4. Giorgione
It might seem strange that artists should be hired at high fees to paint a warehouse wall. But in 1507 the Venetians felt that life without color was dead; and the German traders there, some from the great Dürer’s Nuremberg, had their own lusty sense of art. So they sublimated part of their profits into two murals, and had the luck to choose immortals for the task. The paintings soon succumbed to salt moisture and the sun, and only vague blotches remain, but even these attest the early fame of Giorgione da Castelfranco. He was then twenty-nine years old. We do not know his name; an old story made him the love child of an aristocratic Barbarelli and a woman of the people; but this may be an afterthought.33 In his thirteenth or fourteenth year (c. 1490) he was sent from Castelfranco to Venice to serve as apprentice to Gian Bellini. He developed rapidly, won substantial commissions, bought a house, painted a fresco on its front, and filled his home with music and revelry; for he played the lute well, and preferred gay women in the flesh to the loveliest of them on canvas. What influences formed his wistful style it is hard to say, for he was unlike the other painters of his day, except that he may have learned from Carpaccio some grace and charm. Probably the decisive influence came from letters rather than from art. When Giorgione was twenty-seven or twenty-eight Italian literature was taking a bucolic turn; Sannazaro published his Arcadia in 1504; perhaps Giorgione read these poems and found in their pleasant fancies some suggestions of idealized landscapes and amours. From Leonardo—passing through Venice in 1500—Giorgione may have acquired a taste for a mystic, dreamy softness of expression, a delicacy of nuance, a refinement of manner that made him, for a tragically brief moment, the summit of Venetian art.
Among the earliest works attributed to him—for in hardly any case can we be sure of his authorship—are two wood panels describing the exposure and rescue of the infant Paris; the story is an excuse for painting shepherds and rural landscapes breathing peace. In the first picture that is by common consent his—The Gypsy and the Soldier—we get a typically Giorgionesque fancy: a casual woman, naked except for a shawl around her shoulders, sits on her discarded dress on the mossy bank of a rushing stream, nurses a child, and looks anxiously about her; behind her stretches a landscape of Roman arches, a river and a bridge, towers and a temple, curious trees, white lightning, and green storm-laden clouds; near her is a comely youth holding a shepherd’s staff—but richly garbed for a shepherd!—and so pleased with the scene that he ignores the gathering storm. The story is uncertain; what the picture means is that Giorgione liked handsome youths, soft-contoured women, and nature even in its moods of wrath.
In 1504 he painted, for a bereaved family in the town of his birth, the Madonna of Castelfranco. It is absurd and beautiful. In the forefront St. Liberale, in the shining armor of a medieval knight, holds a lance for the Virgin, and St. Francis preaches to the air; high aloft on a double pedestal Mary sits with her babe, who leans recklessly out from his high perch. But the green and violet brocade at Mary’s feet is a wonder of color and design; Mary’s robes fall about her in wrinkles as lovely as wrinkles can ever be; her face has the gentle tenderness that poets picture in the mates of their dreams; and the landscape recedes with Leonardesque mystery till the sky melts into the sea.
When Giorgione and his friend Tiziano Vecelli received the assignment to paint the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Giorgione chose the wall fronting the Grand Canal, and Titian took the Rialto side. Vasari, examining Giorgione’s fresco half a century later, found it impossible to make head or tail of what another spectator described as “trophies, nude bodies, heads in chiaroscuro… geometricians measuring the terrestrial globe, perspectives of columns, and between them men on horseback, and other fantasies.” However, the same writer adds: “It may be seen how accomplished Giorgione was in handling colors in fresco.”34
But his genius lay in conception rather than coloring. When he painted the Sleeping Venus that was a priceless treasure of the Dresden Gallery, he might have thought of her in purely sensual terms as an inviting formation of molecules. Doubtless she is that, too, and marks the passage of Venetian art from Christian to pagan themes and sentiment. But there is nothing immodest or suggestive about this Venus. She lies asleep, precariously nude in the open air, on a red cushion and a white silken robe, her right arm under her head, her left hand serving as a fig leaf, one perfect limb outstretched over another raised beneath it; seldom has art so simulated the velvet texture of feminine surfaces, or so conveyed the grace of a natural pose. But on her face is a look of such innocence and peace as rarely accord with naked beauty. Giogione here has put himself beyond good and evil, and lets the esthetic sense transiently dominate desire. In another piece—the Fête champêtre or Pastoral Symphony of the Louvre—the pleasure is frankly sexual, and yet again has all the innocence of nature. Two nude women and two clothed men are enjoying a holiday in the countryside: a patrician youth, in a doublet of gleaming red silk, strumming a lute; beside him a disheveled shepherd painfully trying to bridge the gap between a simple and a cultivated mind; the aristocrat’s lady, in a graceful motion, emptying a crystal pitcher into a well; the shepherd’s lass waiting patiently for him to attend to her charms or her flute. No notion of sin has entered their heads; the lute and the flute have sublimated sex into harmony. Behind the figures rises one of the richest landscapes in Italian art.
Finally, in The Concert of the Pitti Palace, desire seems forgotten as irrelevantly primitive, and music is all, or becomes a bond of friendship subtler than desire. Until the nineteenth century this “most Giorgionesque” of all pictures35 was regularly accredited to Giorgione; many critics now ascribe it to Titian; since the matter is still doubtful let us leave the authorship to Giorgione, because he loved music only next to woman, and because Titian is rich enough in masterpieces to spare one to his friend. At the left a plumed youth stands, a bit lifeless and negative; a monk sits at a clavichord, his beautifully rendered hands on the keys, his face turned round to a bald cleric on our right; the cleric lays one hand on the monk’s shoulder, and holds in the other a cello resting on the floor. Has the music ended, or not yet begun? It does not matter; what moves us is the silent depth of feeling in the countenance of the monk, whose every fiber has been refined, and his every sentiment ennobled, by music; who hears it long after all the instruments have been mute. That face, not idealized but profoundly realized, is one of the miracles of Renaissance painting.
Giorgione lived a short life, and apparently a merry one. He seems to have had many women, and to have healed each broken romance with a new one soon begun. Vasari reports that Giorgione caught the plague from his latest love; all that we know is that he died in the epidemic of 1511 at the age of thirty-four. His influence was already extensive. A dozen “Giorgionesque” minor artists painted rural idyls, conversation pieces, musical interludes, masque costumes, in vain efforts to capture the refinement and finish of his style, the airy overtones of his landscapes, the guileless eroticism of his themes. He left two pupils who were to make a stir in the world: Sebastiano del Piombo, who went off to Rome, and Tiziano Vecelli, the greatest Venetian of all.
5. Titian: The Formative Years: 1477–1533
He was born in the town of Pieve, in the Cadoric range of the Dolomites, and those rugged mountains were well remembered in his landscapes. When he was nine or ten he was brought to Venice, and was apprenticed successively to Sebastiano Zuccato, Gentile Bellini, and Giovanni Bellini. In Giovanni’s studio he worked side by side with Giorgione, who was his senior by only a year. When that Keats of the brush set up his own studio Titian probably went with him as assistant or associate. He was so deeply influenced by Giorgione that some of his early pictures have been ascribed to Giorgione, and some of Giorgione’s later pictures to Titian; the inimitable Concert probably belongs to this period. Together they painted the Fondaco walls.
From the plague that took Giorgione’s life—or from the moratorium laid upon Venetian art by the war of the League of Cambrai—Titia
n fled to Padua (1511). There he painted three frescoes for the Scuola del Santo, recording miracles of St. Anthony; if we may judge from their crudity, Titian at thirty-five had far to go before equaling the best work of Giorgione; Goethe, however, with penetrating hindsight, saw in them “the promise of great things.”36 Returning to Venice, Titian addressed to the doge and the Council of Ten (May 31, 1513) a letter that recalls Leonardo’s appeal to Lodovico a generation before:
Illustrious Prince! High and mighty lords! I, Titian of Cadore, have from childhood upwards studied the art of painting, desirous of a little fame rather than of profit…. And although in the past, and also in the present, I have been urgently invited by His Holiness the Pope and other lords to enter their service, I, as the faithful subject of your Excellencies, have rather cherished the wish to leave behind me a memorial in this famous city. Therefore, if it seem good to your Excellencies, I am anxious to paint in the Hall of the Great Council, employing therein all my powers; and to begin with a canvas of the battle on the side of the Piazzetta, which is so difficult that no one has yet had the courage to attempt it. I should be willing to accept for my labor any reward that may be thought proper, or even less. Therefore, being, as aforesaid, studious only of honor and to please your Excellencies, I beg to ask for the first broker’s patent, for life, that shall fall vacant in the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, irrespective of all promised reversions of such patent, and on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as Messer Zuan Belin [Gian Bellini], besides two assistants to be paid by the Salt Office, as well as all colors and necessaries.… In return for which I promise to do the work above named with such speed and excellence as will satisfy the Signori.37
A “broker’s patent” (senseria) was formally an appointment as trade intermediary between Venetian and foreign merchants; actually, in the case of the broker’s patent with the German merchants in Venice, it made the holder the official painter of the state, and paid him 300 crowns ($3750) a year for painting a portrait of the doge and such other pictures as the government might require. Apparently Titian’s proposal was tentatively accepted by the Council; in any case he began to paint The Battle of Cadore in the Ducal Palace. But his rivals persuaded the Council to withhold the patent from him, and to suspend the pay of his assistants (1514). After negotiations that irritated all concerned, he received the post and pay of the patent without the title (1516). He in his turn procrastinated, and did not complete till 1537 the two canvases that he had begun in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. They were destroyed by fire in 1577.
Titian developed leisurely, like any organism dowered with a century of life. But as early as 1508 he showed the spiritual penetration and technical power that were to put him above all his rivals in portraiture. A nameless portrait once named Ariosto has in it a memory of Giorgione’s style—a poetic face, and subtle eyes a little malicious, and sumptuous raiment that set a model for a thousand later works. And in this period (1506–16) the maturing artist already knew how to paint women of ample loveliness, stemming from Giorgione and expanding toward Rubens. The movement from the Virgin to Venus continued in Titian, even while he painted religious pictures of great spendor and renown. The same hand that stirred piety with a Gypsy Madonna and an Adoration of the Shepherds could turn to a Woman at Her Toilet, and that incarnation of voluptuous innocence, the Flora of the Uffizi Gallery. This gentle face and generous bosom probably served again in The Daughter of Herodias; Salome is as thoroughly Venetian as the severed head is powerfully Hebraic.
In or near the year 1515 Titian produced two of his most celebrated pictures. The Three Ages of Man shows a group of naked infants sleeping beneath a tree; a Cupid so soon inoculating them with the mad pursuit; a bearded octogenarian contemplating a skull; and a young couple happy in the spring of love, yet looking at each other wistfully, as if foreseeing the erosive pertinacity of time. Sacred and Profane Love has a modern title that would surprise a resurrected Titian. When first mentioned (1615), the picture was called Beauty Adorned and Unadorned;38 probably it aimed not to point a moral but to adorn a tale. The “profane” nude is the most perfect figure in Titian’s repertoire, the very Venus de Milo of the Renaissance. But the “sacred” lady is secular too; her jeweled girdle draws the eye, her silken gown tempts the touch; probably she is the same buxom courtesan who posed for Flora and the Woman at Her Toilet. If the spectator looks long enough he will see a complex landscape behind the figures: plants and flowers and a thick clump of trees, a shepherd tending his flock, two lovers, hunters and dogs chasing a hare, a town and its towers, a church and its campanile, a green Giorgionesque sea, a clouded sky. What difference does it make that we cannot know just what the picture “means”? It is beauty made to “stay awhile”; and is that not what Faust thought worth a soul?
Having learned that female beauty, adorned or natural, would always find customers, Titian pursued the theme joyously. Early in 1516 he accepted the invitation of Alfonso I to paint some panels in the Castello at Ferrara. The artist was lodged there, with two assistants, for some five weeks, and presumably came frequently thereafter from Venice. For the Alabaster Hall Titian painted three pictures that continued Giorgione’s pagan mood. In The Bacchanal men and women, some of them naked, drink, dance, and make love before a landscape of brown trees, blue lake, and silver clouds; a scroll on the ground bears a French motto: “He who drinks and does not drink again does not know what drinking is.” In the distance an old Noah sprawls naked and drunk; closer a lad and lass join in dance, their garments whirling in the breeze; in the foreground a woman whose firm breasts display her youth lies nude and sleeping on the grass; and near her an anxious child raises his dress to ease his bladder and bring the Bacchic cycle to completion. In Bacchus and Ariadne the abandoned woman is startled by a Bacchic procession bursting through the woods-drunken satyrs, a naked male entwined with snakes, the nude god of wine leaping from his chariot to capture the fleeing princess. In these pictures, and The Worship of Venus, the Pagan Renaissance is in full command.
Meanwhile Titian painted an arresting portrait of his new patron, the Duke Alfonso: a handsome intelligent face, a corpulent body dignified with robes of state, a beautiful hand (hardly that of a potter and gunner) resting on a beloved cannon; this is the picture that stirred even Michelangelo to praise. Ariosto sat for a portrait, and returned the compliment with a line in a later edition of the Furioso. Lucrezia Borgia too sat for the great portraitist, but no trace of that painting remains; and Laura Dianti, Alfonso’s mistress, may have posed for a picture that survives only in a copy in Modena. It was probably for Alfonso that Titian made one of his finest pictures, The Tribute Money: a Pharisee with the head of a philosopher, asking his question sincerely, and a Christ answering without resentment, brilliantly.
It is characteristic of the times that Titian could pass from Bacchus to Christ, from Venus to Mary, and back again, with no apparent loss to his peace of mind. In 1518 he painted for the church of the Frari his greatest work, The Assumption of the Virgin. When it was placed behind the high altar, in a majestic marble frame, the Venetian diarist Sanudo thought the event worth noting: “May 20, 1518: Yesterday the panel painted by Titian for… the Minorites was put up.”39 To this day the sight of the Frari Assumption is an event in any sensitive life. Near the center of the immense panel is the figure of the Virgin, full and strong, clothed in a robe of red and a mantle of blue, rapt in wonder and expectation, lifted up through the clouds by an inverted halo of winged cherubim. Above her is an inevitably futile attempt to portray the Deity—all raiment and beard, and hair disheveled by the winds of heaven; finer is the angel that brings Him a crown for Mary. Below are the Apostles, a variety of magnificent figures, some gazing in astonishment, some kneeling in adoration, some reaching up as if to be taken with her into paradise. Standing before this powerful evocation, the unwilling skeptic mourns his doubts, and acknowledges the beauty and aspiration of the myth.
In 1519 Iacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Papho
s in Cyprus, in gratitude for the victory of his Venetian fleet over a Turkish squadron, commissioned Titian to paint another altarpiece for the Frari—for the chapel that had been dedicated there by his family. Titian knew the risk he was running in challenging comparison between this Madonna of the Pesaro Family and his masterpiece so lately acclaimed. He worked for seven years on the new picture before he released it from his studio. He chose to represent the Virgin enthroned; but, defying precedent, he placed her at the right in a diagonal scheme that put the donor at the left, with St. Peter between them, and St. Francis at her feet. The composition would have been thrown off balance but for the bright illumination focusing the Mother and her Child. Many an artist, tired of the traditional centralized or pyramidal structure of such pictures, welcomed and imitated the experiment.
About 1523 Marquis Federigo Gonzaga invited Titian to Mantua. The artist did not stay long, for he had commitments in Venice and Ferrara; but he began a series of eleven paintings representing Roman emperors; these have been lost. On one of his visits he painted an attractive portrait of the young bearded Marquis. Federigo’s mother, the splendid Isabella, was still living, and sat for a picture. Finding the result uncomfortably realistic, she put it among her antiquities, and asked Titian to copy a portrait that Francia had made of her forty years before. It was from this that Titian produced (c. 1534) the famous picture with the turban hat, the ornate sleeves, the stole of fur, the pretty face. Isabella protested that she had never been so beautiful, but she arranged to have this reminiscent portrait descend to posterity.
Here for a while we leave Tiziano Vecelli. To understand his later career we must fill in the background of political events in which his greatest patron after 1533—Charles V—was intimately concerned. Titian was fifty-six in 1533. Who would have supposed that he had still forty-three years to live, and that he would paint as many masterpieces in his second half-century as in the first?