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SIX

Miracles and Disasters

Often the high and broad trees produced by nature in the fearful mountains tend to please spectators more than the cultivated plants, pruned by learned hands in ornamented gardens … And who doubts that a fountain that naturally comes out of living rocks, surrounded by a little greenery, is more pleasant to human minds than all the others made with art from the whitest marble, resplendent with a lot of gold?

JACOPO SANNAZARO, ARCADIA, 15041

On 1 December 1510 Titian received a visit from a certain Nicola da Stra, the guardiano, or chief executive, of the Confraternity of St Anthony in Padua, who had come with a proposal that no young artist in those lean times could afford to refuse. A programme of frescos depicting miracles performed by St Anthony, patron saint of Padua, was under way in the recently built chapter room on the upper storey of the confraternity. Titian, for a fee of twelve ducats, including an advance of twenty-four lire, the rest to be paid in instalments, agreed to contribute a fresco depicting the miracle of St Anthony’s jawbone (a fragment of which was preserved in a jewelled reliquary in the basilica of St Anthony). Stra would reserve for it the first large space to the right of the entrance to the new hall. The relevant entries in the confraternity account book for the next months are the earliest surviving records in which Titian’s name appears.2

Padua was the left bank of Venice and cultural jewel of the Venetian land empire. The Venetian intellectual elite were educated at its university, which was financed by the central government and was one of the oldest in Italy. The city’s Roman remains – including the first-century AD amphitheatre that is now the site of the Arena Chapel – bore witness to the ancient civilization that had flourished there at a time when Venice was a wilderness of mud banks inhabited by fishermen. The miracle-working St Anthony, a disciple of St Francis, was, and is, one of the most popular of all Christian saints. His shrine, the basilica of St Anthony, known simply as Il Santo, had been begun the year after his death in Padua in 1231, and has been visited ever since by pilgrims from the far corners of Christendom. The confraternity, which is adjacent to the Santo, was well endowed, with a distinguished membership. So the commission to contribute a fresco carried considerable prestige.

Although Titian had recently demonstrated his prodigious talent for creating dynamic figures in fresco on the façade of the Fondaco, the confraternity must have taken advice before employing an artist still in his early twenties. Jacopo Pesaro, his former and future patron and a prominent devotee of St Francis, would have given him a warm reference. Pietro Bembo, who had known Titian from the days in Giovanni Bellini’s studio, kept a house in Padua with his father Bernardo where they made their collection of coins, medals, antiquities and plaster casts of antiquities available for study by artists. The confraternity must also have consulted that fascinating Renaissance man and distinguished Paduan Alvise Cornaro. Cornaro, after enjoying a dissipated youth, regretted his wasteful life, wrote a treatise advocating moderation and sobriety and made a fortune as a technologist and agricultural reformer – ‘holy agriculture’, as he called it. (Tintoretto portrayed him in robust old age.) A man of wide-ranging interests and abilities – his passion for classical architecture would later encourage the young Palladio – he kept open house to gentlemen farmers, scientists, architects, writers, sculptors and painters. Titian, during his stay in Padua, frescoed the exterior of his house near the Santo.3

The choice of an up-and-coming Venetian artist was also an expedient political gesture of loyalty to the Venetian government at a time when Padua was under a cloud of justified suspicion. Since taking control of the town in 1405 Venice had ruled there with a relatively light hand. But Padua had betrayed that trust. Members of the old governing aristocracy continued to harbour imperialist sympathies and some had advocated joining the League of Cambrai against Venice. Their chance had come on 6 June 1509, only a few weeks after the catastrophic Venetian defeat at Agnadello, when the remains of the League were welcomed into Padua, which declared itself an independent republic under the protection of the emperor Maximilian. The occupation lasted for forty-two days before the city was recaptured on 17 July by Venetian forces under the command of the brilliant soldier (and future doge) Andrea Gritti, with the help of Venetian loyalists in the city. The siege of Padua was one of the most violent actions of the Cambrai war, not least because of the use of a terrifying novelty known as ‘Greek fire’ which stuck to the bodies of its victims and could not be extinguished by water. The recovery of the city was celebrated in Venice with a magnificent procession led by the doge, which remained a regular event in the Venetian calendar for centuries to come. And when on 15 September a League army once again reached the walls of Padua the city was so well defended that after two weeks of bombarding the walls with heavy artillery Maximilian abandoned the siege and retreated towards the Alps.

When Titian started work in the confraternity in April 1511, Padua and Treviso and the swathe of territory between them were the only mainland possessions still in Venetian hands. Some leading imperialist partisans had been singled out by the Venetian government as examples and had been executed by hanging, their families fined or imprisoned and their property confiscated. Padua was a garrison city and headquarters for the duration of the war of the Venetian light cavalry, the stradiotti. The gates were guarded and the streets patrolled by able-bodied Venetian conscripts of all classes and occupations – patricians and their servants, peasants, guild members, even the entire crews of merchant galleys were given incentives by the government to occupy and defend the city. The surrounding suburbs and farms had been destroyed to provide a clear line of fire, and property within the city pulled down to speed up communication between threatened points. The population was swollen by refugees from the enemy-occupied territories around Vicenza and Verona. The university was closed.

Titian, his formidable energy undiminished by the depressing mood of the city and bursting with ideas, studied the outstanding examples of central Italian art that Paduan patrons, more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than their Venetian contemporaries, had commissioned since the early fourteenth century when Giotto frescoed the Arena Chapel with scenes from the lives of St Joachim, St Anne and the Virgin, and from the life and passion of Christ. Donatello’s monument to the mercenary commander Erasmo Gattamelata, the first of the great Renaissance equestrian statues, occupied a place of honour in front of the Santo, where his bronze sculptures for the high altar included four relief carvings of the miracles of St Anthony. Mantegna’s frescos in the Ovetari Chapel, strongly influenced by Donatello, were the first paintings in the Veneto to adopt the idiom of the fifteenth-century Tuscan Renaissance.

The members of the confraternity were lay brothers – and indeed sisters since women were admitted, although not into the chapter room. As family men required to conduct exemplary Christian lives, they understood the need to resist and to disclaim the passions, misunderstandings and temptations that can destroy the best of marriages – of the seventeen frescos in the chapter room, eight are about family matters. And it may have been for that reason that it was decided at some time during their early discussions with Titian that he would paint, instead of the miracle of the saint’s jawbone, the Miracle of the Speaking Babe, a story of domestic discord which doubtless appealed more to his sense of drama. A woman in thirteenth-century Ferrara is wrongly accused of adultery by her husband, a distinguished aristocrat who is convinced that another man has fathered their child. The supposed lover is identified by his striped hose as one of the young compagnie delle calze who organized theatrical events and were notorious womanizers. The woman protests her innocence, but a judge is unable to reach a decision. St Anthony gives the baby the gift of speech, allowing it to reveal its legitimate paternity to its father and assembled witnesses. The accused young man rushes forward in relief.

Titian based his composition on one of Giotto’s frescos in the Arena Chapel. The frieze-like arrangement of the figures seems also to have been inspired by Donatello’s miracles and by Antonio Lombardo’s relief carving of the same subject, which had been installed in the Santo only a few years before Titian painted his fresco. The group of three women on the right is a direct quotation from Sebastiano’s altarpiece, finished only a month or so earlier, in the Venetian church of San Giovanni Crisostomo. But it is the lighting and the striking composition of the fresco that account for its dramatic tension. Titian realized the sky, the landscape and the upper part of the church in a single working session or giornata – the time, that is, that it takes the fresh wet plaster on which true fresco is painted to dry. The fresco is divided vertically in half by the edge of the dark church, identified as such by a red cross in a blind arch. The device of splitting his compositions in this way was one he would use again over the next decades, and with stunning effect only a few years later for the impeccably polished Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor (Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca).4

On the church Titian propped a fictive statue of the Roman emperor Trajan,5 copied from a plaster cast or wax model of a Roman relief, which had recently been discovered in Ravenna.6 Although he would later occasionally incorporate all’antica inventions to give added meaning to his subjects, as he already had in the Jacopo Pesaro before St Peter, the figure of Trajan is the first instance in his career of his portraying a real antique model. It referred to a story told by Dante and in The Golden Legend 7 that was often used at the time to decorate wedding chests as a symbol of marital concord. Trajan, although hastening to battle, was persuaded by a grieving widow whose child had been slain to stop and administer justice. Centuries later Pope Gregory the Great saw a sculpted frieze depicting the Justice of Trajan and was so moved by the story that he prayed for the pagan Trajan to be baptized as a Christian by his tears and thus, unlike other pagans, who were automatically sent to hell, placed in Purgatory. Titian probably used it here to reinforce the visual message that Venice, like St Anthony, was dedicated to the administration of justice.

Titian finished the Miracle of the Speaking Babe in early May 1511. Later in the month he was commissioned to paint two smaller frescos for eighteen ducats, with a down payment of ten ducats.8 On 22 May we have the first record of Titian’s brother Francesco, who was in Padua where he witnessed a document in the office of the confraternity, signing himself as a master painter resident in Venice at the Rialto, and where he may have acted as Titian’s assistant. The Miracle of the Repentant Son – in which a bad-tempered boy who has kicked his mother cuts off his foot in remorse, and St Anthony restores the foot when the boy’s mother begs that he be forgiven – was executed in eight giornate. The miracle is witnessed by the first of the portraits of real people – probably members of the confraternity – to whom Titian liked to give roles in his theatrical productions. The only figures who seem to be unaware of the miracle are two soldiers, one in armour looking away from the performance of the miracle, the other seated in the distance.

The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, painted in six giornate, is the most turbulent of Titian’s trilogy of love stories. Possibly the first depiction in Renaissance art of an emotionally driven assault on a real, ordinary woman, the wind-blown landscape that echoes the violent act contradicts the written version of the story which takes place in a domestic setting. It is also one of Titian’s most theatrical early paintings.9 An insanely jealous husband, convinced of his wife’s infidelity, knifes her to death. The murder takes place in the foreground of the fresco, in the shadow of a rocky outcropping, while St Anthony, having resurrected the wife, is seen only in the distance forgiving the husband. In an age when extreme violence was commonplace, although rarely represented in Italian art, and women were regarded as the property of their fathers and husbands, Titian’s empathy with a woman violated by male intemperance is remarkable. As the model for the innocent wife sprawled in agony on the ground Titian quoted, in reverse, the pose of Michelangelo’s dramatically foreshortened figure of Eve from the Fall of Man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling10 or of the Virgin in his earlier Doni Tondo. Thus this most Venetian of painters made use of the two outstanding painters of the Florentine Renaissance, Giotto its founding father and Michelangelo the supreme genius of its maturity. Nor was this the last time Titian would quote Michelangelo, although that greatest of central Italian artists had probably not yet heard of the Venetian painter who would become his artistic opposite and principal rival. Titian executed the three Paduan frescos at top speed and apparently with no cartoons and only sketchy sinopie or underdrawings.11 The lay brothers’ request for domestic subjects gave him the opportunity to express for the first time his precocious understanding of the human heart, but he did so without a trace of rhetoric or religiosity, while his Shakespearean capacity to absorb, synthesize and enliven ideas borrowed from other artists transformed Venetian narrative painting, introducing a sense of naturalistic excitement that rendered obsolete the charming but static processions of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio.

Titian left Padua shortly after 19 July 1511, the day on which he received his last-recorded payment there. It was not until 2 December, a year after he had accepted the commission, that Antonio da Cesuna, the steward of the confraternity, brought the final instalment of four ducats to Titian’s house12 in Venice. Titian’s receipt to the confraternity survives only in a nineteenth-century facsimile, which is however consistent with genuine examples of his handwriting. He signed it ‘Tician depentor’, Tician being the Venetian spelling of his name.13 Depentor signified merely that he was qualified to paint by membership of the painters’ guild. It wasn’t until much later that he signed himself pittore, painter.

Titian was back in Venice in time to say goodbye to the convivial Sebastiano Luciani, who sailed away to Rome in August with Agostino Chigi, who had made an enormous fortune for himself and was collecting artists to work on the decorations of his Villa Farnesina. Banker to the pope and reputedly the richest man in the world – he once told Pope Leo X that he didn’t know how much he was worth – Chigi had been in Venice negotiating a loan to the cash-strapped government, which was struggling to raise the funds and armies it was expected to contribute to Pope Julius’ Holy League against the French. Also on board were the Venetian state jewels, which the banker took as security, and his young Venetian mistress, Francesca Ordeschi, whom he would marry eight years later. Sebastiano did not reappear in Venice, and then only temporarily, for seventeen years. His departure, which was followed in September by the death of Giorgione, left Titian in a lonely position, without the stimulus of a competitor close to his own age, cut off by the war from his family in Cadore, and from Francesco who in the spring of 1512 joined a squadron commanded by two condottieri14 as a footsoldier fighting in Vicenza and Verona. Titian had managed to send money home from Padua to a nephew.15 But communications became more difficult in October when Maximilian’s army took control of the Alpine passes, sacked those villages that had been spared by previous campaigns and forced the surrender of the castle of Pieve. In a message to the doge the citizens of Cadore wrote that they hoped to resist and rebuild the castle but were living meanwhile in huts and caves without even the basic necessities.16

Venice was crowded with peasants whose farmsteads on the mainland had been destroyed by the warring armies and who flocked into the city in ever greater numbers, wandering around half starved with their animals. The refugees were housed in monasteries deserted by monks who had escaped the hardships of the city in wartime, but the presence of so many needy mouths put a strain on the already severely limited supplies of food. The Aldine Press was closed. Horses capable of pulling artillery had been conscripted. The city was uncannily quiet. The plague, which claimed Giorgione as one of its victims, intensified in the summer and autumn after Titian’s return when it coincided with an even more lethal epidemic of fever. Nor, unusually, was it checked by winter. It persisted throughout 1511–12 and then, in a milder form, for two more summers. Titian’s first altarpiece, St Mark Enthroned, was commissioned during the plague by the monks of the church of Santo Spirito in Isola. St Mark’s head and left shoulder are in shadow. He is accompanied by Sts Cosmas and Damian, the physicians, and Sts Sebastian and Roch, protectors against plague. St Roch, an aristocrat who survived a plague, was most famous for his miraculous ability to cure other victims. St Sebastian, a Roman soldier, a captain of the praetorian guard who converted many others to Christianity, was associated with the plague because the wounds of the arrows that pierced his body resembled the lumps that were the first symptoms of bubonic plague. He is always shown young and naked, and Titian’s marvellous figure is his first male nude. Once again he looked to the example of Sebastiano, this time for the pose of St Mark on his high throne, which is very close to the figure of Solomon in Sebastiano’s unfinished Judgement of Solomon.

But war and plague were not the only disasters sent by God to punish Venice. Halfway through the previous Lent, when Titian was preparing to leave for Padua,Venice had been shaken by a tremendous earthquake, the first in living memory. Sanudo described the disaster, which hit the city on 26 March 1511, the day after the feast of the Annunciation, which marked the Venetian new year.

It seemed as though the houses were collapsing, the chimneys swaying, the walls bursting open, the bell-towers bending, objects in high places falling, water boiling, even in the Grand Canal, as though it had been put on fire. They say that, although it was high tide, when the earthquake came some canals dried up as though there had been a tremendous drought. The bells in their towers rang by themselves in many places, especially at St Mark’s, a terrifying thing to happen.17

The statues that toppled from the façades of San Marco and the doge’s palace were read as omens. That Prudence was among those that fell was a warning that the rulers of Venice must learn to be wiser than in recent years. It augured well, however, that some stone lilies fell from the roof of the ducal palace, just above the balcony of the Great Council Hall, and smashed in the courtyard: the lily being the heraldic emblem of the French king, the destruction of the lilies was a sign of God’s will that the French ‘barbarians’ would be driven out of Italy by the pope’s Holy League. The statue of St Mark stayed intact, a prediction that Venice would continue to be the preserver of the Catholic faith and defender of the Church. Some fanatical preachers put the blame for hard times on the Jewish war refugees from the terraferma, but what might have developed into a wave of anti-Semitism was immediately stemmed by order of the Council of Ten. Nevertheless, although given some protection, Jews were ordered to leave Venice within a month and meanwhile to stay indoors except for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.

On the day after the earthquake, the patriarch, addressing the steering committee of the Senate, proclaimed that the catastrophe was God’s punishment for the sins of Venice, and the worst of them (as usual) was sodomy. Sodomy had become so rampant that the female whores had sent to him to say they could no longer make a living. He had heard in confessions that fathers were interfering with their daughters, brothers with sisters. He ordered three days of fasting on bread and water with penitential processions morning and evening. The government strengthened the already punitive legislation against homosexuality and blasphemy, passed more stringent laws against sexual relations with nuns and promised to ensure that justice was dispensed more quickly than had become the custom. Crowds processed through the city chanting litanies and imploring God’s forgiveness. The churches were full, and many more people than usual went to confession.

Although for most Venetians the outbreak of religious observance was a temporary reaction, the disastrous times had a more profound effect on the thinking of a small group of intellectuals from distinguished patrician families. Their spiritual guide and mentor was Tommaso Giustiniani, who after a mysterious visit to the Holy Land had been seized by an urgent need to atone for his hedonistic youth. His most prominent disciples were Vincenzo Querini who, as Venetian ambassador to Germany before the war, had become aware of the illwill against Venice and warned the doge of its possible consequences; and Gasparo Contarini, the son of a wealthy merchant who had studied with some of the greatest scholars of his day and was the youngest and later the most famous of these three. They retreated to an austere monastery on Murano for discussion, prayer, meditation and readings of the Bible and classical texts, and became convinced, at a time when Martin Luther was still an obscure theology professor at the University of Wittenberg, of such proto-Lutheran beliefs as the value of preaching and reading the Bible in the vernacular and of the necessity of ridding the Roman Church of worldly abuses. Giustiniani and Querini, who had come to the conclusion that the war was a sign of the futility of life on this earth, rechristened themselves Peter and Paul, and became hermit monks in the monastery of Camaldoli in the wilderness of the Apennines, from which, in 1513, they presented Pope Leo X with proposals for radical reform of the Church.

Contarini wavered. Although deeply troubled by the spiritual condition of the Christian world – ‘our age sins badly’ he wrote later – he had agonizing doubts about his religious vocation and about the value of retreat and penance. They culminated on the Easter Saturday after the earthquake when he confessed to a sympathetic monk an insight that anticipated Martin Luther’s vision in the tower of two years later. Contarini had reached the conclusion that no amount of self-punishment would compensate for his past sins. Justification in the eyes of God was not to be achieved by penance but by deep, abiding love of Christ and gratitude for His suffering and self-sacrifice on behalf of mankind. Having decided to pursue a worldly career, he went on to serve the Venetian government in a number of important posts, notably as ambassador to Charles V during the diplomatically sensitive period in the 1520s when Venice switched its allegiance from France to the emperor. When in 1535 he was unexpectedly made a cardinal by Pope Paul III, the appointment was taken as a sign that the Church intended to institute reforms, and he did play a crucial role as a reforming humanist at the papal court. His famous idealized description of the republican government, De magistratibus et republica venetorum, was published posthumously in 1543.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1511, only a few months after the resolution of his spiritual crisis, we find Contarini taking part in a jousting tournament at Mestre as one of eight nobles dressed in magnificent armour and silken doublets – the prize was a horse worth forty ducats. Venetians, after all, needed to cheer themselves up in those grim times. While modest merchants watered their wine and struggled to put food on their tables, wealthy members of the government suffered far less from the war. Inside information about troop movements on the mainland made it possible to import agricultural produce from their country estates into the city at inflated prices. Venetian estates overseas were undisturbed while the Turks concentrated on consolidating their Islamic dominions in the Levant. Venice had been at peace with the Ottoman Empire since 1503 and in 1513 obtained the renewal of its commercial privileges in the Ottoman territories. So overseas trade continued, albeit at a slower pace. Although most merchants dealt in quantities too small to justify the risk of re-export, the trading galleys of the richest sailed into the harbour of San Marco with cargoes of essential spices large enough to obtain guarantees of safe conduct through the war zones and into the transalpine markets. The rich and privileged, as Sanudo repeatedly informs us, continued to enjoy the luxurious habits that the rest of the population believed were offensive to God.

In the first winter after the defeat at Agnadello all classes had enjoyed an unusually entertaining and riotous carnival. But in 1511 the season was altogether more muted after the Council of Ten, fearing violence or even insurrection from a discontented population, issued a decree in early February that forbade the wearing of masks and other disguises. It was unanimously signed by the Collegio and was followed a few days later by an official warning to all Venetians who continued to offend God by indulging in ostentatious displays of wealth:

Although we are in great danger, as everyone knows, there are many who in disregard of God and of the obligations to Him and in disregard of the honour and the needs of our republic … continue to spend high, unnecessary sums of money. By this they do damage to themselves and cause general resentment; they show little love for their fatherland since many spend this money without having paid their taxes, which are imposed to preserve this state and to secure the existence of us all.18

The enforcement of sumptuary laws, already the strictest in Europe, was tightened. Dress should be simple; the wearing of pearls and expensive fabrics was prohibited. There were specific instructions about the kinds of foods and numbers of courses to be served at dinners. And yet it was only days after the restrictions on carnival and the recent warning against unnecessary expenditure that the high-ranking and immensely wealthy nobleman Antonio Grimani, who had made his fortune in commodity dealing, hosted a lavish dinner in honour of Agostino Chigi. Just twelve years earlier Grimani, who had been elected naval commander in the Turkish war in return for a loan to the state of 16,000 ducats, had been arrested for failing to engage a Turkish fleet off the southern coast of Greece and for not disciplining his subordinate officers. The case was so sensitive that it took twenty sessions of the Great Council to reach a verdict of treasonable incompetence. Sentenced to exile, Grimani went to live in Rome with his son Domenico, for whom he had shrewdly purchased a cardinal’s hat for 25,000 ducats some years earlier. In 1509, thanks to his vast wealth and useful papal connections, his reputation was restored by an overwhelming vote in the Great Council. He returned to Venice where he was made a procurator of San Marco, and in 1521 at the age of eighty-seven the former incompetent traitor Antonio Grimani was elected seventeenth doge of Venice. Domenico, who had amassed one of the most important collections of ancient Greek and Hellenic sculptures, gave part of it to Venice on Antonio’s death, possibly as a gesture of gratitude for his father’s return to power. The pieces were housed in the doge’s palace where they could be studied by Venetian artists, not least Titian. Some are still in the Venice Archaeological Museum.

Antonio Grimani’s dinner for Agostino Chigi was attended by fashionably dressed ladies dripping in jewels and by some of the highest-ranking members of the Republican government, several of them bankers, who were served numerous lavish courses of the finest forbidden delicacies. We can imagine how the younger male guests might have dressed from Titian’s early portraits of fashionable young men. Not only is the shirt worn by the Man with a Quilted Sleeve (London, National Gallery) gathered in what was thought of as the French way, his sleeves defy an order by the Senate issued in 1512 which explicitly forbade the wearing of ziponi made of expensive quilted materials.19

In another time and place the Grimani dinner might have been enough to spark a revolution. The majority of ordinary Venetians certainly agreed with the official government line that the behaviour of a minority who ignored the proscriptions against feasting and fine clothes had brought disaster upon their city. There was widespread resentment that some of the wealthiest and most influential members of the ruling class avoided military service and the payment of taxes and forced loans, and that some used their money to buy offices for themselves and their sons. But if the government feared insurrection, it never happened. When in August 1511 Maximilian broadcast a message from Innsbruck to the Venetian popolani, inviting them to rise up against the ‘insatiable cupidity and avarice of the so-called gentlemen and rulers’ and to bear in mind that, ‘should you not be liberated, their pride and conceit will be such that you and your fortunes will soon be utterly destroyed and ruined by them’,20 his appeal was ignored.

Although we know very little about Titian’s private commissions at this time, it is a safe assumption that his Venetian patrons were among the small elite who were in a position to indulge themselves during a war that impoverished the majority of Venetians, threatened the very existence of the Republic as an imperial power and saw some of the bloodiest military encounters that had so far been fought. The development of artillery after Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494 meant unprecedented casualties in battles, and some were on a scale no less shocking at the time than the slaughters in the world war of 1914–18 still seem to us. In February 1512 a five-day siege of Brescia, the Venetian gun-manufacturing town, by French and German armies left 15,000 corpses. In a battle fought at Ravenna a few months later on Easter Day between Spain and the pope on one side and France allied with Ferrara on the other, so many were killed that the following day the corpses lay thick on the ground so that for miles it was said to be impossible to walk without treading on them. Closer to home Venetian soldiers whose pay was delayed were forced to live off the land, where they looted the smallholdings of peasants. ‘All the soldiers’, wrote Sanudo, ‘act in their habitual way, dressing up in cloth of gold, and if they are not paid in time by the government, they do so much harm among the villages that they come out very well from it and rejoice, wanting the war to drag on as it does.’

Titian’s paintings of sexy girls, well-dressed young men and Madonnas and saints dressed as though for banquets, conducting their sacred conversations in an unspoiled Veneto, give no hint, apart from the odd soldier resting in the background, that Venice at the time he painted them was at war. His terraferma – which was in reality devastated by warring armies, its farmhouses, fields and vineyards plundered by unpaid Venetian mercenaries as well as by enemy troops – remains a fertile Arcadia into which his patrons could imagine themselves escaping on a fine morning to make love in the open air or pray to the Virgin, her Child and the adoring saints for the return of peace and prosperity. Italian artists, unlike their German counterparts, rarely portrayed the realities of war, and Titian was no exception. ‘Painting’, Dolce wrote several decades later, ‘was invented primarily in order to give pleasure; by this token, then, if the artist fails to please, he remains unnoticed and devoid of reputation.’ If Titian’s wealthy patrons needed an excuse for taking pleasure in his paintings they could always invoke the Neoplatonic theory that the contemplation of beauty, recently given a heterosexual slant by Pietro Bembo, was a first step towards higher wisdom. Beauty was in itself a sign of virtue; and female beauty, which was rare and fleeting at a time of disfiguring illnesses and of primitive medicine, dentistry and cosmetics, was its ultimate expression. The cult of beauty put women on pedestals next to saints and as allegorical representatives of Venetian civic virtues.

Titian’s religious paintings are realized in the same pastoral setting, the sacred figures sometimes taken from the same models, as the secular subjects. The Noli me tangere (London, National Gallery) and the Baptism of Christ (Rome, Pinacoteca Capitolina), both painted just before or after the Padua frescos, are too small to have been intended for church altars, where the pastoral landscapes, which could suggest pagan revelries, would not have been acceptable. For the highly erotic Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland), which is about the same scale and date, he used the same model for the shepherd as for the Baptist in the Baptism of Christ and the same model for the blonde girl who is in the act of initiating passionate sex with her naked shepherd for the St Catherine in the Virgin and Child with St Catherine, St Dominic and a Donor (Mamiano, Parma, Fondazione Magnani Rocca). This is one of the most gorgeous sacred conversations ever painted, the reds, blues, mauves and whites worn by the lovely dark-haired Virgin and glamorous St Catherine glow against their dark-curtained enclosure while the black and white robes of St Dominic and the donor to whom he introduces the splendid vision are silhouetted against the peacefully receding landscape. If we didn’t know the Christian story we might imagine that the men had come upon a harem. Such paintings would have been commissioned by private patrons who were steeped in the pastoral stories of Jacopo Sannazaro and his imitators and who were perhaps sophisticated enough to enjoy the teasing play of an Arcadian landscape as it could have been in the golden age of pagan revelry with the golden age in which Christ was born.21

Nevertheless, although Titian has sometimes been accused of shallow religious beliefs, at least in his early life, no artist of little faith could have painted the intensely moving Entombment of Christ (Paris, Louvre),22 a painting that glimmers with what has been aptly described as a ‘mysterious weirdness’,23 in which Giorgionesque dreaminess gives way to the tumultuous emotion of each mourner as the slack but perfect body of Christ, already cast in shadow, is lowered into the tomb. This intensely moving study in grief has been unjustly neglected, possibly because until recently it hung next to the Mona Lisa and was difficult to see through the crowds determined to focus their attention on the most famous painting in the world.24 The patron is unknown, but if, as has been suggested,25 Titian portrayed himself as the young bearded mourner who supports Christ’s legs26 it is not unreasonable to speculate that he identified with this sacred subject, one to which he would return later in life.

At around the same time Titian was working on these paintings he was also designing one of the most astonishing of all visual celebrations of the Christian faith. It is not a painting but a woodcut illustrating the Triumph of Christ;27 and like all of Titian’s woodcuts he drew it directly on the blocks in collaboration with the master cutter. Although the sources differ about exactly when Titian began the composition, the first multiple impressions were sold in 1517, at the end of a war in which the forces of evil had tried and failed to destroy God’s chosen city. The main inscription describes the Saints singing of how Christ has triumphed over death and is leading all to peace through the gates of heaven. The ‘infinity of figures’, as described by Vasari, are taken from the Old Testament and the Gospels: ‘the first parents, the patriarchs, the prophets, the sibyls, the innocents, the martyrs, the apostles, and Jesus Christ on the triumphal car, drawn by the four evangelists and the four doctors, with the holy confessors behind …’. The woodcut, which is made from ten blocks, incorporates motifs borrowed from several other artists: Mantegna, Michelangelo, Raphael. Titian probably intended it as an answer to Jacopo de’ Barbari’s three-block Triumph of Man over Satyrs and to rival Dürer’s woodcut-in-progress of the Triumph of Maximilian, begun in 1512. The subject may refer to Savonarola’s famous treatise, The Triumph of the Cross, published in Florence in 1497, the year before his execution. If so it conveys a different message. Savonarola describes Christ wearing a crown of thorns, holding the Bible in His right hand and in His left the cross and instruments of His Passion. In Titian’s image Christ carries only a sceptre, the sign of the worldly domination of His Church, as He returns in triumph from a victorious campaign against the forces of evil.

The Triumph of Christ was commissioned by an entrepreneurial publisher, Gregorio de’ Gregoriis. Although it is the only masterpiece de’ Gregoriis ever published, he did not mention Titian’s name in his application for copyright. Perhaps he banked on the subject more than the artist to appeal to an international market large enough to bring a return on his considerable investment. All woodcuts were expensive to produce, Titian’s Triumph of Christ was unusually elaborate, and since he had not yet established an international reputation de’ Gregoriis doubtless decided that his name would not encourage buyers. De’ Gregoriis, in any case, cannot have anticipated the huge success of the woodcut. Although the impressions can’t have been cheap to buy, Titian’s image of the triumphant Saviour restoring order to the Christian world was an international bestseller, hung or pasted on the walls of domestic households throughout Christendom by people who had never heard of Titian and who would never see his paintings. Later in the century motifs from it were used for a stained-glass window in Burgundy.28 It was copied in a painting in the cathedral of Prague, and became so popular that six separate woodcut versions of it were produced in the decades that saw Titian’s fame as the greatest colourist in Europe soar above his genius for designing complex images in black and white.