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

Titian and Sansovino. Together they had many a feast, usually graced

with feminine company usually venal; and there, when the talk turned

on art, Aretino could hold his own. His letters sang the praises of

Titian to a host of possible patrons, and won Vecelli several

lucrative commissions, in which Pietro may have shared. It was Aretino

who persuaded the Doge, the Emperor, and the Pope to sit to Titian for

portraits. Titian painted Aretino twice, and each time made a

masterpiece of mountainous and vulgar vitality. Sansovino,

pretending to carve an Apostle, placed the old satyr's head on a

sacristy door in St. Mark's; and perhaps Michelangelo, in The Last

Judgment, portrayed him as St. Bartholomew.

He was both better and worse than he was painted. He had almost

every vice, and was accused of sodomy. His hypocrisy made his own

Ipocrita seem by comparison sincere. His language, when he set his

mind to it, could be a cloaca maxima of filth. He could be brutal

and unmanly, as when he gloated over the fallen Clement; but he had

the grace to write, later: "I am ashamed that in censuring him I did

so in the depth of his afflictions." `052217 He was physically an

unabashed coward; but he had the courage to denounce powerful

persons and highly cherished abuses. His most visible virtue was

generosity. He gave to his friends and the poor a large part of what

he received in pensions, earnings, gifts, and bribes. He waived

royalties on his published letters, so that they might be sold more

cheaply, and acquire wider fame and higher value. He was annually near

bankruptcy with Christmas giving. Giovanni delle Bande Nere said to

Guicciardini: "I yield to no man in generosity, unless it be to Messer

Pietro, when he has means." `052218 He helped his friends to sell

their pictures and (as in the case of Sansovino) to get release from

jail. "Everybody comes to me," he wrote, "as if I were a custodian

of the royal treasury. Let a poor girl be confined, and my house

pays the expenses. Let anyone be put into prison, and the cost falls

upon me. Soldiers without equipment, strangers down on their luck,

stray cavaliers without number, come to my house to refit." `052219 If

at times he had twenty-two women in his house, it was not that they

constituted his harem; some were nursing unexpected infants, and found

a refuge under his roof; we note that a bishop sent him shoes for

one of these women. Many of the women whom he used or succored loved

and honored him; six favorite courtesans proudly called themselves

"Aretines."

He had whatever virtue is implied by abundant animal spirits; in

private he was a good-natured animal who had never learned a moral

code. He thought- with some excuse in those times- that no person of

any consequence had any real moral code. He told Vasari that he had

never seen a maiden whose features did not betray a touch of

sensuality. `052220 His own sensuality was gross, but to his friends

it appeared to be merely the spontaneous exuberance of life.

Hundreds of people found him lovable; princes and priests delighted in

his conversation. He had no education, but he seemed to know everybody

and everything. He became human in his love for Giovanni delle Bande

Nere, for Caterina and the two children she bore him, and for frail,

consumptive, gracious, faithless Pierina Riccia.

She came into his household as the fourteen-year-old wife of his

secretary. They lived with him, and he played father to her; soon he

loved her with a consuming and solicitous paternal affection. He

reformed his morals, kept, of his mistresses, only Caterina and

their babe Adria. Then, just as he was simmering down to

respectability, a Venetian nobleman, whose wife he had charmed,

accused him in court of blasphemy and sodomy. He denied the charges,

but dared not face the exposures and chances of trial; conviction

would have meant long imprisonment or death. He fled from his house,

and hid for weeks with friends. They persuaded the court to dismiss

the charges; Aretino returned to his home in triumph, cheered by

crowds on both sides of the Grand Canal. But he was heartbroken to

find in Pierina's eyes that she thought him guilty. Then Pierina's

husband deserted her. When she came to Pietro for consolation he

made her his mistress. She developed tuberculosis, and for thirteen

months was near death; he nursed her with anxious tenderness, and

brought her back to health. At the height of his devotion she left him

for a younger lover. He tried to convince himself that it was better

so, but from that day his spirit was broken, and old age advanced upon

him triumphantly.

He grew fat, but never ceased to vaunt his sexual powers. He

frequented brothels, and became more and more religious, he who in his

youth had laughed at resurrections as "nonsense" which "only the

rabble takes seriously." `052221 In 1554 he went to Rome hoping to

be crowned with a red hat, but Julius III could only make him a Knight

of St. Peter. In that year he was evicted from the Casa Aretino for

failure to pay his rent. He took more modest quarters, away from the

Grand Canal. Two years later he died of apoplexy, aged sixty-four.

He had confessed some fraction of his sins, and had received the

Eucharist and Extreme Unction; and he was buried in the church of

San Luca as if he had not been the very paragon and apostle of

lechery. A wit composed for him a possible epitaph:

-

Qui giace l'Aretin, poeta tosco,

Chi disse mal d'ognun fuorche Dio,

Scusandosi col dir, Non lo conosco,-

-

which is to say:

-

Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,

Who evil spoke of everyone but God,

Giving as his excuse, "I never knew him."

III. TITIAN AND THE KINGS: 1530-76

-

In 1530, at Bologna, Aretino introduced Titian to Charles V. The

Emperor, absorbed in reorganizing Italy, sat impatiently for a

portrait, and paid the astonished artist a single ducat ($12.50).

Federigo of Mantua, calling Titian "the best painter now living,"

added out of his own pocket a princely 150 ducats to the fee.

Gradually the Duke brought Charles to his own point of view. In 1532

artist and Emperor met again. During the next sixteen years Titian

painted a dazzling sequence of Imperial portraits: Charles in full

armor (1532, now lost); Charles in brocaded coat, embroidered doublet,

white breeches, stockings and shoes, and black cap with an

inappropriate white feather (1533?); Charles with the Empress Isabella

(1538); Charles in shining armor on a prancing steed at the battle

of Muhlberg (1548)- a glory of color and pride; Charles in somber

black, seated meditative on a balcony (1548). It is a credit to

painter and King that these portraits make no attempt to idealize

their subject, except in costume; they show Charles's

unprepossessing features, his bad skin, his gloomy spirit, and a

certain capacity for cruelty; and yet they reveal the Emperor, a man

of burdens and authority, a cold, hard mind that had brought half of

western Europe under its rule. He could be kind nevertheless, and

atone handsomely for his initial miserliness. In 1533 he sent Titian a

patent making him a count palatine, and a Knight of the Golden Spur;

and from that year Titian was officially court painter to the most

powerful monarch in Christendom.

Meanwhile, presumably through Federigo, Titian had entered into

correspondence with Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino,

who had married Eleonora Gonzaga, Federigo's sister and Isabella's

daughter. Since Francesco was now commander in chief of the Venetian

armies, he and his Duchess were frequently in Venice. There Titian

painted their portraits: a man nine tenths mail (for Titian liked

its sheen), a woman pale and resigned after many illnesses. For them

Titian painted on wood a Magdalen attractive only for the remarkable

variations of light and hue that the artist gave to her auburn hair;

and again for them a lovely portrait, in green and brown, known only

as La Bella, and now in the Pitti Gallery. For Federigo's successor,

Duke Guidobaldo II, Titian made one of art's most perfect nudes, the

Venus of Urbino (c. 1538). Titian, we are told, had put some

finishing touches on Giorgione's Sleeping Venus; now he imitated

that masterpiece in all but the accompaniments and the features.

Here the face lacks the guileless peace of Giorgione's version; and

instead of a quiet landscape we see a rich interior of green

curtain, brown drape, and red couch, while two maids search for

robes gorgeous enough to fitly clothe the lady's golden flesh.

From Duke and Emperor Titian passed on to paint the Pope.

Paul III

was also imperial: a man of virile character and subtle craft, with

a face that recorded two generations of history; here was a better

opportunity for Titian than he had found in the uncommunicative

Emperor. At Bologna in 1535 Paul faced bravely the realism of Titian's

portraiture. Aged sixty-seven, tired but indomitable, he sat in his

flowing papal robes, the long head and large beard bent over a once

powerful frame, the ring of authority conspicuous on his

aristocratic hand; this and Raphael's Julius II contest the

distinction of being the finest, deepest portrait of the Italian

Renaissance. In 1545 the Pope invited Titian, himself now sixty-eight,

to Rome. The artist was lodged in the Belvedere, and received all

the honors of the city; Vasari acted as his cicerone in showing him

the wonders of classic and Renaissance Rome; even Michelangelo

welcomed him, and, in a moment of courtesy, concealed from him an

opinion expressed to friends, that Titian would have been a greater

painter had he learned to draw. `052222 There Titian painted Paul

again, older, more bent, more harassed than before, between two

obsequious grandsons who were soon to rebel against the Pope; this,

too, is among Titian's profoundest works. For one of these

grandsons, Ottavio Farnese, he painted the voluptuous Danae of the

Naples Museum. After eight months in Rome he traveled slowly back

via Florence to Venice (1546), hoping to spend his remaining days

there in rest and peace.

But a year later the Emperor urgently called him over the Alps to

Augsburg. There he stayed nine months, making two of the imperial

portraits listed above, and immortalizing slim Spanish grandees and

mountainous Teutons like the Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony. On

a second visit to Augsburg (1550) Titian met the future Philip II of

Spain, and made several pictures of him; one of these, in the Prado,

is among the master portraits of the Renaissance. Lovelier still is

the likeness that he painted of Charles's Portuguese wife, the Empress

Isabella. She had died in 1539, but the Emperor, four years later,

gave Titian a middling representation of her by an obscure artist, and

asked him to change it into a work of finished art. The result may not

resemble the Empress, but even as an imaginary portrait this Isabella

of Portugal must rank high among Titian's pictures: a refined and

melancholy face, a most royal costume, a book of prayers to console

her premonition of an early death, a distant landscape providing

overtones of green and brown and blue. Titian many times over earned

his noble rank.

After his return from Augsburg (1552) Titian felt that he had

traveled enough. He was seventy-five, and doubtless thought that he

had not much longer to live. Perhaps his busyness made for his

longevity; absorbed in painting after painting, he forgot to die. In a

long succession of religious pictures (1522-70) he gave his own

colorful and dramatic rendering of the Christian creed and story

from Adam to Christ. *05055 He commemorated with powerful images the

Apostles and the saints. The best and most unpleasant of these is The

Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1558, I Gesuiti, Venice): the saint is

being roasted on a gridiron by Roman soldiers and slaves, who add to

his discomfort with hot irons and flagellation. These religious

pictures do not move us as deeply as the similar works of the

Florentines; they excel in anatomy, but give no sense of piety; one

look at the athletic figures of Christ and the Apostles makes it clear

that Titian's interest was purely technical, that he was thinking of

splendid bodies, not of ascetic saints. In the interval between the

Bellini and Titian Christianity, while still proposing topics, had

lost its spiritual hold on Venetian art. `052223

That sensual element which is one requisite of pictorial or

plastic art remained strong in Titian for almost a century. He

repeated his Farnese Danae in several variations, and made many a

Venus for defenders of the faith. Philip II of Spain was his best

customer for these "mythologies"; the royal apartments in Madrid

were adorned with a Danae, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda,

Jason and Medea, Actaeon and Diana, The Rape of Europa, Tarquin and

Lucretia, Diana and Callisto, and Jupiter and Antiope (also known

as The Venus of Pardo ); and all but the last of these were painted

by Titian after 1553, when he was seventy-six or more. It is

encouraging to find the Master's imagination creating in his

eighties female nudes as perfect as those that he had portrayed in his

prime. The Dianas, with their upswept auburn hair, are of the type

that Veronese was using- blonde Venuses almost lovelier than any

Aphrodite of the Greeks. Perhaps the same lady, grown ampler,

appears in Venus with the Mirror (c. 1555, Washington); she is again

the Venus who clings to Adonis in the Prado picture, struggling to woo

him from his dogs. Not even in Correggio is there so frankly sensual a

riot of feminine flesh. And there are still other Venuses scattered in

the galleries, but once peopling Titian's brain: the Venus

Anadyomene (c. 1520) of Bridgewater House, standing in the bath,

and modestly concealed below the knees; the Venus and Cupid (c.

1545) of the Uffizi- a Germanic blonde with impeccable hands; the

clothed Venus of The Education of Cupid (c. 1565) in the Borghese

Gallery; the Prado Venus with the Organ Player (c. 1545), who cannot

keep his mind on his music; and a Venus with the Lute Player

(1560) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It must be said, however,

that the women in these pictures are but part of their charm; Titian

is interested in nature as well as women, and paints on several of

these canvases splendid landscapes that are sometimes as lovely as the

goddess herself.

Greater and deeper than these mythological pictures are the

portraits. If the Venuses display a sense of form that never grew

dull, the portraits reveal in Titian an ability to seize and convey

human character with a force of art unequaled, in their total gallery,

by the combined portraits of any other hand. What could be finer

than the anonymous Man with the Glove (c. 1520, Louvre)?- whose

gloved left hand and delicate white ruff about the neck harmonize so

well with the sensitive spirit mirrored in the eyes. Cardinal

Ippolito de' Medici (1533, Pitti) is a less searching portrayal,

and yet in the face are the subtlety, the artistic sense, the love

of power, that marked the Medici. The Francis I (c. 1538, Louvre)

made the French King's features famous, sending over the world, in a

hundred thousand reproductions, the feathered hat and jolly eye and

rapier nose and handsome beard and scarlet shirt of the man who lost

Italy but won Leonardo and Cellini and a hundred women. Titian's

official post required him to paint portraits of various doges; nearly

all these portraits are lost; three masterly figures remain:

Niccolo Marcello (who died before Titan's birth)- an ugly face and a

gorgeous robe; Antonio Grimani (in the picture of Faith in the

Doges' Palace)- an ascetic face and a gorgeous robe; and Andrea

Gritti - a less gorgeous robe, but a powerful face concentrating in

itself all the resolute majesty of Venice. In an opposite vein is

the delicate Clarice Strozzi, which Aretino praised too fully. The

portraits of Aretino, in the Pitti Gallery at Florence and in the

Frick Collection in New York, are merciless evocations of a

fascinating scoundrel by his dearest friend. Tenderer is Titian's

commemoration of Bembo, the poet lover by this time (1542) become a

cardinal. Among the greatest portraits in Titian's gallery is The

Jurist Ippolito Riminaldi (1542), once known as The Duke of

Norfolk - disheveled brown hair, high forehead, scanty mustache and

beard, firm lips, fine nose, piercing glance; we begin to understand

Italy and Venice better when we see that they had such men, in whom

fine bodies and fine clothes were but the outward form of strong wills

ready for any challenge, and penetrating minds alert to every facet of

experience and art.

Titian's most interesting portraits were of himself. He pictured

himself several times, finally at eighty-nine. Standing before this

autoritratto in the Prado, we see a face lined and yet cleaned by

the flow of countless days; a skullcap not quite enclosing the white

hair; a red beard almost covering the face; a large nose breathing

power; blue eyes a little somber, seeing death closer than it really

was; the hand grasping a brush- the great artistic passion not yet

spent. This- not the doges, not the senators, not the merchants- was

the lord of Venice for half a century, giving immortality to transient

aristocrats and kings, and raising his adopted city to a place

beside Florence and Rome in the history of the Renaissance.

He was a rich man now, though the memory of early insecurity made

him acquisitive to the end. Venice exempted him from certain taxes,

"out of regard for his rare excellence." `052224 He wore elegant

clothing, and lived in a comfortable home with a spacious garden

that overlooked the lagoon; we picture him there entertaining poets,

artists, blue bloods, cardinals, and kings. The mistress whom he had

married in 1525, after having two sons by her, died in 1530, and he

resumed the baccalaureate liberty that he had enjoyed for almost

half a century before. His daughter Lavinia was a joy and pride, and

he made fond portraits of her, even in her matronly amplitude; but she

too died a few years after his marriage. One son, Pomponio, became a

worthless wastrel, saddening the old man's heart; the other, Orazio,

painted some lost pictures, and probably shared in the works

ascribed to his father's final years. Perhaps another of Titian's

pupils- Domenico Theotocopoulos, "El Greco"- helped him then, though

there is no sign of it in Titian's buxom figures and joyous scenes.

Far into old age he painted almost every day, and found in his art

his only secure happiness. There he knew that he was master, that

all the world acclaimed him, and that his hand had not lost its

cunning, nor his eye its keenness; even his intellect, as well as

his imagination, seemed to keep its power to the end. Some

purchasers complained that these final paintings were sent to them

unfinished; even so, they were miracles. Probably no other painter-

excepting Raphael- ever possessed such technical facility, such

control of color and texture, such wizardry of variegated light. His

faults were those of rapid execution, sometimes of careless drawing;

most of his preliminary designs were tentative; yet, when he cared

to take the time, he could produce such a marvel as the pen drawing of

Medoro and Angelica in the Musee Bonnat at Bayonne. In portraiture

he had to work rapidly, for his subjects were too impatient and

occupied to give him long or frequent sittings; therefore he made a

quick sketch and painted from that, perhaps putting more into the

subject's face and head than was really there. In paintings other than

portraits he gave too much prominence to physical features, and seldom

caught the spiritual essence; in depth of insight and feeling he could

not match Leonardo or Michelangelo. But how healthy his art is

compared with theirs! No abnormal introverted broodings, no volcanic

grumblings at the nature of the world and man; Titian took the world

as he found it, took men as he found them, took women when he found

them, and enjoyed them all. He was a frank pagan, who contemplated the

architecture of woman with delight through ninety years; even his

Virgins are healthy, happy, and nubile. The poverty, grief, and

insecurity of life found little room in Titian's art; except for a few

martyrdoms and crucifixions, all is beauty and joy.

He grew old while painting, and lived a quarter century after the

normal span of life. In his eighty-eighth year he traveled to Brescia,

and accepted an arduous commission to paint a ceiling in the palace of

the commune. Vasari, visiting him in his ninetieth year, found him

at work, brush in hand. At ninety-one he painted a portrait of

Iacopo da Strada (Vienna), brilliant with color, strong with

character. But now at last his hand began to tremble, his eyes grew

weak, and he felt that the time had come for piety. In 1576, aged

ninety-nine, he agreed to paint a Burial of Christ for the church of

the Frari, in exchange for a burial place there, where already two

of his greatest works were hung. He did not finish it, and he fell a

year short of living out a century. In that year plague broke out in

Venice; on each day two hundred died; a fourth of the population

succumbed to the pestilence. Titian himself died during the plague,

probably not of it but from old age (August 26, 1576). The

government set aside its prohibition of public gatherings in order

to give him a state funeral. He was buried in Santa Maria Gloriosa de'

Frari, as he had wished. It was the end of a magnificent life, and a

wondrous age.

IV. TINTORETTO: 1518-94

-

It was not quite the end; for a power and spirit almost as great had

still eighteen years to live, and had still to paint his Paradise.

Iacopo Robusti was the son of a dyer; hence the diminutive

nickname by which the whimsical Italians have sent him down to

history. He became indeed a tintor as a great colorist; but his

family name fitted him well enough, for only a robust soul could

have survived the long struggle that Iacopo had to fight for

recognition.

Almost the first notice we have of him is that he was apprenticed to

Titian at an unknown age, and was dismissed after a few days. Carlo

Ridolfi, writing a century later, recounts the incident from the point

of view of Tintoretto's descendants:

-

When Titian came home and entered the place where his students were,

he saw some papers sticking out from a desk; and seeing certain

figures drawn on them, he asked who had done them. Iacopo said timidly

that they were by his hand. Thereupon Titian, foreseeing from such

beginnings that the lad would become a very able man, and would

bring him some trouble in art, impatiently, as soon as he had gone

upstairs and laid aside his mantle, bade Girolamo Dante, his chief

pupil, to immediately forbid Iacopo the house. So a little tinge of

jealousy works in human hearts. `052225

-

We should like to reject this story, but Aretino, Titian's bosom

friend, alludes to the incident in a letter of 1549. The dismissal

is a fact, the interpretation is problematic. It is hard to believe

that Titian, who was already a painter to kings when Iacopo was only a

lad of twelve, could be jealous of so hypothetical a competitor, or

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

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