TITIAN, VECELLIO. - Painter, b. at Pieve di Cadore, probably around 1488-90, d. at Venice on 27 Aug. 1576.
Son of Gregorio and Lucia, brother of Francesco, father of Orazio. One of the greatest artists of all time. His year of birth was long held to be 1477, which would mean that T. lived nearly a century. But it is highly probable that T. was less old than he, or others on his behalf, wished to make believe (the question is not without importance, since it is one thing to imagine that T. painted the Assumption at 40, another at 30 — Dolce even says that he painted it "as a youth" — in the development of Venetian painting). At the age of nine — and this is a quite credible account — his father is said to have entrusted him in Venice for the study of art to the musician Sebastiano Zaccato. From there he would have passed into the workshops of Gentile and then of Giovanni Bellini. But then, attracted by the art of Giorgione, he attached himself to him, and when the latter frescoed in 1508 the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi facing the Grand Canal, he received from him the commission to paint the side facing the Mercerie (frescoes now vanished, and only in part handed down to us in the engravings of Zanetti, 1760). Giorgione was then little more than 30 years old and was already famous; T. was in his earfirst steps. But already in 1511 he is found working on his own in Padua, at the Scuola del Santo, where he frescoes three Stories of St. Anthony, still in existence. On the death of Giorgione from plague in 1511, T. took it upon himself to complete some canvases of the deceased Master.
In 1513 he offers himself to the service of the Republic of Venice, declaring that he had refused foreign offers, and says he is ready to paint the Battle of Cadore for the Hall of the Great Council. At the same time he asks that the "senseria" of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi be granted to him, on the same conditions already held by Bellini. The Council of Ten grants him, after much hesitation, the requested "senseria" and a painter's studio at S. Samuele. T. undertakes, in return, to paint every reigning doge in life size. Finally, in 1516, he is also given the commission for the Battle (portraits and Battle destroyed in the fire of 1577). From 1516 he is in contact with the Court of Ferrara, for the paintings of the Bacchanals, intended for the camerini of Alfonso I d'Este; but only in 1523 does T. complete the canvas of Bacchus and Ariadne. In that same year T. begins his relations with the Court of Mantua. In 1530 his wife Cecilia dies, with whom he had lived freely until 1525; and by whom he had three children: Pomponio, who became a priest; Orazio, a painter; and Lavinia. In 1530 he meets Charles V at Bologna and paints his portrait; and from that day begin his relations with the Habsburgs, which had so much weight in the life and fortune of T. In Sept. 1531 he abandons the workshop at S. Samuele and takes a house at the "Birri", in the northern part of the city, with a view over the lagoon and the native mountains: he will live there until his death. In 1533 Charles V names him Court painter, count palatine, knight of the Golden Spur, and with a noble title transmissible to his sons (in '41 he grants him an annual pension of 100 scudi, increased to 200 in '48).
In the autumn of 1542 his relations with the Farnese begin; and in Apr. of the following year T. paints the Portrait of Pope Paul III Farnese (who was staying at Bologna, Ferrara and Busseto). In July he is already back in Venice. In 1545 T. goes to Rome, stopping at Ferrara and at Pesaro, where he is received by Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino. Having arrived on 15 Oct., he is received with great honours both by Card. Bembo and by the Pontiff himself and lodged at the Belvedere. Vasari acts as his guide, he meets Michelangelo, he is named an honorary citizen. He remains there until the spring of 1546. On his return he stops at Florence, as a guest of Cosimo de' Medici at Poggio a Cajano. Already at the beginning of 1548 he goes to Augsburg, at the invitation of Charles V, and remains there until Oct. In 1550 he is summoned there again and stays until the summer of '51. During these two sojourns in Germany, T. paints the portraits of Charles V, of Philip II and of the major personalities gathered there; from then on begin the dispatches of his paintings to the Spanish Court (as well as his reiterated and pressing requests for payments, which earn him the reputation of being greedy and avaricious).
At the "Birri", T. lives like a great lord, surrounded by friends, among whom, first of all, Aretino and Sansovino (resident in Venice since 1527). But it is also a life of strenuous, constant work, aimed at ever higher goals. Perhaps no artist had more honours in his lifetime than he; and history has confirmed them.
The beginnings of T. are not yet well clarified. It must be considered certain that he received from the daily youthful vision of the mosaics of Zaccato quite strong impressions, such as to constitute the germ of his intense colouristic sensibility, and of his painting "by patches".
Of no great importance was his study with Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, so much is T.'s style immediately different from theirs. And this style (that is, this new way of painting) takes its start from Giorgione, his master. Dolce, in his Dialogo, which is of 1557, reports that Giorgione would have said of T.: "even in his mother's womb he was a painter"; a clear allusion to the precocity of the artist, who, not yet twenty, was frescoing alongside him one side of the Fondaco. Certainly Giorgionesque were the first works of T., pervaded by intense lyricism. Thus the Concert champêtre of the Louvre, erroneously attributed to Giorgione, the Noli me tangere of the National Gallery in London, the Legend of Orpheus at the Galleria Carrara in Bergamo, the Madonna with Sts. Roch and Anthony of the Prado, the Adulteress of the Glasgow Museum, thus finally the Sacred and Profane Love of the Galleria Borghese, all works to be dated between 1508-12 ca.; to which is to be added the other masterpiece, the celebrated Sleeping Venus of Dresden, which belongs to T., and not to Giorgione, as was long believed. Of 1510-15 ca. is also the canvas with Jacopo Pesaro and Pope Alexander before St. Mark, of the Antwerp Museum.
To this youthful period belong likewise the altarpiece of the sacristy of the Salute with St. Mark enthroned and four saints, the Zingarella of the Vienna Museum, the Three Ages of the Bridgwater Gallery in London, the S. Conversazione of the Galleria Balbi in Genoa and the famous Concert of Pitti (this too erroneously attributed to Giorgione), to mention the most important. Of his Portraits, of those years, let be remembered the Knight of Malta of the Uffizi, the so-called Ariosto of the National Gallery; the so-called Parma of Vienna, and the very beautiful female figures - also these somewhat idealized portraits - such as the Flora of the Uffizi, the Salome of the Galleria Doria in Rome, the Lucrezia of Vienna, the so-called Laura Dianti of the Louvre: all works full of dreamy sweetness, of light impasto, but of intense fiery colour, rich in glazes. The lyrical element is preponderant, even if already one perceives, in some fresco of the Scuola del Santo and in some passage of the Adulteress and elsewhere, a power of dramatic expression potently effective. And if one recalls other youthful masterpieces of T., such as the Christ of the coin of Dresden, the Annunciation of the cathedral of Treviso, or finally the exquisite Baptism of Christ of the Capitoline Gallery in Rome, one will have a revealing vision of the creative power of the artist up to his 30th year ca.
With the Assumption of the Frari begins the period of T.'s maturity, teeming with great creations, profoundly innovative. It is known from Dolce that the altarpiece, when it was unveiled to the public (1510), was not understood, so different was it from the "dead and cold things of the Bellinis, the Vivarinis", etc., "but then people began to marvel at the new manner found in Venice by T.". The "new manner" consisted indeed in the monumental grandeur of the conceptions, in the expressive vivacity in the figures, in the bold movement of the composition; but above all in the way of using colour, no longer superimposed on the drawing, but itself the creator of form through a new process of thick impasto, by patches, all alight with sonorous vibrations. Thus was born, from the seed of Giorgione (which Dolce calls "that little spark which T. had discovered in the things of Giorgione") the idea of modern painting.
The Assumption was followed by a series of masterpieces, each of which marked a new stage in the history of Venetian painting: the altarpiece with the Madonna appearing to Sts. Francis and Blaise, executed in 1520 for the church of S. Francesco in Ancona; the Madonna of the Pesaro Family, at the Frari, commissioned in 1519 and unveiled in 1526; the polyptych of the Resurrection, painted for Bishop Altobello Averoldo and placed in 1522 in the church of Sts. Nazarius and Celsus in Brescia, a work that revealed new concepts of light; the great panel of the Madonna of St. Nicholas, formerly in the church of the Frari, now in the Vatican. In 1528 T. emerged as the winner of the competition (in which Palma and Pordenone had taken part) for the altarpiece of the Killing of St. Peter Martyr at Sts. John and Paul, a work that, placed on the altar in 1530, aroused universal admiration; it was later destroyed by fire in 1867. Meanwhile, between about 1520 and 1523, T. painted for the Court of Ferrara three sublime masterpieces on pagan subjects: the Feast of Venus, the Bacchanal, and Bacchus and Ariadne; the first two are now in the Prado, the third in the National Gallery in London.
An incredible quantity of portraits of the most important figures of his time came from T.'s brush: from that of Duke Alfonso d'Este, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to that of Duke Federico Gonzaga in the Prado; from that of Francesco Maria della Rovere and his wife Eleonora Gonzaga, dukes of Urbino, in the Uffizi, to those of the Marquis Davalos (Paris), and of Card. Ippolito Medici in Hungarian costume, at the Pitti; and so on, down to the more complex ones of Charles V and Philip II, which begin a new era in the field of portraiture. The artist portrays his sitters with extreme simplicity, without outward posturing, without any search for fictitious settings; his figures appear with great naturalness, in an atmosphere of austerity that confers on them a high human ethos. Even his colors, especially in the portraits of men, are sober, measured in warm harmonies. And when T. intends to convey, along with his sitter, the setting that surrounds him, he achieves his aim without declamatory gestures, with a nobility of accent to which few can be compared in the history of painting: the Portrait of Duke Alfonso Davalos haranguing the soldiers (Prado), that of Bishop Madruzzo, formerly in Trent, that of Charles V on horseback and of Philip II in armor (both in the Prado) will remain unsurpassable examples, not only of stupendous painterly power, but of profound psychology. They represent not merely physical persons, but the immanent "idea" of those persons themselves.
T.'s painting activity knew no pause. The great public paintings followed one after another. After the aforementioned altarpiece of St. Peter Martyr (1530), he supplied, now for the Doge's Palace, the much-requested canvas of the Battle of Cadore, also destroyed by fire, of which nothing remains to us but the engraving; sufficient, nevertheless, to show us how it signified a new, dramatic and vivid model for the battle painting to come. He painted the Annunciation for the church of S. Rocco; the Presentation in the Temple and the St. John, both now in the Accademia in Venice; the three canvases with the Sacrifice of Abraham, David and Goliath, Cain and Abel, now on the ceiling of the sacristy of the Salute. He supplied the Assumption for the cathedral of Verona, the Crowning with Thorns for the church of the Grazie in Milan (now in the Louvre), the Supper and the Resurrection for the ducal palace of Urbino, the series of Roman Emperors for the ducal palace of Mantua. He continued to create, together with masterreligious masterpieces, pagan scenes of ideal beauty, such as the Venus of Urbino, the Venus of Pardo (Louvre) and other Venuses and deities of the classical world, uninterruptedly.
This classical world T. finally came to know when he came to Rome in 1543, and his spirit received further impulses from the sight of ancient monuments and statues, as well as from his contacts with Michelangelo; but the suggestion of Michelangelo's creations - previously known through prints and drawings - had already been reckoned with on various occasions, for example, in the canvases mentioned above in the sacristy of the Salute. But he saw and interpreted that classical world in his own way; that is, strengthening it into a new expression more intensely chromatic. His contacts first with the pontiff Paul III Farnese, then with the emperor Charles V, must have stimulated T.'s creative energies immensely. The works he created in that period are of the very highest caliber; yet one cannot say which are the highest. For Paul III he painted various portraits, the most famous of all being the one that represents him with his grandsons Ottavio and Alessandro Farnese, now in the Museum of Naples (1546). From here begins the "group of figures" portrait, of which a stupendous example is that of the Vendramin Family, now in the National Gallery in London. But now his color too has become progressively freer, bolder, softer and more impetuous, of a depth and intensity never known until then. For the Emperor's court he supplied Madrid with a series of works, today almost all in the Prado and the Escorial: Sisyphus and Prometheus; Venus and Adonis; the Glory of Charles V (1551-1554); the Deposition (1559), the Adoration of the Magi, Christ in the Garden, these last creations of a profoundly religious pictorial atmosphere, which already touch that complete disintegration of color that characterizes T.'s last style.
From this last period one will also remember, at the Prado, the St. Margaret, the Ecce Homo, the Christ Carrying the Cross, the impressive Votive Picture of Philip II for the victory of Lepanto, the allegory of Spain defending Religion, and finally the marvelous painting of Adam and Eve. At the Escorial: the great Last Supper and the monumental Crucifix. But other works he supplied for his Venice, for the princes of the time; for the church of the Jesuits, the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1548-58); for S. Maria della Salute, the Descent of the Holy Spirit; for S. Salvatore the Transfiguration and the Annunciation; for the Library of S. Marco, the Allegory of History (1560). For the cathedral of Serravalle, near Vittorio Veneto, T. painted a great altarpiece of the Madonna with Sts. Peter and Paul; for the church of Medole near Mantua a Christ appearing to the Madonna; for S. Domenico of Ancona an impressive Christ on the Cross with Mary, St. John
Cambridge; another canvas with Tarquin and Lucretia, of a very late period, at the Academy of Vienna; the Nymph and the Shepherd, a Giorgionesque evocation of the last years of T., at the Museum of Vienna; and still in Austria, that is in the archbishopric of Kremsier, another - but almost unknown - masterpiece of his last years: Marsyas Flayed. Works of his last period are also the Venus with Cupid of the Borghese Gallery, the Madonna and Child, formerly at the Escorial, now in the Pinacoteca of Munich, where another impressive masterpiece of the last years is preserved, the night scene of the Christ Crowned with Thorns; the Madonna (ex Mond) of the National Gallery of London, the St. Sebastian of the Hermitage; the self-portraits, the one in profile at the Prado, the three-quarter one at the Museum of Berlin, and finally the grandiose Pietà of the Gallery of the Academy of Venice, a work that T. had destined for the altar of the Crucifix in the church of the Frari, where he wished to be buried, but which remained unfinished because of the artist's death. Palma il giovane finished it, with «reverent spirit».
In about seventy - or slightly more - years of activity, T. created such an imposing complex of masterpieces that it surpasses the production of any artist who came afterward, such as the already immense ones of a Rubens, a Rembrandt, a Goya. But the singular aspect of T.'s creative spirit is that, from his beginnings around 1505-1507, to the year of his death 1577, there is in him not only a continuous crescendo of expressive force, but also a continuous strengthening, or change, if one prefers, of his own pictorial means. A division into periods of T.'s activity is arbitrary and has a purely scholastic and practical significance.
It has been divided into three or four periods, but one could do it differently as well. There is in him a continuous progression, never a change of course. And in the progression itself, a continuous ascent. Between the Sacred and Profane Love and the Assumption there is an essential gap, in the sense that one passes from Giorgionesque lyrical concepts to a pictorial interpretation, bold, fiery; from a softly tonal laying down to a mixture of fleshy color. From the Assumption to the portrait of Paul III with his nephews (ca. 1545) the pictorial matter becomes more ductile, assumes warmer and deeper tones, is enriched with an immense sensitivity; it is an entirely new procedure, a mixture of thick impasto by patches and of glazes and rubbings. We are at his «last» pictorial period, in which the great artist nevertheless continues, in his process of optical and chromatic synthesis, the boldest experiments that painting has ever attempted, not out of vain aestheticism, but out of the necessity of an immediate, ductile, lightning-like expressive language. It is known that T. sketched his canvases without preparatory drawing, directly with the brush, then placed the great masses in light and shadow, still like phantoms; and St. Dominic. Scattered in various museums are his masterpieces of maturity; of which only the most important are remembered: the Rape of Europa, of the Gardner Museum of Boston, begun in 1559 and sent to Spain in 1562, a work of unattainable freshness; Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, both at Bridgewater House in London; the Hunt of Actaeon of the Earl of Harewood, also in London; Perseus and Andromeda, of the Wallace Collection; Tarquin and Lucretia of the Museum of then he turned the canvases against the wall, and continued them only after several days in order to have the freshest impression of them; and he took them up again, with blows, with rubbings, until from the barely sketched phantoms the figures took on body and life and spirit. But these pictorial methods so revolutionary were not then understood by all, nor were they always understood by posterity; and even less so in the epochs in which «drawing» returned to honor, that is to say in the neoclassical epoch. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when painting resumed a deeper and more human sense, did people begin again to understand the immense pictorial power of the creations of the «old» T., which are the most genuine expression of «pure» painting, so dear to the moderns. - See plates XVIII-XIX.
