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in some respects, as compared with t.i.tian's astonishing performance, it represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still a.s.serts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink sketch in the Louvre showing the a.s.sa.s.sin chasing the companion of the victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual ma.s.sacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by t.i.tian for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A n.o.bleman murdering his Wife_, which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of t.i.tian himself.[50]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu Romischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der Koniglich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, and upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesque of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius, _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted as convincing for ent.i.tling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar incident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious explanation of t.i.tian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of the Venetian idyll generally.

[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a sustained a.n.a.lysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo Lotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "Les Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol.

i.

[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of t.i.tian, see Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of t.i.tian_ (second edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general and local authorities on the subject.

[4] _Life and Times of t.i.tian_, vol. i. p. 29.

[5] _Die Galerien zu Munchen und Dresden_, p. 75.

[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states that Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from t.i.tan: "_C' egli apprese certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso Tiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu Munchen und Dresden_).

[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_.

[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman.

A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the Salon Carre of the Louvre!

[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895.

[10] _Life and Times of t.i.tian_, vol. i. p. 111.

[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his son_.

[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du t.i.tien_, 1887.

[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture, "Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Sta chiesa. t.i.tiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than the work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with the marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of the background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coa.r.s.ely repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form "t.i.tiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.

"Ticia.n.u.s," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earlier time; "t.i.tia.n.u.s" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.

[14] Kugler's _Italian Schools of Painting_, re-edited by Sir Henry Layard.

[15] Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this _Baptism_ in the year 1531 in the house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus describes it: "La tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano, che e nel fiume insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso M. Zuanne Ram ritratto sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li spettatori, fu de man de Tiziano" (_Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da J. Jacopo Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).

[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima's great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, in the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, of a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder master is more pa.s.sionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St.

Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful _Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that of an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of the Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to a.s.sume. The idea of an actual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that of Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. The earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to that of Bartolommeo Montagna.

[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contact with the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ by t.i.tian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S.

Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.

Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John, though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano t.i.tian, a.s.signed by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter has ruined t.i.tian's great conception by subst.i.tuting his own trivial archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of the t.i.tian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the present monograph (p. 99).

[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara, that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S.

Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."

[19] From an often-cited pa.s.sage in the _Anonimo_, describing Giorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525, when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that it was finished by t.i.tian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda, che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to those which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and Profane Love_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same _Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which, according to him, had been retouched by t.i.tian. It need hardly be pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in common with the coa.r.s.e and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supported by Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Pieta of Treviso. The engraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M.

Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du t.i.tien_ as having possibly been derived from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of t.i.tian as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of Pordenone or to that of his imitators.

[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895.

[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.

[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884.

[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_.

[24] The original drawing by t.i.tian for the subject of this fresco is to be found among those publicly exhibited at the ecole des Beaux Arts of Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, and curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie et Oeuvre du t.i.tien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the fresco that it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is in the style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-t.i.tianesque phase, so a.s.siduously imitates.

[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of t.i.tian is to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco a sedere in mezzo a certi santi."

[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known _Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani, bearing the date 1510. This has recently pa.s.sed into the rich collection of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purely Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groups therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely _Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and with the four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al Rialto.

[27] _Die Galerien zu Munchen und Dresden_, p. 74.

[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour, relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn beauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. In both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head of the Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one of t.i.tian's loveliest.

[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1895.

[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was last publicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman of the House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, t.i.tian painted with wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique of the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of eighteen, not even t.i.tian, could have attained. And then Vasari's "giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey sleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with silver. The late form of signature, "t.i.tia.n.u.s F.," on the stone bal.u.s.trade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems likely that the bal.u.s.trade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which curiously enough occurs also on the similar bal.u.s.trade of the beautiful _Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such by Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it pa.s.sed from the collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticia.n.u.s"

occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear to have been signed, the "t.i.tiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription being admittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the "Ticia.n.u.s F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari (1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the _Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonna with St. Anthony Abbot_ of the Uffizi; the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, the _a.s.sunta_, the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia (dated 1522). The _Virgin and Child with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, and the _Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ of the Louvre--neither of them early works--are signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "t.i.tia.n.u.s F.,"

among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the great _Madonna di San Niccol_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. It has been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brera bears the earlier signature, "Ticia.n.u.s F." This is not the case. The signature is most distinctly "t.i.tia.n.u.s," though in a somewhat unusual character.

[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not its equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting in North Italy_, vol. ii.).

[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, but to which within it the writer hesitates to a.s.sign an exact place, are the so-called _t.i.tian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery; the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _Pietro Aretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called _Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-named portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force and conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in the characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yet been discovered.

[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framed with the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and far inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called _Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo.

[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remind the beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in the Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still a.s.signed to the great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of his late pupils or followers.