The Later Works of Titian Part 1

The Later works of t.i.tian.

by Claude Phillips.

CHAPTER I

_Friendship with Aretino--Its effect on t.i.tian's art--Characteristics of the middle period--"Madonna with St. Catherine" of National Gallery--Portraits not painted from life--"Magdalen" of the Pitti--First Portrait of Charles V.--t.i.tian the painter, par excellence, of aristocratic traits--The "d'Avalos Allegory"--Portrait of Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici--S. Giovanni Elemosinario altar-piece._

Having followed t.i.tian as far as the year 1530, rendered memorable by that sensational, and, of its kind, triumphant achievement, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, we must retrace our steps some three years in order to dwell a little upon an incident which must appear of vital importance to those who seek to understand t.i.tian's life, and, above all, to follow the development of his art during the middle period of splendid maturity reaching to the confines of old age.

This incident is the meeting with Pietro Aretino at Venice in 1527, and the gradual strengthening by mutual service and mutual inclination of the bonds of a friendship which is to endure without break until the life of the Aretine comes, many years later, to a sudden and violent end. t.i.tian was at that time fifty years of age, and he might thus be deemed to have over-pa.s.sed the age of sensuous delights. Yet it must be remembered that he was in the fullest vigour of manhood, and had only then arrived at the middle point of a career which, in its untroubled serenity, was to endure for a full half-century more, less a single year. Three years later on, that is to say in the middle of August 1530, the death of his wife Cecilia, who had borne to him Pomponio, Orazio, and Lavinia, left him all disconsolate, and so embarra.s.sed with the cares of his young family that he was compelled to appeal to his sister Orsa, who thereupon came from Cadore to preside over his household. The highest point of celebrity, of favour with princes and magnates, having been attained, and a certain royalty in Venetian art being already conceded to him, there was no longer any obstacle to the organising of a life in which all the refinements of culture and all the delights of sense were to form the most agreeable relief to days of continuous and magnificently fruitful labour. It is just because t.i.tian's art of this great period of some twenty years so entirely accords with what we know, and may legitimately infer, to have been his life at this time, that it becomes important to consider the friendship with Aretino and the rise of the so-called Triumvirate, which was a kind of Council of Three, having as its _raison d'etre_ the mutual furtherance of material interests, and the pursuit of art, love, and pleasure. The third member of the Triumvirate was Jacopo Tatti or del Sansovino, the Florentine sculptor, whose fame and fortune were so far above his deserts as an artist. Coming to Venice after the sack of Rome, which so entirely for the moment disorganised art and artists in the pontifical city, he elected to remain there notwithstanding the pressing invitations sent to him by Francis the First to take service with him.

In 1529 he was appointed architect of San Marco, and he then by his adhesion completed the Triumvirate which was to endure for more than a quarter of a century.

It has always excited a certain sense of distrust in t.i.tian, and caused the world to form a lower estimate of his character than it would otherwise have done, that he should have been capable of thus living in the closest and most fraternal intimacy with a man so spotted and in many ways so infamous as Aretino. Without precisely calling t.i.tian to account in set terms, his biographers Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and above all M. Georges Lafenestre in _La Vie et L'Oeuvre du t.i.tien_, have relentlessly raked up Aretino's past before he came together with the Cadorine, and as pitilessly laid bare that organised system of professional sycophancy, adulation, scurrilous libel, and blackmail, which was the foundation and the backbone of his life of outward pomp and luxurious ease at Venice. By them, as by his other biographers, he has been judged, not indeed unjustly, yet perhaps too much from the standard of our own time, too little from that of his own. With all his infamies, Aretino was a man whom sovereigns and princes, nay even pontiffs, delighted to honour, or rather to distinguish by honours. The Marquess Federigo Gonzaga of Mantua, the Duke Guidobaldo II. of Urbino, among many others, showed themselves ready to propitiate him; and such a man as t.i.tian the worldly-wise, the lover of splendid living to whom ample means and the fruitful favour of the great were a necessity; who was grasping yet not avaricious, who loved wealth chiefly because it secured material consideration and a life of serene enjoyment; such a man could not be expected to rise superior to the temptations presented by a friendship with Aretino, or to despise the immense advantages which it included. As he is revealed by his biographers, and above all by himself, Aretino was essentially "good company." He could pa.s.s off his most flagrant misdeeds, his worst sallies, with a certain large and Rabelaisian gaiety; if he made money his chief G.o.d, it was to spend it in magnificent clothes and high living, but also at times with an intelligent and even a beneficent liberality. He was a fine though not an unerring connoisseur of art, he had a pa.s.sionate love of music, and an unusually exquisite perception of the beauties of Nature.

To hint that the lower nature of the man corrupted that of t.i.tian, and exercised a disintegrating influence over his art, would be to go far beyond the requirements of the case. The great Venetian, though he might at this stage be much nearer to earth than in those early days when he was enveloped in the golden glow of Giorgione's overmastering influence, could never have lowered himself to the level of those too famous _Sonetti Lussuriosi_ which brought down the vengeance of even a Medici Pope (Clement VII.) upon Aretino the writer, Giulio Romano the ill.u.s.trator, and Marcantonio Raimondi the engraver. Gracious and dignified in sensuousness he always remained even when, as at this middle stage of his career, the vivifying shafts of poetry no longer pierced through, and trans.m.u.ted with their vibration of true pa.s.sion, the fair realities of life. He could never have been guilty of the frigid and calculated indecency of a Giulio Romano; he could not have cast aside all conventional restraints, of taste as well as of propriety, as Rubens and even Rembrandt did on occasion; but as Van Dyck, the child of t.i.tian almost as much as he was the child of Rubens, ever shrank from doing. Still the ease and splendour of the life at Biri Grande--that pleasant abode with its fair gardens overlooking Murano, the Lagoons, and the Friulan Alps, to which t.i.tian migrated in 1531--the Epicureanism which saturated the atmosphere, the necessity for keeping constantly in view the material side of life, all these things operated to colour the creations which mark this period of t.i.tian's practice, at which he has reached the apex of pictorial achievement, but shows himself too serene in sensuousness, too unruffled in the masterly practice of his profession to give to the heart the absolute satisfaction that he affords to the eyes. This is the greatest test of genius of the first order--to preserve undimmed in mature manhood and old age the gift of imaginative interpretation which youth and love give, or lend, to so many who, buoyed up by momentary inspiration, are yet not to remain permanently in the first rank. With t.i.tian at this time supreme ability is not invariably illumined from within by the lamp of genius; the light flashes forth nevertheless, now and again, and most often in those portraits of men of which the sublime _Charles V. at Muhlberg_ is the greatest. Towards the end the flame will rise once more and steadily burn, with something on occasion of the old heat, but with a hue paler and more mysterious, such as may naturally be the outward symbol of genius on the confines of eternity.

The second period, following upon the completion of the _St. Peter Martyr_, is one less of great altar-pieces and _poesie_ such as the miscalled _Sacred and Profane Love_ (_Medea and Venus_), the _Baccha.n.a.ls_, and the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, than it is of splendid nudities and great portraits. In the former, however mythological be the subject, it is generally chosen but to afford a decent pretext for the generous display of beauty unveiled. The portraits are at this stage less often intimate and soul-searching in their summing up of a human personality than they are official presentments of great personages and n.o.ble dames; showing them, no doubt, without false adulation or cheap idealisation, yet much as they desire to appear to their allies, their friends, and their subjects, sovereign in natural dignity and aristocratic grace, yet essentially in a moment of representation.

Farther on the great altar-pieces reappear more sombre, more agitated in pa.s.sion, as befits the period of the sixteenth century in which t.i.tian's latest years are pa.s.sed, and the patrons for whom he paints. Of the _poesie_ there is then a new upspringing, a new efflorescence, and we get by the side of the _Venus and Adonis_, the _Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, such pieces of a more exquisite and penetrating poetry as the _Venere del Pardo_ of Paris, and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna.

This appears to be the right place to say a word about the magnificent engraving by Van Dalen of a portrait, no longer known to exist, but which has, upon the evidence apparently of the print, been put down as that of t.i.tian by himself. It represents a bearded man of some thirty-five years, dressed in a rich but sombre habit, and holding a book. The portrait is evidently not that of a painter by himself, nor does it represent t.i.tian at any age; but it finely suggests, even in black and white, a n.o.ble original by the master. Now, a comparison with the best authenticated portrait of Aretino, the superb three-quarter length painted in 1545, and actually at the Pitti Palace, reveals certain marked similarities of feature and type, notwithstanding the very considerable difference of age between the personages represented.

Very striking is the agreement of eye and nose in either case, while in the younger as in the older man we note an idiosyncrasy in which vigorous intellect as well as strong sensuality has full play. Van Dalen's engraving very probably reproduces one of the lost portraits of Aretino by t.i.tian. In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Biography_ (vol. i. pp.

317-319) we learn from correspondence interchanged in the summer of 1527 between Federigo Gonzaga, t.i.tian, and Aretino, that the painter, in order to propitiate the Mantuan ruler, sent to him with a letter, the exaggerated flattery of which savours of Aretino's precept and example, portraits of the latter and of Signor Hieronimo Adorno, another "faithful servant" of the Marquess. Now Aretino was born in 1492, so that in 1527 he would be thirty-five, which appears to be just about the age of the vigorous and splendid personage in Van Dalen's print.

Some reasons were given in the former section of this monograph[1] for the a.s.sertion that the _Madonna with St. Catherine_, mentioned in a letter from Giacomo Malatesta to the Marchese Federigo Gonzaga, dated February 1530, was not, as is a.s.sumed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Madonna del Coniglio_ of the Louvre, but the _Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and St. Catherine_, which is No. 635 at the National Gallery.[2] Few pictures of the master have been more frequently copied and adapted than this radiantly beautiful piece, in which the dominant chord of the scheme of colour is composed by the cerulean blues of the heavens and the Virgin's entire dress, the deep luscious greens of the landscape, and the peculiar, pale, citron hue, relieved with a crimson girdle, of the robe worn by the St. Catherine, a splendid Venetian beauty of no very refined type or emotional intensity.

Perfect repose and serenity are the keynote of the conception, which in its luxuriant beauty has little of the power to touch that must be conceded to the more nave and equally splendid _Madonna del Coniglio_.[3] It is above all in the wonderful Venetian landscape--a mountain-bordered vale, along which flocks and herds are being driven, under a sky of the most intense blue--that the master shows himself supreme. Nature is therein not so much detailed as synthesised with a sweeping breadth which makes of the scene not the reflection of one beautiful spot in the Venetian territory, but without loss of essential truth or character a very type of Venetian landscape of the sixteenth century. These herdsmen and their flocks, and also the note of warning in the sky of supernatural splendour, recall the beautiful Venetian storm-landscape in the royal collection at Buckingham Palace. This has been very generally attributed to t.i.tian himself,[4] and described as the only canvas still extant in which he has made landscape his one and only theme. It has, indeed, a rare and mysterious power to move, a true poetry of interpretation. A fleeting moment, full of portent as well as of beauty, has been seized; the smile traversed by a frown of the stormy sky, half overshadowing half revealing the wooded slopes, the rich plain, and the distant mountains, is rendered with a rare felicity. The beauty is, all the same, in the conception and in the thing actually seen--much less in the actual painting. It is hardly possible to convince oneself, comparing the work with such landscape backgrounds as those in this picture at the National Gallery in the somewhat earlier _Madonna del Coniglio_, and the gigantic _St. Peter Martyr_, or, indeed, in a score of other genuine productions, that the depth, the vigour, the authority of t.i.tian himself are here to be recognised. The weak treatment of the great t.i.tianesque tree in the foreground, with its too summarily indicated foliage--to select only one detail that comes naturally to hand--would in itself suffice to bring such an attribution into question.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Madonna and Child with St. Catherine and St. John the Baptist. National Gallery. From a Photograph by Morelli._]

Vasari states, speaking confessedly from hearsay, that in 1530, the Emperor Charles V. being at Bologna, t.i.tian was summoned thither by Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, using Aretino as an intermediary, and that he on that occasion executed a most admirable portrait of His Majesty, all in arms, which had so much success that the artist received as a present a thousand scudi. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, however, adduce strong evidence to prove that t.i.tian was busy in Venice for Federigo Gonzaga at the time of the Emperor's first visit, and that he only proceeded to Bologna in July to paint for the Marquess of Mantua the portrait of a Bolognese beauty, _La Cornelia_, the lady-in-waiting of the Countess Pepoli, whom Covas, the all-powerful political secretary of Charles the Fifth, had seen and admired at the splendid entertainments given by the Pepoli to the Emperor. Vasari has in all probability confounded this journey of Charles in 1530 with that subsequent one undertaken in 1532 when t.i.tian not only portrayed the Emperor, but also painted an admirable likeness of Ippolito de' Medici presently to be described. He had the bad luck on this occasion to miss the lady Cornelia, who had retired to Nuvolara, indisposed and not in good face.

The letter written by our painter to the Marquess in connection with this incident[5] is chiefly remarkable as affording evidence of his too great anxiety to portray the lady without approaching her, relying merely on the portrait, "che fece quel altro pittore della detta Cornelia"; of his unwillingness to proceed to Nuvolara, unless the picture thus done at second hand should require alteration. In truth we have lighted here upon one of t.i.tian's most besetting sins, this willingness, this eagerness, when occasion offers, to paint portraits without direct reference to the model. In this connection we are reminded that he never saw Francis the First, whose likeness he notwithstanding painted with so showy and superficial a magnificence as to make up to the casual observer for the absence of true vitality;[6]

that the Empress Isabella, Charles V.'s consort, when at the behest of the monarch he produced her sumptuous but lifeless and empty portrait, now in the great gallery of the Prado, was long since dead. He consented, basing his picture upon a likeness of much earlier date, to paint Isabella d'Este Gonzaga as a young woman when she was already an old one, thereby flattering an amiable and natural weakness in this great princess and unrivalled dilettante, but impairing his own position as an artist of supreme rank.[7] It is not necessary to include in this category the popular _Caterina Cornaro_ of the Uffizi, since it is confessedly nothing but a fancy portrait, making no reference to the true aspect at any period of the long-since deceased queen of Cyprus, and, what is more, no original t.i.tian, but at the utmost an atelier piece from his _entourage_. Take, however, as an instance the _Francis the First_, which was painted some few years later than the time at which we have now arrived, and at about the same period as the _Isabella d'Este_. Though as a _portrait d'apparat_ it makes its effect, and reveals the sovereign accomplishment of the master, does it not shrink into the merest insignificance when compared with such renderings from life as the successive portraits of _Charles the Fifth_, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Francesco Maria della Rovere_? This is as it must and should be, and t.i.tian is not the less great, but the greater, because he cannot convincingly evolve at second hand the true human individuality, physical and mental, of man or woman.

It was in the earlier part of 1531 that t.i.tian painted for Federigo Gonzaga a _St. Jerome_ and a _St. Mary Magdalene_, destined for the famous Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, who had expressed to the ruler of Mantua the desire to possess such a picture. Gonzaga writes to the Marchioness on March 11, 1831[8]:--"Ho subito mandate a Venezia e scritto a t.i.tiano, quale e forse il piu eccellente in quell' arte che a nostri tempi si ritrovi, ed e tutto mio, ricercandolo con grande instantia a volerne fare una bella lagrimosa piu che si so puo, e farmela haver presto." The pa.s.sage is worth quoting as showing the estimation in which t.i.tian was held at a court which had known and still knew the greatest Italian masters of the art.

It is not possible at present to identify with any extant painting the _St. Jerome_, of which we know that it hung in the private apartments of the Marchioness Isabella at Mantua. The writer is unable to accept Crowe and Cavalcaselle's suggestion that it may be the fine moonlight landscape with St. Jerome in prayer which is now in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. This piece, if indeed it be by t.i.tian, which is by no means certain, must belong to his late time. The landscape, which is marked by a beautiful and wholly unconventional treatment of moonlight, for which it would not be easy to find a parallel in the painting of the time, is worthy of the Cadorine, and agrees well, especially in the broad treatment of foliage, with, for instance, the background in the late _Venus and Cupid_ of the Tribuna.[9] The figure of St. Jerome, on the other hand, does not in the peculiar tightness of the modelling, or in the flesh-tints, recall t.i.tian's masterly synthetic way of going to work in works of this late period. The n.o.ble _St. Jerome_ of the Brera, which indubitably belongs to a well-advanced stage in the late time, will be dealt with in its right place. Though it does not appear probable that we have, in the much-admired _Magdalen_ of the Pitti, the picture here referred to--this last having belonged to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, and representing, to judge by style, a somewhat more advanced period in the painter's career--it may be convenient to mention it here. As an example of accomplished brush-work, of handling careful and yet splendid in breadth, it is indeed worthy of all admiration. The colours of the fair human body, the marvellous wealth of golden blond hair, the youthful flesh glowing semi-transparent, and suggesting the rush of the blood beneath; these are also the colours of the picture, aided only by the indefinite landscape and the deep blue sky of the background. If this were to be accepted as the _Magdalen_ painted for Federigo Gonzaga, we must hold, nevertheless, that t.i.tian with his masterpiece of painting only half satisfied the requirements of his patron. _Bellissima_ this Magdalen undoubtedly is, but hardly _lagrimosa pin che si puo_. She is a _belle pecheresse_ whose repentance sits all too lightly upon her, whose consciousness of a physical charm not easily to be withstood is hardly disguised. Somehow, although the picture in no way oversteps the bounds of decency, and cannot be objected to even by the most over-scrupulous, there is latent in it a jarring note of unrefinement in the presentment of exuberant youth and beauty which we do not find in the more avowedly sensuous _Venus of the Tribuna_. This last is an avowed act of worship by the artist of the naked human body, and as such, in its n.o.ble frankness, free from all offence, except to those whose scruples in matters of art we are not here called upon to consider. From this _Magdalen_ to that much later one of the Hermitage, which will be described farther on, is a great step upwards, and it is a step which, in pa.s.sing from the middle to the last period, we shall more than once find ourselves taking.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. JEROME. PEN DRAWING BY t.i.tIAN (?) _British Museum_.]

It is impossible to give even in outline here an account of t.i.tian's correspondence and business relations with his n.o.ble and royal patrons, instructive as it is to follow these out, and to see how, under the influence of Aretino, his natural eagerness to grasp in every direction at material advantages is sharpened; how he becomes at once more humble and more pressing, covering with the manner and the tone appropriate to courts the reiterated demands of the keen and indefatigable man of business. It is the less necessary to attempt any such account in these pages--dealing as we are chiefly with the work and not primarily with the life of t.i.tian--seeing that in Crowe and Cavalcaselle's admirable biography this side of the subject, among many others, is most patiently and exhaustively dealt with.

In 1531 we read of a _Boy Baptist_ by t.i.tian sent by Aretino to Maximian Stampa, an imperialist partisan in command of the castle of Milan. The donor particularly dwells upon "the beautiful curl of the Baptist's hair, the fairness of his skin, etc.," a description which recalls to us, in striking fashion, the little St. John in the _Virgin and Child with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, which belongs, as has been shown, to the same time.

It was on the occasion of the second visit of the Emperor and his court to Bologna at the close of 1532 that t.i.tian first came in personal contact with Charles V., and obtained from that monarch his first sitting. In the course of an inspection, with Federigo Gonzaga himself as cicerone, of the art treasures preserved in the palace at Mantua, the Emperor saw the portrait by t.i.tian of Federigo, and was so much struck with it, so intent upon obtaining a portrait of himself from the same brush, that the Marquess wrote off at once pressing our master to join him without delay in his capital. t.i.tian preferred, however, to go direct to Bologna in the train of his earlier patron Alfonso d'Este. It was on this occasion that Charles's all-powerful secretary, the greedy, overbearing Covos, exacted as a gift from the agents of the Duke of Ferrara, among other things, a portrait of Alfonso himself by t.i.tian; and in all probability obtained also a portrait from the same hand of Ercole d'Este, the heir-apparent. There is evidence to show that the portrait of Alfonso was at once handed over to, or appropriated by, the Emperor.

Whether this was the picture described by Vasari as representing the prince with his arm resting on a great piece of artillery, does not appear. Of this last a copy exists in the Pitti Gallery which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have ascribed to Dosso Dossi, but the original is nowhere to be traced. The Ferrarese ruler is, in this last canvas, depicted as a man of forty or upwards, of resolute and somewhat careworn aspect. It has already been demonstrated, on evidence furnished by Herr Carl Justi, that the supposed portrait of Alfonso, in the gallery of the Prado at Madrid, cannot possibly represent t.i.tian's patron at any stage of his career, but in all probability, like the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_ of Castle Howard, is a likeness of his son and successor, Ercole II.

t.i.tian's first portrait of the Emperor, a full-length in which he appeared in armour with a generalissimo's baton of command, was taken in 1556 from Brussels to Madrid, after the formal ceremony of abdication, and perished, it would appear, in one of the too numerous fires which have devastated from time to time the royal palaces of the Spanish capital and its neighbourhood. To the same period belongs, no doubt, the n.o.ble full-length of Charles in gala court costume which now hangs in the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_ in the Prado Gallery, as a pendant to t.i.tian's portrait of Philip II. in youth. Crowe and Cavalcaselle a.s.sume that not this picture, but a replica, was the one which found its way into Charles I.'s collection, and was there catalogued by Van der Doort as "the Emperor Charles the Fifth, brought by the king from Spain, being done at length with a big white Irish dog"--going afterwards, at the dispersal of the king's effects, to Sir Balthasar Gerbier for __150.

There is, however, no valid reason for doubting that this is the very picture owned for a time by Charles I., and which busy intriguing Gerbier afterwards bought, only to part with it to Cardenas the Spanish amba.s.sador.[10] Other famous originals by t.i.tian were among the choicest gifts made by Philip IV. to Prince Charles at the time of his runaway expedition to Madrid with the Duke of Buckingham, and this was no doubt among them. Confirmation is supplied by the fact that the references to the existence of this picture in the royal palaces of Madrid are for the reigns of Philip II., Charles II., and Charles III., thus leaving a large gap unaccounted for. Dimmed as the great portrait is, robbed of its glow and its chastened splendour in a variety of ways, it is still a rare example of the master's unequalled power in rendering race, the unaffected consciousness of exalted rank, natural as distinguished from a.s.sumed dignity. There is here no demonstrative a.s.sertion of _grandeza_, no menacing display of truculent authority, but an absolutely serene and simple att.i.tude such as can only be the outcome of a consciousness of supreme rank and responsibility which it can never have occurred to any one to call into question. To see and perpetuate these subtle qualities, which go so far to redeem the physical drawbacks of the House of Hapsburg, the painter must have had a peculiar instinct for what is aristocratic in the higher sense of the word--that is, both outwardly and inwardly distinguished. This was indeed one of the leading characteristics of t.i.tian's great art, more especially in portraiture.

Giorgione went deeper, knowing the secret of the soul's refinement, the aristocracy of poetry and pa.s.sion; Lotto sympathetically laid bare the heart's secrets and showed the pathetic helplessness of humanity.

Tintoretto communicated his own savage grandeur, his own unrest, to those whom he depicted; Paolo Veronese charmed without _arriere-pensee_ by the intensity of vitality which with perfect simplicity he preserved in his sitters. Yet to t.i.tian must be conceded absolute supremacy in the rendering not only of the outward but of the essential dignity, the refinement of type and bearing, which without doubt come unconsciously to those who can boast a n.o.ble and ill.u.s.trious ancestry.

Again the writer hesitates to agree with Crowe and Cavalcaselle when they place at this period, that is to say about 1533, the superb _Allegory_ of the Louvre (No. 1589), which is very generally believed to represent the famous commander Alfonso d'Avalos, Marques del Vasto, with his family. The eminent biographers of t.i.tian connect the picture with the return of d'Avalos from the campaign against the Turks, undertaken by him in the autumn of 1532, under the leadership of Croy, at the behest of his imperial master. They hazard the surmise that the picture, though painted after Alfonso's return, symbolises his departure for the wars, "consoled by Victory, Love, and Hymen." A more natural conclusion would surely be that what t.i.tian has sought to suggest is the return of the commander to enjoy the hard-earned fruits of victory.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. Pitti Palace, Florence.

From a Photograph by G. Brogi_.]

The Italo-Spanish grandee was born at Naples in 1502, so that at this date he would have been but thirty-one years of age, whereas the mailed warrior of the _Allegory_ is at least forty, perhaps older. Moreover, and this is the essential point, the technical qualities of the picture, the wonderful easy mastery of the handling, the peculiarities of the colouring and the general tone, surely point to a rather later date, to a period, indeed, some ten years ahead of the time at which we have arrived. If we are to accept the tradition that this Allegory, or quasi-allegorical portrait-piece, giving a fanciful embodiment to the pleasures of martial domination, of conjugal love, of well-earned peace and plenty, represents d'Avalos, his consort Mary of Arragon, and their family--and a comparison with the well-authenticated portrait of Del Vasto in the _Allocution_ of Madrid does not carry with it entire conviction--we must perforce place the Louvre picture some ten years later than do Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Apart from the question of identification, it appears to the writer that the technical execution of the piece would lead to a similar conclusion.[11]

To this year, 1533, belongs one of the masterpieces in portraiture of our painter, the wonderful _Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici in a Hungarian habit_ of the Pitti. This youthful Prince of the Church, the natural son of Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours, was born in 1511, so that when t.i.tian so incomparably portrayed him, he was, for all the perfect maturity of his virile beauty, for all the perfect self-possession of his aspect, but twenty-two years of age. He was the pa.s.sionate worshipper of the divine Giulia Gonzaga, whose portrait he caused to be painted by Sebastiano del Piombo. His part in the war undertaken by Charles V. in 1532, against the Turks, had been a strange one. Clement VII., his relative, had appointed him Legate and sent him to Vienna at the head of three hundred musketeers. But when Charles withdrew from the army to return to Italy, the Italian contingent, instead of going in pursuit of the Sultan into Hungary, opportunely mutinied, thus affording to their pleasure-loving leader the desired pretext for riding back with them through the Austrian provinces, with eyes wilfully closed the while to their acts of depredation. It was in the rich and fantastic habit of a Hungarian captain that the handsome young Medici was now painted by t.i.tian at Bologna, the result being a portrait unique of its kind even in his life-work. The sombre glow of the supple, youthful flesh, the red-brown of the rich velvet habit which defines the perfect shape of Ippolito, the red of the fantastic plumed head-dress worn by him with such sovereign ease, make up a deep harmony, warm, yet not in the technical sense hot, and of indescribable effect. And this effect is centralised in the uncanny glance, the mysterious aspect of the man whom, as we see him here, a woman might love for his beauty, but a man would do well to distrust. The smaller portrait painted by t.i.tian about the same time of the young Cardinal fully armed--the one which, with the Pitti picture, Vasari saw in the closet (_guardaroba_) of Cosimo, Duke of Tuscany--is not now known to exist.[12]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Francis the First. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Portrait of a n.o.bleman. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by E. Alinari_.]

It may be convenient to mention here one of the most magnificent among the male portraits of t.i.tian, the _Young n.o.bleman_ in the Sala di Marte of the Pitti Gallery, although its exact place in the middle time of the artist it is, failing all data on the point, not easy to determine. At Florence there has somehow been attached to it the curious name _Howard duca di Norfolk_,[13] but upon what grounds, if any, the writer is unable to state. The master of Cadore never painted a head more finely or with a more exquisite finesse, never more happily characterised a face, than that of this resolute, self-contained young patrician with the curly chestnut hair and the short, fine beard and moustache--a personage high of rank, doubtless, notwithstanding the studied simplicity of his dress. Because we know nothing of the sitter, and there is in his pose and general aspect nothing sensational, this masterpiece is, if not precisely not less celebrated among connoisseurs, at any rate less popular with the larger public, than it deserves to be.[14]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _S. Giovanni Elemosinario giving Alms. In the Church of that name at Venice. From a Photograph by Naya._]

The n.o.ble altar-piece in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario at Venice showing the saint of that name enthroned, and giving alms to a beggar, belongs to the close of 1533 or thereabouts, since the high-altar was finished in the month of October of that year. According to Vasari, it must be regarded as having served above all to a.s.sert once for all the supremacy of t.i.tian over Pordenone, whose friends had obtained for him the commission to paint in compet.i.tion with the Cadorine an altar-piece for one of the apsidal chapels of the church, where, indeed, his work is still to be seen.[15] t.i.tian's canvas, like most of the great altar-pieces of the middle time, was originally arched at the top; but the vandalism of a subsequent epoch has, as in the case of the _Madonna di S. Niccola_, now in the Vatican, made of this arch a square, thereby greatly impairing the majesty of the general effect.

t.i.tian here solves the problem of combining the strong and simple decorative aspect demanded by the position of the work as the central feature of a small church, with the utmost pathos and dignity, thus doing incomparably in his own way--the way of the colourist and the warm, the essentially human realist--what Michelangelo had, soaring high above earth, accomplished with unapproachable sublimity in the _Prophets_ and _Sibyls_ of the Sixtine Chapel.

The colour is appropriately sober, yet a general tone is produced of great strength and astonishing effectiveness. The illumination is that of the open air, tempered and modified by an overhanging canopy of green; the great effect is obtained by the brilliant grayish white of the saint's alb, dominating and keeping in due balance the red of the rochet and the under-robes, the cloud-veiled sky, the marble throne or podium, the dark green hanging. This picture must have had in the years to follow a strong and lasting influence on Paolo Veronese, the keynote to whose audaciously brilliant yet never over-dazzling colour is this use of white and gray in large dominating ma.s.ses. The n.o.ble figure of S.

Giovanni gave him a prototype for many of his imposing figures of bearded old men. There is a strong reminiscence, too, of the saint's att.i.tude in one of the most wonderful of extant Veroneses--that sumptuous altar-piece _SS. Anthony, Cornelius, and Cyprian with a Page_, in the Brera, for which he invented a harmony as delicious as it is daring, composed wholly of violet-purple, green, and gold.

CHAPTER II

_Francesco Maria della Rovere--t.i.tian and Eleonora Gonzaga--The "Venus with the Sh.e.l.l"--t.i.tian's later ideals--The "Venus of Urbino"--The "Bella di Tiziano"--The "Twelve Caesars"--t.i.tian and Pordenone--The "Battle of Cadore"--Portraits of the Master by himself--The "Presentation in the Temple"--The "Allocation" of Madrid--The Ceiling Pictures of Santo Spirito--First Meeting with Pope Paul III.--The "Ecce h.o.m.o" of Vienna--"Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus_."

Within the years 1532 and 1538, or thereabouts, would appear to fall t.i.tian's relations with another princely patron, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, the nephew of the redoubtable Pope Julius II., whose qualities of martial ardour and unbridled pa.s.sion he reproduced in an exaggerated form. By his mother, Giovanna da Montefeltro, he descended also from the rightful dynasty of Urbino, to which he succeeded in virtue of adoption. His life of perpetual strife, of warfare in defence of his more than once lost and reconquered duchy, and as the captain first of the army of the Church, afterwards of the Venetian forces, came to an abrupt end in 1538. With his own hand he had, in the ardent days of his youth, slain in the open streets of Ravenna the handsome, sinister Cardinal Alidosi, thereby bringing down upon himself the anathemas of his uncle, Julius II., and furnishing to his successor, the Medici pope Leo X., the best possible excuse for the sequestration of the duchy of Urbino in favour of his own house. He himself died by poison, suspicion resting upon the infamous Pier Luigi Farnese, the son of Paul III.

Francesco Maria had espoused Eleonora Gonzaga, the sister of t.i.tian's protector, Federigo, and it is probably through the latter that the relations with our master sprang up to which we owe a small group of his very finest works, including the so-called _Venus of Urbino_ of the Tribuna, the _Girl in a Fur Cloak_ of the Vienna Gallery, and the companion portraits of Francesco Maria and Eleonora which are now in the Venetian Gallery at the Uffizi. The fiery leader of armies had, it should be remembered, been brought up by Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, one of the most amiable and enlightened princes of his time, and, moreover, his consort Eleonora was the daughter of Isabella d'Este Gonzaga, than whom the Renaissance knew no more enthusiastic or more discriminating patron of art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Girl in the Fur Cloak. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.

From a Photograph by Lowy._]

A curious problem meets us at the outset. We may a.s.sume with some degree of certainty that the portraits of the duke and d.u.c.h.ess belong to the year 1537. Stylistic characteristics point to the conclusion that the great _Venus_ of the Tribuna, the so-called _Bella di Tiziano_, and the _Girl in the Fur Cloak_--to take only undoubted originals--belong to much the same stage of t.i.tian's practice as the companion portraits at the Uffizi. Eleonora Gonzaga, a princess of the highest culture, the daughter of an admirable mother, the friend of Pietro Bembo, Sadolet, and Balda.s.sarre Castiglione, was at this time a matron of some twenty years' standing; at the date when her avowed portrait was painted she must have been at the very least forty. By what magic did t.i.tian manage to suggest her type and physiognomy in the famous pictures just now mentioned, and yet to plunge the d.u.c.h.ess into a kind of _Fontaine de Jouvence_, realising in the divine freshness of youth and beauty beings who nevertheless appear to have with her some kind of mystic and unsolved connection? If this was what he really intended--and the results attained may lead us without temerity to a.s.sume as much--no subtler or more exquisite form of flattery could be conceived. It is curious to note that at the same time he signally failed with the portrait of her mother, Isabella d'Este, painted in 1534, but showing the Marchioness of Mantua as a young woman of some twenty-five years, though she was then sixty. Here youth and a semblance of beauty are called up by the magic of the artist, but the personality, both physical and mental, is lost in the effort. But then in this last case t.i.tian was working from an early portrait, and without the living original to refer to.

But, before approaching the discussion of the _Venus of Urbino_, it is necessary to say a word about another _Venus_ which must have been painted some years before this time, revealing, as it does, a completely different and, it must be owned, a higher ideal. This is the terribly ruined, yet still beautiful, _Venus Anadyomene_, or _Venus of the Sh.e.l.l_, of the Bridgewater Gallery, painted perhaps at the instigation of some humanist, to realise a description of the world-famous painting of Apelles. It is not at present possible to place this picture with anything approaching to chronological exact.i.tude. It must have been painted some years after the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery, some years before the _Venus_ of the Tribuna, and that is about as near as surmise can get. The type of the G.o.ddess in the Ellesmere picture recalls somewhat the _Ariadne_ in our masterpiece at the National Gallery, but also, albeit in a less material form, the _Magdalens_ of a later time. t.i.tian's conception of perfect womanhood is here midway between his earlier Giorgionesque ideal and the frankly sensuous yet grand luxuriance of his maturity and old age. He never, even in the days of youth and Giorgionesque enchantment, penetrated so far below the surface as did his master and friend Barbarelli. He could not equal him in giving, with the undisguised physical allurement which belongs to the true woman, as distinguished from the ideal conception compounded of womanhood's finest attributes, that sovereignty of amorous yet of spiritual charm which is its complement and its corrective.[16]

Still with t.i.tian, too, in the earlier years, woman, as presented in the perfection of mature youth, had, accompanying and elevating her bodily loveliness, a measure of that higher and n.o.bler feminine attractiveness which would enable her to meet man on equal terms, nay, actively to exercise a dominating influence of fascination. In ill.u.s.tration of this a.s.sertion it is only necessary to refer to the draped and the undraped figure in the _Medea and Venus (Sacred and Profane Love)_ of the Borghese Gallery, to the _Herodias_ of the Doria Gallery, to the _Flora_ of the Uffizi. Here, even when the beautiful Venetian courtesan is represented or suggested, what the master gives is less the mere votary than the priestess of love. Of this power of domination, this feminine royalty, the _Venus Anadyomene_ still retains a measure, but the _Venus of Urbino_ and the splendid succession of Venuses and Danaes, G.o.ddesses, nymphs, and heroines belonging to the period of the fullest maturity, show woman in the phase in which, renouncing her power to enslave, she is herself reduced to slavery.

These glowing presentments of physical attractiveness embody a lower ideal--that of woman as the plaything of man, his precious possession, his delight in the lower sense. And yet t.i.tian expresses this by no means exalted conception with a grand candour, an absence of _arriere-pensee_ such as almost purges it of offence. It is Giovanni Morelli who, in tracing the gradual descent from his recovered treasure, the _Venus_ of Giorgione in the Dresden Gallery,[17] through the various Venuses of t.i.tian down to those of the latest manner, so finely expresses the essential difference between Giorgione's divinity and her sister in the Tribuna. The former sleeping, and protected only by her sovereign loveliness, is safer from offence than the waking G.o.ddess--or shall we not rather say woman?--who in t.i.tian's canvas pa.s.sively waits in her rich Venetian bower, tended by her handmaidens. It is again Morelli[18] who points out that, as compared with Correggio, even Giorgione--to say nothing of t.i.tian--is when he renders the beauty of woman or G.o.ddess a realist. And this is true in a sense, yet not altogether. Correggio's _Danae_, his _Io_, his _Leda_, his _Venus_, are in their exquisite grace of form and movement farther removed from the mere fleshly beauty of the undraped model than are the G.o.ddesses and women of Giorgione. The pa.s.sion and throb of humanity are replaced by a subtler and less easily explicable charm; beauty becomes a perfectly balanced and finely modulated harmony. Still the allurement is there, and it is more consciously and more provocatively exercised than with Giorgione, though the fascination of Correggio's divinities a.s.serts itself less directly, less candidly. Showing through the frankly human loveliness of Giorgione's women there is after all a higher spirituality, a deeper intimation of that true, that clear-burning pa.s.sion, enveloping body and soul, which transcends all exterior grace and harmony, however exquisite it may be in refinement of voluptuousness.[19]

It is not, indeed, by any means certain that we are justified in seriously criticising as a _Venus_ the great picture of the Tribuna.

t.i.tian himself has given no indication that the beautiful Venetian woman who lies undraped after the bath, while in a sumptuous chamber, furnished according to the mode of the time, her handmaidens are seeking for the robes with which she will adorn herself, is intended to present the love-G.o.ddess, or even a beauty masquerading with her attributes.