Titian
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1485-1576). The greatest painter
of the Venetian school.
The
evidence for his birthdate is contradictory, but he was certainly very old when
he died. He received the more important part of his training in the studio of
Giovanni Bellini, then came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a
close relationship. In 1506-08 he assisted him with the external fresco
decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early
death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished
paintings. The authorship of certain works (some of them famous) is still
disputed between them.
Titian's
first great commission was for three frescos in Padua (Scuola del Santo, 1511),
noble and dignified paintings suggesting an almost central Italian firmness and
monumentality. When he returned to Venice, Giorgione having died and Sebastiano
gone to Rome, the aged Bellini alone stood between him and supremacy, and that
only until 1516 when Bellini died and Titian became official painter to the
Republic. Meanwhile he was gradually winning free from the stylistic domination
of Giorgione and developing a manner of his own. Something of a fusion between
Titian worldliness and Giorgione's poetry is seen in the enigmatic allegory
known as Sacred and Profane Love (Villa Borghese, Rome, c. 1516).
This
work inaugurated a brilliant period in Titian's creative career during which he
produced splendid religious, mythological, and portrait paintings, original in
conception and vivid with color and movement. A series of great altarpieces
opens with the Assumption (Sta Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1516-18),
which in the soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the tempestuous group
of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father, contradicts the
stable basis of quattrocento and High Renaissance composition and looks forward
to the Baroque. The strong, simple colors used here, and the artist's evident
pleasure in the silhouetting of dark forms against a light background, reappear
throughout the work of this period. There followed the Pesaro altarpiece (Sta
Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1519-26), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence
in which architectural motifs are used to enhance the drama of the scene, and
the altarpiece of St Peter Martyr (now destroyed but known to us from several
copies and engravings), where trees and figures together form a violent
centrifugal composition suited to the action; Vasari described it as `the most
celebrated, the greatest work... that Titian has ever done'.
Titian's
finest mythological works from this period are three pictures (1518-23) for
Alfonso d'Este -- the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal
(both in the Prado, Madrid), and the Bacchus and Ariadne (National
Gallery, London) -- and outstanding among his portraits is the exquisite Man
with a Glove (Louvre, Paris, c. 1520).
About
1530, the year in which his wife died, a change in Titian's manner becomes
apparent. The vivacity of former years give way to a more restrained and
meditative art. He now began to use related rather than contrasting colors in
juxtaposition, yellows and pale shades rather than the strong blues and reds
which shouldered each other through his previous work. In composition too he
became less adventurous and used schemes which, compared with some of his
earlier works, appear almost archaic. Thus his large Presentation of the
Virgin (Accademia, Venice, 1534-38) makes use of the relief-like frieze
composition dear to the quattrocento. During the 1530s Titian's fame spread
throughout Europe. In 1530 he first met the emperor Charles V (in Bologna,
where he was crowned in that year) and in 1533 he painted a famous portrait of
him (Prado) based on a portrait by the Austrian Seisenegger. Charles was so
pleased with it that he appointed Titian court painter and elevated him to the
rank of Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur -- an unprecedented honor
for a painter. At the same time his works were increasingly sought after by
Italian princes, as with the celebrated Venus of Urbino (Uffizi,
Florence, c. 1538), named after its owner, Guidobaldo, Duke of Camerino, who
later became Duke of Urbino. The pose is based on Giorgione's Sleeping
Venus (Gemдldegalerie, Dresden), but Titian substitutes a direct sensual
appeal for Giorgione's idyllic remoteness.
Early
in the 1540s Titian came under the influence of central and north Italian
Mannerism, and in 1545-6 he made his first and only journey to Rome. There he
was deeply impressed not only by modern works such as Michelangelo's Last
Judgement, but also by the remains of antiquity. His own paintings
during this visit aroused much interest, his Danaл (Museo di
Capodimonte, Naples) being praised for its handling and color and (according to
Vasari) criticized for its inexact drawing by Michelangelo. Titian also painted
in Rome the famous portrait of Pope Paul III and his Nephews
(Museo di Capodimonte). The decade closed with further imperial commissions. In
1548 the emperor summoned Titian to Augsburg, where he painted both a formal
equestrian portrait (Charles V at the Battle of Mьhlberg, Prado)
and a more intimate one showing him seated in an armchair (Alte Pinakothek,
Munich). He travelled to Augsburg again in 1550 and this time painted portraits
of Charles's son, the future Philip II of Spain, and the greatest patron of his
later career. Titian's work for Philip included a series of seven erotic
mythological subjects (c. 1550-62): Danaл and Venus and
Adonis (Prado), Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Collection,
London), The Rape of Europa (Gardner Museum, Boston), Diana
and Actaeon and Diana and Calisto (Ellesmere Collection, on
load to the National Gallery of Scotland), and The Death of Actaeon
(National Gallery, London). Titian referred to these pictures as poesie,
and they are indeed highly poetic visions of distant worlds, quite different
from the sensual realities of his earlier mythological paintings.
During
the last twenty years of his life Titian's personal works, as opposed to those
which busy assistants produced under his supervision and with his intervention,
showed an increasing looseness in the handling and a sensitive merging of
colors which makes them more and more immaterial. Autumnal tones reflected the
artist's meditative spirit. About the same time his interest in new pictorial
conceptions waned. About 1550-55 he had painted a powerful Martyrdom of
St Lawrence (Gesuiti, Venice), which had affinities with Mannerism in
the types and movements of the figures. In 1564-67 he repeated the picture
(Escorial, Madrid), but now the light, which played a dramatic part in the
first version, became the chief feature, creating and dissolving forms. His
powers remained undimmed until the end, and his career closed with the
awe-inspiring Pietа (Accademia, Venice, 1573-76), intended for his
own tomb and finished after his death by Palma Giovane.
Titian's
influence on later artists has been profound: he was supreme in every branch of
painting and revolutionized the oil technique with his free and expressive
brushwork. Vasari wrote of this aspect of his late works that they `are
executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of color, with the result
that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance...
The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes
pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labor
that has gone into them.'
His
greatness as an artist, it appears, was not matched by his character, for he
was notoriously avaricious. In spite of his wealth and status, he claimed he
was impoverished, and his exaggerations about his age (by which he hoped to
pull at the heartstrings of patrons) are one of the sources of confusion about
his birthdate. Jacopo Bassano caricatured him as a moneylender in his Purification
of the Temple (National Gallery, London). Titian, however, was lavish in
his hospitality towards his friends, who included the poet Pietro Aretino and
the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino. These three were so close that
they were known in Venice as the triumvirate, and they used their influence
with their respective patrons to further each other's careers.
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