Titian. Sir Claude Phillips
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on canvas, 139.2 × 181.7 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1506–1507.
Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Scuola del Santo, Venice.
Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian’s share in the much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Of the sixteen frescos executed in 1511 by Titian, in concert with Domenico Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are from the brush of the master himself: The Miracle of the Newborn Child, Saint Anthony Heals the Leg of a Youth and The Miracle of the jealous Husband. Here the figures, the composition and the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the trace of Giorgione’s influence. The composition has just the timidity and lack of rhythm and variety that to the last marks that of Barbarelli. The figures have his naive truth, his warmth and splendour of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The Miracle of the jealous Husband is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what our neighbours would today call the crime passionnel.
A convenient date for the magnificent Saint Mark with Saints Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian is 1511, when Titian, having completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the truculent Saint Mark; but so were the recently terminated frescos. The noble altarpiece[22] symbolises, or rather commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the terrors of the League of Cambrai. On one side are Saint Sebastian, standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, and Saint Roch for plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, Saints Cosmas and Damian, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli’s own could also be described. In particular it shows points of contact with the colouring of the Three Philosophers, which, on the authority of Marcantonio Michiel (the Anonimo), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both sumptuous and boldly contrasting in hues, the sovereign unity of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, nor by any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques. Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last are among the most admirable portrait-figures in Titian’s life work. In them a simplicity and concentration akin to that of Giovanni Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and flexibility of Barbarelli. The Saint Sebastian is the most beautiful among the youthful male figures, as the Venus of Giorgione and the Venus of the Sacred and Profane Love are the most beautiful among the female figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such presentations of youth in its flower abounded. There is something androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a delight in portraying the fresh comeliness and elastic beauty of form proper to a youth on the point of becoming a man was common to many Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had coloured the whole art of Greece.
The singularly attractive, yet a little puzzling, Holy Family with a Shepherd, is in the National Gallery. The landscape is of the early type, and the execution is, even for that time, curiously small and lacking in breadth. In particular the projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescos. The noble type and the stilted attitude of the Saint Joseph suggest the Saint Mark of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of the thick-set young shepherd, who recalls Palma more than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, with a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly in the Miracle of the Newborn Child of the Scuola. Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Tribute-Money, c. 1516.
Oil on wood, 75 × 56 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Baptism of Christ, c. 1513–1514.
Oil on wood, 115 × 89 cm. Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Noli me tangere, c. 1514.
Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 91.9 cm. The National Gallery, London.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Entombment, c. 1520.
Oil on canvas, 148 × 212 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The splendidly beautiful Salome with the Head of John the Baptist in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but definitively placed by Morelli among the Giorgionesque works of Titian, belongs to about the same period as Sacred and Profane Love, and would therefore come in before rather than after the sojourn at Padua and Vicenza. The intention was not so much to emphasise the tragic character of the motif as to exhibit to the highest advantage the voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing for Herod’s baleful consort. Repetitions of this Salome existed in the Northbrook Collection and in that of R. H. Benson. A work traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not only this Doria picture, but that Salome which at Dorchester House is attributed to Pordenone, and another similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in the collection of the Earl of Chichester. The common origin of these works is noticeable in the head of Saint John on the charger, as it appears in each. All of them again show a family resemblance in this particular respect to the interesting full-length Judith at the Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, as well as to the over-painted half-length Judith in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to Hollar’s print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.[23] The sumptuous but much-injured Vanitas, which is in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich – a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the Salome, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other symbols of earthly vanity – may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it to Morelli[24] that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle – as the Salome was ascribed – to Pordenone, has been with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The popular Flora of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though much of the bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in this section of Titian’s life-work, displaying as it does a technique more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served for the Venus of Sacred and Profane Love, though the picture comes some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called Alfonso d’Este and Laura Dianti, known as the Young Woman with a Mirror in the Louvre. Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful Noli me tangere of the National Gallery, which must have its place somewhere here among the early works. The picture is still Giorgionesque, most markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that period. The Magdalene is, appropriately enough, of the same type as the exquisite, golden blond courtesans – or, if you will, models – who constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and subtlety
One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian is to speak of the
In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to the early sixteenth century, there should also be mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known