The Later Works of Titian Part 3

The _Christ crowned with Thorns_, which long adorned the church of S.

Maria delle Grazie at Milan, and is now in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, may belong to about this time, but is painted with a larger and more generous brush, with a more spontaneous energy, than the carefully studied piece at the Gesuiti. The tawny harmonies finely express in their calculated absence of freshness the scene of brutal and unholy violence so dramatically enacted before our eyes. The rendering of muscle, supple and strong under the living epidermis, the glow of the flesh, the dramatic momentariness of the whole, have not been surpa.s.sed even by t.i.tian. Of the true elevation, of the spiritual dignity that the subject calls for, there is, however, little or nothing. The finely limbed Christ is as coa.r.s.e in type and as violent in action as his executioners; sublimity is reached, strange to say, only in the bust of Tiberius, which crowns the rude archway through which the figures have issued into the open s.p.a.ce. t.i.tian is here the precursor of the _Naturalisti_--of Caravaggio and his school. Yet, all the same, how immeasurable is the distance between the two!

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Christ crowned with Thorns. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein_.]

On the 21st of September 1558 died the imperial recluse of Yuste, once Charles V., and it is said his last looks were steadfastly directed towards that great canvas _The Trinity_, which to devise with t.i.tian had been one of his greatest consolations at a moment when already earthly glories held him no more. Philip, on the news of his father's death, retired for some weeks to the monastery of Groenendale, and thence sent a despatch to the Governor of Milan, directing payment of all the arrears of the pensions "granted to t.i.tian by Charles his father (now in glory)," adding by way of unusual favour a postscript in his own hand.[49] Orazio Vecellio, despatched by his father in the spring of 1559 to Milan to receive the arrears of pension, accepted the hospitality of the sculptor Leone Leoni, who was then living in splendid style in a palace which he had built and adorned for himself in the Lombard city. He was the rival in art as well as the mortal enemy of Benvenuto Cellini, and as great a ruffian as he, though one less picturesque in blackguardism. One day early in June, when Orazio, having left Leoni's house, had returned to superintend the removal of certain property, he was set upon, and murderously a.s.saulted by the perfidious host and his servants. The whole affair is wrapped in obscurity. It remains uncertain whether vengeance, or hunger after the arrears of t.i.tian's pension, or both, were the motives which incited Leoni to attempt the crime. t.i.tian's pa.s.sionate reclamations, addressed immediately to Philip II., met with but partial success, since the sculptor, himself a great favourite with the court of Spain, was punished only with fine and banishment, and the affair was afterwards compromised by the payment of a sum of money.

t.i.tian's letter of September 22, 1559, to Philip II. announces the despatch of the companion pieces _Diana and Calisto_ and _Diana and Actaeon_, as well as of an _Entombment_ intended to replace a painting of the same subject which had been lost on the way. The two celebrated canvases,[50] now in the Bridgewater Gallery, are so familiar that they need no new description. Judging by the repet.i.tions, reductions, and copies that exist in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, the Prado Gallery, the Yarborough Collection, and elsewhere, these mythological _poesie_ have captivated the world far more than the fresher and lovelier painted poems of the earlier time--the _Worship of Venus_, the _Baccha.n.a.l_, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_. At no previous period has t.i.tian wielded the brush with greater _maestria_ and ease than here, or united a richer or more transparent glow with greater dignity of colour. About the compositions themselves, if we are to take them as the _poesie_ that t.i.tian loved to call them, there is a certain want of significance, neither the divine nor the human note being struck with any depth or intensity of vibration. The glamour, the mystery, the intimate charm of the early pieces is lost, and there is felt, enwrapping the whole, that sultry atmosphere of untempered sensuousness which has already, upon more than one occasion, been commented upon. That this should be so is only natural when creative power is not extinguished by old age, but is on the contrary coloured with its pa.s.sion, so different in quality from that of youth.

The _Entombment_, which went to Madrid with the mythological pieces just now discussed, serves to show how vivid was t.i.tian's imagination at this point, when he touched upon a sacred theme, and how little dependent he was in this field on the conceptions of his earlier prime. A more living pa.s.sion informs the scene, a more intimate sympathy colours it, than we find in the n.o.ble _Entombment_ of the Louvre, much as the picture which preceded it by so many years excels the Madrid example in fineness of balance, in dignity, in splendour and charm of colour. Here the personages are set free by the master from all academic trammels, and express themselves with a greater spontaneity in grief. The colour, too, of which the general scheme is far less attractive to the eye than in the Louvre picture, blazes forth in one note of lurid splendour in the red robe of the saint who supports the feet of the dead Christ.

In this same year t.i.tian painted on the ceiling of the ante-chamber to Sansovino's great Library in the Piazzetta the allegorical figure _Wisdom_, thus entering into direct compet.i.tion with young Paolo Veronese, Schiavone, and the other painters who, striving in friendly rivalry, had been engaged a short time before on the ceiling of the great hall in the same building. This n.o.ble design contains a p.r.o.nounced reminiscence of Raphael's incomparable allegorical figures in the Camera della Segnatura, but excels them as much in decorative splendour and facile breadth of execution as it falls behind them in sublimity of inspiration.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle are probably right in a.s.signing the great _Cornaro Family_ in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland to the year 1560 or thereabouts. Little seen of late years, and like most Venetian pictures of the sixteenth century shorn of some of its glory by time and the restorer, this family picture appears to the writer to rank among t.i.tian's masterpieces in the domain of portraiture, and to be indeed the finest portrait-group of this special type that Venice has produced. In the simplicity and fervour of the conception t.i.tian rises to heights which he did not reach in the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, where he is hampered by the necessity for combining a votive picture with a series of avowed portraits. It is pretty clear that this _Cornaro_ picture, like the Pesaro altar-piece, must have been commissioned to commemorate a victory or important political event in the annals of the ill.u.s.trious family. Search among their archives and papers, if they still exist, might throw light upon this point, and fix more accurately the date of the magnificent work. In the open air--it may be outside some great Venetian church--an altar has been erected, and upon it is placed a crucifix, on either side of which are church candles, blown this way and the other by the wind. Three generations of patricians kneel in prayer and thanksgiving, taking precedence according to age, six handsome boys, arranged in groups of three on either side of the canvas, furnishing an element of great pictorial attractiveness but no vital significance. The act of worship acquires here more reality and a profounder meaning than it can have in those vast altar-pieces in which the divine favour is symbolised by the actual presence of the Madonna and Child. An open-air effect has been deliberately aimed at and attained, the splendid series of portraits being relieved against the cloud-flecked blue sky with a less sculptural plasticity than the master would have given to them in an indoor scheme. This is another admirable example of the dignity and reserve which t.i.tian combines with sumptuous colour at this stage of his practice. His mastery is not less but greater, subtler, than that of his more showy and brilliant contemporaries of the younger generation; the result is something that appears as if it must inevitably have been so and not otherwise. The central figure of the patriarch is robed in deep crimson with grayish fur, rather black in shadow; the man in the prime of manhood wears a more positive crimson, trimmed with tawnier fur, browner in shadow; a lighter sheen is on the brocaded mantle of yet another shade of crimson worn by the most youthful of the three patricians. Just the stimulating note to break up a harmony which might otherwise have been of a richness too cloying is furnished--in the master's own peculiar way--by the scarlet stockings of one boy in the right hand group, by the cinnamon sleeve of another.[51]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Cornaro Family. In the Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.]

To the year 1561 belongs, according to the elaborate inscription on the picture, the magnificent _Portrait of a Man_ which is No. 172 in the Dresden Gallery. It presents a Venetian gentleman in his usual habit, but bearing a palm branch such as we a.s.sociate with saints who have endured martyrdom. Strangely sombre and melancholy in its very reserve is this sensitive face, and the tone of the landscape echoes the pathetic note of disquiet. The canvas bears the signature "t.i.tia.n.u.s Pictor et Aeques (sic) Caesaris." There group very well with this Dresden picture, though the writer will not venture to a.s.sert positively that they belong to exactly the same period, the _St. Dominic_ of the Borghese Gallery and the _Knight of Malta_ of the Prado Gallery. In all three--in the two secular portraits as in the sacred piece which is also a portrait--the expression given, and doubtless intended, is that of a man who has withdrawn himself in his time of fullest physical vigour from the pomps and vanities of the world, and sadly concentrates his thoughts on matters of higher import.

On the 1st of December 1561 t.i.tian wrote to the king to announce the despatch of a _Magdalen_, which had already been mentioned more than once in the correspondence. According to Vasari and subsequent authorities, Silvio Badoer, a Venetian patrician, saw the masterpiece on the painter's easel, and took it away for a hundred scudi, leaving the master to paint another for Philip. This last has disappeared, while the canvas which remained in Venice cannot be identified with any certainty. The finest extant example of this type of _Magdalen_ is undoubtedly that which from t.i.tian's ne'er-do-well son, Pompinio, pa.s.sed to the Barbarigo family, and ultimately, with the group of t.i.tians forming part of the Barbarigo collection, found its way into the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. This answers in every respect to Vasari's eloquent description of the _magna peccatrix_, lovely still in her penitence. It is an embodiment of the favourite subject, infinitely finer and more moving than the much earlier _Magdalen_ of the Pitti, in which the artist's sole preoccupation has been the alluring portraiture of exuberant feminine charms. This later _Magdalen_, as Vasari says, "ancorche che sia bellissima, non muove a lascivia, ma a commiserazione," and the contrary might, without exaggeration, be said of the Pitti picture.[52] Another of the Barbarigo heirlooms which so pa.s.sed into the Hermitage is the ever-popular _Venus with the Mirror_, the original of many repet.i.tions and variations. Here, while one winged love holds the mirror, the other proffers a crown of flowers, not to the G.o.ddess, but to the fairest of women. The rich mantle of Venetian fashion, the jewels, the coiffure, all show that an idealised portrait of some lovely Cytherean of Venice, and no true mythological piece, has been intended.

At this date, or thereabouts, is very generally placed, with the _Rape of Europa_ presently to be discussed, the _Jupiter and Antiope_ of the Louvre, more popularly known as the _Venere del Pardo_.[53] Seeing that the picture is included in the list[54] sent by t.i.tian to Antonio Perez in 1574, setting forth the t.i.tles of canvases delivered during the last twenty-five years, and then still unpaid for, it may well have been completed somewhere about the time at which we have arrived. To the writer it appears nevertheless that it is in essentials the work of an earlier period, taken up and finished thus late in the day for the delectation of the Spanish king. Seeing that the _Venere del Pardo_ has gone through two fires--those of the Pardo and the Louvre--besides cleanings, restorations, and repaintings, even more disfiguring, it would be very unsafe to lay undue stress on technique alone. Yet compare the close, sculptural modelling in the figure of Antiope with the broader, looser handling in the figure of Europa; compare the two landscapes, which are even more divergent in style. The glorious sylvan prospect, which adds so much freshness and beauty to the _Venere del Pardo_, is conspicuously earlier in manner than, for instance, the backgrounds to the _Diana and Actaeon_ and _Diana and Calisto_ of Bridgewater House. The captivating work is not without its faults, chief among which is the curious awkwardness of design which makes of the composition, cut in two by a central tree, two pictures instead of one.

Undeniably, too, there is a certain meanness and triviality in the little nymph or mortal of the foreground, which may, however, be due to the intervention of an a.s.sistant. But then, with an elasticity truly astounding in a man of his great age, the master has momentarily regained the poetry of his youthful prime, and with it a measure of that Giorgionesque fragrance which was evaporating already at the close of the early time, when the _Baccha.n.a.ls_ were brought forth. The Antiope herself far transcends in the sovereign charm of her beauty--divine in the truer sense of the word--all t.i.tian's Venuses, save the one in the _Sacred and Profane Love_. The figure comes in some ways nearer even in design, and infinitely nearer in feeling, to Giorgione's _Venus_ at Dresden than does the _Venus of Urbino_ in the Tribuna, which was closely modelled upon it. And the aged t.i.tian had gone back even a step farther than Giorgione; the group of Antiope with Jupiter in the guise of a Satyr is clearly a reminiscence of a _Nymph surprised by a Satyr_--one of the engravings in the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ first published in 1499, but republished with the same ill.u.s.trations in 1545.[55]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Rape of Europa. From the Engraving by J.Z.

Delignon_.]

According to the correspondence published by Crowe and Cavalcaselle there were completed for the Spanish King in April 1562 the _Poesy of Europa carried by the Bull_, and the _Christ praying in the Garden_, while a _Virgin and Child_ was announced as in progress.

These paintings, widely divergent as they are in subject, answer very well to each other in technical execution, while in both they differ very materially from the _Venere del Pardo_. The _Rape of Europa_, which has retained very much of its blond brilliancy and charm of colour, affords convincing proof of the unrivalled power with which t.i.tian still wielded the brush at this stage which precedes that of his very last and most impressionistic style. For decorative effect, for "go," for frankness and breadth of execution, it could not be surpa.s.sed. Yet hardly elsewhere has the great master approached so near to positive vulgarity as here in the conception of the fair Europa as a strapping wench who, with ample limbs outstretched, complacently allows herself to be carried off by the Bull, making her appeal for succour merely _pour la forme_. What gulfs divide this conception from that of the Antiope, from t.i.tian's earlier renderings of female loveliness, from Giorgione's supreme Venus![56]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Portrait of t.i.tian, by himself. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_.]

The _Agony in the Garden_, which is still to be found in one of the halls of the Escorial, even now in its faded state serves to evidence the intensity of religious fervour which possessed t.i.tian when, so late in life, he successfully strove to renew the sacred subjects. If the composition--as Crowe and Cavalcaselle a.s.sert--does more or less resemble that of the famous _Agony_ by Correggio now at Apsley House, nothing could differ more absolutely from the Parmese master's amiable virtuosity than the aged t.i.tian's deep conviction.[57]

To the year 1562 belongs the nearly profile portrait of the artist, painted by himself with a subtler refinement and a truer revelation of self than is to be found in those earlier canvases of Berlin and the Uffizi in which his late prime still shows as a green and vigorous manhood. This is now in the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_ of the Prado. The pale n.o.ble head, refined by old age to a solemn beauty, is that of one brought face to face with the world beyond; it is the face of the man who could conceive and paint the sacred pieces of the end, the _Ecce h.o.m.o_ of Munich and the last _Pieta_, with an awe such as we here read in his eyes. Much less easy is it to connect this likeness with the artist who went on concurrently producing his Venuses, mythological pieces, and pastorals, and joying as much as ever in their production.

Vasari, who, as will be seen, visited Venice in 1566, when he was preparing that new and enlarged edition of the _Lives_ which was to appear in 1568, had then an opportunity of renewing his friendly acquaintance with the splendid old man whom he had last seen, already well stricken in years, twenty-one years before in Rome. It must have been at this stage that he formed the judgment as to the latest manner of t.i.tian which is so admirably expressed in his biography of the master. Speaking especially of the _Diana and Actaeon_, the _Rape of Europa_, and the _Deliverance of Andromeda_,[58] he delivers himself as follows:--"It is indeed true that his technical manner in these last is very different from that of his youth. The first works are, be it remembered, carried out with incredible delicacy and pains, so that they can be looked at both at close quarters and from afar. These last ones are done with broad coa.r.s.e strokes and blots of colour, in such wise that they cannot be appreciated near at hand, but from afar look perfect. This style has been the cause that many, thinking therein to play the imitators and to make a display of practical skill, have produced clumsy, bad pictures. This is so, because, notwithstanding that to many it may seem that t.i.tian's works are done without labour, this is not so in truth, and they who think so deceive themselves. It is, on the contrary, to be perceived that they are painted at many sittings, that they have been worked upon with the colours so many times as to make the labour evident; and this method of execution is judicious, beautiful, astonishing, because it makes the pictures seem living."

No better proof could be given of Vasari's genuine _flair_ and intuition as a critic of art than this pa.s.sage. We seem to hear, not the Tuscan painter bred to regard the style of Michelangelo as an article of faith, to imitate his sculptural smoothness of finish and that of Angelo Bronzino, but some intelligent exponent of impressionistic methods, defending both from attack and from superficial imitation one of the most advanced of modernists.

Among the sacred works produced in this late time is a _Crucifixion_, still preserved in a damaged state in the church of S. Domenico at Ancona. To a period somewhat earlier than that at which we have arrived may belong the late _Madonna and Child in a Landscape_ which is No.

1113 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. The writer follows Giovanni Morelli in believing that this is a studio picture touched by the master, and that the splendidly toned evening landscape is all his. He cannot surely be made wholly responsible for the overgrown and inflated figure of the divine _Bambino_, so disproportionate, so entirely wanting in tenderness and charm.

The power of vivid conception, the spontaneous fervour which mark t.i.tian's latest efforts in the domain of sacred art, are very evident in the great _St. Jerome_ of the Brera here reproduced. Cima, Basaiti, and most of the Bellinesques had shown an especial affection for the subject, and it had been treated too by Lotto, by Giorgione, by t.i.tian himself; but this is surely as n.o.ble and fervent a rendering as Venetian art in its prime has brought forth. Of extraordinary majesty and beauty is the landscape, with its mighty trees growing out of the abrupt mountain slope, close to the naked rock.

In the autumn of 1564 we actually find the venerable master, then about eighty-seven years of age, taking a journey to Brescia in connection with an important commission given to him for the decoration of the great hall in the Palazzo Pubblico at Brescia, to which the Vicentine artist Righetto had supplied the ceiling, and Palladio had added columns and interior wall-decorations. The three great ceiling-pictures, which were afterwards, as a consequence of the contract then entered upon, executed by the master, or rather by his a.s.sistants, endured only until 1575, when in the penultimate year of t.i.tian's life they perished in a great fire.

The correspondence shows that the vast _Last Supper_ painted for the Refectory of the Escorial, and still to be found there, was finished in October 1564, and that there was much haggling and finessing on the part of the artist before it was despatched to Spain, the object being to secure payment of the arrears of pension still withheld by the Milanese officials. When the huge work did arrive at the Escorial the monks perpetrated upon it one of those acts of vandalism of which t.i.tian was in more than one instance the victim. Finding that the picture would not fit the particular wall of their refectory for which it had been destined, they ruthlessly cut it down, slicing off a large piece of the upper part, and throwing the composition out of balance by the mutilation of the architectural background.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _St. Jerome in the Desert. Gallery of the Brera, Milan.

From a Photograph by Anderson_.]

Pa.s.sing over the _Transfiguration_ on the high altar of San Salvatore at Venice, we come to the _Annunciation_ in the same church with the signature "t.i.tia.n.u.s fecit fecit," added by the master, if we are to credit the legend, in indignation that those who commissioned the canvas should have shown themselves dissatisfied even to the point of expressing incredulity as to his share in the performance. Some doubt has been cast upon this story, which may possibly have been evolved on the basis of the peculiar signature. It is at variance with Vasari's statement that t.i.tian held the picture in slight esteem in comparison with his other works. It is not to be contested that for all the fine pa.s.sages of colour and execution, the general tone is paler in its silveriness, less vibrant and effective on the whole, than in many of the masterpieces which have been mentioned in their turn. But the conception is a novel and magnificent one, contrasting instructively in its weightiness and majesty with the more nave and pathetic renderings of an earlier time.

The _Education of Cupid_, popularly but erroneously known as _The Three Graces_[59] is one of the pearls of the Borghese Gallery. It is clearly built in essentials on the master's own _d'Avalos Allegory_, painted many years before. This later allegory shows Venus binding the eyes of Love ere he sallies forth into the world, while his bow and his quiver well-stocked with arrows are brought forward by two of the Graces. In its conception there is no great freshness or buoyancy, no pretence at invention. The aged magician of the brush has interested himself more in the execution than in the imagining of his picture. It is a fine and typical specimen of the painting _di macchia_, which Vasari has praised in a pa.s.sage already quoted. A work such as this bears in technique much the same relation to the productions of t.i.tian's first period that the great _Family Picture_ of Rembrandt at Brunswick does to his work done some thirty-five or forty years before. In both instances it is a life-time of legitimate practice that has permitted the old man to indulge without danger in an abridgment of labour, a synthetic presentment of fact, which means no abatement, but in some ways an enhancement of life, breadth, and pictorial effect. To much about the same time, judging from the handling and the types, belongs the curious allegory, _Religion succoured by Spain_--otherwise _La Fe_--now No. 476 in the gallery of the Prado. This canvas, notwithstanding a marked superficiality of invention as well as of execution, is in essentials the master's own; moreover it can boast its own special decorative qualities, void though it is of any deep significance. The showy figure of Spain holding aloft in one hand a standard, and with the other supporting a shield emblazoned with the arms of the realm, recalls the similar creations of Paolo Veronese. t.i.tian has rarely been less happily inspired than in the figure of Religion, represented as a naked female slave newly released from bondage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Education of Cupid. Gallery of the Villa Borghese, Rome. From a Photograph by E. Alinari_.]

When Vasari in 1566 paid the visit to Venice, of which a word has already been said, he noted, among a good many other things then in progress, the _Martyrdom of St. Lawrence_, based upon that now at the Gesuiti in Venice. This was despatched nearly two years later to the Escorial, where it still occupies its place on the high altar of the mighty church dedicated to St. Lawrence. The Brescian ceiling canvases appeared, too, in his list as unfinished. They were sent to their destination early in 1568, to be utterly destroyed, as has been told, by fire in 1575.

The best proof we have that t.i.tian's artistic power was in many respects at its highest in 1566, is afforded by the magnificent portrait of the Mantuan painter and antiquary Jacopo da Strada, now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. It bears, besides the usual late signature of the master, the description of the personage with all his styles and t.i.tles, and the date MDLXVI. The execution is again _di macchia_, but magnificent in vitality, as in impressiveness of general effect, swift but not hasty or superficial. The reserve and dignity of former male portraits is exchanged for a more febrile vivacity, akin to that which Lotto had in so many of his finest works displayed. His peculiar style is further recalled in the rather abrupt inclination of the figure and the parallel position of the statuette which it holds. But none other than t.i.tian himself could have painted the superb head, which he himself has hardly surpa.s.sed.

It is curious and instructive to find the artist, in a letter addressed to Philip on the 2nd of December 1567, announcing the despatch, together with the just now described altar-piece, _The Martyrdom of St.

Lawrence_, of "una pittura d'una Venere ignuda"--the painting of a nude Venus. Thus is the peculiar double current of the aged painter's genius maintained by the demand for both cla.s.ses of work. He well knows that to the Most Catholic Majesty very secular pieces indeed will be not less acceptable than those much-desired sacred works in which now t.i.tian's power of invention is greatest.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Religion succoured by Spain. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_.]

Our master, in his dealings with the Brescians, after the completion of the extensive decorations for the Palazzo Pubblico, was to have proof that Italian citizens were better judges of art than the King of Spain, and more grudging if prompter paymasters. They declared, not without some foundation in fact, that the canvases were not really from the hand of t.i.tian, and refused to pay more than one thousand ducats for them.

The negotiation was conducted--as were most others at that time--by the trusty Orazio, who after much show of indignation was compelled at last to accept the proffered payment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Portrait of the Antiquary Jacopo da Strada. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Lowy_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Madonna and Child. Collection of Mr. Ludwig Mond_.]

The great victory of Lepanto, gained by the united fleets of Spain and Venice over the Turk on the 7th of October 1571, gave fitting occasion for one of Paolo Veronese's most radiant masterpieces, the celebrated votive picture of the Sala del Collegio, for Tintoretto's _Battle of Lepanto_, but also for one of t.i.tian's feeblest works, the allegory _Philip II. offering to Heaven his Son, the Infant Don Ferdinand_, now No. 470 in the gallery of the Prado. That Sanchez Coello, under special directions from the king, prepared the sketch which was to serve as the basis for the definitive picture may well have hampered and annoyed the aged master. Still this is but an insufficient excuse for the absurdities of the design, culminating in the figure of the descending angel, who is represented in one of those strained, over-bold att.i.tudes, in which t.i.tian, even at his best, never achieved complete success. That he was not, all the same, a stranger to the work, is proved by some flashes of splendid colour, some fine pa.s.sages of execution.

In the four pieces now to be shortly described, the very latest and most impressionistic form of t.i.tian's method as a painter is to be observed; all of them are in the highest degree characteristic of this ultimate phase. In the beautiful _Madonna and Child_ here reproduced,[60] the hand, though it no longer works with all trenchant vigour of earlier times, produces a magical effect by means of unerring science and a certainty of touch justifying such economy of mere labour as is by the system of execution suggested to the eye. And then this pathetic motive, the simple realism, the unconventional treatment of which are spiritualised by infinite tenderness, is a new thing in Venetian, nay in Italian art. Precisely similar in execution, and equally restrained in the scheme of colour adopted, is the _Christ crowned with Thorns_ of the Alte Pinakothek at Munich, a reproduction with important variations of the better-known picture in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. Less demonstratively and obviously dramatic than its predecessor, the Munich example is, as a realisation of the scene, far truer and more profound in pathos. n.o.bler beyond compare in His unresisting acceptance of insult and suffering is the Munich Christ than the corresponding figure, so violent in its instinctive recoil from pain, of the Louvre picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Christ crowned with Thorns. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

From a Photograph by F. Hanfstangl_.]

It is nothing short of startling at the very end of t.i.tian's career to meet with a work which, expressed in this masterly late technique of his, vies in freshness of inspiration with the finest of his early _poesie_. This is the _Nymph and Shepherd_[61] of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, a picture which the world had forgotten until it was added, or rather restored, to the State collection on its transference from the Belvedere to the gorgeous palace which it now occupies. In its almost monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver the canvas embodies more absolutely than any other, save perhaps the final _Pieta_, the ideal of tone-harmony towards which the master in his late time had been steadily tending. Richness and brilliancy of local colour are subordinated, and this time up to the point of effacement, to this luminous monotone, so mysteriously effective in the hands of a master such as t.i.tian. In the solemn twilight which descends from the heavens, just faintly flushed with rose, an amorous shepherd, flower-crowned, pipes to a nude nymph, who, half-won by the appealing strain, turns her head as she lies luxuriously extended on a wild beast's hide, covering the gra.s.sy knoll; in the distance a strayed goat browses on the leaf.a.ge of a projecting branch. It may not be concealed that a note of ardent sensuousness still makes itself felt, as it does in most of the later pieces of the same cla.s.s. But here, transfigured by a freshness of poetic inspiration hardly to be traced in the master's work in pieces of this order, since those early Giorgionesque days when the sixteenth century was in its youth, it offends no more than does an idyll of Theocritus. Since the _Three Ages_ of Bridgewater House, divided from the _Nymph and Shepherd_ by nearly seventy years of life and labour, t.i.tian had produced nothing which, apart from the question of technical execution, might so nearly be paralleled with that exquisite pastoral. The early _poesia_ gives, wrapped in clear even daylight, the perfect moment of trusting, satisfied love; the late one, with less purity, but, strange to say, with a higher pa.s.sion, renders, beautified by an evening light more solemn and suggestive, the divine ardours fanned by solitude and opportunity.

And now we come to the _Pieta_,[62] which so n.o.bly and appropriately closes a career unexampled for duration and sustained achievement.

t.i.tian had bargained with the Franciscan monks of the Frari, which contained already the _a.s.sunta_ and the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, for a grave in the Cappella del Crocifisso, offering in payment a _Pieta_, and this offer had been accepted. But some misunderstanding and consequent quarrel having been the ultimate outcome of the proposed arrangements, he left his great canvas unfinished, and willed that his body should be taken to Cadore, and there buried in the chapel of the Vecelli.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Pieta. By t.i.tian and Palma Giovine. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]

The well-known inscription on the base of the monumental niche which occupies the centre of the _Pieta_, "Quod t.i.tia.n.u.s inchoatum reliquit, Palma reverenter absolvit, Deoque dicavit opus," records how what t.i.tian had left undone was completed as reverently as might be by Palma Giovine. At this stage--the question being much complicated by subsequent restorations--the effort to draw the line accurately between the work of the master on one hand and that of his able and pious a.s.sistant on the other, would be unprofitable. Let us rather strive to appreciate what is left of a creation unique in the life-work of t.i.tian, and in some ways his most sublime invention. Genius alone could have triumphed over the heterogeneous and fantastic surroundings in which he has chosen to enframe his great central group. And yet even these--the great rusticated niche with the gold mosaic of the pelican feeding its young, the statues of Moses on one side and of the h.e.l.lespontic Sibyl on the other--but serve to heighten the awe of the spectator. The artificial light is obtained in part from a row of crystal lamps on the cornice of the niche, in part, too, from the torch borne by the beautiful boy-angel who hovers in mid-air, yet another focus of illumination being the body of the dead Christ. This system of lighting furnishes just the luminous half-gloom, the deeply significant chiaroscuro, that the painter requires in order to give the most poignant effect to his last and most thrilling conception of the world's tragedy. As is often the case with Tintoretto, but more seldom with t.i.tian, the eloquent pa.s.sion breathed forth in this _Pieta_ is not to be accounted for by any element or elements of the composition taken separately; it depends to so great an extent on the poetic suggestiveness of the illumination, on the strange and indefinable power of evocation that the aged master here exceptionally commands.

Wonderfully does the terrible figure of the Magdalen contrast in its excess of pa.s.sion with the sculptural repose, the permanence of the main group. As she starts forward, almost menacing in her grief, her loud and bitter cry seems to ring through s.p.a.ce, accusing all mankind of its great crime. It is with a conviction far more intense than has ever possessed him in his prime, with an awe nearly akin to terror, that t.i.tian, himself trembling on the verge of eternity, and painting, too, that which shall purchase his own grave, has produced this profoundly moving work. No more fitting end and crown to the great achievements of the master's old age could well be imagined.

There is no temptation to dwell unnecessarily upon the short period of horror and calamity with which this glorious life came to an end. If t.i.tian had died a year earlier, his biographer might still have wound up with those beautiful words of Vasari's peroration: "E stato Tiziano sanissimo et fortunate quant' alcun altro suo pari sia stato ancor mai; e non ha mai avuto dai cieli se non favori e felicita." Too true it is, alas, that no man's life may be counted happy until its close! Now comes upon the great city this all-enveloping horror of the plague, beginning in 1575, but in 1576 attaining to such vast proportions as to sweep away more than a quarter of the whole population of 190,000 inhabitants. On the 17th of August, 1576, old t.i.tian is attacked and swept away--surprised, as one would like to believe, while still at work on his _Pieta_. Even at such a moment, when panic reigns supreme, and the most honoured, the most dearly beloved are left untended, he is not to be hurried into an unmarked grave. Notwithstanding the sanitary law which forbids the burial of one who has succ.u.mbed to the plague in any of the city churches, he receives the supreme and at this awful moment unique honour of solemn obsequies. The body is taken with all due observance to the great church of the Frari, and there interred in the Cappella del Crocifisso, which t.i.tian has already, before the quarrel with the Franciscans, designated as his final resting-place. He is spared the grief of knowing that the favourite son, Orazio, for whom all these years he has laboured and schemed, is to follow him immediately, dying also of the plague, and not even at Biri Grande, but in the Lazzaretto Vecchio, near the Lido; that the incorrigible Pomponio is to succeed and enjoy the inheritance after his own unworthy fashion. He is spared the knowledge of the great calamity of 1577, the destruction by fire of the Sala del Gran Consiglio, and with it, of the _Battle of Cadore_, and most of the n.o.ble work done officially for the Doges and the Signoria. One would like to think that this catastrophe of the end must have come suddenly upon the venerable master like a hideous dream, appearing to him, as death often does to those upon whom it descends, less significant than it does to us who read. Instead of remaining fixed in sad contemplation of this short final moment when the radiant orb goes suddenly down below the horizon in storm and cloud, let us keep steadily in view the light as, serene in its far-reaching radiance, it illuminated the world for eighty splendid years. Let us think of t.i.tian as the greatest painter, if not the greatest genius in art, that the world has produced; as, what Vasari with such conviction described him to be, "the man as highly favoured by fortune as any of his kind had ever been before him."[63]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "The Earlier Work of t.i.tian," _Portfolio_, October 1897.]