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TITIAN: signature or monogram

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TITIAN: signature or monogram

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TITIAN: signature or monogram

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TITIAN: signature or monogram

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TITIAN: signature or monogram

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TITIAN: signature or monogram

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TITIAN: signature or monogram

Titian was one of four children born to the impoverished nobleman Gregorio di Conte Vecelli. As a young man, he was destined for the law or the army, like his brother Francesco, but his artistic ability decided matters differently. He was placed, probably around the age of 10, with Sebastiano Zuccato, a mosaicist and painter, although he did not remain with him long. He may have also studied briefly with both Gentile Bellini and his brother Giovanni Bellini, leading painters of Venice. It was during this period that Giorgione helped bring about pivotal developments in Venetian painting, and Titian went to train under him around 1505.

Giorgione and his pupil appear to have worked closely together, and the dates of their collaboration have led scholars to establish Titian’s year of birth as 1485 or 1488. He married in 1525, but his wife, Cecilia, died in 1530, leaving him with four children. The first, Pomponio, became a priest; the second, Orazio, was a painter; one of his daughters died while still young and the other, Lavinia, was immortalised by her father in numerous portraits and paintings in which she plays a principal role. One of Titian’s sisters took over care of the children, and in 1531, one year after his wife’s death, Titian left his lodgings in the S Samuele area of Venice for a larger dwelling with a garden at Biri, in the north-east of the city, and it was there that his children grew up.

Frequent visitors to the house included the architect Jacopo Sansovino and the poet Pietro Aretino – who, with Titian, formed a powerful ‘triumvirate’ in Venice – as well as Jacopo Nardi, the Florentine historian. Titian was prolific and worked continuously throughout his life. In 1566, when Giorgio Vasari came to award him with the title of honorary member of the guild of Florentine painters, he found him at his easel, driving his apprentices to the point of exhaustion. Titian travelled a great deal throughout his career and was received, honoured, and rewarded by court after court and enjoyed a life of luxury. Titian was struck by the plague and died in 1576 at about the age of 90. In spite of the law prohibiting plague victims from being buried in churches, Titian was entombed in the church of S Maria dei Frari, for which he had painted two altarpieces.

Much of Titian’s early work is fragmentary or was done in collaboration with Giorgione. In 1507 and 1508, he worked as Giorgione’s assistant on the decoration of the German merchants’ warehouse (Fondaco dei Tedeschi), which had just been rebuilt. Above the doorway, Titian painted a large fresco of a seated woman believed by some historians to represent an allegory of Judith, Justice, or Germania, although the subject is not certain. Only a few indecipherable traces of the work remain, but its appearance is known through Anton Maria Zanetti’s engravings. Around this time he also painted frescoes to decorate the façades of noble houses, which have not survived the damp Venetian environment. Francesco Sansovino mentions a Hercules he painted at the Palazzo Morosicci. Following Giorgione’s death in 1510, Titian completed his Sleeping Venus, and some scholars have split the attribution of the celebrated Concert Champêtre between the two painters or given it solely to one or the other. The continuing dispute confirms the aesthetic bond that linked the teacher and his young pupil.

In 1510, perhaps as a result of political problems, Titian left Venice for Padua. In the three frescoes showing the Miracles of St Anthony of Padua at the Scuola del Santo, which date from 1511, Titian broke free from the influence of Giorgione and began to establish his own narrative and compositional style. In 1513, after his return to Venice, he painted the allegorical picture now called Sacred and Profane Love. Various interpretations of the painting have been proposed, but because of certain symbolic elements and the bridal garments of the woman on the left, it was probably made to commemorate a marriage. By that time Titian’s reputation was sufficiently established for him to write to the Doge and the Great Council of Venice requesting to paint the Battle of Cadore for the cycle of scenes from Venetian history in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio (the great council hall in the Doge’s Palace). His request was granted, but he did not begin the work until the 1520s, when the council threatened to give the commission to another painter because Titian had neglected the project. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1577 and is known only through drawings and engravings. After Giovanni Bellini’s death in 1516, Titian became the most esteemed painter in the city.

Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, summoned Titian and two assistants to his court in February 1516. It was during his time at the duke’s court that Titian became friends with the poet Ludovico Ariosto. Between 1516 and 1523, he executed many works for the Ferrara court, including Flora and painted portraits of the duke, his wife, Lucrezia Borgia, and his mistress, Laura Dianti; all these portraits have disappeared but are known from old copies. According to tradition Laura Dianti appears again in the painting Woman at Her Toilette (Louvre). For the duke’s study (Camerino dell’Alabastro), Titian painted the Worship of Venus, Bacchanal of the Andrians, and Bacchus and Ariadne (1523) and completed Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. During this period, Titian made several trips to Venice and to other towns and cities and painted the Assumption and the Pesaro Madonna for the church of S Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. He is known to have been in Ancona in 1520 painting a Crucifixion, an altarpiece for the church of S Domenico, and The Virgin in Glory with St Francis, St Alvise and the Donor for the church of S Francesco; in 1520, he painted an Annunciation for Treviso Cathedral; at Brescia in 1522, he executed an altar polyptych showing The Resurrection at the church of SS Nazzaro e Celso; and at the Doge’s Palace in Venice, he painted a St Christopher, dated 1523. For the Mantuan court, he painted an Entombment (Louvre) in the mid-1520s.

From this point, Titian’s career was marked by continuous success, and he secured commissions from numerous courtly patrons of the highest echelons of European society. After the duke of Ferrara, the marchese and later duke of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga II, became his patron around 1530, Titian painted for him the Madonna of the Rabbit, 11 half-length portraits of Roman emperors (destroyed), and a portrait of his wife, Isabella d’Este. In the early 1530s, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, became a patron. Vasari relates that Titian went to join the emperor in Bologna after his coronation and executed a portrait of him in armour. Such a portrait is preserved in the Prado, but it may date to a later encounter. Titian enjoyed unquestionable success at the imperial court. He was made Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur; he also received various privileges and allowances and on several occasions was summoned back by Charles V and later by King Philip II of Spain. Noblemen and dignitaries commissioned him to paint their portraits, and it is generally accepted that Titian was the most sought-after portraitist of his day.

In 1538, Titian was in Urbino, where he painted portraits of the Della Rovere family and the Venus of Urbino, all of which are now in the Uffizi, Florence. The Venus of Urbino is one of the great masterpieces of Titian’s maturity. While the inspiration clearly continues to derive from Giorgione, there are elements that distinguish it as Titian’s – the obvious sensuality of the female nude, her direct gaze, and the interior setting. Titian animated the nude’s surroundings: a curtain separates the reclining woman from the background scene with servants and view of a garden, and at her feet is a small sleeping dog. During the same period, but in Venice, Titian was painting the Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple for the Scuola della Carità (now the Accademia Gallery). Around 1541, Titian again visited the court of Charles V, then no longer in Bologna but in Milan; soon after he returned to Venice. Titian met Pope Paul III Farnese in Bologna in 1543, although Titian did not in fact go to Rome until 1546. He was received there by the pope and his grandson Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.

In Rome, Titian again encountered Vasari, whom he had first met in Venice; he also met Michelangelo, who was then working for the pope in the Pauline Chapel. Among the works Titian executed in Rome were the Danaë (Naples) and several portraits of the pope and members of his family, including Cardinal Farnese and another grandson Ottavio, duke of Parma. At about the same time, he painted a portrait of his friend, Pietro Aretino (Pitti Palace, Florence), and had no hesitation in revealing the proud, cynical, and impudent nature of his character. In 1547, he is known to have executed an altarpiece for Serravalle Cathedral.

In 1548, Titian was summoned by Charles V to the Diet of Augsburg and executed the celebrated equestrian painting Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg and Charles V Seated (both in the Prado, Madrid). He also painted a portrait of King Ferdinand, the king’s five daughters and two sons, Maria of Hungary, John Frederick and Maurice of Saxony, and two portraits of the royal prince of Spain, who would later become Philip II. When he returned from the Diet of Augsburg in 1550, Titian continued to work for Charles V, painting the Exaltation of the Holy Trinity known as The Gloria (1551–1554), which the emperor took with him, together with the Ecce Homo of 1547 and the Virgin of Sorrows of 1550, to the monastery of Yuste following his abdication. When Philip II came to the Spanish throne, he commissioned Titian to paint portraits, religious subjects, and mythological scenes, including: The Entombment (1559), Martyrdom of St Lawrence (1567), Venus and Adonis (1553), Diana and Callisto (1559), and The Rape of Europa (around 1560), some of which are still in Madrid. During this period, it appears that Titian often returned to subjects he had already painted, such as the Danaë (1554), the Annunciation (1564), and the Entombment (1566), and some of these works were executed by his assistants under his direction. However, his personal output remained considerable: in 1559, Diana and Actaeon; in 1564, four ceilings for the municipal hall of Brescia; in 1565, The Education of Cupid; and in 1571, Tarquin and Lucretia. In 1573, he began a Pietà (finished by Palma Giovane) which is remarkable for its rough painterly texture, a feature of the artist’s late work that some have attributed to his failing eyesight. In 1574, he collaborated with Tintoretto on the city’s decorations in honour of the visit of King Henry III of France to Venice.

Titian is also credited with designs for much-admired prints. The best known of these are large composite woodcuts (printed from several blocks and pieced together), which had precedents in the work of the Venetian Jacopo de’ Barbari and Albrecht Dürer (in Venice 1505–1507). The first of these, according to Vasari, is the Triumph of Christ (1508); several years later, Titian designed the Crossing of the Red Sea, which was popular enough to be reprinted in 1549. It is generally accepted that these were simply executed after drawings by Titian and perhaps under his direction. As a painter, he excelled in many different genres: histories, portraiture, devotional works, mythological and allegorical subjects, and the Venetian ‘poesia’.

Although earlier Venetian art had shown an emphasis on colour, Titian, in no small part because of the length of career and size of his oeuvre, defined Renaissance Venetian ‘colore’ – the emphasis on colour as the defining aesthetic element of painting. According to the medley of anecdotes and facts reported by Vasari, Michelangelo may have praised Titian’s qualities as a colourist, but he also said that ‘Titian would have been a great artist if only he had learned how to draw’ – an assertion that reflects the aesthetic debate (‘paragone’) between Venetian ‘colore’ and the central Italian focus on line and draughtsmanship (‘disegno’). Palma Giovane described Titian at work: ‘He sketched out his paintings by applying masses of colour which served as a bed or foundation for what he wanted to express and on which he later relied. Then, with a touch of white, of white lead, and the same brush then dipped in red, black or yellow, he created pale and dark areas to give the effect of relief.’ This is valuable information about Titian’s method, as it was probably observed firsthand and describes aspects of the artist’s preparatory technique and his method of working up the elements of his composition. Titian’s painterly brushwork and warm palette, as well as his adoption of powerful, dynamic figures from Michelangelo, were influential on succeeding generations of painters – notably El Greco, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Peter Paul Rubens, among countless others.