Titian. Sir Claude Phillips
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the art of Venice, that fire ran like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth. The blood of his contemporaries and juniors was of the material to ignite and flame like his own.
The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that “they who were excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of flesh, etc.”[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B. C.; just as the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first years of the cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when – to take one instance only among many – the ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was always of love. In that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina’s courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty, Pietro Bembo wrote for “Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa illustrissima di Ferrara,” and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius, the leaflets which, under the title Gli Asolani, ne’ quali si ragiona d’ amore,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.
The Virgin and Child in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, popularly known as La Zingarella, which is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class, is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength and richness of the colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already Giorgionesque. Even Titian here asserts himself, and lays the foundation of his own manner. The characteristics of the divine Child differ widely from those adopted by Giorgione in the altarpieces of Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The Virgin is a woman beautified only by youth and the intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione and Titian in their loveliest types of woman are sensuous compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But Giorgione’s sensuousness is that which may easily characterise the goddess, while Titian’s is that of the woman, much nearer to the everyday world in which both artists lived.
The famous Christ Carrying the Cross in the Chiesa di San Rocco in Venice was first ascribed by Vasari to Giorgione in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The biographer quaintly adds: “This figure, which many have believed to be from the hand of Giorgione, is today the most revered object in Venice, and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life.” Indeed the embers of this debate remain hot to this day, as the Scuola di San Rocco now reattributes this work to the Castelfranco master, Giorgione. The picture, which presents “Christ dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the background,” resembles most among Giorgione’s authentic creations the Christ bearing the Cross. The resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this latter – one of the earliest Giorgiones – still recalls Giovanni Bellini, and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception. In both renderings of the divine countenance there seems to be a sinister, disquieting look, almost a threat underlying that expression of serenity and humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the Christ between Saint Andrew and Saint Catherine. Here the head of the infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest. Crowe and Cavalcaselle refused to accept this picture as a genuine Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place among the early works.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Virgin and Child (“Gypsy Madonna”), c. 1510.
Oil on wood panel, 65.8 × 83.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine, Saint Dominic, and a Donor, c. 1512–1516.
Oil on canvas, 138 × 185 cm. Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Parma.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Virgin and Child with Saints Dorothy and George, c. 1515.
Oil on wood, 86 × 130 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the Three Ages and Sacred and Profane Love, one is inclined to place the Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI to Saint Peter, once in the collection of Charles I[9] and now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The main elements of Titian’s art may be seen here, in imperfect fusion, as in very few of his early productions. The somewhat undignified Saint Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in the Sacred and Profane Love, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his immediate followers. The magnificently robed Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, echoes the portraiture style of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio, while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro – an ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of fleets, as the background suggests – is one of the most characteristic portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos and intensity contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same Baffo in the renowned Retable of the Madonna of the Pesaro, painted twenty-three years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It is the first in order of a great series, including the Ariosto of the National Gallery, the Man with a Glove, the Portrait of a Man in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and perhaps the famous Concert in the Palazzo Pitti, once ascribed to Giorgione. Crowe, Cavalcaselle and Georges Lafenestre[10] have all called attention to the fact that the detested Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot well have been executed after that time. It would have been a bold man who attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI into a votive picture painted immediately after his death. How is it possible to assume that Sacred and Profane Love, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art, was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or at the latest in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted his Castelfranco altarpiece, his Venus nor his Three Philosophers (Aeneas, Evander and Pallas). Old Gian Bellini himself had not entered upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great San Zaccaria altarpiece finished in 1505.[11]
Vasari’s many manifest errors and disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained relations between Giorgione and our painter, which are supposed to have arisen around the fresco decorations painted by the two artists on the façades of the new Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on the 28th of January 1505. That they decorated it together with a series of frescos for which the exterior of the Fondaco is famous is all that is known for certain, Titian being apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of these frescos only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved in a much-damaged condition, the few fragments that remained of those facing the side canal having been destroyed in 1884.[12] Vasari
Vasari,
One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman. A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the basis for such a picture as Titian’s
Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king’s effects, taken after his execution, as
The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture,
Kugler’s