Titian.ARIOSTO.London.(Photo, Mansell and Co.)
TITIAN(continued)
With the “Assumption,” finished in 1518 for the Church of the Frari, Titian rose to the very highest among Renaissance painters. The “Glorious S. Mary” was his theme, and he concentrated all his efforts on the realisation of that one idea. The central figure is, as it were, a collective rather than an individual type. Well proportioned and elastic as it is, it has the abundance of motherhood. Harmonious and serene, it combines dramatic force and profound feeling. Exultant Humanity, in its hour of triumph, rises with her, borne up lightly by that throbbing company of child angels and followed by full recognition and awestruck satisfaction in the adoring gaze of the throng below, yet Titian has contrived to keep some touch of the loving woman hurrying to meet her son. The flood of colour, the golden vault above, the garment of glowing blues and crimsons, have a more than common share in that spirit of confident joy and poured-out life which envelopsthe whole canvas. In the worthy representation of a great event, the visible assumption of Humanity to the Throne of God, Titian puts forth all his powers and steeps us in that temper of sanguine emotion, of belief in life and confidence in the capacity of man, which was so characteristic of the ripe Renaissance. In looking at this splendid canvas, we must call to mind the position for which Titian painted it. Hung in the dusky recesses of the apse, it was tempered by and merged in its stately surroundings. The band of Apostles almost formed a part of the whispering crowd below, and the glorious Mother was beheld soaring upwards to the golden light and the mysterious vistas of the vaulted arches above.
The patronage of courts had by this time altered the tenor of Titian’s life. In 1516 Duke Alfonso d’Este had invited him to Ferrara, where he had finished Bellini’s “Bacchanals.” It bears the marks of Titian’s hand, and he has introduced a well-known point of view at Cadore into the background. In 1518 Alfonso writes to propose another painting, and Titian’s acceptance is contained in a very courtier-like letter, in which we divine a touch of irony. “The more I thought of it,” he ends, “the more I became convinced that the greatness of art among the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes, who were content to leave to the painter the credit andrenown derived from their own ingenuity in bespeaking pictures.” Alfonso’s requirements for his new castle were frankly pagan. Mythological scenes were already popular. Mantegna had adorned Isabela d’Este’s “Paradiso” with revels of the gods, Botticelli had given his conception of classic myth in the Medici villa, already Bellini had essayed a Bacchanal, and Titian was to make designs for similar scenes to complete the decorations of the halls of Este. The same exuberant feeling he shows in the “Assumption” finds utterance in the “Garden of Loves” and the “Bacchanals,” both painted for Alfonso of Ferrara. The children in the former may be compared with the angels in the “Assumption.” Their blue wings match the heavenly blue sky, and they are painted with the most delicate finish.
We can imagine the beauty of the great hall at Ferrara when hung with this brilliant series, which was completed in 1523 by the “Bacchus and Ariadne” of the National Gallery. The whole company of bacchanals is given up to wanton merrymaking. Above them broods the deep blue sky and great white clouds of a summer day. The deep greens of the foliage throw the creamy-white and burning colour of the draperies and the fair forms of the nymphs into glowing relief, while by a convention the satyrs are of a deep, tawny complexion. On a roll of music is stamped the rollicking device, “Chi boit et ne reboit, ne sçeais que boir soit.”The purple fruit hangs ripened from the vines, its crimson juice shines like a jewel in crystal goblets and drips in streams over rosy limbs. The influence of such pictures as these was absorbed by Rubens, but though they hardly surpass him in colour, they are more idyllic and less coarse. The perfect taste of the Renaissance is never shown more victoriously than here, where indulgence ceases to be repulsive, and the actors are real flesh and blood, yet more Arcadian than revolting. In the “Bacchus and Ariadne,” Titian gives triumphant expression to a mood of wild rejoicing, so gay, so good-tempered, so simple, that we must smile in sympathy. The conqueror flinging himself from his golden chariot drawn by panthers, his deep red mantle fluttering on high, is so full of reckless life that our spirit bounds with him. His rioting band, marching with song and laughter, seems to people that golden country-side with fit inhabitants. The careless satyrs and little merry, goat-legged fauns shock us no more than a herd of forest ponies, tossing their manes and dashing along for love of life and movement.[3]Yet almost before this series was put in place Titian wasshowing the diversity of his genius by the “Deposition,” now in the Louvre, which was painted at the instance of the Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua and nephew of Alfonso d’Este. Here he makes a great step in the use of chiaroscuro. While it is satisfying in balance and sweeping rhythm, and by the way in which every line follows and intensifies the helpless, slackened lines of the dead Body, it escapes Raphael’s academic treatment of the same subject. Its splendid colours are not noisy; they merge into a scene of solemn pathos and tragedy. The scene has a simplicity and unity in its passion, and what above all gives it its intense power is the way in which the flaming hues are absorbed into the twilight shadows. The dark heads stand out against the dying sunset, the pallor of the dead is half veiled by the falling night. It is a picture which has the emotional beauty of a scene in nature, and makes a profound impression by its depth and mystery. This same solemnity and gravity temper the brilliant colouring of the great altarpiece painted for the Pesaro family in the Frari. Columns rise like great tree-trunks, light and air play through the clouds seen between them. The grouping is a new experiment, but the way in which the Mother and Child, though placed quite at one side of the picture, are focussed as the centre of interest, by the converging lines, diagonal on the one hand and straight on theother, crowns it with success. The scheme of colour brings the two figures into high relief, while St. Francis and the family of the donor are subordinated to rich, deep tints. Titian has abandoned, more completely than ever before, any attempt to invest the Child with supernatural majesty. He is a delightful, spoiled baby, fully aware of his sovereignty over his mother, pretending to take no notice of the kneeling suppliants, but occupying himself in making a tent over his head out of her veil. The “Madonna in Glory with six Saints” of the Vatican is another example of the rich and “smouldering” colour in which Titian was now creating his great altarpieces, kneading his pigments into a quality, a solidity, which gives reality without heaviness, and finishing with that fine-grained texture which makes his flesh look like marble endowed with life.
Titian.DIANA AND ACTAEON.Earl Brownlow.(The Medici Society, Ltd.)
Venuses, altarpieces, and portraits all tell us how boldly his own style was established. His sacred persons are not different from his pagans and goddesses. Yet though he has gone far, he still reminds us of Giorgione. He has been constant to the earliest influences which surrounded him, and to that temperament which made him accept those influences so instantaneously—and this constancy and unity give him the untroubled ascendancy over art which is such a feature of his position.
With Leonardo and with Titian, painters hadsprung to a recognised status in the great world of the Renaissance. They were no longer the patronised craftsmen. They had become the courted guests, the social equals. Titian, passing from the courts of Ferrara to those of Mantua and Urbino, attended by a band of assistants, was a magnificent personage, whose presence was looked upon as a favour, and who undertook a commission as one who conferred a coveted boon. Among those who clustered closest round the popular favourite, no one did more to enhance his position than Aretino, the brilliant unscrupulous debauchee, wit, bully, blackmailer, but a man who, with all his faults, had evidently his own power of fascination, and, the friend of princes, must have been himself the prince of good company. Aretino, as far as he could be said to be attached to any one, was consistent in his attachment to Titian from the time they first met at the court of the Gonzaga. He played the part of a chorus, calling attention to the great painter’s merits, jogging the memory of his employers as to payments, and never ceasing to flatter, amuse, and please him. Titian, for his part, shows himself equally devoted to Aretino’s interests, and has left various characteristic portraits of him, handsome and showy in his prime, sensual and depraved as age overtook him.
In the spring of 1528 the confraternity of St. Peter Martyr invited artists to send insketches for an altarpiece to their patron-saint, in SS. Giovanni and Paolo, to replace an old one by Jacobello del Fiore. Palma Vecchio and Pordenone also competed, but Titian carried off the prize. The picture was delivered in 1530, and during the autumn of 1529 Sebastian del Piombo had returned to Venice from Rome, and Michelangelo had sought refuge there from Florence and had stayed for some months. A quarrel with the monks over the price had delayed the picture, so that it may quite probably have only been begun after intercourse with the Roman visitors had given a fresh turn to Titian’s ideas; for though he never ceases to be himself, it certainly seems as if the genius of Michelangelo had had some effect. From what we know of the altarpiece, which perished by fire in 1867, but of which a good copy by Cigoli remains, Titian embarked suddenly upon forms of Herculean strength in violent action, but there his likeness to the Florentine ended; the figures were, indeed, drawn with a deep, though not altogether successful, attention to anatomy and foreshortening, but the picture obtained its effect and derived its impressiveness from the setting in which the figures were placed—the great trees, bending and straining, the hurrying clouds, as if nature were in portentous harmony with the sinister deed, and overhead the enchanting gleam of light which shot downward and irradiated the face of themartyr and the two lovely winged boys, bathed in a flood of blue æther, who held aloft the palm of victory. Many copies of it remain, and we only regret that one which Rubens executed is not preserved among them.
When we look at the delicious “Madonna del Coniglio” in the Louvre and our own “Marriage of S. Catherine,” the first of which certainly, and the second probably, was painted about this time, we cannot doubt that the charm of the idea of motherhood had particularly arrested the painter. About 1525 his first son, Pomponio, was born, and was followed by another son and a daughter. In the S. Catherine he paints that passion of mother-love with an intensity and reality that can only be drawn from life, and on the wheel at her feet he has inscribed his name, Ticianus, F. His feeling for landscape is increasing, and the landscape in these pictures equals the figures in importance and has engrossed the painter quite as much. Every year Titian paid a visit to Cadore, and in the rich woodlands, the distant villages, the great white villa on the hill-side, and, above all, in the far-off blue mountains and the glooms and gleams of storm and sunshine, the sudden dart of rays through the summer clouds, which he has painted here, we see how constant was his study of his native country, and how profoundly he felt its poetry and its charm. He had married Cecilia, the daughter of a barber belonging toPerarolo, a little town near Cadore. In 1530 she died, and he mourned her deeply. He went on working and planning for his children’s future, and his sister came from Cadore to take charge of the motherless household; but his friends’ letters speak of his being ill from melancholy, and he could not go on living in the old house at San Samuele, which had been his home for sixteen years. He took a new house on the north side of the city, in the parish of San Canciano. The Casa Grande, as it was called, was a building of importance, which the painter first hired and finally bought, letting off such apartments as he did not need. The first floor had a terrace, and was entered by a flight of steps from the garden, which overlooked the lagoons, and had a view of the Cadore mountains. It has been swept away by the building of the Fondamenta Nuove, but the documents of the leases are preserved, and the exact site is well established. Here his children grew up, and he worked for them unceasingly. Pomponio, his eldest son, was idle and extravagant, a constant source of trouble, and Aretino writes him reproachful letters, which he treats with much impertinence. Orazio took to his father’s profession, and was his constant companion, and often drew his cartoons; and his beautiful daughter, Lavinia, was his greatest joy and pride. In this house Titian showed constant hospitality, and there are records of the princely fashion in whichhe entertained his friends and distinguished foreign visitors. Priscianese, a well-known Humanist andsavantof the day, describes a Bacchanalian feast on the 1st of August, in a pleasant garden belonging to Messer Tiziano Vecellio. Aretino, Sansovino, and Jacopo Nardi were present. Till the sun set they stayed indoors, admiring the artist’s pictures. “As soon as it went down, the tables were spread, looking on the lagoons, which soon swarmed with gondolas full of beautiful women, and resounded with music of voices and instruments, which till midnight, accompanied our delightful supper. Titian gave the most delicate viands and precious wines, and the supper ended gaily.”
In the year 1532 Titian for the first time sought other than Italian patronage. Charles V., who was then at the height of his power, with all Italy at his feet, passed through Mantua, and among all the treasures that he saw was most struck by Titian’s portrait of Federigo Gonzaga. After much writing to and fro, it was arranged that Titian should meet the Emperor at Bologna, where he had just been crowned. He made his first sketch of him, from which he afterwards produced a finished full length. It was the first of many portraits, and Vasari declares that from that time forth Charles would never sit to any other master. He received a knighthood, and many commissions from members of the Emperor’s court. It was for one of his nobles,da Valos, Marquis of Vasto, that he painted the allegorical piece in the Louvre, in which Mary of Arragon, the lovely wife of da Valos, is parting with her husband, who is bound on one of the desperate expeditions against the terrible Turks. Da Valos is dressed in armour, and the couple are encircled by Hymen, Victory, and the God of Love. The composition was repeated more than once, but never with quite the same success. We again suspect the influence of Michelangelo in the altarpiece painted before Titian next left Venice, of St. John the Almsgiver, for the Church of that name, of which the Doge was patron. The figures are life-size, the types stern and rugged, daringly foreshortened, and the colours, though gorgeous, are softened and broken by broad effects of light and shade. It is painted in a solemn mood, a contrast to that in which about this time he produced a series of beautiful female portraits, nude or semi-nude, chiefly, it would appear, at the instance of the Duke of Urbino. The Duke at this time was the General-in-Chief of the Venetian forces, a position which took him often to Venice, and Titian’s relations with him lasted till the painter’s death. At least twenty-five of his works must have adorned the castles of Urbino and Pesaro. Among these were the Venus of the Uffizi, “La Bella di Tiziano,” in her gorgeous scheme of blue and amethyst, the “Girl in a Fur Cloak,” besides portraits of the Duke and Duchess. Itwould be impossible to enumerate here the numbers of portraits which Titian was now supplying. The reputation he had acquired, not only in Italy, but in Spain, France, and Germany, was greater than had ever been attained by any painter, while his social position was established among the highest in every court. “He had rivals in Venice,” says Vasari, “but none that he did not crush by his excellence and knowledge of the world in converse with gentlemen.” There is not a writer of the day who does not acclaim his genius. Titian was undoubtedly very fond of money, and had amassed a good fortune. He was constantly asking for favours, and had pensions and allowances from royal patrons. Lavinia, when she married, brought her husband a dowry of 1400 ducats. He had painted the portraits of the Doges with tolerable regularity, but all through his life complaints were heard of his neglect of the work of the Hall of Grand Council. Occupied as he was with the work of his foreign patrons, he had systematically neglected the conditions enjoined by his possession of a Broker’s patent, and the Signoria suddenly called on him to refund the salary amounting to over 100 ducats a year, for the twenty years during which he had drawn it without performing his promise, while they prepared to instal Pordenone, who had lately appeared as his bitter rival, in his stead. Though Titian must have beenmaking large sums of money at this time, his expenses were heavy, and he could not calmly face the obligation to repay such a sum as 2000 ducats at the same time that he lost the annual salary, nor was it pleasant to be ousted by a second-rate rival. His easy remedy was, however, in his own hands; he set to work and soon completed a great canvas of the “Battle of Cadore,” which, though it is only known to us from a contemporary print and a drawing by Rubens, evidently deserved Vasari’s verdict of being the finest battlepiece ever placed in the hall. The movement and stir he contrives to give with a small number of figures is astonishing. The fortress burns upon the hill-side, a regiment advancing with lances and pennons produces the illusion that it is the vanguard of a great army, the desperate conflict by the narrow bridge realises all the terrors of war. It was an atonement for his long period of neglect, but it was not till1439that, Pordenone having suddenly died, the Signoria relented and reinstated Titian in his Broker’s patent. One of his later paintings for the State still keeps its place, “The Triumph of Faith,” in which Doge Grimani, a splendid, steel-clad form with flowing mantle, kneels before the angelic apparition of Faith, who holds a cross, which angels and cherubs help her to support. Beneath the clouds are seen the Venetian fleet, the Ducal Palace, and the Campanile. It is an allegory of Grimani’s life; his defeat and captivityare symbolised by the cross and chalice, and the magnificent figure of St. Mark with the lion is introduced to show that the Doge believes himself to owe his freedom to the saint’s intercession. The prophet and standard-bearer at the sides were added by Marco Vecellio.
Though the battlepiece perished in the fire of 1577, another masterpiece of this time marks a climax in Titian’s brilliantly coloured and highly finished style. The “Presentation of the Virgin” was painted for the refectory of the Confraternity of the Carità, which was housed in the building now used as the Academy, so that the picture remains in the place for which it was executed. It is one of the most vivid and life-like of all his works. The composition is the traditional one; the fifteen steps of the “Gospel of Mary,” the High Priest of the old dispensation welcoming the childish representative of the new. Below is a great crowd, but it is this little figure which first attracts the eye. The contrast between the mass of architecture and the free and glowing country beyond is not without meaning, and a broken Roman torso, lying neglected on the ground, symbolises the downfall of the Pagan Empire. The flight of steps, with the figure sitting below them, is an idea borrowed from Carpaccio, and perhaps taken by him from the sketch-book of Jacopo Bellini. The men on the left are portraits of members and patrons of the confraternity. Most Titianesqueare the beautiful women in rich dresses at the foot of the steps. In this stately composition we see what is often noticeable in Titian’s scenes; he brings in the bystanders after the manner of a Greek chorus. They all, with one accord, express the same sentiment. There is a certain acceptation of the obvious in Titian, a vein of simplicity flows through his nature. He has not the sensitive and subtle search after the motives of humanity which we find in Tintoretto or Lotto. He has great intellectual power, but not great imagination. It is a temper which helps to keep the unity, the monumental quality of his scenes undisturbed and adds to their effect. In the “Ecce Homo” Christ is shown to the populace by Pilate, who with dubious compliment is a portrait of Aretino, and the contrast of the lonely, broken-down man with the crowd which, with all its lower instincts let loose, thunders back the cry of “Crucify Him,” is the more dramatic because of the unanimous spirit which possesses the raging multitude. Other artists would have given more incidental byplay, and drawn off our attention from the main issue.
TITIAN(continued)
While Titian was executing portraits of the Doges, of Aretino and of Isabella of Portugal, and of himself and his daughter Lavinia, he was also striking out a new line in the ceiling pictures for the Church of San Spirito, which have since been transferred to the Salute. Though painted before his journey to Rome, it may be suspected that he had Michelangelo’s work in the Sixtine Chapel in mind, and that he was setting himself the task of bold foreshortening and technical problems. The daring of the conception is great, yet we feel sure that this is not Titian’s element; his figures in violent movement give a vivid idea of strength and muscular force, but fail both in grace and drawing, and though the colour and light and shade distract our attention from defects of form, he does not possess that mastery over the flowing silhouette which Tintoretto attained.
It was in 1543 that his relations with the Farnese, whose young cardinal he had beenpainting, drew him at last to Rome. Leo X. had tried to attract him there without success, but now at sixty-eight he found himself as far on the road as Urbino. His son Orazio was with him, and Duke Guidobaldo was himself his escort, and sent him on with a band of men-at-arms from Pesaro. He was received in Rome by Cardinal Bembo; Paul III. gave him a cordial welcome and Vasari was appointed his cicerone. It is interesting to inquire what impression Rome, with its treasures of antique statuary and contemporary painting, made upon Titian. “He is filled with wonder and glad that he came,” writes Bembo. In a letter to Aretino he regrets that he had not come before. He stayed eight months in Rome, and was made a Roman citizen. He visits the Stanze of Raphael in company with Sebastian del Piombo, and Michelangelo comes to see him at his lodgings, and he receives a long letter from Aretino advising him to compare Michelangelo with Raphael, and Sansovino and Bramante with the sculptors and architects of antiquity. Titian was well established in his own style, and was received as the creator of acknowledged masterpieces, and he never painted a more magnificent portrait-piece than that of Paul III., the peevish old Pope, ailing and humorous, suspicious of the two nephews who are painted with him, and who he guessed to be conspiring against him. The characteristic attitude of the old man ofeighty, bent down in his chair, his quick, irritable glance, the steady, determined gaze of the cardinal, the obsequious attitude and weak, wily face of Ottavio Farnese are all immortalised in a broader, more careless technique than Titian has hitherto used. Though he does not seem to have been directly influenced by all he saw in Rome, we undoubtedly find a change coming over his work between 1540 and 1550, which may be in part ascribed to a widening of his artistic horizon and a consciousness of what others were doing, both around him and abroad. In its whole handling and character his late is different from his early manner. It begins at this time to take on a blurred, soft, impressionist character. His delight in rich colouring seems to wane, and he aims at intensifying the power of light. He reaches that point in the Venetian School of painting which we may regard as its climax, when there is little strong local colour, but the canvas seems illumined from within. There are no clear-cut lines, but the shapes are suggested by sombre enveloping shades in which the radiant brightness is embedded. His landscapes alter too; they are no longer blue and smiling, filled with loving detail, but grander, more mysterious. In the “St. Jerome” in Paris the old Saint kneels in wild and lonely surroundings, and the moon, slowly rising behind the dark trees, sends a sharp, silver ray across the crucifix. The “Supper at Emmaus” hasthe grandiose effect that is given by avoidance of detail and simplification of method.
Titian painted several portraits of himself, and we know what sort of stately figure was presented by the old man of seventy who, at Christmas in 1547, set forth to ride across the Alps in the depths of winter to obey Charles V.’s call to Augsburg. The excitement of the public was great at his departure, and Aretino describes how his house was besieged for the sketches and designs he left behind him. For nearly forty years Titian was employed by the House of Hapsburg. He had been working for Charles since 1530, and when the Emperor abdicated, his employment by Philip II. lasted till his death. The palace inventory of 1686 contained seventy-six Titians, and though probably not all were genuine, yet an immense number were really by him, and the gallery, even now, is richer in his works than any other.
The great hall of the Pardo must have been a wonderful sight, with Titian’s finest portrait of himself in the midst, and the magnificent portraits and sacred and allegorical pieces which he continued from this time forward to contribute to it. In this year, which was the last before Charles’s abdication, and during this visit to South Germany, he painted the great equestrian portrait of the Emperor on the field of Mühlberg, and two years later came the first of his many portraits of Philip II. The face, in the first sketch, is laid in with a sort of furyof impressionism, and in the parade portrait the sitter is realised as a man of great distinction. Ugly and sensual as he is, we never tire of looking at Titian’s conception—a full length of distinguished mien rendered attractive by magnificent colour. Everything in it lives, and the slender, aristocratic hands are, as Morelli says, a whole biography in themselves.
The splendid series of allegorical subjects which Titian contributed to the Pardo, while he was still supplying sacred pictures and altarpieces to Venice and the neighbouring mainland, are among his most mature and important works. Never has his gamut of tones been fuller and stronger than in the “Jupiter and Antiope,” or the “Venus of the Pardo” as it is sometimes called. The Venus herself has the attitude of Giorgione’s dreaming goddess, with her arm flung up above her head. It is, perhaps, the only time that Titian succeeds in giving anything ideal to one of his Venuses. The famous nudes of the Uffizi and the Louvre are splendid courtesans, far removed from Giorgione’s idyllic vision; but Antiope, slumbering on her couch of skins, and her woodland lover, gazing with adoring eyes on her beautiful face, have a whole world of sweet and joyful fancy. The whole scene is full of ajoie de vivre, which carries us back to the Bacchanals painted so many years before, and in these Titian gives King Philip his most perfect work, every touch of whichis his own. This picture, now in the Louvre, was given to Charles I. by the King of Spain, and bought for Cardinal Mazarin in 1650. “Danaë,” “Venus and Adonis,” “Europa and the Bull,” and a “Last Supper” followed in quick succession, but Titian was now employing many assistants, and great parts of the canvases issuing from his workshop show weak, imitative hands, while replicas were made of other works.
His later feeling for the religious in art is expressed in the now bedimmed paintings in San Salvatore in Venice. Vasari describes these in 1566. Painted when Titian was nearly ninety years old, the “Transfiguration” is remarkable for forcible, majestic movement, while in the “Annunciation” he invents quite a new treatment. Mary turns round and raises her veil, while she grasps the book as if she depended on it for stay and support. The four angels are full of life and gaiety, and the whole has much grace and colour, though it is dashed in, in the painter’s later style, in broad and sweeping planes without patience of detail. The old man has signed it “Titianus, fecit, fecit,” a contemptuous reply to some critics who complained of its want of finish. He knew well what it was in composition and execution, and that all that he had ever known or done lay within the careless strength of his last manner.
A letter written to the King of Spain’s secretary in 1574 gives a list “in part” offourteen pictures sent to Madrid during the last twenty-five years, “with many others which I do not remember.” On every hand we hear of lost pictures from the master’s brush, and the number produced even during the last ten years of his life must have been enormous, for till the end he was full of great undertakings and achievements. Very late in life he painted a “Shepherd and Nymph” (Vienna), which in its idyllic feeling, its slumberous delight, its mingling of clothed and nude figures, recalls the early days with Giorgione, yet the blurred and smouldering richness, the absolute negation of all sharp lines and lights is in his very latest style, and he has gone past Giorgione on his own ground. Then in strange contrast is the “Christ Crowned with Thorns,” at Vienna, a tragic figure stupefied with suffering. His last great work was the “Pietà” in the Academy, which, though unfinished, is nobly designed and very impressive. He places the Virgin supporting the Body in a great dome-shaped niche, which gives elevation. It is flanked by two calm, antique, stone figures, whose impassive air contrasts with the wild pain and grief below. The Magdalen steps out towards the spectator with the wailing cry of a Greek tragedy. It perhaps hardly moves us like the concentrated feeling of Bellini’s Madonna, or the hurried, trembling grief of Tintoretto’s Magdalen, but it is monumental in the sweeping grace of itsline, and full of nobility of feeling. It is sadly rubbed and darkened and has lost much of Titian’s colour, but is still beautiful in its deep greys mingled with a sombre golden glow, as of half-extinguished fires. These late paintings are of the true impressionist order; looked at closely they present a mass of scumbled touches, of incoherent dashes, but if we step farther away, to the right focus, light and dark arrange themselves, order shines through the whole, and we see what the great master meant us to see. “Titian’s later creations,” says Vasari, “are struck off rapidly, so that when close you cannot see them, but afar they look perfect, and this is the style which so many tried to imitate, to show that they were practised hands, but only produced absurdities.” Titian was preparing the picture for the Frari, in payment for the grant of a tomb for himself, when in August 1576 the plague broke out in Venice, and on the 27th the great painter died of it in his own house. The stringent regulations concerning infection were relaxed to do honour to one of the greatest sons of Venice, and he was laid to rest in the Frari, borne there in solemn procession, through a city stricken by terror and panic, and buried in the Chapel of the Crucified Saviour, for which his last work was ordered. The “Assumption” of his prime looked down upon him, and close at hand was the “Madonna of Casa Pesaro.” His son Orazio caught theplague and died immediately after, and the painter’s house was sacked by thieves and many precious things stolen.
The great personality of Titian stands out as that which of all others established and consolidated the school of Venice. He is its central figure. The century of life, of which eighty years were passed in ceaseless industry of production, left its deep impression on the art of every civilised country of Europe. Every great man of the day who was a lover of art and culture fell under Titian’s spell. His influence on his contemporaries was enormous, and he had everything: genius, industry, personal distinction, character, social charm. He is, perhaps, of too intellectual a cast of mind to be quite typical of the Venetian spirit, in the way that Tintoretto is; it is conceivable that in another environment Titian might have developed on rather different lines, but this temper gave him greater domination. He was free from the eccentricities which beset genius. He possessed the saving salt of practical common sense, so that the golden mean of sanity and healthful joy in his works commended them to all men, and they are not difficult to understand. Yet while all can see the beauty of his poetic instinct for colour, his interesting and original technique, his grasp and scope, his mastery and certainty have gained for him the title of “the painter’s painter.” There is no one from whom men feel that theycan so safely learn so much, and the grand breadth and power of elimination of his later years is justified by the way in which in his earlier work he has carried exquisite finish and rich impasto to perfection.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Ancona.Crucifixion (L.).S. Domenico: Madonna with Saints and Donor, 1520.Antwerp.Pope Alexander VI. presenting Jacopo Pesaro.Berlin.Infant Daughter of Strozzi, 1542; Portrait of Himself (L.); Lavinia bearing Charges.Brescia.SS. Nazaro e Celso: Altarpiece, 1522.Dresden.Madonna with Saints (E.); Tribute Money (E.); Lavinia as Bride, 1555; Lavinia as Matron (L.); Portrait, 1561; Lady with Vase (L.); Lady in Red Dress.Florence.Pitti: La Bella; Aretino, 1545; Magdalen; The Young Englishman; The Concert (E.); Philip II.; Ippolito de Medici, 1533; Tomaso Mosti.Uffizi: Eleanora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, 1537; Francesco della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1537; Flora; Venus, the head a portrait of Lavinia; Venus, the head a portrait of Eleanora Gonzaga; Madonna with S. Anthony Abbot.London.Holy Family and Shepherd; Bacchus and Ariadne (E.); Noli me tangere (E.); Madonna with SS. John and Catherine.Bridgewater House: Holy Family (E.); Venus of the Shell; Three Ages of Man; Diana and Actaeon, 1559; Callisto, 1559.Earl Brownlow: Diana and Actaeon (L.).Sir F. Cook: Portrait of Laura de Dianti.Madrid.Madonna with SS. Ulfus and Bridget (E.); Bacchanal; The Garden of Loves; Danaë, 1554; Venus and Youth playing Organ (L.); Salome (portrait of Lavinia); Trinity, 1554; Entombment, 1559; Prometheus; Religion succoured by Spain (L.); Sisyphus (L.); Alfonso of Ferrara; Charles V. at the Battle of Mühlberg, 1548; Charles V. and his Dog, 1533; Philip II., 1550; Philip II.; The Infant;Don Fernando and Victory; Portrait; Portrait of Himself; Duke of Alva; Venus and Adonis; Fall of Man; Empress Isabella.Medole.(near Brescia) Christ appearing to His Mother.Munich.Vanitas; Portrait of Charles V., 1548; Madonna and Saints; Man with Baton.Naples.Paul III. and Cardinals, 1545; Danaë.Padua.Scuola del Santo: Frescoes; S. Anthony granting Speech to an Infant; The Youth who cut off his Leg; The Jealous Husband, 1511.Paris.Madonna with Saints (E.); La Vierge au Lapin; Madonna with S. Agnes; Christ at Emmaus (L.); Crowning with Thorns (L.); Entombment; S. Jerome (L.); Jupiter and Antiope (L.); Francis I.; Allegory; Marquis da Valos and Mary of Arragon; Alfonso of Ferrara and Laura Dianti; L’Homme au Gant (E.); Portraits.Rome.Villa Borghese: Sacred and Profane Love (E.); St. Dominio (L.); Education of Cupid (L.).Capitol: Baptism (E.).Doria: Daughter of Herodias.Vatican: Madonna in Glory and six Saints, 1523.Treviso.Duomo: Annunciation.Urbino.Resurrection (L.); Last Supper (L.).Venice.Academy: Presentation of Virgin, 1540; S. John in the Desert; Assumption, 1518; Pietà, 1573.Palazzo Ducale Staircase: S. Christopher, 1523.Sala di Quattro Porte: Doge Giovanni before Faith, 1555.Frari: Pesaro Madonna, 1526.S. Giovanni Elemosinario: S. John the Almsgiver, 1523.Scuola di San Rocco: Annunciation (E.).Salute Sacristy: Descent of the Holy Spirit; St. Mark enthroned with Saints; David and Goliath; Sacrifice of Isaac; Cain and Abel.S. Salvatore: Annunciation (L.); Transfiguration (L.).Verona.Duomo: Assumption.Vienna.Gipsy Madonna (E.); Madonna of the Cherries (E.); Ecce Homo, 1543; Isabela d’Este, 1534; The Tambourine Player; Girl in Fur Cloak; Dr. Parma (E.); Shepherd and Nymph (L.); Portraits; Doge Andrea Gritti; Jacopo Strada; Diana and Callisto; Madonna and Saints.Wallace Collection.Perseus and Andromeda. (In collaboration with his nephew, Francesco Vecellio.)Louvre.Madonna and Saints. (The same by Francesco alone.)Glasgow.Madonna and Saints.
PALMA VECCHIO AND LORENZO LOTTO
Among the many who clustered round Titian’s long career, Palma attained to a place beside him and Giorgione which his talent, which was not of the highest order, scarcely warranted. But he was classed with the greatest, and influenced contemporary art because his work chimed in so well with the Venetian spirit. A Bergamasque by birth, he came of Venetian parentage, and learnt the first elements of his art in Venice. He never really mastered the inner niceties of anatomy in its finest sense, and the broad generalisation of his forms may be meant to conceal uncertain drawing, but his large-bosomed, matronly women and plump children, his round, soft contours, his clean brilliancy, and the clear golden polish in which his pictures are steeped, made a great appeal to the public. His invention is the large Santa Conversazione, as compared with those in half-length of the earlier masters. The Virgin and saints and kneeling or bending donors are placed underthe spreading trees of a rich and picturesque landscape. It is Palma’s version of the Giorgionesque ideal, which he had his share in establishing and developing. The heavy tree-trunk and dark foliage, silhouetted almost black against the background, are characteristic of his compositions. As his life goes on, though he still clings to his full, ripe figures and to the same smooth fleshiness in his women, the features become delicate and chiselled, and the more refined type and subtler feeling of his middle stage may be due to his companionship with Lotto, with whom he was in Bergamo when they were both about twenty-five. He touches his highest, and at the same time keeps very near Giorgione, in the splendid St. Barbara, painted for the company of theBombadierior artillerists. Their cannon guard the pedestal on which she stands; it was at her altar that they came to commend themselves on going forth to war, and where they knelt to offer thanksgiving for a safe return; and she is a truly noble figure, regal in conception and fine and firm in execution, attired in sumptuous robes of golden brown and green, with splendid saints on either hand. Palma was often approached by his patrons who wanted mythological scenes, gods, and goddesses; but though he produced a Venus, a handsome, full-blown model, he never excels in the nude, and his tendency is to seize upon the homely. His scenes have a domestic, familiar flavour. Withall his golden and ivory beauty he lacks fire, and his personages have a sluggish, plethoric note. In his latest stage he hides all sharpness in a sort of scumble or haze. It would, however, be unfair to say he is not fine, and his portraits especially come very near the best. Vienna is rich in examples in half-lengths of one beautiful woman after another robed in the ample and gorgeous garments in which he is always interested. Among them is his handsome daughter, Violante, with a violet in her bosom, and wearing the large sleeves he admires. The “Tasso” of the National Gallery has been taken from him and given first to Giorgione and then to Titian, but there now seems some inclination to return it to its first author. It has a more dreamy, intellectual countenance than we are accustomed to associate with Palma; but he uses elsewhere the decorative background of olive branches, and the waxen complexion, tawny colouring, and the pronounced golden haze are Palmesque in the highest degree. The colouring is in strong contrast to the pale ivory glow of the Ariosto of Titian, which hangs near it.
Palma Vecchio.HOLY FAMILY.Colonna Gallery, Rome.(Photo, Anderson.)
No one could be more unlike Palma than his contemporary, Lorenzo Lotto, who has for long been classed with the Bergamasques, but who is proved by recently discovered documents to have been born in Venice. It was for long an accepted fact that Lotto was a pupil of Bellini, and his earliest altarpiece, to S. Cristina at Treviso,bears traces of Bellini’s manner. A Pietà above has child angels examining the wounds with the grief and concern which Bellini made so peculiarly his own, and the St. Jerome and the branch of fig-leaves silhouetted against the light remind us of the altarpiece in S. Crisostomo. Lotto seems to have clung to quattrocento fashions. The ancona had long been rejected by most of his contemporaries, but he painted one of the last for a church in Recanati, in carved and gilt compartments, and he painted predellas long after they had become generally obsolete. We ask ourselves how it was that Lotto, who had so susceptible and easily swayed a nature, escaped the influence of Giorgione, the most powerful of any in the Venice of his youth—an influence which acted on Bellini in his old age, which Titian practically never shook off, and which dominated Palma to the exclusion of any earlier master.
It would take too long to survey the train of argument by which Mr. Berenson has established Alvise Vivarini as the master of Lotto. Notwithstanding that Bellini’s great superiority was becoming clear to the more cultured Venetians, Alvise, when Lotto was a youth, was still the painterpar excellencefor the mass of the public. In the S. Cristina altarpiece the Child standing on its Mother’s knee is in the same attitude as the Child in Alvise’s altarpiece of 1480, and the Mother’s hand holds it in the same way. Otherdetails which supply internal evidence are the shape of hands and feet, the round heads and the way the Child is often represented lying across the Mother’s knees. Lotto carries into old age the use of fruit and flowers and beads as decoration, a Squarcionesque feature beloved of the Vivarini, but which was never adopted by Bellini.
About 1512 Lotto comes into contact with Palma, and for a short time the two were in close touch. A “Santa Conversazione,” of which a good copy exists in Villa Borghese, Rome, and one at Dresden, with the Holy Family grouped under spreading trees, is saturated with Palma’s spirit, but it soon passes away, and except for an occasional touch, disappears entirely from Lotto’s work.
Lotto may have had relations in Bergamo, for when in 1515 a competition between artists was set on foot by Alessandro Martino, a descendant of General Colleone, for an altarpiece for S. Stefano, he competed and carried off the prize. This was the first of the series of the great works for Bergamo, which enrich the little city, where at this period he can best be studied. The great altarpiece (now removed to San Bartolommeo) is a most interesting human document, a revelation of the painter’s personality. He does not break away from hieratic conventions, like the rival school; his Madonna is still placed in the apse of the church with saints grouped round her, a formfrom which the Vivarini never departed, but the whole is full of intense movement, of a lyric grace and ecstasy, a desire to express fervent and rapturous devotion. The architectural background is not in happy proportion in relation to the figures, but the effect of vista and space is more remarkable than in any North Italian master. The vivid treatment of light and shade, and the gaiety and delicacy of the flying angels, who hold the canopy, and of the putti, who spread the carpet below, the shapes of throne and canopy and the decorations have led to the idea that Lotto drew his inspiration from Correggio, whom he certainly resembles in some ways; but at this time Correggio was only twenty, and had not given any examples of the style we are accustomed to call Correggiesque. We must look back to a common origin for those decorative details, which are so conspicuous in Crivelli and Bartolommeo Vivarini, which came to Lotto through the Vivarini and to Correggio through Ferrarese painters, and of which the fountain-head for both was the school of Squarcione. For the much more striking resemblances of composition and spirit, the explanation seems to be that Lotto on one side of his nature was akin to Correggio; he had the same lyrical feeling, the same inclination to exuberance and buoyancy. To both, painting was a vehicle for the expression of feeling, but Lotto had also common sense and agoodly share of that humour that is allied to pathos.
Till the year 1526 Lotto was much in Bergamo, where the first altarpiece gained him orders for others. The reputation of a member of the school of Venice was a sure passport to employment. We trace Alvise’s tradition very plainly in the altarpiece in San Bernardino, where the gesture of the Madonna’s hand as she expounds to the listening saints recalls Alvise’s of 1480. The little gathered roses, which Lotto makes use of to the end of his life, lie scattered on the step; angels, daringly foreshortened, sweep aside the curtain of the sanctuary. The colour is in Lotto’s scarlet, light blues, and violet. He soon shows himself fond of genre incidents, and in “Christ taking leave of His Mother” gives a view into a bedroom and a cat running across the floor. The donor kneels with her hair fashionably dressed and wearing a pearl necklace. In the “Marriage of S. Catherine” at Bergamo the saint is evidently a portrait, with hair pearl-wreathed. She kneels very simply and naturally before the Child, and the exquisitely lovely and elaborately gowned young woman who represents the Madonna, looks out towards the spectator with a mundane and curiously modern air. It was probably the recognition of Lotto’s success with portraits that led to their being so often introduced into his sacred pieces. In the one we havejust noticed, the donor, Niccolas Bonghi, is brought in, and is on rather a larger scale than the rest, but Lotto has evidently not found him interesting. The portraits of the brothers della Torre, and that of the Prothonotary Giuliano in the National Gallery, inaugurate that wonderful series of characterisations which are his greatest distinction. A series of frescoes in village churches round Bergamo must also be noticed. They are remarkable for spontaneous and original decoration, and may compare with the ceremonial groups of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. Lotto’s personages, as they chatter in the market-places, are full of natural animation and gaiety, and we realise what a step had been made in the painting of actual life.
Owing to the unsettled state of the rest of Italy, the years from 1530 to 1540, which Lotto spent in Venice, found that city the gathering-ground of many of the most distinguished scholars and deepest thinkers of the day. Men of all shades of religious thought were engaged in learned discussion, and Lotto’s ardent and inquiring temperament must have been stimulated by such an environment. During these years, too, he became intimate with Titian, and experimented in Titian’s style, with the result that his painting gets thicker and richer, more fused and solid, and his figures are better put together. He imitates Titian’s colour, too, butit makes him paint in deeper, fiercer tints, and he soon finds it does not suit him, and returns to his own scheme. His colour is still rather too dazzling, but the distances are translucent and atmospheric. He continues to introduce portraits. In his altarpiece in SS. Giovanni and Paolo the deacons giving alms and receiving petitions curiously resemble in type and expression the ecclesiastics we see to-day.
Lotto was now an accepted member of Titian’s set, and Aretino, in a letter dated 1548, writes that Titian values his taste and judgment as that of no other; but Aretino, with his usual mixture of connoisseurship and clever spite, goes on to insinuate accidentally, as it were, what he himself knew perfectly well, that Lotto was not considered on a par with the masters of the first rank. “Envy is not in your breast,” he says, “rather do you delight to see in other artists certain qualities which you do not find in your own brush, ... holding the second place in the art of painting is nothing compared to holding the first place in the duties of religion.”
An interesting codex or commentary tells us that Lotto never received high prices for his work, and we hear of him hawking pictures about in artistic circles, putting them up in raffles, and leaving a number with Jacopo Sansovino in the hope that he might hear of buyers. His work ended as it had begun, in the Marches. Heundertook commissions at Recanati, Ancona, and Loreto, and in September 1554 he concluded a contract with the Holy House at Loreto, by which, in return for rooms and food, he made over himself and all his belongings to the care of the fraternity, “being tired of wandering, and wishing to end his days in that holy place.” He spent the last four years of his life at Loreto as a votary of the Virgin, painting a series of pictures which are distinguished by the same sort of apparent looseness and carelessness which we noticed in Titian’s late style; a technique which, as in Titian’s case, conceals a profound knowledge of plastic modelling.
Though Lotto executed an immense number of important and very beautiful sacred works, his portraits stand apart, and are so interesting to the modern mind that one is tempted to linger over them. Other painters give us finer pictures; in none do we feel so anxious to know who the sitters were and what was their story. Lotto has nothing of the Pagan quality which marks Giorgione and Titian; he is a born psychologist, and as such he witnesses to an attitude of mind in the Italy of his day which is of peculiar interest to our own. Lotto’s bystanders, even in his sacred scenes, have nothing in common with Titian’s “chorus”; they have the characterisation of distinct individuals, and when he is concerned with actual portraits he is intensely receptive and sensitive to the spirit of his sitters.He may be said to “give them away,” and to take an almost unfair advantage of his perception. The sick man in the Doria Gallery looks like one stricken with a death sentence. He knows at least that it is touch and go, and the painter has symbolised the situation in the little winged genius balancing himself in a pair of scales. In the Borghese Gallery is the portrait of a young, magnificently dressed man, with a countenance marked by mental agitation, who presses one hand to his heart, while the other rests on a pile of rose-petals in which a tiny skull is half-hidden. The “Old Man” in the Brera has the hard, narrow, but intensely sad face of one whose natural disposition has been embittered by the circumstances of his life, just as that of our Prothonotary speaks of a large and gentle nature, mellowed by natural affections and happy pursuits. We smile, as Lotto does, with kindly mischief at “Marsilio and his Bride;” the broad, placid countenance of the man is so significantly contrasted with the clever mouth and eyes of the bride that it does not need the malicious glance of the cupid, who is fitting on the yoke, to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” of their future. Again, the portrait of Laura di Pola, in the Brera, introduces us to one of those women who are charming in every age, not actually beautiful, but harmonious, thoughtful, perfectly dressed, sensible, and self-possessed, and the “Family Group” in our own gallery holds ahistory of a couple of antagonistic temperaments united by life in common and the clasping hands of children. Lotto does not keep the personal expression out of even such a canvas as his “Triumph of Chastity” in the Rospigliosi Gallery. His delightful Venus, one of the loveliest nudes in painting, flies from the attacking termagant, whose virtue is proclaimed by the ermine on her breast, and sweeps her little cupid with her with a well-bred, surprised air, suggestive of the manners of mundane society.