Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 23

Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576).

Tiziano Vecellio – "il divino Tiziano," as his countrymen called him – is one of the greatest names in the history of painting: "There is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they" (Two Paths, § 57). Titian's works "are not art," said one of his contemporaries, "but miracles; they make upon me the impression of something divine, and as heaven is the soul's paradise, so God has transfused into Titian's colours the paradise of our bodies." It is not easy, however, to point out the special characteristics of Titian, for it is his glory to offer nothing over-prominent and to keep "in all things the middle path of perfection." Titian's mind was "wholly realist, universal, and manly. He saw that sensual passion in man was not only a fact, but a Divine fact; the human creature, though the highest of the animals, was, nevertheless, a perfect animal, and his happiness, health, and nobleness depended on the due power of every animal passion, as well as the cultivation of every spiritual tendency" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 30). As a youth Titian worked under the influence of Giorgione, of whom (says Vasari), "they who were excellent confessed that he was born to put the breath of life into painted figures and to imitate the elasticity and colour of flesh." The so-called "Sacred and Profane Love" of Titian marks the culmination of his "Giorgionesque" style, in which sensuous delight and spiritual yearning are mixed in subtle harmony. The "Bacchus and Ariadne" of our own Gallery belongs to a somewhat later date, and is a combination of poetry and painting almost unique in the world of art. "One object," says Sir Frederick Burton,42 "Titian kept steadily before him from the beginning – the rendering of the lustre of the skin in its warmth, its pearliness, and its light, such as it is found in the European races, and nowhere perhaps in such perfection as in the blended northern and southern blood of Venetia. He presents to us humanity in its noblest and most beautiful forms, and so profoundly had he studied it that the ideal personages introduced in his pictures have an intense individuality. Naturally, therefore, he stands supreme amongst the great portrait-painters. In the department of landscape he was, if not the first to perceive, at least the first to render, nature in her sublimer aspects. When dealing with classical themes he thoroughly translated the spirit, without idly imitating the forms, of antiquity." And as the range of his intellectual sympathy was wide, so was that of his executive skill. He is, indeed, especially supreme as a colourist; but for the rest, the very greatness of the master lies in there being no one quality predominant in him. Raphael's power is properly called "Raphaelesque," but "Titian's power is simply the power of doing right. Whatever came before Titian, he did wholly as it ought to be done" (Two Paths, §§ 57, 58, 69).

This universality of Titian's art is reflected in his life – a life prolonged far beyond the ordinary human spell, and full to the end of "superhuman toil." He was sent from his country home at Cadore to Venice to begin his studies when quite a boy: he was only nine, it is said, when he entered Gentile Bellini's studio. He lived to be ninety-nine, and his life was one long education. He was nearly threescore years and ten when he visited Rome and saw Michael Angelo, but he "had greatly improved," he said in later years, "after he had been at Rome." He painted until his dying hour, and is said to have exclaimed at the last that he was "only then beginning to understand what painting was." This continual striving after perfection, this consciousness of falling short, is in striking contrast to the honour and glory paid to him by others. He was painter in ordinary to the Venetian State (a post in which he succeeded Giovanni Bellini). He was an honoured guest at the court of Alphonso I., Duke of Ferrara, for whom he painted the "Bacchus and Ariadne" (35). To the Emperor Charles V. he "stood as Apelles to Alexander the Great, the only man worthy to paint his royal master," and he was made Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur, with precedence for his children as nobles of the Empire. The emperor's son, Philip II. (of Spain), was an equally generous patron; the Pope Paul III. tried hard to induce Titian to settle in Rome; and Henry III. of France, who visited him at his own house, wished the picture on which the painter was then at work to be placed over his tomb. In his house at Venice Titian lived in great style, attracting kings and nobles and men of letters to him. There is all the keenness of a city of merchants in Titian's business relations, and many of the extant documents about him are petitions for further favours and for arrears of pensions. But if he gathered like a beggar, he spent like a prince. There is a story of two cardinals coming to dine at his house. He flung his purse to the steward, and bade him make ready, for "all the world was coming to dine with him." Certain too it is that if he knocked too much at the doors of princes, it was for the sake of his children rather than of himself. At the loss of his wife (when he was fifty-seven) he was "utterly disconsolate," says the letter of a friend. His sister Orsa afterwards kept house for him – "sister, daughter, mother, companion, and steward of his household," so Aretino described her; and it was his daughter Lavinia whom he oftenest loved to paint. She was "the person dearest to him in all the world," and many years after she had died (1560) in childbirth, he described her to Philip II. as "absolute mistress of his soul." A less pleasant light is thrown upon the great painter by his friendship and close association with the infamous Aretino. This curious product of the Renaissance came to Venice in 1527, and with Titian and Jacopo del Sansovino formed "the so-called Triumvirate, which was a kind of Council of Three, having as its raison d'être the mutual furtherance of material interests, and the pursuit of art, love, and pleasure." To Titian's association with Aretino some critics have ascribed the stronger vein of sensuality which is discernible in some of his later works. To the extreme limit, however, of his long life his hand never lost its cunning, nor was the force of imagination abated. He was carried off by the plague, and received even in that time of panic the honour of solemn obsequies in the church of the Frari – "the man as highly favoured," says Vasari, "by fortune as any of his kind had ever been before him." His house at Venice is still shown. It looks across the lagoons to the distant mountains of his early home.

One of the pictures which mark the advance made by Titian in the art of landscape. Look at the background of some earlier Holy Family – at the "purist" landscape, for instance, of Perugino (288), – and the change will be seen at once – a change from the conventional or ideal to the real and the actual. Titian was one of the first to "relieve the foreground of his landscapes from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded formalism of the early painters, and give a close approximation to the forms of nature in all things; retaining, however, this much of the old system, that the distances were for the most part painted in deep ultramarine blue, the foregrounds in rich green and brown" (Lectures on Architecture and Painting, p. 158). In particular he was the first43 to "apprehend the subduing pathos that comes with eventide" (see Gilbert's Cadore or Titian's Country, p. 33). Titian, says Ruskin (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ii. § 1, ch. vii. § 15), "hardly ever paints sunshine, but a certain opalescent twilight which has as much of human emotion as of imitative truth in it: