Titian

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1590, the painter and art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo called Titian "the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world". The man behind that praise was Tiziano Vecellio, born in Pieve di Cadore near Belluno, in a mountainous region ruled by Venice. He would become the most important artist of Renaissance Venetian painting, sought after first by Venice, then by north Italian princes, and finally by the Habsburgs and the papacy.

  Yet the basic facts of his life resist certainty. The exact date of his birth is unknown, and when he was old he told Philip II of Spain he was born in 1474, a claim scholars find most unlikely. He worked for some sixty years as the undisputed master of his city, painting popes and emperors, naked goddesses and dying saints. How did a timber merchant's son from the Cadore mountains end up granted noble status by a monarch? What was the secret in his brushwork that later artists, even the Expressionists, kept measuring themselves against? And why, in his final years, did he paint his own face into a prayer to ward off the plague that would kill him?

• 2. The Cadore Inheritance

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  Gregorio Vecellio, Titian's father, was active as a soldier and closely associated with the Venetian Arsenal, but worked mainly as a timber merchant and managed mines in the mountainous Cadore region for their owners. The family was well established there. Titian's grandfather, Conte Vecellio, was a prominent notary who held a number of offices in the local administration, and three of Conte's sons followed him into that trade.

  Little is known of Titian's mother, Lucia. The Vecellio family of Cadore are descended from the Lombard Da Camino family, through their common ancestor Vecile da Camino, and the Da Camino most likely descend from the Collalto family. This was not a household of painters. Several other members of the Vecelli family would later try their hand at the craft, but the lineage Titian was born into traded in timber, grain, and legal offices.

  The business instincts ran deep in him. Titian invested in real estate and lent money at interest, and like other merchants he dealt in lumber and grain. In 1542 he obtained a contract for supplying grain to Cadore when local stores were low. He kept a villa on the Manza Hill, and the so-called Titian's mill, often discernible in his studies, stood at Collontola near Belluno.

• 3. Apprenticed To A City

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  Ludovico Dolce, who knew Titian, said the painter had four masters: first Sebastiano Zuccato, then Gentile Bellini, then his brother Giovanni Bellini, and last, Giorgione. No documentation for these relationships has been found. Dolce writes that the boy was sent to Venice at age nine, with his brother Francesco, to live with an uncle and apprentice to Zuccato, whose family of artists is best known for mosaics.

  Giorgio Vasari, who also knew Titian, gives a different account, claiming the artist first studied under Giovanni Bellini. Because there is no documentation of Titian's work before 1510, there is no way to know which version is closer to the truth. Following Gentile Bellini's death in 1507, Titian entered an apprenticeship with Giovanni, acknowledged by contemporaries as the preeminent Venetian painter of the day.

  In the city Titian found a group of young men about his own age, among them Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano Luciani, and Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione. In 1507-1508, Giorgione was commissioned to paint exterior frescoes on the rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a warehouse for German merchants beside the Rialto bridge. Titian painted the facade above the street, probably in 1509, and many contemporary critics found his work more impressive. Only some badly damaged fragments of the paintings remain.

• 4. Out Of Giorgione's Shadow

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  The relationship between the two young artists evidently contained a significant element of rivalry, and distinguishing their works from this period remains a subject of scholarly controversy. A substantial number of attributions moved from Giorgione to Titian during the 20th century, with little traffic the other way. One of the earliest known Titian works, Christ Carrying the Cross in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, was long regarded as being by Giorgione.

  After Giorgione's early death in 1510, Titian continued to paint Giorgionesque subjects for a time, though his style developed its own features, including the bold and expressive brushwork characteristic of his later years. His talent in fresco shows in the work he painted in 1511 at Padua, in the Carmelite church and in the Scuola del Santo. Among the preserved scenes are the Meeting at the Golden Gate and episodes from the life of St. Anthony of Padua.

  Giorgione died in 1510, Giovanni Bellini in 1516, and Sebastiano del Piombo had gone to Rome, leaving Titian unrivaled in the Venetian School. An early portrait, A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, painted around 1509, shows how far his reach would extend. Rembrandt saw it at auction, sketched a thumbnail of it, and later studied it closely in the home of a Sicilian merchant named Ruffio. The work inspired the Dutch artist to sketch his own self-portrait in 1639, then to make an etching, and finally a self-portrait in oils in 1640.

• 5. The Sansaria

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  On the 31st of May 1513, Titian petitioned the Council of Ten for a commission to paint a great battle scene for the Doge's palace. At the same time he requested the next available sansaria, a broker's patent at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi that assured an annual stipend of 120 ducats, whose symbolic value was usually greater than the income itself. The Council, who already knew his reputation, were receptive. The request was granted, reversed in March 1514, and recorded again that November.

  The patent carried implicit recognition as quasi-official painter to the republic, and an opportunity to win major commissions from the state. Titian did not obtain it on Giovanni Bellini's death in late 1516, however. Apparently the Senate wanted to keep his services in reserve until he proved himself, and the appointment was withheld until 1523. Once he had it, he transformed it over time into a sinecure that required little work.

  Venetian society was profoundly conservative, and painters were relegated to the craftsmen guild of the Arte dei Depentori. Titian was active in the guild's local affairs, yet felt far from confined by the medieval corporate system with its duties and political strictures. He enjoyed the freedom afforded by his continued residence in the Most Serene Republic, a freedom that would let him serve emperors without ever fully becoming a courtier.

• 6. Altars And Goddesses

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  In 1516, Titian completed his masterpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin, for the high altar of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. It is still in situ and is his largest single panel. This piece of colourism, on a grand scale rarely before seen in Italy, created a sensation. The composition unites three domains: the apostles on earth, the Madonna rising in the sky, and God the Father in heaven looking over all.

  Major altarpieces followed at Brescia and Ancona, and for the Pesaro family chapel in the Frari. For the Church of Santi Nazzaro e Celso in Brescia, a papal legate named Altobello Averoldi commissioned a St Sebastian, signed and dated 1522. The wounded saint, an intercessor during outbreaks of plague, gave Titian an occasion to portray the male nude in a religious context. Merchants in the Dalmatian city of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, commissioned a polyptych for their cathedral.

  For the camerino of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara came three large mythological scenes: The Bacchanal of the Andrians and the Worship of Venus, both in the Prado, and Bacchus and Ariadne, painted between 1520 and 1523, in London. In that last work Bacchus leaps from a chariot drawn by two cheetahs toward Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on Naxos. From her jewelled wedding crown he creates the constellation Corona Borealis, whose stars Titian places in the upper left of the sky to symbolize their eternal love.

• 7. Painter To The Emperor

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  In 1533, after painting a portrait of the Emperor Charles V in Bologna, Titian was made a Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur, and his children were also made nobles of the Empire. He had become court painter to Charles that same year. The duties were comparatively light. He crossed the Alps twice to join the emperor in Germany and made a few trips to Asti, Bologna, and Milan, but otherwise his presence at court was not required.

  The Equestrian Portrait of Charles V, completed in 1548, was commissioned to commemorate the emperor's defeat of the Schmalkaldic League at the Battle of Mühlberg. It shows Charles in battle armour carrying a lance, suggesting a Roman emperor going on campaign, and casting him as a Christian knight. Titian's pensions accumulated across the years. On the 15th of August 1541, Charles awarded him an annual stipend of 100 scudi payable at a bank in Milan, and on the 10th of July 1548 granted a second pension of the same amount.

  Commissions from Charles, and then from his son Philip II, monopolized the artist's output from the 1550s. Philip II signed a royal deed on the 5th of July 1571 reaffirming a stipend of 200 scudi annually, with the right to transfer the privilege to Titian's son Orazio. To meet the rising demand, Titian reordered his workshop and began producing variants and replicas in a systematic, almost assembly-line fashion, using specialised collaborators whose copies he retouched to impart his own spirit.

• 8. The Poems And The Pietà

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  For Philip II, Titian painted a series of large mythological works he called the "poesie", or poems, inspired mostly by Ovid. They include Danaë, sent to Philip in 1553; Venus and Adonis, delivered in 1554; The Rape of Europa, delivered to what is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1562; and The Death of Actaeon, begun in 1559 but never completed or delivered. In 1623, when Prince Charles of England sought to marry Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, he asked for all of Titian's poesie as part of her dowry, until the wedding was cancelled and the crated paintings were hung back on the palace walls.

  Titian's final painting, the Pietà, is an image of tragic pathos. In it he portrays himself as Saint Jerome, prostrate before the Virgin, reaching toward the lifeless body of Christ. The votive tablet in the lower right shows Titian and his son Orazio praying before a heavenly vision, and behind it sits Titian's coat-of-arms with the double-headed Habsburg eagle. Composed of seven pieces of canvas stitched together, measuring 378 cm by 348 cm, it is one of the largest he ever painted. Because it was to decorate his own tomb, it is often read as a painted prayer for protection from the plague.

  While the plague raged in Venice, Titian died on the 27th of August 1576, at least eighty-six and no more than ninety. He was buried beneath the Frari's Altar of the Crucifix, without the Pietà in place, after the Franciscan friars returned it. Very shortly after, his son and sole heir Orazio also died of the plague, leaving no will and complicating the estate. The Pietà passed eventually to the painter Jacopo Palma il Giovane, and one legacy of Titian's reaches far beyond the canvas: since the 19th century, Titian hair has named the red hair of women, a phrase Anne Shirley puzzles over in the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables.