Читать книгу Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice - Sheila Hale - Страница 22

ONE

Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara

You see, the Cupids are gathering apples, and you might be surprised at their numbers, but that they are the offspring of the nymphs and govern all that is mortal, and their multitude is proportioned to the varied desires of mankind … They hang their golden arrows and quivers on the boughs, and rove in swarms about the place … Blue, gold, or coloured are their wings, the hum of which is like music. The baskets in which they throw the apples are of cornelian, emerald, or pearl … Ladders they need not, for they fly into the very heart of the fruit; they dance and run, or rest, or sleep or sate themselves with apples. Here are four of the loveliest of them. One throws an apple to the other; a third shoots his arrow; but there is no wickedness in him … The riddle which the painter gives us here to solve doubtless expresses love and longing …

PHILOSTRATUS, IMAGINES, THIRD CENTURY AD1

He who rests must take action and he who acts should take rest.

INSCRIPTION ON A CARVING BY ANTONIO LOMBARDO FOR ALFONSO D’ESTE’S STUDY

Alfonso I d’Este, third Duke of Ferrara and the first in the chain of Titian’s aristocratic foreign patrons, was a rough diamond. He traced his ancestry back to the knights of King Arthur’s round table, but he dressed carelessly, and his manner was gruff. He enjoyed playing outrageous practical jokes and working with his hands. When he was a young man it was reported in the Venetian Senate that the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara had the habit of strolling about Ferrara stark naked – ‘nudo, nudo’; it was also said that he had fathered several illegitimate children, and contracted syphilis. Even after he had inherited his title and with it the weighty responsibilities of ruling and defending a large and much-contested state, he continued in his spare time to enjoy carpentry, painting pottery, casting in bronze, constructing and playing musical instruments, maintaining a menagerie of exotic hunting animals, fishing for sturgeon in the lagoons at the mouth of the Po, and commissioning works of art.

His special passion and expertise lay in weapons of war, which he collected, designed and helped to construct. His personal device was a smouldering grenade, and he had his court painter Dosso Dossi paint him on a battlefield surrounded by heavy artillery. He nicknamed one of his favourite cannon Il Diavolo, the Devil. It may be the weapon with which he posed, his hand resting on its muzzle as though it were a pet dog, for Titian’s first portrait of a foreign ruler.2 Alfonso pioneered some of the new powerful models of guns and cannon that changed the nature of warfare in the Renaissance. The Battle of Ravenna fought on Easter Day 1512, in which he served on the French side as a soldier and technical adviser against a Spanish and papal army, was the most alarming demonstration yet seen of the killing power of gunpowder. The power and deployment of his artillery routed the enemy forces, but killed nearly as many French, with the unintended result that the French were for a time driven out of Italy.

Alfonso was twenty-nine in 1505 when he inherited the Duchy of Ferrara from his father Ercole. For all his eccentric ways he proved to be a reforming ruler of a government that had become corrupt, as well as a brave and resourceful soldier and a shrewd political strategist with an innate sense of timing that told him when it would be opportune to switch into or out of alliances with the larger powers that continually threatened the independence of his duchy. The city of Ferrara had been a self-governing papal fief for centuries before it fell under the control of the Este lords early in the thirteenth century. By the time of Alfonso’s rule the state comprised a vast hinterland, stretching 160 kilometres from the mineral-rich Apennines, where gold and silver were mined, through the productive farmlands of the Po Valley and on down to the Adriatic coast, the Po delta and the valuable salt marshes of Comacchio. It embraced the problematic towns of Reggio and Modena, which were historically imperial possessions. For most of Alfonso’s reign Reggio and Modena were used as political currency in the quarrels between successive popes and emperors.

Five years after the death in childbirth of his first wife, Anna Sforza, daughter of the Duke of Milan, Alfonso bowed to the political necessity of marrying Pope Alexander VI’s adored twenty-one-year-old daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, in the interests of warding off a threat by the pope to install his son Cesare as ruler of Ferrara. On the eve of their marriage in 1502 Lucrezia’s dowry of 100,000 ducats in cash plus 75,000 in jewels and other valuables was carried into the city on seventy-two mules covered with the Borgia colours of black and yellow. Historians differ about how well founded Lucrezia’s infamous reputation was – she was supposed to have murdered one or both of her previous husbands and to have had incestuous relations with her father and her brother Cesare. Whatever the truth of the dark rumours, as Duchess of Ferrara she contributed gaiety, fun and style to the court, surrounding herself with artists, musicians and writers – not least Pietro Bembo, who was one of her lovers, whether platonic or not we do not know. Her kindness and generosity won the hearts of the people and eventually, it seems, of her husband.

In 1508 Alfonso joined the League of Cambrai on a promise from Pope Julius II to rid the city of occupying Venetian troops and to restore Rovigo and the Polesine, which had been surrendered to Venice in 1484. In the early stages of the war he fought in person with the French against Venice at the Battle of Agnadello. His brother, Ippolito d’Este, who had been made a cardinal at the age of fourteen and was, like several of Julius’ cardinals, a soldier and military strategist as well as a prince of the Church, assisted the emperor Maximilian with the initially successful siege of Padua. In December 1509 the two brothers commanded a spectacularly successful naval battle at Poleselle on the Po near Rovigo in which a Venetian fleet was routed and all but destroyed. Celebrated by the poet Ludovico Ariosto, who was in the service of Ippolito at the time, it was a turning point in the Cambrai war. But when, less than two years after the resounding Venetian defeat at Agnadello, Venice accepted Julius II’s invitation to join a Holy League against France, which the pope now perceived as the greater threat to the stability of Italy, Alfonso refused to join Julius and stuck by his French alliance.

Julius, the ‘papa terribile’, was easily enraged by opposition. Machiavelli described him in The Prince as ‘impetuous in everything’, a man who ‘found the time and circumstances so favourable to his way of proceeding that he always met with success’. Vasari said of Raphael’s wonderful portrait of him painted when he was an old man that it made all who saw it tremble. This was the pope who had fathered three daughters while a cardinal, and who, dressed in silver papal armour, had led his troops in mostly successful conquests of cities which resisted his authority. Not a man to cross, he excommunicated Alfonso, imposed an interdict on Ferrara and, in February 1511 – the coldest winter in living memory – ordered two of his cardinal commanders to lay siege to the city. ‘I want Ferrara,’ he declared to the assembled troops. ‘I would rather die like a dog than ever give it up … And if by any chance I am beaten, then I will raise another army and so wear out [the French] that I’ll chase them out of Italy.’3 The interdict hurt, but the siege failed. Alfonso outmanoeuvred the papal troops, inflicted heavy losses on them while the lives of his own men were largely spared, and seized the enemy banners and guns. Julius retreated. Ferrara, in any case, was so well fortified in 1511 that a French commander described it as the greatest fortress in Christianity.4 Alfonso had further grounds for satisfaction in May when an occupying papal army was driven out of Bologna by French troops with the support of the people. In December the citizens of Bologna celebrated by toppling Michelangelo’s enormous bronze statue of Pope Julius from its pedestal on the façade of the church of San Petronio. Some of the metal was taken to Ferrara, where, so the story went, Alfonso kept the head for his collection and had the rest melted down and reforged as a cannon, which he named La Giulia.

Nevertheless, the disastrous Pyrrhic victory on Easter Day 1512 at Ravenna, in which Alfonso played such a crucial role, put him in an exposed position and left him in economic difficulties. With his only allies, the French, temporarily driven out of Italy it would not be long before the papal armies attacked. The cost of refortifying Ferrara had to be met by selling off some of the ducal treasures, including some of Lucrezia Borgia’s jewels. When the table silver went too, the court was reduced to dining on ceramic plates and vessels painted by the ducal hand. By June Alfonso recognized the need to make his peace with the pope. Julius provided safe conduct as he travelled to Rome, accompanied by Ludovico Ariosto, to attempt reconciliation with the irate pope. While in the Holy City he took time off to inspect the Sistine Chapel ceiling, climbing the scaffolding with Michelangelo, whom he begged, unsuccessfully, to paint something for him. But he refused to listen to the pope’s demands, and the pope refused to be pacified. Alfonso and Ariosto were obliged to flee. Fearing for their lives and living rough, disguised sometimes as priests, sometimes as peasants, they made their way home through Umbria and Tuscany. Julius died in 1513, shortly after Alfonso had returned to Ferrara. But any hopes that the apparently more peaceable Medici pope Leo X would prove less of a threat to Ferrara were soon dashed. Leo, as it turned out, was as obsessed with regaining Ferrara for the papacy as his more openly bellicose predecessor.

While Ferrara remained on a war footing, the warrior duke found time to indulge his keen appetite for acquiring and commissioning works of art. It was a passion he shared with his elder sister Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua and one of the most astute and formidable Renaissance politicians and patrons of art and learning. Their ancestors had collected antiquities and Flemish paintings and nurtured a school of Ferrarese painting that included Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti. Immediately after the death of his father, Alfonso began to rearrange and decorate the rooms he had chosen to be his private quarters in the long elevated building known as the Via Coperta, which links the castle to the ducal palace.5 A year or two later he brought to Ferrara the sculptor Antonio Lombardo,6 who spent two or three years carving beautiful relief sculptures for rooms described in later inventories as camerini d’alabastro, little alabaster chambers. One of them, a study next to the duke’s bedroom that was entirely lined with Antonio’s marble carvings, was unique in Italy.7 Some of the larger panels depict mythological scenes in high relief. Some, of birds and animals, are in low relief. Inscriptions note that the duke’s study was a space for rest, relaxation and quiet contemplation – the necessary complements to action for Renaissance man.

Alfonso’s court painter Dosso Dossi and Dosso’s brother Battista – the sons of a land agent to the court – decorated the rooms in the Via Coperta with painted ceilings and friezes. But it was not until Ferrara was at peace with Venice after the spring of 1513 that the duke was in a position to begin to realize his most ambitious project. It was for a small, intimate room that would be a private showcase for the best representatives of the three principal schools of Italian painting: Giovanni Bellini for Venice, Raphael for Rome, Fra Bartolommeo for Florence, all painters whose works he had admired on his travels. The prototype for such a room was Isabella’s studiolo in the ducal castle at Mantua, for which she had commissioned two paintings by Mantegna, one by Perugino and two by Lorenzo Costa, all illustrating subjects from classical antiquity. (She had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Leonardo to contribute a painting. Giovanni Bellini also refused because the terms of her commission did not provide him with enough freedom.) Although Alfonso’s taste was by no means untutored – he had travelled widely and had an even more perceptive and independent eye than his glamorous and domineering bluestocking sister – he was without intellectual pretensions. Nevertheless, like his nephew, Isabella’s son Federico Gonzaga, and his political ally Francis I – and, for that matter, many twenty-first-century tycoon collectors – he was interested in employing top names.

He overlooked Titian in the first instance in favour of the more famous Giovanni Bellini, who agreed to paint the Feast of the Gods. Giovanni took as his source a free translation of a story from Ovid’s poetic calendar, the Fasti, about a feast given by Cybele, goddess of the harvest and fertility, at which Priapus’ attempted rape of the sleeping nymph Lotis is foiled when Silenus’ ass brays and wakes her. (Priapus has the ass killed for interfering with his right to satisfy his sexual appetite.) He conflated two separate episodes of the story (which may be the explanation for a subsequent attempt by another painter to bring the figures more in line with one of Ovid’s originals). The frieze-like arrangement of his feasting Olympian deities may have been intended to conform with Antonio Lombardo’s sculptures. Giovanni set them against a forest with tree trunks extending across the width of the picture, which was later cancelled by repaintings by Dosso Dossi and finally by Titian. But the painting, even after Giovanni had been requested, presumably by Alfonso, to eroticize the goddesses by revising their postures and lowering their necklines, lacks sex appeal.

Giovanni had finished and signed the Feast of the Gods by 4 November 1514 when he received a payment of eighty-five ducats. Three years later Alfonso began to plan a radical rebuilding of the Via Coperta. He was impatient to see, on either side of the Feast of the Gods, a Worship of Venus, which he had commissioned from Fra Bartolommeo, and a Triumph of Bacchus promised by Raphael. An exciting source of subjects was available to him in the first ever translation into Italian of the Imagines (the Eikones in Greek) written in the third century AD by the Greek writer Philostratus.8 The translation by the scholar Demetrios Moschus had been commissioned by Isabella, who had given it to her brother on loan.9 Philostratus described in detail sixty-four paintings he purported to have seen in a house outside Naples. No one in the Renaissance had ever seen antique paintings, and since few if any painters could read Philostratus in the original Greek, Isabella’s translation was a treasure trove of ideas.

Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael sent sketches of their respective subjects. But Fra Bartolommeo died on 31 October 1517 before he could make a start on his painting. Raphael was given an advance payment early in 1518, but then prevaricated. Alfonso hounded him through his agents in Rome, who found it increasingly difficult to make contact with that prince of painters. Alfonso flew into rages. Raphael tried to assuage his anger with gifts of preliminary cartoons for some of his other paintings. But in September 1518 Alfonso instructed one of his agents to find Raphael and advise him that his evasive behaviour was not the proper way to treat a person such as himself and if he didn’t do his duty, and soon, he would regret it. The correspondence continued in January and March of 1520. And then, on 6 April of that year, in the night of Good Friday, Raphael died, probably from overwork, at the untimely age of thirty-seven.

Titian had agreed in the previous year to take over Fra Bartolommeo’s subject and to base his painting on that painter’s sketch and on the description by Philostratus of cupids playing love games in front of a statue of Venus. But, although outwardly more accommodating than the more famous Raphael, he also prevaricated. The success of the Frari Assunta had attracted other commissions, and his studio was crowded with works in progress. When in late September 1519 he had still not delivered the painting he had promised a year and half earlier to begin that very morning the enraged Alfonso instructed his ambassador in Venice, Jacopo Tebaldi, to warn ‘the painter’ that it was high time he finished ‘that picture of ours’. The ambassador had to find Titian as soon as possible and tell him in no uncertain terms that he, the Duke of Ferrara, didn’t like to be disappointed. Tebaldi replied on 3 October that he had been looking for Titian but had been told by his neighbours that he had gone to Padua, promising that on his return he would finish the duke’s picture. A week later Tebaldi informed the duke that Titian had given his word that he would come to Ferrara with the picture, which he would finish in situ once he had seen where it was to hang and in what light. But, he added, he had heard by word of mouth that the reason for the delay was that Titian was working on a painting for the Very Reverend —— and that Titian did not deny the rumour.

The name of the Very Reverend is missing from Tebaldi’s letter, which was later damaged by fire. But we know that it was Altobello Averoldi, the papal legate to Venice and a member of the nobility of Brescia, the gun-manufacturing town on the westernmost edge of the Venetian terraferma. As papal legate Averoldi had made it his business to smooth relations between Venice and Rome after the Cambrai war. Titian had gone to Padua, probably encouraged by the Venetian government, to discuss with him a painting for the high altar of the Brescian church of Santi Nazaro e Celso, of which Averoldi was provost. While Titian was in Padua discussing the Brescian commission Averoldi’s arch-rival, Broccardo Malchiostro, the canon of the cathedral of Treviso, was celebrating the completion of a new chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Annunciate. We don’t know exactly when Malchiostro began the decorations of the chapel, but his choice of Titian to paint an Annunciation for its altar (still in situ) may have been motivated by his intense jealousy of Averoldi – the mutual detestation of the two prelates was such that they had once come to blows during a church service. Malchiostro was in fact generally disliked. His extreme vanity is evident from the frequency with which the Malchiostro coat of arms and initials appeared in the chapel and on Titian’s painting. It was also considered inappropriate that he had Titian paint him as the donor facing worshippers at the altar, rather than in the usual position kneeling in profile. But the awkward and apparently malign figure of Malchiostro lurking outside the columns is evidence not of Titian’s judgement of the canon’s character but of a repainting by another hand after the picture had been attacked by vandals not long after it was finished.

Although Titian, who presumably worked alternately on the Averoldi and Malchiostro commissions, gave less of his attention to Malchiostro’s Annunciation than to the altarpiece for the papal legate, the Treviso altarpiece was his first treatment of its subject and is full of original ideas. The fictive architecture extends the real space of the chapel; the asymmetrical composition anticipates the Pesaro Madonna in the Frari; and the child angel skidding down the elongated perspective of the floor approaches the Virgin from behind, an unusual relationship that was later adopted by Lorenzo Lotto. But the painting doesn’t really work, and looks as though Titian tossed it off in a hurry, probably with assistance.

He was far more inspired by a commission from another foreigner, one that carried a political message that would not have been lost on those who saw it after Titian had completed it in 1520. This was the Madonna in Glory with Sts Francis and Blaise and the Donor Alvise Gozzi (Ancona, Museo Civico) over the high altar of the church of San Francesco in Ancona. Alvise Gozzi was a nobleman and merchant originally from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) who had settled in Ancona and made frequent business trips to Venice, where he must have seen Titian’s Frari Assunta. Ancona and Ragusa, which face the Adriatic from opposite sides, had long been required to pay Venice for the privilege of trading in Venetian waters, until in 1510 Pope Julius II, in gratitude for Ancona’s loyalty during the Cambrai war, granted that city the right to trade without paying tribute to Venice. By the time Titian painted Gozzi’s altarpiece, the war was over and Venice was once again queen of the Adriatic. The painting is thus a celebration of the renewed hegemony of Venice, of which Titian painted the skyline in the background. St Blaise, patron saint of Ragusa, places one arm around the shoulder of the donor while pointing upwards at the Madonna in Glory, protector of the Republic of Venice, who gazes down from a golden sky on St Francis, patron of the church but also of the city of Ancona. Although Titian modelled the composition on Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (c. 1512), his version, with its dynamic figures and spellbinding view of Venice, one of the most hauntingly beautiful passages he ever painted, has an emotional depth and a unity of space and colour that are in an altogether different key from Raphael’s more contemplative prototype.

When he was in Venice Titian worked from time to time on the San Nicolò ai Frari altarpiece, which he had grabbed from Paris Bordone, and for which he thriftily reused the panel on which he had begun the Bathing Scene for Alfonso d’Este. The informal grouping of the saints recalls those in the more successful Gozzi altarpiece, but he didn’t actually finish the upper part of the painting, and then with the help of an assistant, until the early 1530s when he transformed it into the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints (Vatican City, Pinacoteca Vaticana).10 He did, however, make a start on a more compelling commission, the second from his old patron Jacopo Pesaro, who wanted another celebration of his victory over the Turks in 1502 – the highpoint in his otherwise unmemorable career – this one for the altar, which had recently been granted to the Pesaro family, in the left nave of the Frari. It was a demanding and unusual order, and not well paid – the instalments Titian received over the seven years it took him to complete the painting amounted to only 102 ducats. But it gave him a second opportunity to show in the prominent church dominated from the high altar by his Assunta. Judging by the outcome, which was in its different way as innovative and subsequently influential as the Assunta, the Pesaro Madonna was often on his mind in the next seven years, during which he made three radical changes to its composition. In April and June 1519 he acknowledged his first two payments of ten ducats each from ‘Monsignor the Bishop of Baffo [Baffo was short for Paphos] of the House of Pesaro’. Since it was his usual practice to begin work on a painting after he had received a down payment, we can assume that he made a start on the altarpiece that summer, or at least by 22 September 1519 when he issued a receipt for six ducats to cover the costs of the canvas and stretcher.

In October Titian arrived at long last in Ferrara with two assistants and his unfinished painting for the duke – the court expense account records that his journey from Venice cost four lire. He spent the better part of the next three months there, as the fog of winter settled on the city, completing the Worship of Venus in situ. Ferrara is only ninety kilometres south of Venice but in those days it seemed another world. With a population of no more than 30,000, some 2,000 of whom were employed by the court, it was much smaller but not much less cosmopolitan, prosperous or busy than Venice. Alfonso’s father, the spendthrift Duke Ercole I, had trebled the size of his city, adding to the old, cramped medieval centre a spacious garden suburb complete with orchards, religious establishments, palaces, villas, a hunting park, a racecourse and some twelve new churches, all enclosed in a massive circuit of defensive walls. A tributary of the Po curved around the gloomy fourteenth-century castle, in which two of the duke’s brothers, following a plot to assassinate him, were imprisoned for life in windowless dungeons. Over the coming years, Titian, arriving by barge towed upstream along the Po with his precious cargos of canvases, rolled and packed in specially built crates wrapped in waxed cloth, would become accustomed to the sight of the walls and towers of Ferrara looming across the fields from the port of Francolino. But coming as he did from a city with no court and no need of a castle or walls, his first visits to the best-defended court in Christendom must have been something of a culture shock.

The Francophile Este modelled their court on the royal courts of Burgundy and France. Although Ferrara might have seemed provincial by comparison, it was a lively and important centre of artistic activity, learning, literature, theatre, music and other courtly pleasures. Life there was a round of expensive and showy entertainments of the kind that were discouraged in Venice by sumptuary laws and by perpetual reminders to refrain from conspicuous consumption in the name of God and country. The courtiers of Ferrara, by contrast, were required to dress lavishly; clothes, indeed, were a courtier’s single biggest investment. They went jousting and hunting with cheetahs, leopards and panthers. They played real tennis, gambled on the horses and feasted at banquets where course after course of delicacies was served between dancing, concerts performed by Alfonso’s orchestra of thirty musicians and theatrical productions. Alfonso’s gluttonous cardinal brother Ippolito, who liked to be watched by an audience while he stuffed himself, died in 1520, aged only forty-one, of excessive consumption of roasted crayfish and vernaccia wine. After his death an inventory of his possessions itemized more than one hundred carnival disguises.11

Alfonso d’Este gave Titian his first opportunity to satisfy the courtly taste for large painted fables about the sexual exploits of the pagan gods and goddesses. It was a demand that did not exist in Republican Venice, where the preference of private patrons was for pretty girls whose classical disguises were really beside the point. And Titian, who had no previous experience of aristocratic courts, and whose imagination was uncluttered by the first-hand study of the Roman antiquities that was supposed to be an essential part of a Renaissance painter’s education, brought an unprecedented freshness and vitality to the inventions he devised for Alfonso’s pleasure, using colour and movement rather than narrative to shape his monumental figures. Without having seen or read the originals he unearthed the very spirit of the antique sculptures and stories in a way that established the interpretation of classical myths for subsequent artists, and especially for his most ardent follower, Rubens. The more experienced and conventionally educated Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael would doubtless have produced magnificent paintings for the duke. But they might have looked academic in comparison with Titian’s wholly original, dramatically exciting representations, which continue even today to remind us that those old myths spun by the writers of ancient Greece and Rome lasted as long as they did because they were cracking good stories.

Titian was not the only groundbreaking artist employed by Alfonso’s court in the 1520s. Another, the pioneering Netherlandish composer Adrian Willaert, the European master of the new polyphony, is today of interest only to specialists. But the Ferrarese poet and dramatist Ludovico Ariosto12 is still read, and his vast epic poem, Orlando Furioso (Mad Roland), first published in 1516 when the poet was in the service of Ippolito, remains the most romantic and entertaining of all the many versions told over the centuries of the tale of the Carolingian knight who was driven mad by his unrequited love for the princess Angelica. Ariosto, however, paid homage to his employers by making Ruggiero, the virtuous warrior and supposed founder of the Este dynasty, the true hero of his story. The poem is so close in spirit to Titian’s poetic paintings that Ridolfi invented a tradition according to which the painter-poet and the poet-painter enjoyed an intellectual partnership: ‘Thus, painting fulfils the function of mute poetry, and poetry acts as loquacious painting.’ He described an illustration of their companionable relationship, which he claimed would have decorated the catafalque to a plan (never realized) for Titian’s funeral, in which Alfonso, with attendant pages, sat listening to Ariosto read aloud while watching Titian paint at his easel.

The poet and painter must have met at least by 1522 or 1523 when Titian portrayed Ariosto as one of a group of prominent men in a canvas, now lost, for the doge’s palace.13 But, although Ariosto may well have advised Titian and the duke about subjects and sources, he did not mention Titian in writing until the third and final edition of Orlando Furioso, revised with Bembo’s help and published in 1532, in which ‘the honour of Cadore’ is listed – along with Mantegna, Leonardo, Giovanni Bellini, the Dossi brothers, Michelangelo and Sebastiano – as one of the greatest artists of the time.14 Titian made a woodcut portrait of the poet for the frontispiece of that edition, but none of his surviving portraits that have been hopefully identified as Ariosto – the Man with a Quilted Sleeve, and the portraits of men in Indianapolis (Herron Art Institute) and New York (Metropolitan Museum) – look anything like the woodcut portrait, or for that matter like each other.

They may not have known one another particularly well in the 1520s when both men came and went to and from the court where Ariosto was often employed as an extraordinary ambassador. They were, however, certainly aware of one another, and shared, as well as a vigorously modern spirit, similar tastes in feminine beauty. The golden hair, dark eyes and eyebrows of some of Titian’s models are the features that Ariosto most admired in women. For the last edition of Orlando Furioso he added a new story, in which the erotic charms of the heroine, Olimpia – her eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth, shoulders, hair, breasts, belly, hips, thighs and ‘Those other parts which to conceal she tries’15 – seem to echo the brazen sexuality of the women Titian painted for the Duke of Ferrara.

On 24 June 1519, in the summer before Titian came to Ferrara to finish his Worship of Venus, Lucrezia Borgia died in childbirth of puerperal fever. She was thirty-nine and had borne Alfonso eight children, four of whom would outlive him. Alfonso was beside her at her deathbed and was said to have fainted at her funeral. Nevertheless, at forty-three he knew himself well enough to see that without a consort he would return to his old whoring ways, which, according to his contemporary biographer,16 he realized ‘would not be good for his reputation nor would it be safe for him to stain the honoured families of citizens with seductions and adultery’. So he took ‘as his woman a person of decent habits and of dignified bearing who was, like himself, very fecund’. The woman was Laura Eustochia Dianti, known as la bella berettarina because she was the daughter of a hat maker. Nobody knew whether the duke ever made her his legitimate duchess. Vasari and Pietro Aretino thought they were married, but Alfonso described their two sons, born in 1527 and 1530 – and both confusingly named Alfonso – as the natural children of an unmarried woman. Titian’s splendid (but now very ruined) Portrait of Laura Dianti (Kreuzlingen, Klisters Collection) could have been painted late in her first pregnancy.17 At a time when childbirth was dangerous, Alfonso, who had lost both his wives to puerperal fever, must have feared for Laura’s life and requested from Titian a record of her beauty. Whether or not she was the legitimate Duchess of Ferrara, the bleached skin in Titian’s portrait, which he enjoyed contrasting with the black face of her charming little Ethiopian page, was a fashion that signified patrician purity, while her magnificent but provocatively dishevelled dress suggests a favoured mistress. Her piled-up hair is about to escape the pearl and gold headdress fashioned in the shape of a spray of laurel leaves. She has pushed up one sleeve of her jewel-studded blue dress, where Titian placed his signature on the armband.18

In the November after Titian’s arrival in Ferrara he and Dosso Dossi made a short study visit to nearby Mantua, where they admired the Gonzaga Mantegnas and the paintings in Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the ducal palace. Alfonso, who had fallen seriously ill earlier in the month, was somewhat recovered when the two painters returned to his court on 22 November, although his lack of appetite worried his doctors. In January 1520 his condition was still weak enough to prompt Leo X to sponsor an attack on Ferrara and even to try to bribe a corruptible guardian of one of the gates to the city. The plot was foiled by Alfonso’s nephew, Federico Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua, who had close papal connections and sent a warning through to Ferrara.

The Worship of Venus was finished by mid-January, when Titian returned to Venice. It is a close transcription of one of the pictures described in Demetrios Moschos’s Italian translation of Philostratus’ Imagines, which had been commissioned by Alfonso’s sister Isabella d’Este: a classical divertissement in which rollicking little cupids imitate the joys and mysteries of every kind of adult erotic experience for a Renaissance patron who imagined he could see and hear in it the very heartbeat of the antique world. To one side of the action two courtesans dressed as nymphs worship a shrine of their patron goddess, the unchaste Venus.19 The apples with which the cupids play their love games – plucking them from the tree tops, gathering them in bejewelled baskets, biting into them, playing catch with them – would have been interpreted by contemporaries as euphemisms for the female pudenda: in classical texts to catch an apple meant to be smitten with love. One of the cupids has captured a hare, symbol of fecundity, and seems to be riding it. Another bites the ear of his companion, an indication of rule-breaking or homoerotic love, in contrast with the cupids in the foreground happily throwing and catching their apples.

When Raphael died on 6 April without having made a start on the Triumph of Bacchus, the duke was so satisfied with Titian’s work that he was perhaps not as distressed as he might have been. Raphael’s pupils offered to take over his commission, but Alfonso refused the offer, demanded the return of his advance of fifty ducats, and transferred the order to Titian, from whom, however, he requested a different, more unusual episode from the Bacchanalian myth, the story of Bacchus and Ariadne. In Titian, however, the Duke of Ferrara had met his match. The painter’s sense of humour was subtler than the duke’s; he had better manners and more charm. He was every bit as wily and stubborn as his aristocratic patron, and he continued, just as he had started, to oblige him whenever he asked for small errands while working on the big commissions in his own good time. Now in his early thirties, his international reputation established by the Assunta, and the Worship of Venus admired by Alfonso d’Este’s circle of influential friends, Titian knew that the duke needed him as much as he needed the duke. And the duke, who would often be reduced to cajoling, threatening and trying to bribe Titian with favours – anything to get him to finish and deliver his paintings – never again referred to him as ‘the painter’.