We are still, I think, wedded to an image of the great artist as someone who is single-minded, who is not prepared to compromise, who, with mind focused on visions beyond the merely worldly, is prepared to suffer for his art. He is a Michelangelo chiselling the rippling muscles and veins of Moses in a sort of divine fury; he is Beethoven struggling with the demons of fugual counterpoint; and so on, and so forth. We have trouble with those artists – especially if they are artists whose works are indisputably great – who are of a more down-to-earth and worldly nature; who are, indeed, businessmen. Shakespeare was probably one such. And Titian certainly was. His art studio was a successful business venture in that most commercial of cities, Venice, and, while he certainly created some very great works of art – some of the very greatest, indeed – he often seemed quite content to let works pass out of his studio that weren’t always up to the highest standards.
Take, for instance, his group portrait of the male members of the Vendramin family, now hanging in the National Gallery, London. It is a vast and imposing canvas: Titian had been working on it on and off for a few years, and he must have known that he was creating a masterpiece. And yet, he seemed perfectly happy to allow a studio assistant to paint three boys in the bottom left corner in such a way as to make nonsense of the painting’s spatial unity. Why would he allow this? Presumably, the request to paint in the boys was received late, and the customer had to be satisfied. But given that Titian had failed to meet his deadline anyway (and not for the first time either, nor the last), the obvious solution would have been to expand the canvas to the left to create a suitable space for the boys. But what we have instead is a clumsy blot on what is otherwise a breathtaking masterpiece. Somehow, one cannot imagine an artist of Michelangelo’s temperament allowing something like that.
The comparison with Michelangelo is bound to come up, firstly because Michelangelo and Titian were the two leading figures of the 16th century Italian High Renaissance (Raphael was of the same generation, but he died when still in his thirties, leaving the field open, as it were, to the other two; and Leonardo was a generation older); and secondly because they had such sharply contrasting artistic styles, and aims, and temperaments. Titian had seen Michelangelo’s work, and, while no direct quotes exist on the matter, it is clear he was deeply impressed; indeed, as Sheila Hale points out, the pose of the woman in the early Miracle of the Jealous Husband (in the Scuola del Santo in Padua) is the exact mirror image of the pose of Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit in the Sistine Chapel. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence.
Michelangelo, on his part, had seen Titian’s portrait of Alfonso d’Este in Ferrara, and, according to Vasari, looked at it in “stupefaction”. The only recorded meeting between the two was in 1545, when Titian was passing through Rome. According to Vasari, Michelangelo saw and expressed admiration for Titian’s painting of Danaë, but, on leaving, muttered that it was a shame that Venetians don’t learn how to draw. This story has now become famous, but it’s hard to discern how accurate it is: Vasari, after all, had his own biases on the matter. But this does lay out, albeit in crude terms, the very different aims of the Florentine and the Venetian schools, and, in particular, of Michelangelo and of Titian, the leading representatives of these two schools. Put crudely, the Florentines were interested in draughtsmanship, in accuracy of line, in the creation of space according to the law of perspective, in the sculptural solidity of figures and objects situated within that space; while the Venetians, on the other hand, were interested in light, in shadings, in textures, and, above all, in colour.
The two sets of interests are not mutually exclusive, of course. Sheila Hale insists that, no matter what Michelangelo may or may not have said, Titian was indeed a very fine draughtsman: there are too many examples in his work of very fine draughtsmanship to think otherwise. Take, for instance, that superbly drawn figure of Actaeon at the left of the painting of Actaeon and Diana (now jointly owned by the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and the National Gallery, London). Here, Actaeon, out hunting, chances upon the private woodland bower of Diana, goddess of the hunt and of chastity, and sees what he, a mere mortal, shouldn’t. We see him moving away a hanging drapery as if it were a curtain on a stage, screening a tableau vivant behind. And the draughtsmanship here is quite exquisite.
And yet, what are we to make of the very strange figure of Diana in the same painting? Her head appears too small. We appear simultaneously to be seeing her side profile and her back – which is anatomically impossible. Is his not indeed poor draughtsmanship? This had long troubled me: how could the artist who had created the rest of this miraculous painting with such breathtaking skill mess up so badly at this point? But, Sheila Hale tells us:
Titian took immense trouble with the figure of Diana, first painting her realistically from the side, and only at the end deciding on the anatomically impossible pose – a deliberate solecism that was unprecedented in European painting – that shows the breast in profile as well as the whole of her back. Her averted head, too small for her body, gives a snake-like venom to her pose.
In short, it wasn’t that he couldn’t: he didn’t. The distortions are deliberate. And it is for us to determine why Titian chose to distort in this manner.
I personally think it is because Titian wants us to see Diana as Actaeon sees her. He doesn’t see much of her head, as Diana very quickly hides it. Diana also turns away from him. So Actaeon, in the brief moment that he sees her, has a fleeting vision of her side profile, and of her back. It is this momentary view, startled and confused, that Titian chose to depict. As for showing both the side profile and the back at the same time, modern viewers, used to cubism, should have no problem with that: it’s the fact that we are seeing this in a sixteenth century Renaissance painting that, I think, throws us. (At least, that, I think, is what threw me.) There is much in Titian’s artistic vision, or, rather, in his artistic visions, that can still throw us.
But Titian was, nonetheless, a businessman, and a very successful one too. He was also a man widely respected and admired as an artist: no starving in the garret for him. His art was in demand by princes, by cardinals, by the wealthiest of families, and even by Emperor Charles V himself. (And, after Charles’ death, by his son, Philip II, who was something of a connoisseur.) The famous anecdote about Emperor Charles V picking up a paintbrush for him that he had accidentally dropped is, most likely, apocryphal, but the very existence of such an anecdote reveals the extent to which he was esteemed by even the most mighty and the most powerful. However, although we know much of the history of the times – political social, cultural – there doesn’t really seem to be much about Titian the man. What letters remain by Titian are mainly business letters. (Titian, like most artists, was apprenticed to a studio at an early age, and was not the most well lettered of people: he would often ask his friend, the flamboyant and larger-than-life figure Pietro Aretino, to draft formal letters he sometimes had to send to princes and clerics). We know nothing about what Titian thought on politics, on religion, on social matters, or even on art. Indeed, we find more biographical details in Hale’s book of Titian’s friend Pietro Aretino than we do of Titian himself: Aretino’s life is far better recorded. We may infer from all this that Titian, despite his social stature, and despite his closeness with some of the most powerful men of his time (including the Holy Roman Emperor himself), kept, by and large, a low profile. However, his close and long-lasting friendship with a man as erudite and intellectual as Aretino does suggest that Titian’s was not a dull personality; and his closeness with the highest and the mightiest indicates a man possessed of tact and of courtly manners. Further, the success not merely of his studio, but also of his interventions in the family business, suggest a man who was commercially shrewd. And that’s about as much as we know of his personality.
We know also of his repeated attempts to find an ecclesiastical livelihood for his elder son Pomponio, and also of Pomponio’s reluctance to lead such a life; we know also of the eventual estrangement between father and son. But beyond this, there isn’t really much to tell.
This means that Hale has to focus not so much on the details of Titian’s life, but more on the times – on the various wars and political upheavals, on the social and cultural aspects, on the various religious disputes, and so on. These were momentous times. Of course, any period in history will have its fair share of wars and conflicts, and of various political manoeuvrings, but the sixteenth century saw also the beginnings of Protestantism. In 1517, Martin Luther famously nailed the text of his “95 Theses” to the castle church door in Wittenberg. It was not as dramatic an act as it might now seem: nailing theological theses to the church door was quite common practice. Luther himself was unlikely to have anticipated what this seemingly simple act would eventually lead to, but to describe the aftermath of his act as “seismic” doesn’t seem an overstatement.
The era of the Reformation, and also of the counter-Reformation that followed, is among the most crucial periods of European history, and scholars may spend entire lifetimes studying it. I am not a historian, and my understanding of this era may with justice have been described as “sketchy”. However, while great works of art may well transcend their times (and I, for one, believe that they do), they are also, paradoxically, products of their time; and so, to come to even an adequate understanding Titian’s works, we must have some understanding, at least, of the times in which they were created. This Hale gives us: not an in-depth picture of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation (that is not what this book is about), nor an in-depth analysis of the various political power struggles, the various wars, the various territorial and trade disputes, and all the rest of it; but as much of it as is needed for a layman like myself to make at least some sense of the era in which these masterpieces were created.
But of Titian the Person, who lived through it all, we don’t really know much more than we do, say, of Shakespeare the Person. Except that, despite the picture we may still have of what great geniuses ought, at least, to be, they were both shrewd and successful businessmen.
Which leaves, of course, the art.
For any artist whose creative life spans so many years (and Titian’s spans over 60), the nature of the art has to keep renewing itself; otherwise, it becomes stagnant and the fire dies. Titian’s art did most certainly renew itself over the years: the early masterpieces are very different from the later ones. There was a period, when Titian was around 50 or so, when he seemed content merely painting portraits of rich and powerful people – although, perhaps, I shouldn’t use the term “merely”: these portraits are, without exception, magnificent: Titian ranks with the likes of Holbein or Rembrandt as among the greatest of portrait painters. However, he could easily have continued his thriving business painting merely these portraits. But one does not become a great artist without having some sort of artistic vision burning inside, no matter how shrewd a businessman one may be, and Titian, no less than his contemporary Michelangelo, had such fires burning inside. But the essence of these fires is not easy to apprehend, let alone describe.
What strikes one immediately about Titian’s paintings – and especially, I think, his early paintings – is the brilliance and vibrancy of his colours. While Luther was preparing those ninety-five theses that he famously nailed to the church door, Titian, then in his late twenties, was at work on one of the monumental masterpieces of Catholic art – The Assumption of the Virgin for the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari church in Venice, where it still hangs. It is a vast work, almost 7 metres in height, and depicts the moment when the Virgin Mary is taken up into Heaven. It is a subject that had been treated before by other artists, but never like this. Raphael had painted the subject some fifteen or so years earlier, and the contrast between the two is instructive. Raphael’s is a calm and serene affair, with the disciples in the lower half of he painting standing in an orderly line, looking up reverently into a heavenly world that is distinctly different from their own earthly world. In this heavenly world, the Virgin Mary, eyes demurely downcast in worship, is being crowned. Titian’s vision, though, is very different. The first thing one notices – at least, the first thing I noticed – was the colour. Instead of casting the scene in the sober and muted hues of Raphael, Titian chose a much warmer palate, and saturated the canvas with the most vivid of colours. Particularly striking is the flame-like red in which he chose to dress the Virgin (rather than in the more traditional blue), and the repetition of that same shade of red in the gowns worn by two of the disciples below: these three figures form an isosceles triangle, with Mary at the apex. And behind Mary is the most extraordinary golden light, which dazzles the viewer as much as it appears to dazzle Mary. Now, how one can paint an unearthly light using what are, after all, merely earthly paints, I do not know, but I cannot think of any light in any other painting I have seen that seems so insistently to belong to another world.
And, again in contrast to Raphael’s painting, there is a sense of drama. The figures here are not idealised representations: these are real, natural people, albeit witnessing a seemingly unreal and supernatural event. Of course, they are in turmoil. Most of the disciples are in the shade: the few whose faces we can see look up in bewilderment. The postures of the others suggest disorientation and confusion. What they are witnessing maybe an other-worldly vision, but it is here – right here, on earth. The heavenly world may be different from the earthly one, but the boundary is not as strictly defined as it is in Raphael’s more ordered vision: here, the muscular arm of one of the disciples seems almost to touch that other world.
And neither is there anything calm and collected about Mary’s reaction: her posture, with her hands raised, may be seen as one of religious ecstasy, but it is also, I think, the posture of an earthly creature startled by the sudden revelation of the Eternal. Caravaggio is the artist often credited with placing people from the real world into his religious scenes, but, on the basis of this painting, I’d say Titian had got there almost a century earlier.
Masterpiece followed masterpiece: religious scenes, mythological scenes, genre scenes, portraits, group portraits, small canvases, large canvases, monumental canvases – all painted with a mastery that seemed able to adapt itself to whatever was required. The tragic, the joyful, the everyday – nothing seemed beyond his scope. Even the erotic. Perhaps, in seeking to distance the sacred calling of Art from mere fleshly lust, we have tried to downplay this aspect of Titian’s art, or, maybe, sublimate it into something that may be thought of as nobler and loftier; but Titian clearly loved the nude female form, and was quite unabashed by it. When Mark Twain described Venus of Urbino as “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses”, I think he had a pretty good idea of what Titian was depicting. Indeed, I find it hard to see Titian’s nudes, in poses that often anticipate those of Playboy, and miss the delight he took in the female body. From the agony of Christ’s Passion to the voluptuous delights of the female nude: nothing in life was too sacred or too profane for his art.
Titian’s depictions of light, of various types of lights, are still as breathtaking now as they must have seemed back then; his figures are endowed with tremendous life and with vitality, his textures are exquisite, and his colours are like nothing seen before. Of course, other artists have also used vivid colours, but Titian, to a greater extent, I think, than just about any other artist I can think of, seemed to depict a world in which the vividness of the colours seems to define the dynamism and the radiance of life itself.
When an artist’s work ranges so widely, it becomes difficult to identify, let alone describe, the nature of his artistry, or of his artistic vision. The very range of Titian’s work is dazzling: it seems hard to imagine an artist less single-minded. But it is quite sobering to realise that much of what Titian had painted, including many regarded as among his greatest masterpieces, is now lost. The Assassination of St Peter Martyr, for instance, was regarded by many as Titian’s greatest masterpiece: it was destroyed completely by fire in 1867, and what hangs now in its place is a copy made in 1691 by a Johann Carl Loth. How well or otherwise this copy communicates what the original painting had communicated can only be a matter of conjecture.
But looking through the astonishing treasures that remain, I really don’t know that it is possible to pick a single painting as the “greatest” masterpiece. And, contrary to the myth of great artists being recognised only after their deaths, the art of Titian (as of Michelangelo) was recognised in his own times.
Titian was patronised even by the Emperor Charles V, and, after his death, by his son Philip II, both of whom liberally commissioned works from him – portraits of themselves and of their families, and subjects both religious and mythological. It was for Philip that, in the mid-1550s, Titian painted a set of six paintings, now collectively known as “Poesie”, based on episodes from Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. Hale describes them as:
… first and foremost about erotic passion (or in the case of the Diana pictures about its negation) which for better or worse changes us and determines our destiny. And just as Ovid edited the much older and more detailed Greek myths in order to dramatize that underlying theme, so Titian took liberties with Ovid to convey, in a way that would be rivalled only by Shakespeare, the many manifestations of the most primitive and overwhelming of human emotions: the sadness of anticipated loss, the suspense, danger, cruelty and unfairness, and the sheer anarchic fun. It was in these paintings that Titian … showed himself to be the dispenser of all emotions and the plenipotentiary of the senses.
The series consists of; Danaë (the version currently in Apsley House, London, is now believed to be the one presented to Philip); Venus and Adonis (Prado, Madrid); Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Collection, London); Rape of Europa (Isabella Stewart Gardner Collection, Boston); and two paintings featuring Diana, now shown in rotation in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and the National Gallery, London – Diana and Actaeon, and Diana and Callisto. Lucian Freud once described these two Diana paintings as simply “the most beautiful paintings in the world”.
Though now scattered around different galleries, in 2020, somewhat delayed by the pandemic, they were they brought together and exhibited in a single room. This exhibition toured the world, and I saw it when it came to the National Gallery, London. The exhibition was titled, perhaps rather cheesily, Love, Desire, Death. Big themes, certainly, and perhaps themes that all major artists have to address. But there was no sense of portentiousness. I felt little sense of awe or of reverence that one often feels in the presence of art of this stature. Rather, what I felt was a sense of exhilaration, of elation; a sense of being in the midst of the most extraordinary whirl of colours and of movement. Or, as Sheila Hale puts it, a sense of “sheer anarchic fun”.
But, along with the anarchic fun, there is also cruelty. And it seems to me that as Titian entered into his old age, this element of cruelty started becoming an increasingly salient feature in his work. Not that Titian hadn’t depicted tragic themes before, but the vibrancy of his colours and the exuberance of his compositions communicated in those earlier works an intoxicated sense of elation, of exhilaration, that seemed somehow to counteract the tragic. But in his later paintings, the tone seems to me to become darker, both literally and metaphorically. The palette becomes more restrained, the brushwork rougher, the finish less glossy; and there seems less radiance in the light. At times, indeed, he seems to be depicting wat Milton later famously referred to as “darkness visible”: rather than a brilliant or a gracious light bathing the world, we seem at times, in his very late work, to be enveloped in some profound murk lit only fitfully by spots of light spontaneously bursting and dying in the air.
To see the contrast most clearly, one may compare two paintings of his on the same subject – The Crowning of Thorns. The earlier version, now hanging in the Louvre in Paris, dates from around 1540, when Titian was around 50 or so (his exact date of birth is uncertain); the later, now hanging in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, was painted some thirty-five years later in extreme old age. The composition is much the same in both, but where, in the earlier painting, the vibrancy of the colours and of the light involves us in the sense of movement, there is no mistaking the terror and the despondency of the later vision, painted with brushstrokes that are far less smooth, and seen seemingly through broken shards of light. The vision has, without doubt, darkened.
Not that the turn was sudden, of course. Even in the “Poesie”, we had had more than a few hints of the tragic. Take, say, the painting of Diana and Callisto: In Ovid’s poem, Callisto was one of Diana’s handmaiden, but was banished after she was judged to have broken her vow of chastity. (Never mind that she had been raped by Jupiter.) In Titian’s painting, against a dramatically darkening sky, the pregnant Callisto is dragged before Diana by the other handmaidens, and right at the very centre of the composition is Diana’s imperiously outstretched finger, condemning without sympathy. If the mood isn’t quite tragic, it isn’t, perhaps, too far off.
But this was not the last painting by Titian about Diana, and neither is this the last time Diana passes her divine and inhuman judgement on an uncomprehending humanity. In one of the paintings in the “Poesie” he had painted for Philip, he had shown Actaeon stumbling upon Diana’s bower; The Death of Actaeon, now hanging in the National Gallery, London, shows its terrible aftermath. Actaeon is transformed into a stag, and is torn to pieces by his own hounds.
Whether Titian had intended this as an addition to the series is not known. My guess is that it isn’t, as its tone, far from projecting a sense of dizzying intoxication, is now grim. The palette is far more restricted than it had been – even though a forest scene, there’s barely any trace of greenery – and the whole thing seems oppressive and airless. The goddess, faceless (her facial features are not seen) delivers a terrible judgement on humanity that can make no sense to human sensibilities.
This was one of the paintings still in the studio at the time of Titian’s death, and there is some controversy about whether it is finished, but I am not sure it matters. Over his last two decades or so, Titan had moved away from the highly finished works of his earlier years to something much newer and much more innovative: in a great many paintings now, not only are the individual brush-strokes not hidden, they’re not meant to be hidden: we’re supposed to see the internal workings, as it were; the very textures of the brush-strokes is part of the effect these pictures are intended to create. I am no art historian, but I think this was new, and was taken up afterwards by entire generations of artists.
Titian had painted tragic subjects before, but comparing his earlier tragic works to his later is a bit like comparing Romeo and Juliet to King Lear. The exuberance has gone; in its stead has descended a profound gloom, as mankind suffers dumbly under divine judgements that, to human standards, can make no sense. The Flaying of Marsyas, now in the State Museum of Kroměříž in the Czech Republic, was also one of the paintings still in Titian’s studio at the time of his death, and depicts the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the satyr, Marsyas, who had challenged the god Apollo to a contest of musical skill. Marsyas had lost, of course, and the punishment divinely deemed suitable for his transgression was for him to be skinned alive. In this painting, right down the central vertical axis, we have the startling and rather grotesque image of the satyr Marsyas hung upside down, his goat’s legs prominent. The hideous act is skinning alive has already begun, and a puppy sniffs at the blood that is soaking the ground. To the left, a musician, possibly Apollo himself, plays a stringed instrument (a lira di braccio), gazing upward, and seemingly oblivious to the atrocity carried out right under his nose. And to the right, King Midas looks down upon the skinning: there is no trace of horror either in his posture or in his expression. These figures are all painted close to the plane of the canvas, taking up the foreground; and what little space there is between these figures is painted with textures so thick as to appear airless. The colours are bright, but not really in harmony: they appear garish. And the light is dense and murky. I saw this painting when it was exhibited in London nearly twenty years ago, and it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, as grotesque and as disturbing as anything I’ve seen. It projects a sense of terror that I have experienced only one other time in the presence of art – when I stood before the Black Paintings of Goya in the Prado.
There’s a late Nymph and Shepherd hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, but we’re far from a pastoral idyll here: the shepherd holds his pipe, and the nymph smiles at him, but the landscape these two traditional lovers inhabit, far from evoking the pastoral, seems to speak of some apocalyptic devastation. It’s as if Titian had deliberately seized upon the traditional images of pastoral grace precisely in order to subvert them. But to what purpose he subverts them in such a manner, it is for us to decide.
And there is the enigmatic and terrifying Pietà, which Titian, seemingly, had intended to be placed over his own tomb. There seems a sort of nostalgic glance back at the graceful and radiant paintings of Giovanni Bellini, who had been active in Venice when Titian had been starting out: Bellini had often set his figures within a niche, with an arch overhead. (The San Zaccaria Alterpiece is a very beautiful example of Bellini’s art.) In Titian’s painting, we have, once again, the arch and the niche, but there is nothing graceful or radiant about this. The arch itself seems constructed of large, ugly stone, roughly put together. The light, once again, is unreal, but it is no heavenly light; we seem, rather, in some unearthly region, as far as can be imagined from the light of Paradise that had greeted Mary on her assumption in that painting from over fifty years earlier. The paintwork here is rough: the paint on the chest of the dead Christ seems to have been applied with the fingers rather than with a brush. Mary looks upon her dead son in quiet contemplation, but, towering over her and forming the apex of an assymetrical triangle, is the gigantic figure of Mary Magdalene, screaming into the dark. Standing before this extraordinary painting in the Gallerie dell’Academia in Venice is a chilling experience: one feels in the presence of death itself. One feels the need immediately afterwards to go over to the Frari church to see again The Assumption of the Virgin to remind oneself of what Titian’s vision once had been.
It is hard to say why Titian’s vision darkened. From the evidence of his paintings, it was a gradual rather than a sudden change. But I don’t know that biographical reasons, even assuming they exist, could take us any closer to the heart of this vast and magnificent body of work. Great artists will always look beyond what is immediately in front of them: studying what is immediately in front of them can be instructive, but we mustn’t expect that to unlock the mysteries that all great art contains.
It is hard to see how Sheila Hale’s biography of Titian could possibly be bettered. She tells us what little we know of him as a person, without passing judgement on any aspect of it; and, more importantly, she gives us, with great scholarly rigour, a fascinating picture of the historic and cultural background against which Titian created these magnificent works. Reading this book, we come to understand these works in the context of their times; but if we are to understand how these works – from the profound sensuality and exuberance of his earlier paintings to the dark and comfortless vision of the later – we must, as ever, look for ourselves. The miracles are right there, before us: all we need to do is to look. Look, and wonder.
The Argumentative Old Git 
