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THE LATER WORK OF TITIAN

By

CLAUDE PHILLIPS

Keeper of the Wallace Collection

1898







[Illustration: Titian. From a photograph by G. Brogi.]



[Illustration]





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


COPPER PLATES

Portrait of Titian, by himself. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Frontispiece

La Bella di Tiziano. Pitti Palace, Florence.

Titian's daughter Lavinia. Berlin Gallery.

The Cornaro Family. Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.


ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN SEPIA

Drawing of St. Jerome. British Museum.

Landscape with Stag. Collection of Professor Legros.


ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Madonna and Child with St. Catherine and St. John the Baptist. In the
National Gallery.

Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. Pitti Palace, Florence.

Francis the First. Louvre.

Portrait of a Nobleman. Pitti Palace, Florence.

S. Giovanni Elemosinario giving Alms. In the Church of that name at
Venice.

The Girl in the Fur Cloak. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.

Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

The Battle of Cadore (from a reduced copy of part only). Uffizi Gallery,
Florence.

The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. Accademia delle Belle
Arti, Venice.

The Magdalen. Pitti Palace, Florence.

The Infant Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Royal Gallery, Berlin.

Ecce Homo. Imperial Gallery, Vienna

Aretino. Pitti Palace, Florence

Pope Paul III. with Cardinal Farnese and Ottavio Farnese. Naples Gallery

Danae and the Golden Rain. Naples Gallery

Charles V. at the Battle of Muehlberg. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid

Venus with the Mirror. Gallery of the Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Christ crowned with Thorns. Louvre

The Rape of Europa

Portrait of Titian, by himself. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid

St. Jerome in the Desert. Gallery of the Brera, Milan

The Education of Cupid. Gallery of the Villa Borghese, Rome

Religion succoured by Spain. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid

Portrait of the Antiquary Jacopo da Strada. Imperial Gallery, Vienna

Madonna and Child. Collection of Mr. Ludwig Mond

Christ crowned with Thorns. Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Pieta. By Titian and Palma Giovine. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice




THE LATER WORK OF TITIAN




CHAPTER I

_Friendship with Aretino--Its effect on Titian'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.--Titian the painter, par excellence, of
aristocratic traits--The "d'Avalos Allegory"--Portrait of Cardinal
Ippolito de' Medici--S. Giovanni Elemosinario altar-piece._


Having followed Titian 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 Titian'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. Titian was at that time fifty years of age, and he might thus be
deemed to have over-passed 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 embarrassed 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
Titian'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 Titian, 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 Titian to
account in set terms, his biographers Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and above
all M. Georges Lafenestre in _La Vie et L'Oeuvre du Titien_, 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 Titian 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 pass off his
most flagrant misdeeds, his worst sallies, with a certain large and
Rabelaisian gaiety; if he made money his chief god, 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 passionate 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 Titian, 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
illustrator, 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 transmuted with their vibration of true passion,
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 Titian 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 Titian 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 Titian'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 Titian 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
Muehlberg_ 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
_Bacchanals_, 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
noble 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
passion, as befits the period of the sixteenth century in which
Titian's latest years are passed, 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 Titian 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 Titian at any age; but it finely suggests, even in
black and white, a noble 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 Titian. In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Biography_ (vol. i. pp.
317-319) we learn from correspondence interchanged in the summer of 1527
between Federigo Gonzaga, Titian, 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 assertion 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 assumed 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 naive 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 Titian 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 Titian himself are here to be recognised. The weak
treatment of the great Titianesque 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.

[Illustration: _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, Titian 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 Titian 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 Titian 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 Titian'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 Titian, 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 Titian 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 Titian 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 Titiano, 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 passage is worth quoting as showing the
estimation in which Titian 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 Titian, 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 Titian's masterly synthetic way of going to work
in works of this late period. The noble _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 Titian 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 noble 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 passing from the middle to the last period, we shall more
than once find ourselves taking.

[Illustration: ST. JEROME. PEN DRAWING BY TITIAN (?) _British Museum_.]

It is impossible to give even in outline here an account of Titian's
correspondence and business relations with his noble 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 Titian--seeing that in Crowe and Cavalcaselle's admirable
biography this side of the subject, among many others, is most patiently
and exhaustively dealt with.

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