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EIGHT

‘His Industrious Brush’: Pentimenti and Portraits

Confronted by a rival, whose name may be Pordenone or Michelangelo, Titian responds by engorging him. He appropriates his opponent’s style, or some part of it, which remains, for a brief moment, undigested within his own … The result is not, as with Hogarth or Renoir, disappointing: it is harrowing and short-lived. Titian works through the challenge, and his style reasserts itself.

RICHARD WOLLHEIM, PAINTING AS ART, 1987

When Titian was in his sixties he told a doctor that there were some days when he couldn’t paint at all and others when he could do and think of nothing else. Although his style changed radically in old age, his working habits were formed early in his career. When he was stimulated by competition or by the threat of losing a commission or by painting in fresco, he could work fast. But while the biographers of artists across different times and civilizations have told stories about wizardly speed of execution, as though the artists’ hands were directed by some supernatural force,1 Titian was known for his slowness and the procrastinations that stretched the patience of his patrons. He liked to work concurrently in different styles on paintings of different genres, stacking pictures that failed to satisfy him against a wall, leaving them unfinished or returning to them months, years or in some cases decades later. With growing success came the habit of taking on more tasks than he could realistically finish to a deadline. And he was capable of producing indifferent work on an off day or if the fee wasn’t high enough to merit his full attention: there are dull paintings – some come on the market or are stored in the basements of public galleries – that can be securely attributed to Titian, as well as some that are given to him without documentary evidence on the grounds of their high quality alone.

Painting conservators can detect the layers of dust that accumulated while he set his paintings aside until he had solved a problem or could no longer put off the demands of a patron. He made his alterations over dry paint, cancelling out previous attempts with white lead paint, which shows up on X-rays. Joshua Reynolds, who claimed to have taken a painting by Titian to pieces to discover the elusive ‘Venetian secret’, would have envied our up-to-date technologies, which allow us to watch Titian at work, rearranging, adding and cancelling, searching for the composition and the tonal relationships in his mind’s eye. Titian was an explorer in paint, trying out new ideas, striking out in new directions, assimilating lessons from other masters and quoting them before discarding their example to find his own way into an unmapped future. Although he frequently quoted motifs from paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael, the story goes that later in his life he once said to an imperial ambassador in Venice, ‘who saw him use a brush as big as a birch-broom’, that he wished to paint in a manner different from that of Raphael or Michelangelo, because he was not content to be a ‘mere imitator’.2 He was, as his contemporaries liked to say of him, an exemplar of the Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the effort that goes into great art.3 But the false starts and the pentimenti – changes of plan while he worked on a painting4 – that can be detected beneath the assured surfaces of his masterpieces give us an idea of just how great the effort was. Bellini and Giorgione had taken advantage of the slow-drying property of oil paint to make changes, but Titian’s more numerous changes were so characteristic of his working methods that they have become a hallmark for distinguishing autograph Titians from imitations or mainly studio works.

Although some of Titian’s compositions look as though he must have worked them out on paper before starting to paint, the majority of the preparatory sketches, if they existed, have long since disappeared, as have all but a few dozen of his other drawings, many of which are of debatable attribution. The whole question of Titian’s drawings, and what use he made of them, is one of the more vexed issues of Titian scholarship. The surviving sketches and drawings that are accepted, at least by some authorities, as autograph cover a wide variety of subjects – landscapes, animals, anatomical studies, sketches for portraits, studies for the benefit of assistants. But very few preliminary sketches for paintings have been identified, which, even allowing for the vulnerability of work on paper, is a tiny proportion of the 500 or so paintings he produced in the course of his long career. From the evidence we have, it seems that his painting technique from the beginning was to work and rework a compositional framework directly on to the primed support either in paint or black chalk and then more often than not ignore his own outlines. This does not mean, as his central Italian critics maintained, that Titian could not draw. Some of his sketches are masterpieces in their own right. One in particular, a Portrait of a Young Lady (Florence, Uffizi) of about 1511–12, in black chalk on blue paper covered with a yellowish wash, stands out from the other drawings not only because it is unique in his surviving oeuvre but because of its breathtaking beauty, the characterization of its moody introspective subject, and its vigorous and assured pictorial technique that looks strikingly modern when seen next to central Italian drawings of the same period. The rounded Slavic face of the model, whoever she was, evidently intrigued Titian at this time because it was a type he used also for the so-called Gypsy Madonna and the painting known as La Schiavona.

A nineteenth-century restoration of the Madonna of the Cherries (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) provided one of the first modern revelations of Titian’s way of working. When the painting was transferred from canvas to panel the conservators could see that the figure of the Madonna had been achieved only after trial and error while Titian tried different outlines with rough sketches, which he modified for the final design. Since he borrowed the motif of St John the Baptist grasping cherries from Dürer’s Madonna of the Siskin, which was painted in Venice in 1506, it is likely that he began his picture not long after he saw the Dürer. Then he seems to have lost interest or inspiration – or a patron – and abandoned the canvas. The two fathers, St Zacharias behind the Baptist and St Joseph behind the Christ child, were added, possibly at the request of a new patron, more than a decade later.

A restoration in the 1970s revealed that the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints5 is executed over two previous paintings.6 The first was a subject that included trees and water,7 which he never finished. He extended and reused the same panel for a new painting, which was commissioned for the high altar of the Oratory of San Nicolò ai Frari.8 This he set aside after sketching in rough outlines the figures of saints and filling in areas of colour before elaborating their poses or deciding how they would be arranged. He then abandoned the project for some years before in the 1530s completing on the same panel the painting we see today, with the help of an assistant, probably his brother Francesco. The thrifty habit of reusing the supports of discarded paintings continued throughout his career, even after he became well paid and famous.

In the Noli me tangere,9 the first and most delicate of his portrayals of the whore who was redeemed by her love for Christ, Titian evokes their close relationship during His lifetime, her yearning for Him and the drama of His miraculous reappearance to her after His Crucifixion with the balletic geometry of their poses, their limbs, Christ’s hoe and the tree planted in the centre of the painting which sways in counterpoint to Christ’s leaning torso. Here, as one writer put it, European painting has ‘become the richer by a new aerial quality due to nimbleness or expression in the touch itself’.10 Some scholars insist he must have worked out this highly complex composition on paper. There is no way of settling the question, but scientific examination has shown up the numerous changes that lie beneath the finished painting. A first attempt at a design evidently dissatisfied him because he cancelled part of it with a layer of white lead, apparently applied with a palette knife, and started again. He moved the ridge and buildings from lower down on the viewer’s left to their present position on the right, lopped off a branch of the tree, which was originally much smaller, and recast the agile figure of Christ, who originally wore a gardener’s hat and was shown upright and striding towards us away from the Magdalen rather than stepping towards her. The underdrawings sketched directly on the prepared canvas support are fine, free but very cursory scribbles describing some of the main elements, such as the curve of Christ’s back, hip and thigh but leaving details incomplete.11 The subject was so unusual in early sixteenth-century Venice and Titian treated it in such a wholly original manner that it is possible that he painted it for his own satisfaction without a commission as a way of exploring a depiction of the event that would emphasize the depth of feeling between the two protagonists.

The Three Ages of Man,12 the sexiest of all Venetian pastoral romances, was realized after unusually numerous revisions even by Titian’s standards. In a previous plan Cupid’s quiver was suspended from the top of the shattered tree; there was a tower in the central background; the old man holding two skulls was surrounded by four. The couple in the foreground – a naked young man and a girl who has not yet removed her white undershift, her pale bare arm resting on the brown flesh of his thigh while she points her flute at his groin – make love in the open air like the pagan shepherds and shepherdesses of the golden age described by Virgil and Ovid. But it was with one simple change – by twisting the girl’s head away from its original position facing the spectator towards her adoring lover so that, as Richard Wollheim put it, ‘their eyes copulate’13 – that he transformed a Giorgionesque mood painting into a Shakespearean poem about the most important and overwhelming of human emotions, for as long as youth and beauty last.

The Three Ages of Man (a seventeenth-century title) was commissioned by a goldsmith, Emiliano Targone,14 whom Benvenuto Cellini called ‘the finest jeweller in the world’. Vasari, who saw it in the late 1540s in the house in Faenza of Targone’s son-in-law Giovanni da Castel Bolognese, described it as ‘a naked shepherd and a country girl who is offering some pipes for him to play, with an extremely beautiful landscape’. A literary source has of course been endlessly discussed by modern scholars, but as with all Giorgionesque pastoral paintings it has never been possible to match the Three Ages of Man precisely to a particular text that would have been known at the time, and most of us are happy to accept it, with Titian’s nineteenth-century biographers,15 as a tale ‘merely half told … treated with such harmony of means as to create in its way the impression of absolute perfection’.16

It is in fact far from technically perfect. Titian, unable to fit in the girl’s legs, left the lower part of her body in an ungainly pose covered by the skirt of her red dress. The placing of the figures defies perspective: the old man is too small, the sleeping cupids too large. This is one of the first paintings in which Titian attempted the difficult challenge of grouping large figures seated directly on the ground within a landscape – a format that later became a hallmark of Venetian sixteenth-century painting but which continued to trouble Titian, who, even in his otherwise more assured pastoral paintings of the early 1530s,17 did not always quite bring off the anatomy of his seated figures. He had a similar problem with the Virgin’s pose in the Holy Family with a Shepherd of about the same date or a few years earlier,18 in which the disproportionately large head of St Joseph (apparently taken from the same model as St Mark in the St Mark Enthroned) looks as though it had been added on as an afterthought, perhaps for a patron or carpenters’ guild devoted to the popular cult of St Joseph. It was around the same time, or perhaps a few years earlier, that Titian painted the Baptism of Christ19 for Giovanni Ram, a Spanish collector resident in Venice who is portrayed in profile as the donor. The grandiose figures of Christ and the Baptist strike complicated, stagey poses, which look as though Titian was working from sketches or descriptions of classical and central Italian prototypes he had not seen in the original.20 The portrait of Ram is executed in a tight, explicit way that harks back to Giovanni Bellini.

If Titian in his twenties was still feeling his way in such paintings, he was already secure in the art of portraiture, which was a new genre in Venice – Vasari gave Giovanni Bellini the credit for starting what was evidently an unusual custom. It is our bad luck that the identities of most of Titian’s earliest sitters are lost, probably because portraits seem rarely to have been commissioned with written contracts. According to Vasari one of them was of Titian’s friend, a member of the noble Barbarigo family, who recommended Titian for the job of frescoing the Fondaco. Vasari wrote that he painted this portrait when he was no more than eighteen, ‘at the time he first began to paint like Giorgione’, and that it was held to be:

extremely fine, for the representation of the flesh-colouring was true and realistic and the hairs were so well distinguished one from the other that they might have been counted, as might the stitches in a doublet of silvered satin which also appeared in that work. In short the picture was thought to show great diligence and to be very successful.

It is possible that this is the painting now known as the Man with a Quilted Sleeve. Although the sleeve is actually blue it may be that Vasari was referring to silvery light playing on it before the surface of the painting was abraded over time. Nevertheless, it is remarkably assured for the date Vasari suggests, which would date it in or before 1508.

A doublet with voluminous sleeves was in any case the kind of luxurious garment that was frowned upon by the older, stricter seafaring generation. It went against the long-standing Venetian tradition of moderation intended to minimize jealousy within and without the ruling class. At a time when Venice was engaged in a crippling war, lavish clothes and foreign fashions were especially unpatriotic and indeed dangerous because offensive to God. Members of the patrician class, furthermore, were supposed to wear the toga or the robes that indicated higher office. In Titian’s portraits members of the nobility who had withdrawn from active trade and wished to be portrayed as gentlemen of refined taste are dressed instead in fashions that prevailed elsewhere in Italy and Europe. Some may indeed have been foreigners – Titian’s studio was already one of the many attractions of the much-visited city. But others were young Venetians emulating an ideal of how a gentleman should look and behave in a way that was gaining currency through drafts of Baldassare Castiglione’s popular and influential dialogue The Courtier. If some were, like Titian’s Barbarigo friend, members of the patrician class, their taste for avant-garde art would have been consistent with a subversive attitude to the dress code thought appropriate by their conservative elders. Perhaps some of them wished to be portrayed as they would like to be remembered before going off to war. The Man with a Red Cap (New York, Frick Collection) carries a sword and is dressed in furs, perhaps for campaigning in a northern winter.

When Titian was young most of the men he painted were also young. They generally posed for him in black, with touches of a white shirt showing at the neck. The Spanish fashion for wearing black was recommended by Castiglione as the most suitable attire for courtiers, and black, the most expensive cloth because the dye was difficult to fix, was an indication of the sitter’s wealth. Venetians who dressed like foreign aristocrats were making a statement about their status as gentlemen who had abandoned the sea for a more civilized and contemplative life. The expensive clothes, the rings that draw attention to their expressive hands, and their gloves, which would have been scented with musk, further signify their position as aristocrats or quasi-aristocrats. By limiting his palette to the variations of black, white and the flesh tones at which he excelled Titian brought a new drama and mystery to his portraits, which would later inspire painters as different from one another as Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Velázquez and Whistler. The earliest portraits seem to catch their subjects off-guard, ‘heads inclined like too heavy flowers’,21 lost in melancholy musing. The gaunt, handsome features of the Young Man with a Red Sleeve (Earl of Halifax on loan to the London National Gallery),22 tired eyes staring into the distance, are those of a man so intensely preoccupied by his own thoughts that we feel he would be startled by the slightest interruption. The initial ‘C’ on the scroll in the background to his right may give a teasing clue to his identity. One of the earliest extant portraits, the elderly man in Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst) wearing the habit of a lay brother – he could be a member of the confraternity of St Anthony whom Titian knew in Padua23 – averts his eyes like saints in religious paintings of the previous century. The Frick Man in a Red Hat gazes up and away from the viewer as though he too is absorbed in otherworldly thoughts. Sometimes Titian gives the impression that his gentlemen are about to emerge from their dark backgrounds to go out for the evening, or that they have just returned. The Young Man with a Red Sleeve has removed one of his kid gloves and his broad-brimmed hat. The Man with a Quilted Sleeve has his black outdoor cloak slung over his left shoulder.

The mysterious Concert,24 Titian’s first triple portrait and his last before the unfinished Paul III with his Grandsons of more than three decades later, has been one of the most discussed, analysed and admired of Titian’s paintings: Walter Pater (who thought it was by Giorgione) called it ‘among the most precious things in the world of art’.25 But after more than a century of conjecture about its meaning and the identity of the three musicians there is no consensus about who or what it represents.26 Three men of different ages – one elderly, one middle-aged, one young – are absorbed in making music. Their clothes provide the only clues to their identities. The elderly man on the right holding a stringed instrument is dressed as a cleric. The middle-aged man at the keyboard whom he interrupts wears what was thought to be a toga, indicating that he was a member of the government, until a restoration in 1976 showed it to be dark blue rather than black. The young man’s fancy hat would have been worn only for a theatrical production, probably during carnival. So is this a rehearsal? Is the oldest man suggesting that they start again from the previous bar while the impassive young man with the plumed hat – presumably a singer – waits for his cue? Did Titian intend his painting to signify, as one art historian has put it, that ‘sublime and harmonious time must contend with the powerful interference of real time in the world’?27 Would an artist still in his early twenties have thought that way? Or is it about the dual purpose of music, which gives both pleasure and spiritual edification?28 If only we knew who commissioned the Concert, we might be able to guess at some answers. As it is we can only marvel at how Titian managed to give, in this as in so many of his paintings, a sense of suspended narrative, akin to the way our memory sometimes condenses a past episode into a single image. Painting in the hands of a master, as Leonardo had observed, can capture the impression we gain from a single glance just as we do in reality. Titian’s sense of the moment, indeed his ability to capture ‘The Decisive Moment’,29 has rarely been matched by any photographer or painter, and is all the more impressive because we know from technical investigation that he planned and painted this picture of three figures all at the same time.

Although fewer of Titian’s portraits have been scientifically examined than his other paintings, the work that has been done on them demonstrates that he used the same techniques and made similar changes as he went along. One of the portraits that has been thoroughly investigated is the so-called ‘The Slav’, La Schiavona, as it came to be called (London, National Gallery), of about 1511. Although Titian counted women among his close friends – Vasari used the word compare, pal or confidante, to describe his relationship with one of them, the beautiful young Giulia da Ponte, who was the subject of one of his lost portraits30 – there are far fewer identifiable portraits of Venetian women in his surviving oeuvre than of men. Venice, unlike the other Italian city-states, had no court. Female portraits, which elsewhere served to encourage or celebrate dynastic marriages with other courts, were of no use in a city where marriages were contracted within the local patriciate and where the doges and procurators were often very old, celibate or widowed. That women do not even appear in his later group portraits of noble Venetian families may indicate that there was also some prejudice, in the oriental tradition, about display of female features.

La Schiavona, in any case, is his only extant early portrait of a Venetian woman wearing contemporary dress – apart, that is, from the Uffizi drawing of a woman whose features and costume are similar. Her red dress, glazed with costly madder lake, seems to identify her as a member of the upper class. It has been suggested that she may be Caterina Cornaro, the deposed Queen of Cyprus, who died in 1510; or, since he used the same model in profile for the mother in the fresco of the Miracle of the Speaking Babe in Padua, she may have been a woman he knew there. She was in any case unique in early sixteenth-century Venetian painting as a portrait of a woman who was neither an anonymous professional beauty nor the consort of a foreign prince. It is one of the earliest three-quarter-length portraits in Italian painting, and her commanding position, which Titian meant to be seen from below and at a distance, was also unprecedented in European female portraiture. It has been aptly observed that her strong matriarchal features look like ‘the early sixteenth-century equivalent of Picasso’s Gertrude Stein’.31

Given the originality of La Schiavona it is not surprising that the portrait evolved slowly while Titian tried out different ideas for it. He altered the sitter’s headdress and the veil on her right shoulder, and deleted a window in the upper-right section of the canvas. The red of her dress can be seen with the naked eye through the marble parapet, which he raised over it and upon which he placed and then erased a skull and a foreshortened dish before resting her hand on it instead. The fictive relief carving of her profile refers to a debate that went back to classical literature about the relative merits of painting and sculpture.32 In the Renaissance Michelangelo became the representative of the greater integrity of sculpture, while Leonardo championed painting as the art that required more intellect. Vasari was tapping into the argument when he gave Giorgione the credit for proving ‘that painting requires more skill and effort and can show in one scene more aspects of nature than is the case with sculpture’. If the contest seems academic to us today, it was one that preoccupied Titian, the most painterly of painters, throughout his career.

On a raised parapet, just to the left of the forehead of the relief profile bust, Titian painted a large V, traces of which can still be detected with the naked eye. The initials V, VV or VVO, which appear on other Venetian portraits of around the same date,33 have been variously interpreted as indicating virtus vincit (omnia), virtue is victorious over everything; vivens vivo, from life by the living; or virtus e veritas, virtue and truth. A single V has also been detected by infrared reflectography in the centre of the parapet of the Man with a Quilted Sleeve.

If La Schiavona in its final version was intended as an illustration of the superiority of painting over sculpture – a painter can imitate sculpture but a sculptor cannot represent a painting – the blue sleeve of the young bearded man known as the Man with a Quilted Sleeve of a few years earlier is a demonstration of the power of painting, as celebrated by Pliny in his stories about the realistic paintings of Apelles, to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. Despite fading and abrasions the thrust of the sleeve into the space of the viewer still startles. The sitter, now identified as a member of the Barbarigo family, was thought to be Ludovico Ariosto, author of the famous romantic epic Orlando Furioso, until in the 1970s a scholar34 observed that the swivel and tilt of the man’s head are consistent with the pose an artist would adopt while portraying his reflection in a mirror and that his projecting chin and under-hung lower lip resemble the two surviving self-portraits from Titian’s old age. Could this arrogant man with the sensuous mouth and the intent gaze be the elusive young Titian? If so, is the portrait of what could be the same man five or ten years older (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) also Titian? In fact the straight nose in both paintings doesn’t quite match the more aquiline shape of the later self-portraits. Whoever the sitter, the richly worked quilted protruding sleeve is an early manifestation of Titian’s lifelong interest in textiles – later he sometimes invented the designs of his own painted textiles – and may have been intended to advertise his virtuoso talent for imitating fine fabrics to the wealthy textile manufacturers of Venice who were potential patrons.

Although Titian flattered his sitters, and it would be anachronistic to claim that he would have thought in terms of what we call ‘psychological insight’, his instinctive understanding of human nature does seem to reveal what W. B. Yeats, a great admirer of Titian, called ‘the personality of the whole man, blood, imagination, intellect running together’.35 It is this quality that makes his portraits stand out in picture galleries, and their lost identities especially frustrating. Writers who would like to link him with the most famous men of letters of his youth have proposed, on more or less shaky grounds, that the Portrait of a Man with a Book (Hampton Court, Royal Collection) might be the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro; and that a Portrait of a Man in the Dublin National Gallery is the humanist philosopher and author of The Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione.36 We can at least put a name to one of his early sitters, the forceful, bull-necked man with long grey hair in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.37 He is Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma, a physician and prolific writer of, among many other texts, an obscene macaronic poem, Macharonea medicinalis. He served as physician to the Venetian fleet and prior of the Venetian College of Physicians, and, since Giorgione also painted his portrait (the ‘Terris’ portrait, San Diego), presumably numbered Venetian artists among his patients. He sat for Titian in 1520 when he was about fifty, a powerful, confrontational personality.38

Comparing Titian’s Dr Parma with Giorgione’s gentler portrait of the same man, seemingly more introverted, painted about ten years earlier, suggests that Titian in his early thirties was abandoning Giorgionesque moodiness to attempt a more intense engagement with the individuality of his sitters. He was also discovering new ways of modelling and structuring portraits while experimenting with the different formats, scales and dimensions that the great Swiss historian of art and culture Jacob Burckhardt called the most important innovation of the sixteenth century.39 We can see the transition in the marvellously assured pyramidal compositions of the Flora (Florence, Uffizi) and the Portrait of Tommaso Mosti (Florence, Galleria Palatina), both probably several years later than the Portrait of Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma.

In the Man with a Glove (Paris, Louvre), his most famous portrait of the early 1520s,40 everything Titian had achieved in the field of portraiture up to that time – his unrivalled mastery of blacks, whites and flesh tones, the most difficult pigments to manage on an artist’s palette; the modelling with light and shade; the tellingly naturalistic action of the exquisitely painted hands; his interest in the personality and status of his sitters – culminates in one of the most beautiful and intriguing of all Renaissance portraits.41 He borrowed the pose from Raphael’s Portrait of Angelo Doni of about 1507–8, but probably learned more about patrician restraint and exploration of personality from the same artist’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1514–16), now in the Louvre, which he saw during a visit in the winter of 1523 to Mantua where Castiglione, who was at that time in the service of the Gonzagas, kept the portrait in his house. But if Titian’s Man with a Glove was in part an homage to one of the greatest artists of the central Italian High Renaissance – Raphael had died at the age of thirty-seven only a few years earlier – he looked back in order to paint something so new that we would be forgiven for attributing it to Rembrandt.

It is a moot point whether Titian’s paintings of anonymous pretty girls, usually disguised as classical or biblical characters, can be categorized as portraits. The foreign dignitaries to whom some were sold or presented as gifts referred to them simply as ‘women’. Whether the models were prostitutes, courtesans, Titian’s mistresses or perhaps some of them the mistresses of the young men he portrayed, they would have been hung in the bedrooms of men who we can safely guess were less interested in learned allusions than in the realistic depiction of beautiful young faces, skin, hair and bodies. The Venetians were the first Italian artists known to paint routinely from living models, a practice that was much less common in central Italy where artists were supposed to learn how the body works by study and dissection and how it should ideally look from classical examples. (Raphael, for example, never used human models for his bodies.) Four decades or so after Botticelli painted the first heroic and timeless mythological women of the Italian Renaissance, Titian, as a feminist art historian has put it, ‘reinvented womankind’.42

Titian warmed the flesh of his women – Dolce quoted Pordenone as saying that Titian put flesh not colour on to a nude – and softened the voluptuous contours of their bodies. Even if some of his models were common whores, their faces tell us that he wanted to explore their personalities as well as their bodies. Seen next to any one of Titian’s girls, the numerous beauties painted by his Venetian contemporaries – Paris Bordone, Palma Vecchio or Giovanni Cariani – look like hardened professionals. The Reclining Nude in a Landscape (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie) and Venus Anadyomene (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland)43 (anadyomene is the Greek word for ‘rising from the sea’) – which was inspired by Pliny’s description of a Venus Anadyomene painted by Apelles, the lower half of which had been damaged – adopt the pudica pose of antique sculptures of the goddess, at once voluptuous and modest, the position of their hands drawing attention to what they conceal. The ravishing Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and prostitutes, whose name was often adopted by Renaissance courtesans, is only partially successful in preventing her pleated white shift – a costume worn by actresses in the contemporary theatre to identify them as nymphs or goddesses – from tumbling further off her plump shoulders. Her modestly averted glance was a second thought: in the original version she looked straight out at the viewer.

The Salome (Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilj), for which Titian seems to have used the same model who posed for the naked Dresden Venus, is not the first Renaissance painting to exploit the erotic subtext of the biblical story,44 in which the seductive daughter of Herodias displays the decapitated head of St John the Baptist on a salver. But Titian’s version, which is based on the composition of a more sombre Salome by Sebastiano Luciani of 1510, is surely the most explicitly sensuous of them all. Salome45 is associated with Venus by the little winged cupid perched on the arch behind her. Like a prostitute in the pornography of the period46 she allows a lock of hair to stray flirtatiously over her fresh young cheek, while the hair of the decapitated Baptist caresses her bare arm as she clutches his head to her breast. It looks as though Titian, who seems to have enjoyed playing the occasional walk-on role in his productions, may have portrayed himself as the Baptist47 – the arched nose and the contour of the forehead resemble those in his late self-portraits, and the receding hairline may anticipate early balding. If this is the young Titian, could we be witnessing a private joke between Titian and a sexually voracious mistress? Perhaps the painting was in lieu of payment for her services? Or might she have been a courtesan rich and cultivated enough, as some courtesans were, to commission her own portrait?

Of course writers and critics have been speculating since his lifetime about Titian’s relationships with his female models. When in 1522 the Duke of Ferrara’s ambassador in Venice reported that he had found Titian looking exhausted, he assumed, although Titian denied it, that he had been sleeping with the models he often painted in provocative poses. Even a diplomat with limited imagination would have guessed that powerfully creative artists usually have powerful libidos, and that the act of tracing the contours of a desirable woman’s body with a brush laden with paint is a kind of sublimated love-making. Sperone Speroni writing about love in 1537 named Titian as the painter who best visualized the concept that ‘a lover is actually a reflection of that which he loves’.48 Alas, Titian, the artist who knew better then any other how to paint heterosexual passion, seems only rarely to have written or spoken about his private life and personal feelings, and then mainly about his family and friends. According to Pietro Aretino, the close friend with whom he spent many companionable evenings, Titian seemed never to have met a woman he didn’t like, but whereas Aretino claimed to be so fond of brothels that it almost killed him to be elsewhere, Titian, at least when in society, fondled and made a great show of kissing the ladies, and entertained them with a thousand juvenile pranks,49 but remained faithful to his wife or current mistress.

But the temptation to find and name a mistress for Titian was irresistible, and by the end of the sixteenth century, when Titian and Aretino were both long dead, the pretty redhead with violets tucked into her décolletage in Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (Madrid, Prado), painted early in his career for Duke Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara, had given rise to the notion that Titian’s beloved was called Violante.50 In the next century Carlo Ridolfi, in his biography of Titian, wrote that Titian had had an innamorata called Violante, who was the daughter of his friend Palma Vecchio. Ridolfi may or may not have picked that idea up from someone who told him about the rumour in Ferrara. But it was his reference that generated claims that Violante was also the model for a number of early sixteenth-century Venetian paintings of women, especially the so-called Violante (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), a hard-faced, bleached blonde, who also has a violet tucked into her bodice, but looks more like the work of Palma than Titian. The Vienna Violante is in any case a different physical type from other candidates who have been proposed for Violante, all of whom, like the girl in the Andrians, have auburn hair and brown eyes. One is the beautiful Flora. Another is the Venus Anadyomene, whose head Titian altered, possibly putting one woman’s face on another’s body. She appears again in the Woman with a Mirror, her long auburn hair over one shoulder like the Venus Anadyomene, but now en négligée and closely observed by the man who holds a second mirror for her. Although the man looks nothing like Titian, the painting entered the collection of Charles I of England as ‘Titian and his Mistress’. But then came the age of legend-busting Titian scholarship, when it was discovered that Palma never married, and that there is no record of an illegitimate daughter. And so, although Titian’s women leave us in no doubt that he loved them, blonde or brunette, slim or buxom, whores, courtesans or high-ranking girlfriends of his patrons, we are forced to respect his reticence about his private life. He may, like his great modern admirer Lucian Freud, have needed to sleep with his models before painting them. But we will never know which, if any of them, shared his bed.