Titian. Sir Claude Phillips
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the great merchant city of the North as Venice was of the South. Rubens, who could arguably be described as the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period during the Renaissance. He too was without rival in the creation of those vast altarpieces that made famous the churches that owned them; he too was the finest painter of landscape of his time, using it as an accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait painter who, in his greatest efforts – those sumptuous and almost truculent portraits d’apparat of princes, nobles and splendid dames – knew no superior, though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Velázquez. Rubens united nature and man in a more demonstrative, seemingly closer embrace, drawing from a more exuberant vigour, but taking from the very closeness some of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a realist as his successor, and one less content with the mere exterior of things, was filled with the spirit of beauty which was everywhere; in the mountain home of his birth as well as in the radiant home of his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art always demonstrated, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion that distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art from elsewhere.
The relation between the two masters – both in the first line of the world’s painters – was much like that between Venice and Antwerp. The apogee of each city represented in its different way the highest point that modern Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as distinguished from mental culture. Reality, with all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But it was reality made at once truer, wider and more suave by the method of its presentation. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements, to the genuine naturalness of such a way of life. Art itself could only add to it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to the beauties of the land, to the force, character and warm human charm of the people. This is what Titian, one of the best among his contemporaries of the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which, in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek for a parallel.
Other Venetian artists may, in one way or another, more irresistibly enlist our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some special branch of their art. Frequently, though, we still find ourselves invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them; taking him as the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre and, it could be said, more happily combined the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his creation of a phase of art of which the penetrating exquisiteness has never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only marginally less the poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of a higher sublimity that Titian did not reach until he came to the extreme limits of old age. This assertion is not a mere paradox, as the great Madonna del Carmelo at the Galleria dell’Academia and the magnificent Trinity in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms to the painter of the Assunta, the Entombment and the Supper at Emmaus? Tintoretto, at his best, had lightning flashes of illumination, a titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art. All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not dissimilar comparison might be made between the portraits of Lorenzo Lotto and those of Titian. No other Venetian painter had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him to unconsciously infuse into it much of his own tremulous sensitiveness and charm, while seeking to penetrate into the depths of human individuality. In this way no portraits of the sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in deciphering them it is necessary to take into account the peculiar temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]
Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has serious rivals in those Veronese who became Venetians: the elder Bonifazi and the younger Paolo Veronese. That is to say, there will be found lovers of painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in frank juxtaposition to a relatively restricted palette, used with more subtle, if less dazzling art than theirs, and resulting in a deeper, graver richness. That is, a more significant beauty, if less stimulating in gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant colourist of the Venetian school, and Dives and Lazarus of the Galleria dell’Academia and the Finding of Moses at the Brera are at hand to give solid support to such an assertion.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Portrait of Aretino, 1545.
Oil on canvas, 96.7 × 77.6 cm. Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, Florence.
Giovanni Bellini, The Doge Leonardo Loredan, c. 1501–1504.
Oil on poplar, 61.6 × 45.1 cm. The National Gallery, London.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Portrait of Doge Marcantonio Trevisani, 1553.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 86.5 cm. Szépmūvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Self-Portrait, c. 1562–1564.
Oil on canvas, 96 × 75 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held as the greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors – painters such as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri, Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci and Caliari – dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors, however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant grey and large depths of cool dark shadow – brown shot through with silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the church of that name at Venice, the Allegory on the Victory of Lepanto in the Galleria dell’Academia, or the vast Nozze di Cana of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it was in one sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris Bordone – constituting as it does a further development of painting from the purely decorative standpoint – must appear just a little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler, graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and indeed with Tintoretto, colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to realise the subject presented with splendid and penetrating truth, and colour in accordance with the true Venetian principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very body and soul of painting, as it is in nature.
To put forward Paolo Veronese as purely the dazzling virtuoso would be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art. He could
For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto’s portraits and a sustained analysis of his art generally, Bernard Berenson’s