Читать книгу Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice - Sheila Hale - Страница 14
ОглавлениеOne should know how to simulate the glint of armour, the gloom of night and the brightness of day, lightning flashes, fires, lights, water, earth, rocks, grass, trees, leaves, flowers and fruits, buildings and huts, animals and so on, so comprehensively that all of them possess life, and never surfeit the admirer’s eyes.
LODOVICO DOLCE, L’ARETINO, 1557
However much talent he may have demonstrated as a child in Cadore, Titian had much to learn before he would be experienced enough to collaborate with a master or turn out paintings in the style of that master’s studio. And so, Dolce tells us, an uncle took Titian along to the workshop of Sebastiano Zuccato, and asked him ‘to impart to Titian the basic principles of art’. Sebastiano was a minor painter from Treviso,1 where the Vecellio men stopped on their journeys between Venice and Cadore and may have got to know the Zuccato family. Sebastiano’s two sons, Valerio and Francesco, later became the leading mosaicists of Venice.2 Although they were a generation younger than Titian, who didn’t stay in their father’s studio for long, they became lifelong friends. Valerio, who was a talented actor in staged comedies, married Polonia, the pre-eminent Venetian actress in the 1530s. He also designed women’s hats and clothes, which he sold in a boutique off the Merceria.
Like most Venetian artists Sebastiano Zuccato probably lived and worked in the same premises in the vicinity of the Rialto, in a campo or on a quay where pictures could be set out to dry, and with easy access to a canal to facilitate taking delivery of supplies and dispatching paintings.3 Some artists’ workshops used slave labour for unskilled jobs, but most employed boys who worked in return for instruction and a small wage. Sebastiano Zuccato would have taught Titian the basics: how to prepare a panel and stretch canvas; how to size the support with a thin layer of gypsum mixed with warmed rabbit glue; how to grind pigments, clean the grinding stones, wash brushes with lamp oil. Although Sebastiano was probably too limited an artist to teach the new techniques of painting with oils, Francesco and Valerio affected Titian’s artistic development by inspiring an interest in the art of mosaic. He would design some of the cartoons – which would have been on paper, to scale and in colour – for their mosaics in the basilica of San Marco. And his understanding of mosaics, which had to be seen in dim, flickering light, was to be useful when he came to compose paintings for difficult locations. Later in his career it may have affected the impressionistic technique – which Vasari described as ‘executed … in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect from a distance’.
But, in his first months with Sebastiano Zuccato, just running to the shops to buy supplies was an education in itself for a fledgling painter. Venice offered the most various and least expensive selection of high-quality artists’ materials in the world. Linen canvas was available in a variety of weights and weaves – fine, heavy, twilled or herringbone – from specialist shops that also supplied the sail-makers in the arsenal. Canvas, which was beginning to be used as a support for large-scale works, particularly in Venice where fresco deteriorated rapidly in the damp climate, encouraged painters to experiment with the rough texture it could contribute to their works. Gradually it would be used in preference to panel because if primed with a flexible gypsum it allowed paintings to be rolled for transport. The mineral, vegetable and insect ingredients of pigments and dyestuffs, which were essential for the manufacture of glass, ceramics and textiles as well as for painters, were imported into the city in industrial quantities from the Levant, from northern Europe and later in the century from the new world. Venetians experimented with more intense colours, like the brilliant orange produced when realgar was mixed with orpiment, new paint mixtures such as red lakes with copper-green glazes and orange mixed with blue paint. Visiting artists took advantage of the pre-export prices to stock up with colours, which were sold, not by apothecaries as elsewhere in Italy, but by specialist colour sellers, the vendecolori,4 whose shops were also meeting places where artisans and artists exchanged information and ideas about the uses of new and familiar materials. The vendecolori also stocked linseed and walnut oil, glue, brushes, cloth for cleaning rags, and the gums and resins used as varnishes or to refine or manufacture pigments, as well as unusual substances, such as the pulverized glass or sand some painters used to add vibrant reflections, to speed up drying time and to enhance transparency.
The air of the dark, dusty, busy colour shops was spiced with warmed vinegar in which lead and copper were steamed to produce lead white and verdigris. Their shelves and backrooms were piled with dried insects, herbaceous perennials, metals and minerals: yellow orpiment and orange realgar, which was also used for making fireworks; cinnabar and the tiny bodies of female insects imported from India that produced the finest crimson glazes; malachite from Hungary; earth colours from Siena and Umbria; softwood pitch, a by-product of charcoal making, used for brown glazes. Of the pigments manufactured locally, Venice was well known for its vermilion, its lead-tin yellow and especially its lead white, which was exported to England in such quantities that it was known there as Venetian white. Venetians used it as a priming coat, greyed or browned by the addition of particles of charcoal or lamp black, for modelling or impasto highlights, or mixed with other pigments to intensify their colour and enhance their reflective properties.
The most precious pigments were sold by the ounce or half-ounce. Venice had a virtual monopoly on lapis lazuli. The most expensive artists’ material after gold, lapis lazuli was mined in the mountainous caves of Badakhshan (in present-day Afghanistan), which were accessible for only a few months in the year. The extraction of ultramarine – oltremare di Venezia – from lapis lazuli was a laborious procedure, which involved hammering and kneading the ground stone with wax, resins and oils, which was then soaked in water for several days until the precious pigment floated to the surface. Lapis was sometimes used in combination with azurite, which was known as German blue because the best-quality crystals were mined in Germany, where they were ground and graded before export to Venice to be made into pigment, some of which was returned across the Alps.
Dyestuffs used for glass and textiles coloured the lakes, which, applied over lighter opaque layers of pigment, act like coloured filters, enriching tone and adding to the sense of light emerging from within the painting. Many years after Titian had run errands for Sebastiano Zuccato he sent to Venice from Germany, where he was working on a portrait of the emperor Charles V, for half a pound of red lake, ‘so fiery and splendid in its madder colour that by the side of it the crimson of velvet and silk become less beautiful’. (Titian, in other words, would outshine the most precious fabrics by painting with the same dyestuffs – madder was one of the most costly – in which they had been dipped.) By mid-century there were some twenty vendecolori, some of them also providing ready-mixed colours, in and around the Rialto. It is possible that Titian’s fine portrait of a man with a palm and a box of colours (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), dated 1561,5 is one of them, displaying the high-quality ready-to-use pigments that they increasingly prepared in their shops.
Nevertheless, although it was often said, by Leonardo among others, that colours are beautiful in themselves, it was the handling of pigments, not the use of brilliant colours, that set the greatest artists apart. Dolce objected to those who praised Titian as a colourist, pointing out that if that was all there was to him many women would be his equals. In the seventeenth century Marco Boschini, a Venetian poet, painter, engraver and art dealer, attributed to Titian the remark that a painter needs only three colours: white, black and red. But it takes time to understand how colours work together. The implication for those who knew their Pliny was that Titian was even more skilled at mixing colours than Apelles6 and the other ancient Greek painters, whose palettes were supposedly limited to four colours: white, black, red and yellow.
Titian’s practice of superimposing over opaque body colour layer upon layer of transparent glazes and semi-opaque scumbles – veils of paint that create tonal unity, and a cool, hazy, subdued effect when painted over a darker underlayer – would intrigue and inspire some of the greatest painters of successive centuries. Unfortunately, however, glazes and scumbles are subject over time to discolouration, abrasion and often to clumsy restoration. In some cases cleaning has stripped away centuries of accumulated dirt to reveal something closer to Titian’s original intentions. Too often, alas, he has been compromised to a greater or lesser extent by the loss of some of the paint that made his pictures, in the eyes of his contemporaries, not just stupendous but miraculous.
Once he had qualified as a master painter, probably around 1506, Titian joined the painters’ guild and later served on its board. Membership of the guild, the oldest and most conservative of its kind in Italy, was compulsory; and although it was small and poor it controlled everything from technical standards and the size of studios to the length of holidays. It provided security for its members, who were expected to look after one another in difficult times, and was highly protectionist. Albrecht Dürer, although welcomed by Venetian society, was fined by the guild for practising painting in Venice. The guild did not represent figure painters alone but also textile designers, miniaturists, gilders and painters of playing cards, stage sets, furniture, shields, wheels, bulkheads and barges, saddles and banners (the gilding and painting of embossed leather was a highly prized speciality). A Venetian college of figure painters was not founded until the seventeenth century; nor, until the eighteenth century, was there a Venetian academy that represented both painters and sculptors. Renaissance Venice, unlike Florence, never produced a painter who was also a sculptor, possibly because Florentine artists often began their training as goldsmiths, which could take them either way, while Venetian painters developed in isolation from the other arts.
Painting in any case was the art that most appealed to the Venetian taste for surface decoration. ‘Is there a man, finally,’ asked Dolce, ‘who does not understand the ornament that painting offers to any object at all’:
For though their interior walls be dressed in extremely fine tapestries, and though the chests and tables be covered with most beautiful cloths, both public and private buildings suffer a marked loss of beauty and charm without some painting to ornament them. Outside, too, the façades of houses and palaces give greater pleasure to the eyes of other men when painted by the hand of a master of quality than they do with incrustations of white marble and porphyry and serpentine embellished with gold.
Decorative objects were usually more highly valued in inventories and wills than easel paintings, which are often identified in surviving documents by their subjects or by the value of their frames rather than by the names of the artists who painted them – a habit that has created difficulties for art historians searching for attributions and dates, and which may conceal the names of artists whose works are now hesitantly given to those painters whose names we do happen to know. The problem is exacerbated by the similarities between the paintings of Giorgione and those of the young Sebastiano Luciani and Titian, now the starring names of the first decade of the century, who may well have shared assistants. Artists better known today for their easel paintings and altarpieces were in any case not above turning their hands to decorative jobs. Several panels of scenes from Ovid, probably painted on domestic storage chests, have been attributed to the young Titian,7 although the only widely accepted candidate is the damaged but delightful Orpheus and Eurydice (Bergamo, Accademia Carrara). Frescoing the façades and courtyards of houses, sometimes for a special occasion such as a wedding or the visit of a foreign dignitary, offered painters, including Giorgione and Titian, the opportunity to work on a large scale and to proclaim their talents for all the world to see, at least for as long as the frescos lasted in the humid saline air of the lagoon, polluted as it was even then by industrial fumes.
Titian came to study painting in a Venice that was only just emerging, generations after the Florentine rediscovery of classical antiquity, from what has been described as ‘the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration’.8 Unlike the city states of central Italy, Venice had never had a princely or papal court or the equivalent of the Medici family to encourage rivalry and sophisticated innovation. While Florentine artists thrived on competition – Donatello, working in the Venetian university town of Padua, complained of the absence there of the artistic rivalry that sharpened the ambitions and talents of his fellow Florentines – Venetian studios were by and large run as family partnerships passed down from one generation to another. They were commercial enterprises that aimed to provide conservative patrons, whose minds were preoccupied with empire building and commerce, with familiar products rather than to challenge existing norms. The Vivarini family, which supplied Venice, the empire and beyond with religious paintings throughout the second half of the fifteenth century, worked in such similar styles that the hand of one Vivarini cannot always be distinguished from another.
In Florence – that small, brown, restless, cerebral, idealistic city dominated by the cranial shape of its cathedral dome – Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Pittura of 1436, the first modern theoretical treatise on painting, had provided painters with a framework of concepts and precepts about preparatory drawing and perspective. In Venice critical theory about painting lagged behind execution; painters painted without the benefits and constraints of written guidelines. The first fully articulated Venetian treatises on painting, written by Paolo Pino and Lodovico Dolce, did not appear until the middle of the sixteenth century, and did not so much prescribe as describe the qualities that distinguished the work of the greatest Italian painters.9 Dolce’s L’Aretino, into which his biography of Titian is incorporated, is a fictional dialogue between Titian’s most articulate admirer, Pietro Aretino, and a Tuscan grammarian, Giovanni Francesco Fabrini, who acts as spokesman for the Florentine point of view. ‘Aretino’, speaking for Venice, proposes three guidelines by which a painting should be judged:
The whole sum of painting is, in my opinion, divided into three parts: invention, design and colouring. The invention is the fable or history which the painter chooses on his own or which others present him with, as material for the work he has to do. The design is the form he uses to represent this material. And the colouring takes its cue from the hues with which nature paints (for one can say as much) animate and inanimate things in variegation.10
The ultimate goal of painting, he continues, is to astonish and give pleasure by rivalling the illusionist feats performed by ancient Greek artists (whose painted grapes were so lifelike that birds pecked at them, whose horses made real horses neigh, whose statues of Venus caused men to ejaculate, and so on) and which were routinely used to describe the sense of the real world evoked by Renaissance painters starting with Giotto, who was supposed to have painted a fly on one of Cimabue’s figures so lifelike that Cimabue tried to brush it off.
The Aretino was intended as a riposte to the first, 1550 edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, from which he had excluded living painters with the single exception of Michelangelo. While Venetians aimed to rival nature by imitating it, Vasari’s anthropomorphic scheme placed art in its most mature phase – of which the greatest exemplars were Michelangelo and Raphael – as its own master, not reflecting but triumphant over nature. For him, as for all Florentines, the essential basis of all the high arts was disegno. Disegno – the word meant both draughtsmanship and design of a composition – was the father of the three arts of sculpture, architecture and painting. A painting was ‘a plane the surface of which is covered by fields of colours … bound by lines … which by virtue of a good drawing of circumscribed lines defines the figure’. A good painting, in other words, was a good drawing filled in by colour; and young Florentine artists were not permitted to hold a paintbrush until they had learned to draw.
For Venetians contour lines were increasingly to be avoided because they were not seen in nature, which was more readily evoked by shading and blending colours applied directly on to the support, allowing the viewers to fill in lost outlines with their own imaginations, as we do in the real world. The dichotomy between Florentine and Venetian methods was of course exaggerated. Any figure painter must master both. But in an age when critical language about art was limited it was a useful and much used distinction. Vasari claimed that Michelangelo, upon seeing a painting by Titian,11 had commented that it was a pity Titian had learned to paint in Venice where artists were not taught how to draw. Tintoretto posted a note in his studio reminding himself to rival ‘the disegno of Michelangelo and the colorito of Titian’.
‘The things obtaining to colouring are infinite,’ wrote Pino, ‘and it is impossible to explain them in words.’ Modern art historians try to meet that challenge by employing a more sophisticated specialist vocabulary than was available to sixteenth-century critics, most of whom were trained to write about literature and tended to restrict their comments about paintings to generalizations, classical tropes and a simplistic binary device, the paragone, borrowed from literary dialogues and treatises, which compared the relative merits of painting or sculpture, painting or poetry, colorito or disegno, literature or the visual arts,12 Florentine or Venetian art. But even today it is not possible to explain in words our visceral response to Venetian paintings, which are more about illusion than construction, about execution more than concept, and which speak more directly to the emotions and the senses – not only of vision and hearing but for some people of touch, even of taste13 – than to the intellect. We can criticize Titian for his lack of interest in deep space and linear perspective, but we are still dealing with a mystery, which Dolce called ‘that whatever it is … that fills the soul with infinite delight without our knowing what it is that gives us such pleasure’.
Venetian painters, many of whom were also musicians, seem to have been aware that colour like music can induce distinct moods. Vasari tells us that Giorgione played the lute ‘so beautifully to accompany his own singing that his services were often used at music recitals and social gatherings’; and that Sebastiano Luciani, whose first profession was not painting but music, was an accomplished singer, adept at various instruments, especially the lute. Ridolfi wrote that Tintoretto played the lute ‘and other strange instruments of his own invention’. In the 1540s Titian had a harpsichord made for his house in return for a portrait of the man who built it. In Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, painted in 1563 for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore, Titian performs on the viola da gamba in a string quartet with the other greatest Venetian artists of the time, Tintoretto, Jacopo Bassano and Veronese himself.
The enchanting musical angels perched on the steps of the Virgins’ thrones in fifteenth-century paintings are among the most popular Venetian postcards. Titian’s musicians are not so innocent. Their recorders, flutes and organs are charged with eroticism, sublime but transient like their music. Music, like feminine beauty and life itself, can exist only in time, while painting captures and fixes the momentary exaltation for ever. Titian’s Concert (Florence, Galleria Palatina), whatever else its much debated significance may be, is about collaborative music making, as is the enigmatic Concert Champêtre (Paris, Louvre).14 His ruined Portrait of a Musician (Rome, Galleria della Spada) anticipates the Romantic conception of wild, self-forgetful genius by several centuries. Some people even today who are sensitive to Titian’s works imagine that they can hear sounds within his paintings: his leaves rustling in the wind, the voices of his protagonists, and above all their music making, music being the art that since antiquity had been thought to reflect the harmony of the planets and the rational order of the universe.
Albrecht Dürer, who was in Venice in 1505–6, about the time Titian was emerging as an independent painter, heard some viola players who were moved to tears by the beauty of the music they were performing. Despite being fined by the painters’ guild, having his prints plagiarized by Venetian publishers and suffering the accusation that his work was insufficiently cognizant of antique models, Dürer seems to have enjoyed himself in Venice, where the doge paid him a state visit in his lodgings in the German exchange house and where he was befriended ‘by so many nice men among the Italians who seek my company, more and more every day which is very pleasing to me: men of good sense and knowledge, good lute-players and pipers, judges of painting, men of much noble sentiment and honest virtue; and they show me much honour and friendship’.15 Dürer’s surprise at finding himself so warmly received in Venice suggests that the social status of artists was higher there than in his native Germany. ‘Here I am a gentleman,’ he wrote home to Nuremberg. ‘At home I am a bum.’
Once he had taught him everything he could, Sebastiano Zuccato found Titian a place in the studio of Gentile Bellini, who was the foremost gentleman artist of Venice. The Bellini family were cittadini, a rank that was something like what we would call middle class but was more clearly defined; and Gentile, who was the first of the European diplomat painters before Rubens, was also the first Italian artist to be knighted, and not once but twice: in 1469 by the emperor Frederick III, and again a decade later by the Turkish sultan Mehmet II, ‘The Conqueror’, during a visit to Constantinople, where he had been sent by the Venetian government as a gesture of political goodwill, and where he painted the portrait of the sultan now in the London National Gallery. Gentile was a sociable man and well connected in Venice where, as a board member of the Scuola di San Marco, he was in frequent contact with the rich businessmen, civil servants, industrialists and merchants who were potential patrons. His studio was a good place for an ambitious young unknown from the provinces to make useful contacts and observe the intricacies of Venetian powerbroking.
Gentile and his younger brother Giovanni were the premier artists and teachers of Venice. By the time Titian entered their orbit, they had been active as independent artists for over forty years, and although their birthdates are unknown, they must by that time have been in their late sixties. The family practice had been founded in the 1420s or 1430s by their father Jacopo, whose remarkable and suggestive sketchbooks,16 which passed after his death to Gentile and then to Giovanni, contained drawings of classical fantasies and buildings decorated with antique statues and relief carvings, as well as religious subjects, textile designs, coins, animals, brooding landscapes and pastoral scenes with woods, barns and cottages. In 1454 their sister Nicolosia had married the Paduan painter Andrea Mantegna, whose interest in classical archaeology and the ‘stony manner’ (as Vasari described it) made more of an impression on the young Giovanni than on Gentile.
The brothers were apparently fond of one another. The worldly and sociable Gentile protected and cared for the more talented but retiring Giovanni, who eventually chose to be buried next to his brother in the cemetery of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. They were, however, so different temperamentally and artistically that they seem to have made a conscious decision to maintain separate studios and to specialize in different types of painting. Although both Bellini supplied history paintings to the doge’s palace (they were destroyed by a fire later in the century), and both painted portraits, it was Gentile who invented the large, painted descriptions of processions and ceremonies in the city. Carpaccio, who contributed fantasy to the genre, probably studied with Gentile, but it is hard to see what Gentile could have taught Titian, whose early paintings show no signs of his influence. It may, however, have been in his workshop that Titian saw his first examples of classical art, including a head of Plato and a statue of Venus ascribed to Praxiteles.17
Gentile is nowadays sometimes dismissed by academic art historians as a ‘grand decorator’.18 Dolce called him ‘that clodhopper’, adding that Titian ‘could not bear to follow that arid and laboured line of Gentile’s. Instead, he made designs boldly and with great rapidity. When Gentile saw, therefore, that Titian was diverging from his own track, he told him that there was no prospect of his making good as a painter.’ (Titian may have told Dolce this story years later when he was the most successful painter in Europe – it would have appealed to his well-developed sense of irony; or Dolce, always intent on emphasizing the superiority of Titian over all other painters, may have invented it.) Their artistic incompatibility, in any case, put an end to the relationship, and Titian moved on to study with Giovanni.
Giovanni Bellini was not only the greatest Venetian painter of his day, he was also the most generous teacher. His studio in the now rather forlorn Campo Santa Marina – which must have been a livelier square before its church was demolished by the occupying Austrians in 1820 – was the largest in Venice, probably in Italy. He had trained or influenced in one way or another all Venetian painters of his own and successive generations: Bartolomeo Montagna, Cima da Conegliano, Vittore Carpaccio, Marco Basaiti, Sebastiano Luciani (better known today as Sebastiano del Piombo) and Giorgione. Those of his students born a decade or so before Titian – Vincenzo Catena, Jacopo Palma (‘il Vecchio’), Lorenzo Lotto – shared and may have stimulated his interest in artistic currents outside Venice. In his later years, some of his former pupils assisted him and relieved him of his teaching load even after they were established as independent artists: Carpaccio was in his forties when he worked as his assistant around 1507.
Although Giovanni, like his brother, kept sketches and gessos of antique figures in his studio, he found a way of expressing in paint a sense of flesh-and-blood humanity and a response to the natural world that had not been seen before in Venice. In his studio gold grounds gave way to sunlit meadows, farmyards, plains and mountains; stiffly posed saints became real people. Giovanni was the first Venetian to paint a naked Christ child; the first to bring his Madonnas down from their thrones into a naturalistic countryside built by colour and light. The Madonna of the Meadow gazes down at the sleeping baby sprawled across her lap, as He will be in death, against a background of a muddy farmyard with cows, oxen, goats and sheep tended by a man in Levantine dress. The Madonna with Two Saints is poised above a landscape so abstract that it could almost have been painted by Cézanne. And yet, innovator though he was, Giovanni never entirely abandoned the neo-Byzantine sensibility that infuses his Madonnas with their iconic stillness. Between 1488, when he painted the jewel-like triptych for the sacristy of the Frari and 1505 when he finished his last sacred conversation,19 the Madonna and Four Saints for the church of San Zaccaria, Giovanni Bellini laid the foundations of an artistic revolution that Titian would complete. And yet both Madonnas are enthroned, in the Byzantine tradition, beneath gilded mosaic semi-domes; and both retain a transcendent spirituality that has not lost its power to soothe troubled hearts in our frantic, disillusioned age.
Giovanni was the first Venetian to recognize the full potential of oil-based paint and glazes. While northern European painters had bound their pigments with oil for centuries, Italians had on the whole preferred the drier, more precise finish of egg-tempera, which has to be applied with a soft brush in small strokes, and is suitable for filling in the drawn outlines preferred by Florentine painters. In the 1460s and 1470s, Giovanni had been inspired to experiment with the oil medium by paintings imported from northern Europe; and the visit in 1475–6 of the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, the first Italian painter to adopt the minute oil technique favoured by Flemish painters, contributed to the refinement of his technique. The polished surface of oil mixed with pigments reflects natural light in a way that tempera does not. Diluted to varying degrees of transparency it allows the light to penetrate, giving an impression of depth, and encourages what we call atmospheric perspective or tonal painting by which the separation of pictorial elements is achieved by colour rather than line. Oil is also more malleable and slower to dry than tempera and therefore more forgiving. Mistakes can be scraped off or reworked. Colours can be blended and worked together directly on the support. In some paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Titian you can see where they have modelled the soft paint with fingers, palms, rags, scraped it with the handle of a brush, or swept across the damp surface with a dry brush. In the hands of Giovanni and his successors oil paint encouraged experimentation and an unprecedented freedom of gesture. It gave them the freedom, as Bembo once described Giovanni’s way of working to Isabella d’Este,20 ‘to wander at will’; to create softer contours; to build naturalistic landscapes with light and colour; to create a rich range of blacks, and of pearly, buttery or iced whites; to imitate the textures and tones of textiles, glass, trees, sky, clouds, and the nuanced tones of ‘the substance rather than the shape of flesh’;21 to suggest detail with a flick of paint or well-placed daubs of impasto. Giovanni’s portrait of the emaciated old doge Leonardo Loredan, ‘all spirit and grand stature’ as a chronicler described him after his election in 1501, is one of his masterpieces. His gold and white damask robe of state is an especially fine example of the use of heavily applied paint, in this case lead white and lead-tin yellow, to suggest rather than describe.
Early in his career Giovanni had mixed his mediums, sometimes establishing the composition in tempera and finishing it with oil glazes. The first work in which he fully exploited the potential of oil paint and glazes was the Coronation of the Virgin, a watershed in the history of Venetian painting commissioned by Costanzo Sforza, lord of Pesaro, probably between 1472 and 1475. The Resurrection, St Francis in the Desert and the Transfiguration from later in the decade show Bellini’s increasing mastery of the technique, although the drying cracks that can be seen to a greater or lesser degree in many of his early oil paintings indicate that he was not yet entirely accustomed to the chemistry of the medium. When Titian joined Giovanni as an apprentice some three decades later no up-and-coming Venetian artist used anything but oil paint. So Titian had the advantage over his master of early training in a medium that was still new and exciting enough to invite further experimentation. Like many good teachers, Giovanni was as ready to absorb lessons from his best pupils as to impart them: it has often been said that the paintings of his later years show indebtedness to the examples of Titian, Giorgione and Sebastiano Luciani. The colouristic freedom of his St Christopher in the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo is so close to Titian that one Italian scholar22 has been tempted to speculate that Titian might have had a hand in it. The curtain behind Giovanni’s Young Woman with a Mirror that divides her private space sharply from the landscape is a device Titian had used several years earlier.
By the time Titian came to him as a pupil Giovanni was something of a living national treasure. From 1479 until his death in 1516 he received from the state the much coveted sanseria, a sinecure in the form of an honorary tax-free brokerage in the German exchange house awarded by the government-controlled Salt Office to various individuals including a number of artists who supplied paintings to the doge’s palace. More indicative of his status was an unprecedented exemption from membership of the painters’ guild granted in 1480. It was a privilege that was not given again to any other Italian artist before Michelangelo sixty years later. Sought after by the foreign aristocracy and the small circle of Venetian patricians who were beginning to collect cabinet paintings, Giovanni was by no means unaware of his value.
His studio, like most Venetian studios, was run as a business. While he preferred to work on original paintings in private, his assistants were employed in turning out copies or variants of his Madonnas, which were so greatly in demand that purchasers were either prepared to accept workshop versions or unable to recognize that they were not entirely by the master’s hand.
Giovanni’s usual practice seems to have been to provide cartoons as templates for the Madonnas – in some paintings the pounced marks from the transfer process can be detected by infrared imaging techniques – to be traced by assistants and then to paint the side figures and landscapes himself. Although there is not enough documentation to provide precise information about his prices there are indications that he charged something between 100 and 300 ducats for altarpieces. Isabella d’Este beat him down from 150 ducats to 100 for an allegory, and from 100 to 50 for a devotional painting for her bedroom. And yet, despite his genius and typically Venetian head for money, he remained a modest and essentially private man who was, as far as we can tell, universally liked. Dürer, who was treated badly by other artists in Venice, certainly liked and admired him. ‘Everyone tells me what an upright man he is,’ he wrote in one of his letters home in 1506. ‘I am genuinely fond of him. He is very old, and yet he is still the best in painting.’ Pietro Bembo, a close friend who described visits to his studio and had him portray his married mistress, Maria Savorgnan, referred to him affectionately as ‘il mio Giovanni’ – ‘my Giovanni’.
He had had a good start working with his father, a fine draughtsman of original subjects but not an overshadowing genius as a painter, who must have recognized and encouraged his son’s superior talent. But Giovanni’s life had not been entirely untroubled. Since he was not mentioned in his parents’ will, we can guess that he was illegitimate. A more serious stigma, if we are to believe the evidence of a Latin poem composed by a friend around 1507, would have been that he was apparently bisexual, although if the authorities knew about his homoerotic inclinations it would not have been the only time they chose to ignore that most heinous crime, as they saw it, in the case of a prominent and valuable Venetian. The poem, which was suppressed by a shocked librarian of the Marciana library in the early nineteenth century, was rediscovered and published in 1990 by an English scholar.23 It describes him in bed with a boy whose body is compared to the marble of Greek sculptures, and was evidently not intended as a criticism, let alone an exposé or for circulation. Whatever the truth about his sexuality it had not prevented him from marrying well. His wife Ginevra Bocheta, a relative of the Zorzi family of dyers, had brought him the substantial dowry, for an artist at that time, of 500 ducats. They had one son, Alvise. Since the poem was written after his wife’s death it is possible that he turned to boys only as an aged widower.
Some time around 1502 Giovanni bought a house on the mainland. But he was not a traveller and rarely left the Veneto unless tempted by irresistible commissions. The last of these came from Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, for whom in 1514, two years before his death, he painted the Feast of the Gods, his first and last major mythological painting, parts of which would later be repainted by Titian. Giovanni’s last work, the Young Woman with a Mirror,24 was completed in 1515. It was the year before his death when he was well into his eighties. He signed it ‘Joannes bellinus faciebat M.D.X.V.’ Signing a painting as though it were still in progress was a trope, used by other artists including Michelangelo and, later, by Titian, referring to Pliny who had written in the preface to his Natural History that great art was never finished and that the greatest artists did not claim that a painting was finished to their satisfaction.
The subject of a young woman seated at her dressing table with a mirror was, like the reclining nude, a Venetian invention. Giovanni may have seen Titian’s Young Woman with a Mirror (Paris, Louvre).25 The underdrawings of the woman’s contours, which are unusually spare for Giovanni, suggest that he was experimenting with Titian’s technique of painting with only summary guidelines, but his use of a textured layer of underpaint in the background was his own innovation. This beautiful painting has been described as an ‘apotheosis of seeing’ and as one of the purest expressions in Venetian art of idealized nudity.26 The woman’s expensive headdress probably indicates that she was married. Her torso, which is usually thought to have been conceived after a statue or fragment, lacks the erotic appeal of Titian’s clothed beauty, who wrings her long, loose golden blonde hair like a Venus rising from the sea.
Giovanni, supreme master though he was, lacked Titian’s genius for drama and his penetrating understanding of human nature. His feasting gods for the Duke of Ferrara appear to be acting out rather than taking part in Ovid’s story of an orgy and attempted rape. (Either on his own initiative or at his patron’s request he lowered the necklines of the women in an attempt to make them more desirable.) His landscapes, enlivened though they are by charming naturalistic detail, have none of the poetry that Titian saw in distant mountains and lost horizons. Giovanni was essentially a religious painter, and the range of his subject matter, and of the emotions he conveyed, was narrower than those of his greatest pupil. And so it happened that Giovanni Bellini’s reputation was eclipsed soon after his death by Titian’s more sophisticated, dynamic and protean oeuvre. Vasari, whose sharp eye for quality was sometimes clouded by his commitment to Florentine painting and the Aristotelian theory of art as progressive, dismissed Giovanni for his ‘arid, crude and laboured manner’. Titian’s friend Pietro Aretino likened him to a poet who puts ‘perfumes in his inks and miniatures in his letters’. He was not rediscovered until the late nineteenth century when Ruskin pronounced the Frari and San Zaccaria altarpieces to be the two best pictures in the world,27 a judgement that encouraged Henry James’s rapturous description of the Frari altarpiece:
Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this. It is one of those things that sum up the genius of a painter, the experience of life, the teaching of a school. It seems painted with molten gems, which have only been clarified by time, and it is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as it is deep.28
But Ruskin loved Giovanni for the wrong reasons, seeing him as the last of the pure, godly masters ‘who did nothing but what was lovely, and taught only what was right’, rather than as the founding father of the golden age of Venetian painting. If Giovanni Bellini struggled to keep pace with Titian, Titian could hardly have liberated himself immediately from such a master, whose example continued to haunt his early works; and to whom he would pay homage in his last painting, the Pietà, in which the Virgin cradles her dead Son beneath a mosaic semi-dome, which deliberately refers to the – by then archaic – neo-Byzantine settings of Giovanni’s many depictions of the Virgin and Her Son.
Although the absence of documentation makes the chronology of Titian’s earliest paintings notoriously impossible to establish – dating of the undocumented paintings was not even attempted until the late nineteenth century, when the invention of photography made stylistic comparisons feasible – Titian’s votive picture of Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St Peter by Pope Alexander VII (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum) is traditionally supposed to be his first surviving work, possibly painted while he was still in Giovanni Bellini’s studio or shortly after he left it. Jacopo Pesaro was a Venetian patrician and papal legate, who adopted the nickname Baffo after he was appointed Bishop of Paphos in Cyprus. The simulated all’antica reliefs on the podium of St Peter’s throne seem to depict a story about Venus, to whom Paphos was sacred because after her birth from the sea she was blown on to its shore in the half-shell. The naval battle in the background refers to Pesaro’s role as commander of the papal fleet in the recapture of the Greek island of Santa Maura (modern Lefkas) from the Turks in August 1502. He posed for Titian grasping a banner that bears the Borgia coat of arms while kneeling before St Peter – who resembles some of Giovanni Bellini’s figures – to whom he is presented by the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who wears full papal regalia painted in an archaic manner that Titian would soon abandon.
Although the earliest record of the existence of this painting is a drawing of it by Van Dyck made in Venice in 1623 – and the inscription bearing Titian’s name is later than the picture – no one has ever doubted that it is by his hand. The problem is not whether but when he painted it. It is unlikely to be earlier than 1503, when Alexander VI died. It could have been painted in or shortly after 1506, when Jacopo Pesaro is first known to have returned to Venice. Pesaro was born in 1460, and this portrait looks like a man in his mid-forties, which fits a date around 1506.29 There are some awkward passages – the perspective of the floor and sea doesn’t quite work – that are understandable in an artist not yet twenty trying his hand at a complex and ambitious composition. But, for all its faults, it is a remarkable painting. Evidently it satisfied its patron who years later would commission from Titian another altogether more masterly celebration of the same victory over the Turks.30
Another candidate for Titian’s earliest painting is now, after a thorough restoration, the Flight into Egypt, which came to the Hermitage palace in the late eighteenth century, when it was subjected to one of the destructive treatments that were characteristic of the period. Although mentioned by Vasari as a commission from Andrea Loredan for his palace on the Grand Canal (now the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi), the picture was dismissed by some modern scholars31 on account of the muddy colouring of its landscape and procession of awkward figures. The restoration32 in the Hermitage laboratory, which was completed in 2011, removed layers of discoloured varnish and insertions by other hands, reattached the paint layer where it had come loose from the primer and closed horizontal seams that had opened where the three pieces of the canvas support had been stitched together. The picture is now much easier to read, and many, but not all, scholars are convinced that it is a very early work by Titian, possibly painted even before he entered Giovanni Bellini’s studio.
Exhibitions of Titian’s paintings often begin with the Gypsy Madonna (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), so called because of the young Virgin’s dusky complexion, as the most striking example of Titian’s debt to and liberation from the example of Giovanni Bellini. Technical investigations show that it started as an attempt to understand by imitation Giovanni’s later way of treating the subject. Beneath the finished painting is a different Madonna, which is very close to Bellini’s Virgin and Child of 1509 in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Titian cancelled that homage to his great master. His Virgin and Child are set against a landscape with a soldier and fortress in the far distance and a brand-new cloth of honour, its crisp folds indicating that it has just that minute been shaken out. Their faces are plump, as though modelled in low relief, while their lowered eyelids invite us to meditate on the humanity of the two central figures of the Christian story. Whereas Giovanni’s Madonnas were usually carefully underdrawn, Titian in this painting used as his guidelines only summary strokes made with a fairly wide brush with thin wash shading applied at the underdrawing stage. He made changes as he painted: his first Madonna seems to have had a different face, and her hair was tied with a ribbon; the fingers of the Christ child were first stretched, then covered with the Madonna’s red robe and repainted. The result looks like nothing that had been painted by the hand or studio of Giovanni Bellini. With the Gypsy Madonna Titian proved to himself that he had learned everything he needed from that source. By then he had fallen under the spell of a different Venetian painter, who became for a while his alter ego. Giorgione (the name means ‘Big George’) of Castelfranco, who was closer to Titian’s age than Giovanni Bellini, introduced Titian to what Vasari called ‘the modern manner’, the style that, for want of a better adjective, art historians to this day call Giorgionesque.
