Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

first picture that is by common consent his- The Gypsy and the

Soldier - we get a typically Giorgionesque fancy: a casual woman,

naked except for a shawl around her shoulders, sits on her discarded

dress on the mossy bank of a rushing stream, nurses a child, and looks

anxiously about her; behind her stretches a landscape of Roman arches,

a river and a bridge, towers and a temple, curious trees, white

lightning, and green storm-laden clouds; near her is a comely youth

holding a shepherd's staff- but richly garbed for a shepherd!- and

so pleased with the scene that he ignores the gathering storm. The

story is uncertain; what the picture means is that Giorgione liked

handsome youths, soft-contoured women, and nature even in its moods of

wrath.

In 1504 he painted, for a bereaved family in the town of his

birth, the Madonna of Castelfranco. It is absurd and beautiful. In

the forefront St. Liberale, in the shining armor of a medieval knight,

holds a lance for the Virgin, and St. Francis preaches to the air;

high aloft on a double pedestal Mary sits with her babe, who leans

recklessly out from his high perch. But the green and violet brocade

at Mary's feet is a wonder of color and design; Mary's robes fall

about her in wrinkles as lovely as wrinkles can ever be; her face

has the gentle tenderness that poets picture in the mates of their

dreams; and the landscape recedes with Leonardesque mystery till the

sky melts into the sea.

When Giorgione and his friend Tiziano Vecelli received the

assignment to paint the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Giorgione chose the wall

fronting the Grand Canal, and Titian took the Rialto side. Vasari,

examining Giorgione's fresco half a century later, found it impossible

to make head or tail of what another spectator described as "trophies,

nude bodies, heads in chiaroscuro... geometricians measuring the

terrestrial globe, perspectives of columns, and between them men on

horseback, and other fantasies." However, the same writer adds: "It

may be seen how accomplished Giorgione was in handling colors in

fresco." `051134

But his genius lay in conception rather than coloring. When he

painted the Sleeping Venus that was a priceless treasure of the

Dresden Gallery, he might have thought of her in purely sensual

terms as an inviting formation of molecules. Doubtless she is that,

too, and marks the passage of Venetian art from Christian to pagan

themes and sentiment. But there is nothing immodest or suggestive

about this Venus. She lies asleep, precariously nude in the open

air, on a red cushion and a white silken robe, her right arm under her

head, her left hand serving as a fig leaf, one perfect limb

outstretched over another raised beneath it; seldom has art so

simulated the velvet texture of feminine surfaces, or so conveyed

the grace of a natural pose. But on her face is a look of such

innocence and peace as rarely accord with naked beauty. Giogione

here has put himself beyond good and evil, and lets the esthetic sense

transiently dominate desire. In another piece- the Fete champetre or

Pastoral Symphony of the Louvre- the pleasure is frankly sexual, and

yet again has all the innocence of nature. Two nude women and two

clothed men are enjoying a holiday in the countryside: a patrician

youth, in a doublet of gleaming red silk, strumming a lute; beside him

a disheveled shepherd painfully trying to bridge the gap between a

simple and a cultivated mind; the aristocrat's lady, in a graceful

motion, emptying a crystal pitcher into a well; the shepherd's lass

waiting patiently for him to attend to her charms or her flute. No

notion of sin has entered their heads; the lute and the flute have

sublimated sex into harmony. Behind the figures rises one of the

richest landscapes in Italian art.

Finally, in The Concert of the Pitti Palace, desire seems

forgotten as irrelevantly primitive, and music is all, or becomes a

bond of friendship subtler than desire. Until the nineteenth century

this "most Giorgionesque" of all pictures `051135 was regularly

accredited to Giorgione; many critics now ascribe it to Titian;

since the matter is still doubtful let us leave the authorship to

Giorgione, because he loved music only next to woman, and because

Titian is rich enough in masterpieces to spare one to his friend. At

the left a plumed youth stands, a bit lifeless and negative; a monk

sits at a clavichord, his beautifully rendered hands on the keys,

his face turned round to a bald cleric on our right; the cleric lays

one hand on the monk's shoulder, and holds in the other a cello

resting on the floor. Has the music ended, or not yet begun? It does

not matter; what moves us is the silent depth of feeling in the

countenance of the monk, whose every fiber has been refined, and his

every sentiment ennobled, by music; who hears it long after all the

instruments have been mute. That face, not idealized but profoundly

realized, is one of the miracles of Renaissance painting.

Giorgione lived a short life, and apparently a merry one. He seems

to have had many women, and to have healed each broken romance with

a new one soon begun. Vasari reports that Giorgione caught the

plague from his latest love; all that we know is that he died in the

epidemic of 1511 at the age of thirty-four. His influence was

already extensive. A dozen "Giorgionesque" minor artists painted rural

idyls, conversation pieces, musical interludes, masque costumes, in

vain efforts to capture the refinement and finish of his style, the

airy overtones of his landscapes, the guileless eroticism of his

themes. He left two pupils who were to make a stir in the world:

Sebastiano del Piombo, who went off to Rome, and Tiziano Vecelli,

the greatest Venetian of all.

5. Titian: The Formative Years: 1477-1533

-

He was born in the town of Pieve, in the Cadoric range of the

Dolomites, and those rugged mountains were well remembered in his

landscapes. When he was nine or ten he was brought to Venice, and

was apprenticed successively to Sebastiano Zuccato, Gentile Bellini,

and Giovanni Bellini. In Giovanni's studio he worked side by side with

Giorgione, who was his senior by only a year. When that Keats of the

brush set up his own studio Titian probably went with him as assistant

or associate. He was so deeply influenced by Giorgione that some of

his early pictures have been ascribed to Giorgione, and some of

Giorgione's later pictures to Titian; the inimitable Concert

probably belongs to this period. Together they painted the Fondaco

walls.

From the plague that took Giorgione's life- or from the moratorium

laid upon Venetian art by the war of the League of Cambrai- Titian

fled to Padua (1511). There he painted three frescoes for the Scuola

del Santo, recording miracles of St. Anthony; if we may judge from

their crudity, Titian at thirty-five had far to go before equaling the

best work of Giorgione; Goethe, however, with penetrating hindsight,

saw in them "the promise of great things." `051136 Return to Venice,

Titian addressed to the doge and the Council of Ten (May 31, 1513) a

letter that recalls Leonardo's appeal to Lodovico a generation before:

-

Illustrious Prince! High and mighty lords! I, Titian of Cadore, have

from childhood upwards studied the art of painting, desirous of a

little fame rather than of profit.... And although in the past, and

also in the present, I have been urgently invited by His Holiness

the Pope and other lords to enter their service, I, as the faithful

subject of your Excellencies, have rather cherished the wish to

leave behind me a memorial in this famous city. Therefore, if it

seem good to your Excellencies, I am anxious to paint in the Hall of

the Great Council, employing therein all my powers; and to begin

with a canvas of the battle on the side of the Piazzetta, which is

so difficult that no one has yet had the courage to attempt it. I

should be willing to accept for my labor any reward that may be

thought proper, or even less. Therefore, being, as aforesaid, studious

only of honor and to please your Excellencies, I beg to ask for the

first broker's patent, for life, that shall fall vacant in the Fondaco

de' Tedeschi, irrespective of all promised reversions of such

patent, and on the same conditions and with the same charges and

exemptions as Messer Zuan Belin [Gian Bellini], besides two assistants

to be paid by the Salt Office, as well as all colors and

necessaries.... In return for which I promise to do the work above

named with such speed and excellence as will satisfy the

Signori. `051137

-

A "broker's patent" ( senseria ) was formally an appointment as

trade intermediary between Venetian and foreign merchants; actually,

in the case of the broker's patent with the German merchants in

Venice, it made the holder the official painter of the state, and paid

him 300 crowns ($3750) a year for painting a portrait of the doge

and such other pictures as the government might require. Apparently

Titian's proposal was tentatively accepted by the Council; in any case

he began to paint The Battle of Cadore in the Ducal Palace. But

his rivals persuaded the Council to withhold the patent from him,

and to suspend the pay of his assistants (1514). After negotiations

that irritated all concerned, he received the post and pay of the

patent without the title (1516). He in his turn procrastinated, and

did not complete till 1537 the two canvases that he had begun in the

Sala del Maggior Consiglio. They were destroyed by fire in 1577.

Titian developed leisurely, like any organism dowered with a century

of life. But as early as 1508 he showed the spiritual penetration

and technical power that were to put him above all his rivals in

portraiture. A nameless portrait once named Ariosto has in it a

memory of Giorgione's style- a poetic face, and subtle eyes a little

malicious, and sumptuous raiment that set a model for a thousand later

works. And in this period (1506-16) the maturing artist already knew

how to paint women of ample loveliness, stemming from Giorgione and

expanding toward Rubens. The movement from the Virgin to Venus

continued in Titian, even while he painted religious pictures of great

splendor and renown. The same hand that stirred piety with a Gypsy

Madonna and an Adoration of the Shepherds could turn to a Woman at

Her Toilet, and that incarnation of voluptuous innocence, the Flora

of the Uffizi Gallery. This gentle face and generous bosom probably

served again in The Daughter of Herodias; Salome is as thoroughly

Venetian as the severed head is powerfully Hebraic.

In or near the year 1515 Titian produced two of his most

celebrated pictures. The Three Ages of Man shows a group of naked

infants sleeping beneath a tree; a Cupid so soon inoculating them with

the mad pursuit; a bearded octogenarian contemplating a skull; and a

young couple happy in the spring of love, yet looking at each other

wistfully, as if foreseeing the erosive pertinacity of time. Sacred

and Profane Love has a modern title that would surprise a resurrected

Titian. When first mentioned (1615), the picture was called Beauty

Adorned and Unadorned; `051138 probably it aimed not to point a moral

but to adorn a tale. The "profane" nude is the most perfect figure

in Titian's repertoire, the very Venus de Milo of the Renaissance.

But the "sacred" lady is secular too; her jeweled girdle draws the

eye, her silken gown tempts the touch; probably she is the same

buxom courtesan who posed for Flora and the Woman at Her Toilet.

If the spectator looks long enough he will see a complex landscape

behind the figures: plants and flowers and a thick clump of trees, a

shepherd tending his flock, two lovers, hunters and dogs chasing a

hare, a town and its towers, a church and its campanile, a green

Giorgionesque sea, a clouded sky. What difference does it make that we

cannot know just what the picture "means"? It is beauty made to

"stay awhile"; and is that not what Faust thought worth a soul?

Having learned that female beauty, adorned or natural, would

always find customers, Titian pursued the theme joyously. Early in

1516 he accepted the invitation of Alfonso I to paint some panels in

the Castello at Ferrara. The artist was lodged there, with two

assistants, for some five weeks, and presumably came frequently

thereafter from Venice. For the Alabaster Hall Titian painted three

pictures that continued Giorgione's pagan mood. In The Bacchanal men

and women, some of them naked, drink, dance, and make love before a

landscape of brown trees, blue lake, and silver clouds; a scroll on

the ground bears a French motto: "He who drinks and does not drink

again does not know what drinking is." In the distance an old Noah

sprawls naked and drunk; closer a lad and lass join in dance, their

garments whirling in the breeze; in the foreground a woman whose

firm breasts display her youth lies nude and sleeping on the grass;

and near her an anxious child raises his dress to ease his bladder and

bring the Bacchic cycle to completion. In Bacchus and Ariadne the

abandoned woman is startled by a Bacchic procession bursting through

the woods- drunken satyrs, a naked male entwined with snakes, the nude

god of wine leaping from his chariot to capture the fleeing

princess. In these pictures, and The Worship of Venus, the Pagan

Renaissance is in full command.

Meanwhile Titian painted an arresting portrait of his new patron,

the Duke Alfonso: a handsome intelligent face, a corpulent body

dignified with robes of state, a beautiful hand (hardly that of a

potter and gunner) resting on a beloved cannon; this is the picture

that stirred even Michelangelo to praise. Ariosto sat for a

portrait, and returned the compliment with a line in a later edition

of the Furioso. Lucrezia Borgia too sat for the great portraitist,

but no trace of that painting remains; and Laura Dianti, Alfonso's

mistress, may have posed for a picture that survives only in a copy in

Modena. It was probably for Alfonso that Titian made one of his finest

pictures, The Tribute Money: a Pharisee with the head of a

philosopher, asking his question sincerely, and a Christ answering

without resentment, brilliantly.

It is characteristic of the times that Titian could pass from

Bacchus to Christ, from Venus to Mary, and back again, with no

apparent loss to his peace of mind. In 1518 he painted for the

church of the Frari his greatest work, The Assumption of the Virgin.

When it was placed behind the high altar, in a majestic marble

frame, the Venetian diarist Sanudo thought the event worth noting:

"May 20, 1518: Yesterday the panel painted by Titian for... the

Minorites was put up." `051139 To this day the sight of the Frari

Assumption is an event in any sensitive life. Near the center of the

immense panel is the figure of the Virgin, full and strong, clothed in

a robe of red and a mantle of blue, rapt in wonder and expectation,

lifted up through the clouds by an inverted halo of winged cherubim.

Above her is an inevitably futile attempt to portray the Deity- all

raiment and beard, and hair disheveled by the winds of heaven; finer

is the angel that brings Him a crown for Mary. Below are the Apostles,

a variety of magnificent figures, some gazing in astonishment, some

kneeling in adoration, some reaching up as if to be taken with her

into paradise. Standing before this powerful evocation, the

unwilling skeptic mourns his doubts, and acknowledges the beauty and

aspiration of the myth.

In 1519 Iacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos in Cyprus, in gratitude

for the victory of his Venetian fleet over a Turkish squadron,

commissioned Titian to paint another altarpiece for the Frari- for the

chapel that had been dedicated there by his family. Titian knew the

risk he was running in challenging comparison between this Madonna of

the Pesaro Family and his masterpiece so lately acclaimed. He

worked for seven years on the new picture before he released it from

his studio. He chose to represent the Virgin enthroned; but, defying

precedent, he placed her at the right in a diagonal scheme that put

the donor at the left, with St. Peter between them, and St. Francis at

her feet. The composition would have been thrown off balance but for

the bright illumination focusing the Mother and her Child. Many an

artist, tired of the traditional centralized or pyramidal structure of

such pictures, welcomed and imitated the experiment.

About 1523 Marquis Federigo Gonzaga invited Titian to Mantua. The

artist did not stay long, for he had commitments in Venice and

Ferrara; but he began a series of eleven paintings representing

Roman emperors; these have been lost. On one of his visits he

painted an attractive portrait of the young bearded Marquis.

Federigo's mother, the splendid Isabella, was still living, and sat

for a picture. Finding the result uncomfortably realistic, she put

it among her antiquities, and asked Titian to copy a portrait that

Francia had made of her forty years before. It was from this that

Titian produced (c. 1534) the famous picture with the turban hat,

the ornate sleeves, the stole of fur, the pretty face. Isabella

protested that she had never been so beautiful, but she arranged to

have this reminiscent portrait descend to posterity.

Here for a while we leave Tiziano Vecelli. To understand his later

career we must fill in the background of political events in which his

greatest patron after 1533- Charles V- was intimately concerned.

Titian was fifty-six in 1533. Who would have supposed that he had

still forty-three years to live, and that he would paint as many

masterpieces in his second half-century as in the first?

6. Minor Artists and Arts

-

We must retrace our steps now, and briefly honor two painters who

were born after Titian but died long before his death. We bow, in

passing, to Girolamo Savoldo, who came to Venice from Brescia and

Florence, and painted pictures of high excellence: the Madonna and

Saints now in the Brera Gallery; an ecstatic St. Matthew in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a Magdalen in Berlin, far more

tempting than the stout lady of that name in Titian.

Giacomo Nigreti was named Palma from some hills near his birthplace,

Serina, in the Bergamasque Alps; he became Palma Vecchio when his

grandnephew Palma Giovane also acquired fame. For a time he was

considered the equal of Titian by their contemporaries. Perhaps some

jealousy arose between them, which was not eased by Titian's

stealing of Giacomo's mistress. Giacomo had painted her as Violante;

Titian had her pose for his Flora. Like Titian, Palma handled sacred

and profane themes with equal skill if not with equal zest; he

specialized in Sacred Conversations or Holy Families, but probably

owed his fame to his portraits of Venetian blondes- full-bosomed women

who dyed their hair to an auburn hue. Nevertheless his finest pictures

are religious: a Santa Barbara in the church of Santa Maria Formosa,

the patron saint of the Venetian bombardiers; and the Jacob and

Rachel of the Dresden gallery- a handsome shepherd sharing a kiss

with a buxom lass. Palma's portraits would have ranked with the best

of his time and city had not Titian produced half a hundred deeper

ones.

His pupil Bonifazio de' Pitati, called Veronese from his birthplace,

adopted the style of Giorgione's Fete champetre and Titian's Diana

to adorn Venetian walls and furniture with attractive landscapes and

nudes; and his Diana and Actaeon is worthy of these masters.

Lorenzo Lotto, less popular than Bonifazio in their day, has

gained repute with the years. A shy, pious, melancholy spirit, he

was not quite at home in Venice, where paganism resumed its sway as

soon as the church bells and choirs ceased to sing. At the age of

twenty (1500) he produced one of the most original paintings of the

Renaissance, the St. Jerome in the Louvre: no hackneyed image of the

emaciated eremite, but an almost Chinese study of somber chasms and

mountainous rocks, amid which the old scholar is a minor element, at

first hardly seen; this is the first European painting that reproduces

nature in its wild dominance rather than as an imaginary

background. `051140 Passing to Treviso, Lorenzo painted for the church

of Santa Cristina a monumental altar back of The Madonna

Enthroned, which made his fame throughout northern Italy. Another

success with a Madonna for the church of San Domenico at Recanati

earned him a call to Rome. There Julius II commissioned him to paint

some rooms in the Vatican; but when Raphael came the frescoes that

Lotto had begun were destroyed. Perhaps this humiliation helped to

darken Lorenzo's mood. Bergamo better appreciated his peculiar

talent for moderating the warm colors of Venetian art into softer

tones more congruous with piety; twelve years he labored there,

modestly paid but content to be first in Bergamo rather than fourth in

Venice. For the church of San Bartolommeo he painted an overcrowded

but still beautiful altarpiece, The Madonna in Majesty. Lovelier

is an Adoration of the Shepherds at Brescia; the color, while full

and pervasive, has a subdued tone more restful to eye and spirit

than the brilliant effects of the great Venetians.

A sensitive soul like Lotto's could at times penetrate more deeply

into a personality than Titian. Few artists have caught the glow of

healthy youth so intimately as in Lotto's Portrait of a Boy in the

Castello at Milan. His Self-Portrait shows Lorenzo himself

apparently well and strong, but he must have known much sickness and

pain to represent illness so sympathetically as in The Sick Man of

the Borghese Gallery, or in another of the same title in the

Galleria Doria at Rome- an emaciated hand pressed over the heart, a

look of pain and bewilderment on the face, as if asking why should he,

so good or so great, be chosen by the germ? A more famous portrait,

Laura di Pola, shows a woman of quiet beauty, also puzzled by

life, and finding no answer except in religious faith.

Lotto too came to that consolation. Restless, solitary, unmarried,

he wandered from place to place, perhaps from philosophy to

philosophy, until in his final years (1552-6) he settled down as a

resident in the convent of the Santa Casa at Loreto, near the Holy

House that pilgrims believed to have once sheltered the Mother of God.

In 1554 he gave all his property to the convent, and took an

oblate's vows. Titian called him "as good as goodness, and as virtuous

as virtue." `051141 Lotto had outlived the Pagan Renaissance, and

had sunk to rest, so to speak, in the arms of the Council of Trent.

In that vibrant century- 1450-1550- during which Venetian commerce

suffered so many defeats, and Venetian painting scored so many

victories, the minor arts shared in the cultural exuberance. It was

not for them a Renaissance, for they were old and mature in Italy by

Petrarch's time, and merely continued their medieval excellence.

Perhaps the mosaicists had lost some of their skill or patience;

even so their work on St. Mark's was at least abreast of their age.

The potters were now learning to make porcelain; Marco Polo had

brought some from China; a sultan had sent fine specimens of it to the

doge (1461); by 1470 the Venetians were making their own. The glass

blowers at Murano reached in this period the acme of their art, making

cristallo of exquisite purity and design. The names of the leading

glass blowers were known throughout Europe, and every royal house

competed for their wares. Most of them used a mold or model; some

put the mold aside, blew a bubble into the molten glass as it poured

from the furnace, and shaped the substance into cups, vases, chalices,

ornaments of a hundred colors and a thousand forms. Sometimes,

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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