Mark Hudson - Titian: The Last Days

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Professor Charles Hope of the Warburg Institute for sharing many insights, particularly concerning Titians family, and for his generosity and patience in answering a great many questions. I would also like to thank Professor Augusto Gentili and Professor Lionello Puppi, both of the Universita Ca Foscari, Venice; Dr Miguel Falomir of the Museo Nacional del Prado; Jill Dunkerton of the National Gallery, London; Professor Bernard Aikema of the University of Verona.

My gratitude is also due to Guerrino Lovato, Pietro Scarpa, Antonio Foscari, Mario Berta Battiloro, Alec Cobbe, Professor Brian Pullan, Richard Palmer, Jurgen Schultz, Jan Willem Hoenig, Ketty Gottardo, Daniella Carr, Luisella Romeo, Sharon Reed and William Sargent, Thomas Almeroth-Williams, the press offices of the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

I am grateful to Guerrino Lovato for the theory concerning Bartolomeo dAlviano and The Tempest ; to Charles Hope for the theory concerning Ippolite de Medici, Angela la Zaffetta and The Venus of Urbino ; and to Jill Dunkerton for many insights into Titians working methods. The interpretation of these ideas is my own, and any factual errors in this book are entirely my responsibility.

I would like to thank a number of artists for sharing their ideas about Titian: Chris Christophorou, Thomas and Clare Newbolt, Lino Mannocci.

For translations of original sources I am grateful to Charles Hope for his translation of the letters of Niccolo Stoppio and the writings of Marco Boschini and Antonio Persio; and to Richard Palmer for his translation of the diary of Rocco Benedetti.

I would like to thank my editor Michael Fishwick, my agent David Godwin, Alexandra Pringle, Anna Simpson, Richard Collins, Alexa von Hirschberg and all at Bloomsbury.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of a grant from the Arts Council of England in the writing of this book.

Lastly, I would like to thank my wife, Julia, and my daughter, Rachel, for their patience throughout the writing of this book.

A Painting About Red

It has been described as one of the first great psychological paintings, as a devastating study of the corrupting effects of power, a picture of impotent old age contrasted with vigorous youth. But as much as anything its a painting about red a painting thats as much about red as Matisses Red Studio , Degas La Coiffure or any of Rothkos vaporous essays into the contrasting temperatures of the red hues.

But red in Titians painting isnt a purely abstract phenomenon or simply an attempt to replicate effects found in nature. Red here is the colour of the curia, the papal court, an administrative entity designed to preserve the integrity of the Christian faith that raised its own armies, possessed its own lands held in fief by a client aristocracy, that maintained embassies and spies in every court in Europe. A hierarchy of men who lived in a state of notional chastity, but were waited on by a population of bankers, poets, artists, buffoons and courtesans. A world where the princes of the Church erected palaces in the city of the Caesars that vied with those of the most powerful secular rulers of the time, where, needless to say, every pope replaced the appointments of his predecessor with his own clients and family members, where the red of priestly vestments signified a willingness to die for the faith, but where no one, least of all ones brother-priests, was entirely to be trusted.

And because this painting isnt finished, you get a sense of the way Titian has laid in the composition blocking in the surface of the canvas with masses of relatively thinly applied colour the vermilion of the four-pointed cap of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who stands looking impassively out at us, matched by the earthy orange-red of the cloth covering the table on which sits the hourglass indicating the brevity of even a pontiffs life. The colder, bluer crimson of the Popes hat and cape is made slightly warmer to fit in with the overall scheme, as the pontiff turns towards his grandson Ottavio. And the reddish-brown doublet worn by Ottavio, who seems to bear down on his grandfather even as he bows to him, is only slightly darker and colder than the great curtain looped up through the back of the painting, compounding the sense of a world where everything is built on a monumental scale, but nothing is quite fixed or secure.

Paul III, who acceded to the papal throne in 1534, had elevated his grandsons, to the consternation of reforming elements in the Church and all those who had hoped that his Papacy might check the corruption that fanned the flames of Protestant heresy. Alessandro, the eldest and Pauls favourite, was made cardinal at sixteen, while his younger brother Ottavio was appointed Duke of Camerino and married at the age of fifteen to Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

In August 1545, just two months before Titians arrival in Rome, Pope Paul had removed the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza from the feudal lands of the Papacy and installed his son Pier Luigi the boys father as duke. He thereby provoked the anger of the now twenty-five-year-old Ottavio, who had hoped to gain this territory for himself.

It has been supposed, at least since the nineteenth century, that Titians painting represents the moment when Ottavio went to lay his grievances before his grandfather a moment, it has been suggested, that Titian himself witnessed. The seventy-seven-year-old Pope turns to reprimand his grandson for his ingratitude and disloyalty, a smile of irritation playing over his narrow features aware of how much he has compromised himself in promoting these two young men, yet appearing pitifully vulnerable seated there between them.

Within the year, one of the players in this family power game will have been brutally murdered an event that was believed to have precipitated the Popes own death. It has become axiomatic in the folklore of art history that the Farnese were unnerved by the acuteness with which Titian revealed the tensions between them, and that he was impelled to put his brush down virtually mid-stroke. Yet Titian had come to Rome with his own very clear material objectives in mind. How likely was it that he would have risked alienating the very people on whom his hopes rested, on account of something as abstract and as relative as the truth?

On 10 October 1545, Pietro Bembo, cardinal of the Holy See and one of the most influential men of letters of his time, wrote to the prominent Venetian aristocrat Girolamo Quirini in a state of some excitement. Titian, he wrote, is here!

It was Bembo who had first invited Titian to Rome in 1513, when the artist was still only twenty-four. Since then, while he had expressed continual interest in visiting the city of the Caesars, he had turned down every conceivable entreaty from popes, cardinals, dukes and some of the most influential intellectuals of the age. But now Titian and his son and assistant Orazio were ensconced in rooms in the Belvedere Palace in the Vatican, overlooking Bramantes magnificent gardens and close to the Popes own apartments. Giorgio Vasari had been appointed his guide to Romes ancient treasures, and every artist in the city was talking about his presence there many with a concerned eye to their own commissions and appointments.

Titian has already seen so many fine antiquities that he is filled with wonder, and very glad that he came, Bembo told Quirini. Indeed, Titian wrote to Aretino soon after his arrival, expressing regret that he had not come to Rome twenty years earlier. Many people had contributed to making his visit a reality advising, encouraging and providing the material wherewithal among them Bembo, Quirini and the artists patron and protector Guidobaldo della Rovere, for whom he had painted The Venus of Urbino and who had provided an escort of seven horsemen to convey Titian through the Papal States to Rome. But the influence of one man had proved crucial in persuading the artist to leave his comfortable Venetian milieu: Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grandson and first minister of Pope Paul III. At twenty-five, Alessandro was already amassing what would become the biggest collection of classical sculpture in private hands in Europe, and had his own court of poets and intellectuals gathered around him in his palace, the Cancelleria. We see him in Taddeo Zuccaros portrait: dark-bearded, cool, watchful, handsome. Yet theres something unnerving, something almost primeval, in the forward, incising set of the mouth. He was at that moment one of