The Later Works of Titian Part 2

t.i.tian's friend and patron of that time, Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino, had at first opposed t.i.tian's visit to the Roman court, striving to reserve to himself the services of the Venetian master until such time as he should have carried out for him the commissions with which he was charged. Yielding, however, to the inevitable, and yielding, too, with a good grace, he himself escorted his favourite with his son Orazio from Venice through Ferrara to Pesaro, and having detained him a short while there, granted him an escort through the Papal States to Rome. There he was well received by the Farnese Pope, and with much cordiality by Cardinal Bembo. Rooms were accorded to him in the Belvedere section of the Vatican Palace, and there no doubt he painted the unfinished portrait-group _Paul III. with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio Farnese_, which has been already described, and with it other pieces of the same type, and portraits of the Farnese family and circle now no longer to be traced. Vasari, well pleased no doubt to renew his acquaintance with the acknowledged head of the contemporary Venetian painters, acted as his cicerone in the visits to the antiquities of Rome, to the statues and art-treasures of the Vatican, while t.i.tian's fellow-citizen Sebastiano del Piombo was in his company when he studied the Stanze of Raphael.

It was but three years since Michelangelo's _Last Judgment_ had been uncovered in the Sixtine, and it would have been in the highest degree interesting to read his comments on this gigantic performance, towards which it was so little likely that his sympathies would spontaneously go out. Memorable is the visit paid by Buonarroti, with an unwonted regard for ceremonious courtesy, to t.i.tian in his apartments at the Belvedere, as it is recalled by Vasari with that nave touch, that power of suggestion, which gives such delightful colour to his unstudied prose.

No _Imaginary Conversation_ among those that Walter Savage Landor has devised equals in significance this meeting of the two greatest masters then living, simply as it is sketched in by the Aretine biographer. The n.o.ble Venetian representing the alternating radiance and gloom of earth, its fairest pages as they unfold themselves, the joys and sorrows, the teeming life of humanity; the mighty Florentine disdainful of the world, its colours, its pulsations, its pomps and vanities, incurious of mankind save in its great symbolical figures, soaring like the solitary eagle into an atmosphere of his own where the dejected beholder can scarce breathe, and, sick at heart, oppressed with awe, lags far behind!

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Pope Paul III. with Cardinal Farnese and Ottavio Farnese. Naples Gallery. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]

t.i.tian the gracious, the serene, who throughout a long life of splendid and by comparison effortless achievement has openly and candidly drunk deep of all the joys of life, a man even as others are! Michelangelo the austere, the scornful, to whom the pleasures of the world, the company in well-earned leisure of his fellow-man, suggest but the loss of precious hours which might be devoted to the shaping in solitude of masterpieces; in the very depths of whose nature lurk nevertheless, even in old age, the strangest ardours, the fiercest and most insatiate longings for love and friends.h.i.+p!

Let Vasari himself be heard as to this meeting. "Michelangelo and Vasari going one day to pay a visit to t.i.tian in the Belvedere, saw, in a picture which he had then advanced towards completion, a nude female figure representing _Danae_ as she receives the embrace of Jove transformed into a rain of gold, and, as the fas.h.i.+on is in people's presence, praised it much to him. When they had taken leave, and the discussion was as to the art of t.i.tian, Buonarroti praised it highly, saying that the colour and handling pleased him much, but that it was a subject for regret that at Venice they did not learn from the very beginning to design correctly, and that its painters did not follow a better method in their study of art." It is the battle that will so often be renewed between the artist who looks upon colour as merely a complement and adjunct to design, and the painter who regards it as not only the outer covering, but the body and soul of art. We remember how the stiff-necked Ingres, the greatest Raphaelesque of this century, hurled at Delacroix's head the famous dictum, "Le dessin c'est la probite de l'art," and how his ill.u.s.trious rival, the chief of a romanticism which he would hardly acknowledge, vindicated by works rather than by words his contention that, if design was indeed art's conscience, colour was its life-blood, its very being.

The _Danae_, seen and admired with reservations by Buonarroti in the painting-room of t.i.tian at the Belvedere, is now, with its beauty diminished in important particulars, to be found with the rest of the Farnese pictures in the gallery of the Naples Museum. It serves to show that if the artist was far beyond the stage of imitation or even of a.s.similation on the larger scale, he was, at any rate, affected by the Roman atmosphere in art. For once he here comes nearer to the realisation of Tintoretto's ideal--the colour of t.i.tian and the design of Michelangelo--than his impetuous pupil and rival ever did. While preserving in the _Danae_ his own true warmth and transparency of Venetian colour--now somewhat obscured yet not effaced--he combines unusual weightiness and majesty with voluptuousness in the nude, and successfully strives after a more studied rhythm in the harmony of the composition generally than the art of Venice usually affected.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Danae and the Golden Rain. Naples Gallery. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]

t.i.tian, in his return from Rome, which he was never to revisit, made a stay at Florence with an eye, as we may guess, both to business and pleasure. There, as Vasari takes care to record, our master visited the artistic sights, and _rimase stupefatto_--remained in breathless astonishment--as he had done when he made himself acquainted with the artistic glories of Rome. This is but vague, and a little too much smacks of self-flattery and adulation of the brother Tuscans. t.i.tian was received by Duke Cosimo at Poggio a Caiano, but his offer to paint the portrait of the Medici ruler was not well received. It may be, as Vasari surmises, that this att.i.tude was taken up by the duke in order not to do wrong to the "many n.o.ble craftsmen" then practising in his city and dominion. More probably, however, Cosimo's hatred and contempt of his father's minion Aretino, whose portrait by t.i.tian he had condescended to retain, yet declined to acknowledge, impelled him to show something less than favour to the man who was known to be the closest friend and intimate of this self-styled "Scourge of Princes."

Crowe and Cavalcaselle have placed about the year 1555 the extravagantly lauded _St. John the Baptist in the Desert_, once in the church of S.M.

Maria Maggiore at Venice, and now in the Accademia there. To the writer it appears that it would best come in at this stage--that is to say in or about 1545--not only because the firm close handling in the nude would be less explicable ten years later on, but because the conception of the majestic St. John is for once not pictorial but purely sculptural. Leaving Rome, and immediately afterwards coming into contact for the first time with the wonders of the earlier Florentine art, t.i.tian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus. Strange to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose n.o.ble ascetic type of the _Precursor_ is here modernised, and in the process deprived of some of its austerity. The glorious mountain landscape, with its brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael's, is all t.i.tian. It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all its majesty, appear not a little artificial.

The little town of Serravalle, still so captivatingly Venetian in its general aspect, holds one of the most magnificent works of t.i.tian's late time, a vast _Virgin and Child with St. Peter and St. Andrew_. This hangs--or did when last seen by the writer--in the choir of the Church of St. Andrew; there is evidence in t.i.tian's correspondence that it was finished in 1547, so that it must have been undertaken soon after the return from Rome. In the distance between the two majestic figures of the saints is a prospect of landscape with a lake, upon which t.i.tian has shown on a reduced scale Christ calling Peter and Andrew from their nets; an undisguised adaptation this, by the veteran master, of the divine Urbinate's _Miraculous Draught of Fishes_, but one which made of the borrowed motive a new thing, no excrescence but an integral part of the conception. In this great work, which to be more universally celebrated requires only to be better known to those who do not come within the narrow circle of students, there is evidence that while t.i.tian, after his stay at the Papal court, remained firm as a rock in his style and general principles--luckily a Venetian and no pseudo-Roman,--his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier but grander, than it had been in middle age--his horizon altogether vaster. To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a physical and psychical perturbation which belonged both to the man in advanced years and to the particular moment in the century. Even in his treatment of cla.s.sic myth, of the nude in G.o.ddess and woman, there was, as we shall see presently, a greater unrest and a more poignant sensuality--there was evidence of a mind and temperament troubled anew instead of being tranquillised by the oncoming of old age.

Are we to place here, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle do, the _Venus and Cupid_ of the Tribuna and the _Venus with the Organ Player_ of the Prado? The technical execution of these canvases, the treatment of landscape in the former, would lead the writer to place them some years farther on still in the _oeuvre_ of the master. There are, however, certain reasons for following them in this chronological arrangement.

The _Venus and Cupid_ which hangs in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, as the pendant to the more resplendent but more realistic _Venus of Urbino_, is a darker and less well-preserved picture than its present companion, but a grander if a more audacious presentment of the love-G.o.ddess. Yet even here she is not so much the Cytherean as an embodiment of the Venetian ideal of the later time, an exemplification of the undisguised wors.h.i.+p of fleshly loveliness which then existed in Venice. It has been pointed out that the later Venus has the features of t.i.tian's fair daughter Lavinia, and this is no doubt to a certain extent true. The G.o.ddesses, nymphs, and women of this time bear a sort of general family resemblance to her and to each other. This piece ill.u.s.trates the preferred type of t.i.tian's old age, as the _Vanitas, Herodias_, and _Flora_ ill.u.s.trate the preferred type of his youth; as the paintings which we have learnt to a.s.sociate with the d.u.c.h.ess of Urbino ill.u.s.trate that of his middle time.

The dignity and rhythmic outline of Eros in the _Danae_ of Naples have been given up in favour of a more naturalistic conception of the insinuating urchin, who is in this _Venus and Cupid_ the successor of those much earlier _amorini_ in the _Wors.h.i.+p of Venus_ at Madrid. The landscape in its sweeping breadth is very characteristic of the late time, and would give good reason for placing the picture later than it here appears. The difficulty is this. The _Venus with the Organ Player_[39] of Madrid, which in many essential points is an inferior repet.i.tion of the later _Venus_ of the Tribuna, contains the portrait of Ottavio Farnese, much as we see him in the unfinished group painted, as has been recorded, at Rome in 1546. This being the case, it is not easy to place the _Venus and Cupid_, or its subsequent adaptation, much later than just before the journey to Augsburg. The _Venus with the Organ Player_ has been overrated; there are things in this canvas which we cannot without offence to t.i.tian ascribe to his own brush. Among these are the tiresome, formal landscape, the wooden little dog petted by Venus, and perhaps some other pa.s.sages. The G.o.ddess herself and the amorous Ottavio, though this last is not a very striking or successful portrait, may perhaps be left to the master. He vindicates himself more completely than in any other pa.s.sage of the work when he depicts the youthful, supple form of the Venetian courtesan, as in a merely pa.s.sive pose she personates the G.o.ddess whose insignificant votary she really is. It cannot be denied that he touches here the lowest level reached by him in such delineations. What offends in this _Venus with the Organ Player_, or rather _Ottavio Farnese with his Beloved_, is that its informing sentiment is not love, or indeed any community of sentiment, but an ostentatious pride in the possession of covetable beauty subdued like that of Danae herself by gold.

If we are to a.s.sume with Crowe and Cavalcaselle that the single figure _Ecce h.o.m.o_ of the Prado Gallery was the piece taken by the master to Charles V. when, at the bidding of the Emperor, he journeyed to Augsburg, we can only conclude that his design was carried out by pupils or a.s.sistants. The execution is not such as we can ascribe to the brush which is so shortly to realise for the monarch a group of masterpieces.

It was in January 1548 that t.i.tian set forth to obey the command of the Emperor, "per far qualche opera," as Count Girolamo della Torre has it in a letter of recommendation given to t.i.tian for the Cardinal of Trent at Augsburg. It is significant to find the writer mentioning the painter, not by any of the styles and t.i.tles which he had a right to bear, especially at the court of Charles V., but extolling him as "Messer t.i.tiano Pittore et il primo huomo della Christianita."[40]

It might be imagined that it would be a terrible wrench for t.i.tian, at the age of seventy, to transplant himself suddenly, and for the first time, into a foreign land. But then he was not as other men of seventy are. The final years of his unexampled career will conclusively show that he preserved his mental and physical vigour to the end. Further, the imperial court with its Spanish etiquette, its Spanish language and manners, was much the same at Augsburg as he had known it on previous occasions at Bologna. Moreover, Augsburg and Nuremberg[41] had, during the last fifty years, been in close touch with Venice in all matters appertaining to art and commerce. Especially the great banking house of the Fuggers had the most intimate relations with the queen-city of the Adriatic. Yet art of the two great German cities would doubtless appeal less to the Venetian who had arrived at the zenith of his development than it would and did to the Bellinis and their school at the beginning of the century. The gulf had become a far wider one, and the points of contact were fewer.

The trusted Orazio had been left behind, notwithstanding the success which he had achieved during the Roman tour, and it may be a.s.sumed that he presided over the studio and workshop at Biri Grande during his father's absence. t.i.tian was accompanied to Augsburg by his second cousin, Cesare Vecellio,[42] who no doubt had a minor share in very many of the canvases belonging to the period of residence at Augsburg. Our master's first and most grateful task must have been the painting of the great equestrian portrait of the Emperor at the Battle of Muhlberg, which now hangs in the Long Gallery of the Prado at Madrid. It suffered much injury in the fire of the Pardo Palace, which annihilated so many masterpieces, but is yet very far from being the "wreck" which, with an exaggeration not easily pardonable under the circ.u.mstances, Crowe and Cavalcaselle have described it. In the presence of one of the world's masterpieces criticism may for once remain silent, willingly renouncing all its rights. No purpose would be served here by recording how much paint has been abraded in one corner, how much added in another. A deep sense of thankfulness should possess us that the highest manifestation of t.i.tian's genius has been preserved, even though it be shorn of some of its original beauty. Splendidly armed in steel from head to foot, and holding firmly grasped in his hand the spear, emblem of command in this instance rather than of combat, Caesar advances with a mien impa.s.sive yet of irresistible domination. He bestrides with ease his splendid dark-brown charger, caparisoned in crimson, and heavily weighted like himself with the full panoply of battle, a perfect harmony being here subtly suggested between man and beast. The rich landscape, with a gleam of the Elbe in the distance, is still in the half gloom of earliest day; but on the horizon, and in the clouds overhead, glows the red ominous light of sunrise, colouring the veils of the morning mist. The Emperor is alone--alone as he must be in life and in death--a man, yet lifted so high above other men that the world stretches far below at his feet, while above him this ruler knows no power but that of G.o.d. It is not even the sneer of cold command, but a majesty far higher and more absolutely convinced of its divine origin, that awes the beholder as he gazes. In comparison with the supreme dignity of this ugly, pallid Hapsburger, upon whom disease and death have already laid a shadowy finger, how artificial appear the divine a.s.sumptions of an Alexander, how theatrical the Olympian airs of an Augustus, how merely vulgar and ill-worn the imperial poses of a Napoleon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Charles V. at the Battle of Muhlberg. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie._]

No veracious biographer of t.i.tian could pretend that he is always thus imaginative, that coming in contact with a commanding human individuality he always thus unfolds the outer wrappings to reveal the soul within. Indeed, especially in the middle time just past, he not infrequently contents himself with the splendid outsides of splendid things. To interpret this masterpiece as the writer has ventured to do, it is not necessary to a.s.sume that t.i.tian reasoned out the poetic vision, which was at the same time an absolutely veracious presentment, argumentatively with himself, as the painter of such a portrait in words might have done. Pictorial genius of the creative order does not proceed by such methods, but sees its subject as a whole, leaving to others the task of probing and unravelling. It should be borne in mind, too, that this is the first in order, as it is infinitely the greatest and the most significant among the vast equestrian portraits of monarchs by court painters. Velazquez on the one hand, and Van Dyck on the other, have worked wonders in the same field. Yet their finest productions, even the _Philip IV._, the _Conde Duque Olivarez_, the _Don Balthasar Carlos_ of the Spaniard, even the two equestrian portraits of Charles I., the _Francisco de Moncada_, the _Prince Thomas of Savoy_ of the Fleming, are in comparison but magnificent show pieces aiming above all at decorative pomp and an imposing general effect.

We come to earth and every-day weariness again with the full-length of Charles V., which is now in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. Here the monarch, dressed in black and seated in a well-worn crimson velvet chair, shows without disguise how profoundly he is ravaged by ill-health and _ennui_. Fine as the portrait still appears notwithstanding its bad condition, one feels somehow that t.i.tian is not in this instance, as he is in most others, perfect master of his material, of the main elements of his picture. The problem of relieving the legs cased in black against a relatively light background, and yet allowing to them their full plastic form, is not perfectly solved. Neither is it, by the way, as a rule in the canvases of those admirable painters of men, the quasi-Venetians, Moretto of Brescia and Moroni of Bergamo. The Northerners--among them Holbein and Lucidel--came nearer to perfect success in this particular matter. The splendidly brushed-in prospect of cloudy sky and far-stretching country recalls, as Morelli has observed, the landscapes of Rubens, and suggests that he underwent the influence of the Cadorine in this respect as in many others, especially after his journey as amba.s.sador to Madrid.

Another portrait, dating from the first visit to Augsburg, is the half-length of the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. He sits obese and stolid, yet not without the dignity that belongs to absolute simplicity, showing on his left cheek the wound received at the battle of Muhlberg. The picture has, as a portrait by t.i.tian, no very commanding merit, no seduction of technique, and it is easy to imagine that Cesare Vecellio may have had a share in it.

Singular is the absence of all pose, of all attempt to harmonise the main lines of the design or give pictorial elegance to the nave directness of the presentment. This mode of conception may well have been dictated to the courtly Venetian by st.u.r.dy John Frederick himself.

The master painted for Mary, Queen Dowager of Hungary, four canvases specially mentioned by Vasari, _Prometheus Bound to the Rock, Ixion, Tantalus_, and _Sisyphus_, which were taken to Spain at the moment of the definitive migration of the court in 1556. Crowe and Cavalcaselle state that the whole four perished in the all-devouring conflagration of the Pardo Palace, and put down the _Prometheus_ and _Sisyphus_ of the Prado Gallery as copies by Sanchez Coello. It is difficult to form a definite judgment on canvases so badly hung, so darkened and injured.

They certainly look much more like Venetian originals than Spanish copies. These mythological subjects may very properly be cla.s.sed with the all too energetic ceiling-pictures now in the Sacristy of the Salute. Here again the master, in the effort to be grandiose in a style not properly his, overreaches himself and becomes artificial. He must have left Augsburg this time in the autumn of 1548, since in the month of October of that year we find him at Innsbruck making a family picture of the children of King Ferdinand, the Emperor's brother. That monarch himself, his two sons and five daughters, he had already portrayed.

Much feasting, much rejoicing, in the brilliant and jovial circle presided over by Aretino and the brother Triumvirs, followed upon our master's return to Venice. Aretino, who after all was not so much the scourge as the screw of princes, would be sure to think the more highly of the friend whom he really cherished in all sincerity, when he returned from close and confidential intercourse with the mightiest ruler of the age, the source not only of honour but of advantages which the Aretine, like Falstaff, held more covetable because more substantial. To the year 1549 belongs the gigantic woodcut _The Destruction of Pharaoh's Host_, designed, according to the inscription on the print, by "the great and immortal t.i.tian," and engraved by Domenico delle Greche, who, notwithstanding his name, calls himself "depentore Venetiano." He is not, as need hardly be pointed out, to be confounded with the famous Veneto-Spanish painter, Domenico Theotocopuli, Il Greco, whose date of birth is just about this time (1548).

t.i.tian, specially summoned by the Emperor, travelled back to Augsburg in November 1550. Charles had returned thither with Prince Philip, the heir-presumptive of the Spanish throne, and it can hardly be open to question that one of the main objects for which the court painter was made to undertake once more the arduous journey across the Alps was to depict the son upon whom all the monarch's hopes and plans were centred.

Charles, whose health had still further declined, was now, under an acc.u.mulation of political misfortune, gloomier than ever before, more completely detached from the things of the world. Barely over fifty at this moment, he seemed already, and, in truth, was an old man, while the master of Cadore at seventy-three shone in the splendid autumn of his genius, which even then had not reached its final period of expansion.

t.i.tian enjoyed the confidence of his imperial master during this second visit in a degree which excited surprise at the time; the intercourse with Charles at this tragic moment of his career, when, sick and disappointed, he aspired only to the consolations of faith, seeing his sovereign remedy in the soothing balm of utter peace, may have worked to deepen the gloom which was overspreading the painter's art if not his soul. It is not to be believed, all the same, that this atmosphere of unrest and misgiving, of faith coloured by an element of terror, in itself operated so strongly as unaided to give a final form to t.i.tian's sacred works. There was in this respect kins.h.i.+p of spirit between the mighty ruler and his servant; t.i.tian's art had already become sadder and more solemn, had already shown a more sombre pa.s.sion. The tragic gloom is now to become more and more intense, until we come to the climax in the astonis.h.i.+ng _Pieta_ left unfinished when the end comes a quarter of a century later still.

And with this change in the whole atmosphere of the sacred art comes another in the inverse sense, which, being an essential trait, must be described, though to do so is not quite easy. t.i.tian becomes more and more merely sensuous in his conception of the beauty of women. He betrays in his loss of serenity that he is less than heretofore impervious to the stings of an invading sensuality, which serves to make of his mythological and erotic scenes belonging to this late time a tribute to the glories of the flesh unenn.o.bled by the gilding touch of the purer flame. And the painter who, when Charles V. retired into his solitude, had suffered the feeble flame of his life to die slowly out, was to go on working for King Philip, as fierce in the intensity of his physical pa.s.sion as in the fervour of his faith, would receive encouragement to develop to the full these seemingly conflicting tendencies of sacred and amorous pa.s.sion.

The Spanish prince whom it was the master's most important task on this occasion to portray was then but twenty-four years of age, and youth served not indeed to hide, but in a slight measure to attenuate, some of his most characteristic physical defects. His unattractive person even then, however, showed some of the most repellent peculiarities of his father and his race. He had the supreme distinction of Charles but not his majesty, more than his haughty reserve, even less than his power of enlisting sympathy. In this most difficult of tasks--the portrayal that should be at one and the same time true in its essence, distinguished, and as sympathetic as might be under the circ.u.mstances, of so unlovable a personage--t.i.tian won a new victory. His _Prince Philip of Austria in Armour_ at the Prado is one of his most complete and satisfying achievements, from every point of view. A veritable triumph of art, but as usual a triumph to which the master himself disdains to call attention, is the rendering of the damascened armour, the puffed hose, and the white silk stockings and shoes. The two most important variations executed by the master, or under his immediate direction, are the full-lengths of the Pitti Palace and the Naples Museum, in both of which sumptuous court-dress replaces the gala military costume. They are practically identical, both in the design and the working out, save that in the Florence example Philip stands on a gra.s.s plot in front of a colonnade, while in that of Naples the background is featureless. As the pictures are now seen, that in the Pitti is marked by greater subtlety in the characterisation of the head, while the Naples canvas appears the more brilliant as regards the working out of the costume and accessories.

To the period of t.i.tian's return from the second visit to Augsburg belongs a very remarkable portrait which of late years there has been some disinclination to admit as his own work. This is the imposing full-length portrait which stands forth as the crowning decoration of the beautiful and well-ordered gallery at Ca.s.sel. In the days when it was sought to obtain _quand meme_ a striking designation for a great picture, it was christened _Alfonso d'Avalos, Marques del Vasto_.

More recently, with some greater show of probability, it has been called _Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino_. In the _Jahrbuch der koniglich-preussischen Kunstsammlungen_,[43] Herr Carl Justi, ever bold and ingenious in hypothesis, strives, with the support of a ma.s.s of corroborative evidence that cannot be here quoted, to prove that the splendid personage presented is a Neapolitan n.o.bleman of the highest rank, Giovan Francesco Acquaviva, Duke of Atri. There is the more reason to accept his conjecture since it helps us to cope with certain difficulties presented by the picture itself. It may be conceded at the outset that there are disturbing elements in it, well calculated to give pause to the student of t.i.tian. The handsome patrician, a little too proud of his rank, his magnificent garments and accoutrements, his virile beauty, stands fronting the spectator in a dress of crimson and gold, wearing a plumed and jewelled hat, which in its elaboration closely borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear. Still more astonis.h.i.+ng in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on the left of the canvas, Cupid himself supports. To the right, a rival even of Love in the affections of our enigmatical personage, a n.o.ble hound rubs himself affectionately against the stalwart legs of his master. Far back stretches a prospect singularly unlike those rich-toned studies of sub-Alpine regions in which t.i.tian as a rule revels. It has an august but more colourless beauty recalling the middle Apennines; one might almost say that it prefigures those prospects of inhospitable Sierra which, with their light, delicate tonality, so admirably relieve and support the portraits of Velazquez. All this is unusual, and still more so is the want of that aristocratic gravity, of that subordination of mere outward splendour to inborn dignity, which mark t.i.tian's greatest portraits throughout his career. The splendid materials for the picture are not as absolutely digested, as absolutely welded into one consistent and harmonious whole, as with such authors.h.i.+p one would expect. But then, on the other hand, take the magnificent execution in the most important pa.s.sages: the distinguished silvery tone obtained notwithstanding the complete red-and-gold costume and the portentous crimson helmet; the masterly brush-work in these last particulars, in the handsome virile head of the model and the delicate flesh of the _amorino_. The dog might without exaggeration be p.r.o.nounced the best, the truest in movement, to be found in Venetian art--indeed, in art generally, until Velazquez appears. Herr Carl Justi's happy conjecture helps us, if we accept it, to get over some of these difficulties and seeming contradictions. The Duke of Atri belonged to a great Neapolitan family, exiled and living at the French court under royal countenance and protection. The portrait was painted to be sent back to France, to which, indeed, its whole subsequent history belongs. Under such circ.u.mstances the young n.o.bleman would naturally desire to affirm his rank and pretensions as emphatically as might be; to outdo in splendour and _prestance_ all previous sitters to t.i.tian; to record himself apt in war, in the chase, in love, and more choice in the fas.h.i.+on of his appointments than any of his compeers in France or Italy.

An importance to which it is surely not ent.i.tled in the life-work of the master is given to the portrait of the Legate Beccadelli, executed in the month of July 1552, and included among the real and fancied masterpieces of the Tribuna in the Uffizi. To the writer it has always appeared the most nearly tiresome and perfunctory of t.i.tian's more important works belonging to the same cla.s.s. Perhaps the elaborate legend inscribed on the paper held by the prelate, including the unusual form of signature "t.i.tia.n.u.s Vecellius faciebat Venetiis MDLII, mense Julii," may have been the cause that the canvas has attracted an undue share of attention.[45] At p. 218 of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's second volume we get, under date the 11th of October 1552, t.i.tian's first letter to Philip of Spain. There is mention in it of a _Queen of Persia_, which the artist does not expressly declare to be his own work, and of a _Landscape_ and _St. Margaret_ previously sent by Amba.s.sador Vargas ("... il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta. Margarita mandatovi per avanti"). The comment of the biographers on this is that "for the first time in the annals of Italian painting we hear of a picture which claims to be nothing more than a landscape, etc." Remembering, however, that when in 1574, at the end of his life, our master sent in to Philip's secretary, Antonio Perez, a list of paintings delivered from time to time, but not paid for, he described the _Venere del Pardo_, or _Jupiter and Antiope_, as "La nuda con il paese con el satiro," would it not be fair to a.s.sume that the description _Il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta.

Margarita_ means one and the same canvas--_The Figure of St. Margaret in a Landscape_? Thus should we be relieved from the duty of searching among the authentic works of the master of Cadore for a landscape pure and simple, and in the process stumbling across a number of spurious and doubtful things. The _St. Margaret_ is evidently the picture which, having been many years at the Escorial, now hangs in the Prado Gallery.

Obscured and darkened though it is by the irreparable outrages of time, it may be taken as a very characteristic example of t.i.tian's late but not latest manner in sacred art. In the most striking fas.h.i.+on does it exhibit that peculiar gloom and agitation of the artist face to face with religious subjects which at an earlier period would have left his serenity undisturbed. The saint, uncertain of her triumph, armed though she is with the Cross, flees in affright from the monster whose huge bulk looms, terrible even in overthrow, in the darkness of the foreground. To the impression of terror communicated by the whole conception the distance of the lurid landscape--a city in flames--contributes much.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Venus with the Mirror._ _Gallery of the Hermitage, St.

Petersburg. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie._]

In the spring and summer of 1554 were finished for Philip of Spain the _Danae_ of Madrid; for Mary, Queen of Hungary, a _Madonna Addolorata_; for Charles V. the _Trinity_, to which he had with t.i.tian devoted so much anxious thought. The _Danae_ of the Prado, less grandiose, less careful in finish than the Naples picture, is painted with greater spontaneity and _elan_ than its predecessor, and vibrates with an undisguisedly fleshly pa.s.sion. Is it to the taste of Philip or to a momentary touch of cynicism in t.i.tian himself that we owe the deliberate dragging down of the conception until it becomes symbolical of the lowest and most venal form of love? In the Naples version Amor, a fairly-fas.h.i.+oned divinity of more or less cla.s.sic aspect, presides; in the Madrid and subsequent interpretations of the legend, a grasping hag, the attendant of Danae, holds out a cloth, eager to catch her share of the golden rain. In the St. Petersburg version, which cannot be accounted more than an atelier piece, there is, with some slight yet appreciable variations, a substantial agreement with the Madrid picture.

Of this Hermitage _Danae_ there is a replica in the collection of the Duke of Wellington at Apsley House. In yet another version (also a contemporary atelier piece), which is in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, and has for that reason acquired a certain celebrity, the greedy duenna is depicted in full face, and holds aloft a chased metal dish.

Satisfaction of a very different kind was afforded to Queen Mary of Hungary and Charles V. The lady obtained a _Christ appearing to the Magdalen_, which was for a long time preserved at the Escorial, where there is still to be found a bad copy of it. A mere fragment of the original, showing a head and bust of Christ holding a hoe in his left hand, has been preserved, and is now No. 489 in the gallery of the Prado. Even this does not convince the student that t.i.tian's own brush had a predominant share in the performance. The letter to Charles V., dated from Venice the 10th of September 1554, records the sending of a _Madonna Addolorata_ and the great _Trinity_. These, together with another _Virgen de los Dolores_ ostensibly by t.i.tian, and the _Ecce h.o.m.o_ already mentioned, formed afterwards part of the small collection of devotional paintings taken by Charles to his monastic retreat at Yuste, and appropriated after his death by Philip. If the picture styled _La Dolorosa_, and now No. 468 in the gallery of the Prado, is indeed the one painted for the great monarch who was so sick in body and spirit, so fast declining to his end, the suspicion is aroused that the courtly Venetian must have acted with something less than fairness towards his great patron, since the _Addolorata_ cannot be acknowledged as his own work. Still less can we accept as his own that other _Virgen de los Dolores_, now No. 475 in the same gallery.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Landscape drawing in pen and bistre by t.i.tian.]

It is very different with the _Trinity_, called in Spain _La Gloria_, and now No. 462 in the same gallery. Though the master must have been hampered by the express command that the Emperor should be portrayed as newly arisen from the grave and adoring the _Trinity_ in an agony of prayer, and with him the deceased Empress Isabel, Queen Mary of Hungary, and Prince Philip, also as suppliants, he succeeded in bringing forth not indeed a complete masterpiece, but a picture all aspiration and fervent prayer--just the work to satisfy the yearnings of the man who, once the mightiest, was then the loneliest and saddest of mortals on earth. The crown and climax of the whole is the group of the Trinity itself, awful in majesty, dazzling in the golden radiance of its environment, and, beautifully linking it with mortality, the blue-robed figure of the Virgin, who stands on a lower eminence of cloud as she intercedes for the human race, towards whom her pitying gaze is directed. It would be absurd to pretend that we have here a work ent.i.tled, in virtue of the perfect achievement of all that has been sought for, to rank with such earlier masterpieces as the _a.s.sunta_ or the _St. Peter Martyr_. Yet it represents in one way sacred art of a higher, a more inspired order, and contains some pictorial beauties--such as the great central group--of which t.i.tian would not in those earlier days have been equally capable.

There is another descent, though not so marked a one as in the case of the _Danae_, with the _Venus and Adonis_ painted for Philip, the new King-Consort of England, and forwarded by the artist to London in the autumn of 1554. That the picture now in the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_ at Madrid is this original is proved, in the first place, by the quality of the flesh-painting, the silvery s.h.i.+mmer, the vibration of the whole, the subordination of local colour to general tone, yet by no means to the point of extinction--all these being distinctive qualities of this late time. It is further proved by the fact that it still shows traces of the injury of which Philip complained when he received the picture in London. A long horizontal furrow is clearly to be seen running right across the canvas. Apart from the consideration that pupils no doubt had a hand in the work, it lacks, with all its decorative elegance and felicity of movement, the charm with which t.i.tian, both much earlier in his career and later on towards the end, could invest such mythological subjects.[46] That the aim of the artist was not a very high one, or this _poesia_ very near to his heart, is demonstrated by the amusingly material fas.h.i.+on in which he recommends it to his royal patron. He says that "if in the _Danae_ the forms were to be seen front-wise, here was occasion to look at them from a contrary direction--a pleasant variety for the ornament of a _Camerino_." Our worldly-wise painter evidently knew that material allurements as well as supreme art were necessary to captivate Philip. It cannot be alleged, all the same, that this purely sensuous mode of conception was not perfectly in consonance with his own temperament, with his own point of view, at this particular stage in his life and practice.

The new Doge Francesco Venier had, upon his accession in 1554, called upon t.i.tian to paint, besides his own portrait, the orthodox votive picture of his predecessor Marcantonio Trevisan, and this official performance was duly completed in January 1555, and hung in the Sala de'

Pregadi. At the same time Venier determined that thus tardily the memory of a long--deceased Doge, Antonio Grimani, should be rehabilitated by the dedication to him of a similar but more dramatic and allusive composition. The commission for this piece also was given to t.i.tian, who made good progress with it, yet for reasons unexplained never carried the important undertaking to completion. It remained in the workshop at the time of his death, and was completed--with what divergence from the original design we cannot authoritatively say--by a.s.sistants. Antonio Grimani, supported by members of his house, or officers attached to his person, kneels in adoration before an emblematic figure of Faith which appears in the clouds holding the cross and chalice, which winged child-angels help to support, and haloed round with an oval glory of cherubim--a conception, by the way, quite new and not at all orthodox.

To the left appears a majestic figure of St. Mark, while the clouds upon which Faith is upborne, rise just sufficiently to show a very realistic prospect of Venice. There is not to be found in the whole life-work of t.i.tian a clumsier or more disjointed composition as a whole, even making the necessary allowances for alterations, additions, and restorations.

Though the figure of Faith is a sufficiently n.o.ble conception in itself, the group which it makes with the attendant angels is inexplicably heavy and awkward in arrangement; the flying _pulli_ have none of the audacious grace and buoyancy that Lotto or Correggio would have imparted to them, none of the rush of Tintoretto. The n.o.ble figure of St. Mark must be of t.i.tian's designing, but is certainly not of his painting, while the corresponding figure on the other side is neither the one nor the other. Some consolation is afforded by the figure of the kneeling Doge himself, which is a masterpiece--not less in the happy expression of nave adoration than in the rendering, with matchless breadth and certainty of brush, of burnished armour in which is mirrored the glow of the Doge's magnificent state robes.

CHAPTER IV

_Portraits of t.i.tian's daughter Lavinia--Death of Aretino--"Martyrdom of St. Lawrence"--Death of Charles V.--Attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Orazio Vecellio--"Diana and Actaeon" and "Diana and Calisto"--The "Comoro Family"--The "Magdalen" of the Hermitage--The "Jupiter and Antiope" and "Rape of Europa"--Vasari defines t.i.tian's latest manner--"St. Jerome" of the Brera--"Education of Cupid"--"Jacopo da Strada"--Impressionistic manner of the end--"Ecce h.o.m.o" of Munich--"Nymph and Shepherd" of Vienna--The unfinished "Pieta"--Death of t.i.tian_.

It was in the month of March 1555 that t.i.tian married his only daughter Lavinia to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle, thus leaving the pleasant home at Biri Grande without a mistress; for his sister Orsa had been dead since 1549.[47] It may be convenient to treat here of the various portraits and more or less idealised portrait-pieces in which t.i.tian has immortalised the thoroughly Venetian beauty of his daughter. First we have in the great _Ecce h.o.m.o_ of Vienna the graceful white-robed figure of a young girl of some fourteen years, placed, with the boy whom she guards, on the steps of Pilate's palace. Then there is the famous piece _Lavinia with a Dish of Fruit_, dating according to Morelli from about 1549, and painted for the master's friend Argentina Pallavicino of Reggio. This last-named work pa.s.sed in 1821 from the Solly Collection into the Berlin Gallery. Though its general aspect is splendidly decorative, though it is accounted one of the most popular of all t.i.tian's works, the Berlin picture cannot be allowed to take the highest rank among his performances of the same cla.s.s. Its fascinations are of the obvious and rather superficial kind, its execution is not equal in vigour, freedom, and accent to the best that the master did about the same time. It is pretty obvious here that only the head is adapted from that of Lavinia, the full-blown voluptuous form not being that of the youthful maiden, who could not moreover have worn this sumptuous and fanciful costume except in the studio. In the strongest contrast to the conscious allurement of this showpiece is the demure simplicity of mien in the avowed portrait _Lavinia as a Bride_ in the Dresden Gallery. In this last she wears a costume of warm white satin and a splendid necklace and earrings of pearls. Morelli has pointed out that the fan, in the form of a little flag which she holds, was only used in Venice by newly betrothed ladies; and this fixes the time of the portrait as 1555, the date of the marriage contract. The execution is beyond all comparison finer here, the colour more transparent in its warmth, than in the more celebrated Berlin piece. Quite eight or ten years later than this must date the _Salome_ of the Prado Gallery, which is in general design a variation of the _Lavinia_ of Berlin. The figure holding up--a grim subst.i.tute for the salver of fruit--the head of St. John on a charger has probably been painted without any fresh reference to the model. The writer is unable to agree with Crowe and Cavalcaselle when they affirm that this _Salome_ is certainly painted by one of the master's followers. The touch is a.s.suredly t.i.tian's own in the very late time, and the canvas, though much slighter and less deliberate in execution than its predecessors, is in some respects more spontaneous, more vibrant in touch. Second to none as a work of art--indeed more striking than any in the nave and fearless truth of the rendering--is the _Lavinia Sarcinelli as a Matron_ in the Dresden Gallery. Morelli surely exaggerates a little when he describes Lavinia here as a woman of forty. Though the demure, bright-eyed maiden has grown into a self-possessed Venetian dame of portentous dimensions, Sarcinelli's spouse is fresh still, and cannot be more than two-or three-and-thirty.

This a.s.sumption, if accepted, would fix the time of origin of the picture at about 1565, and, reasoning from a.n.a.logies of technique, this appears to be a more acceptable date than the year 1570-72, at which Morelli would place it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _t.i.tian's Daughter Lavinia._]

One of the most important chapters in our master's life closed with the death of Aretino, which took place suddenly on the 21st of October 1556.

He had been sitting at table with friends far into the night or morning.

One of them, describing to him a farcical incident of Rabelaisian quality, he threw himself back in his chair in a fit of laughter, and slipping on the polished floor, was thrown with great force on his head and killed almost instantaneously. This was indeed the violent and sudden death of the strong, licentious man; poetic justice could have devised no more fitting end to such a life.

In the year 1558 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, for very sufficient reasons, place the _Martyrdom of St. Lawrence_, now preserved in the hideously over-ornate Church of the Jesuits at Venice. To the very remarkable a.n.a.lysis which they furnish of this work, the writer feels unable to add anything appreciable by way of comment, for the simple reason that though he has seen it many times, on no occasion has he been fortunate enough to obtain such a light as would enable him to judge the picture on its own merits as it now stands.[48] Of a design more studied in its rhythm, more akin to the Florentine and Roman schools, than anything that has appeared since the _St. Peter Martyr_, with a _mise-en-scene_ more cla.s.sical than anything else from t.i.tian's hand that can be pointed to, the picture may be guessed, rather than seen, to be also a curious and subtle study of conflicting lights. On the one hand we have that of the gruesome martyrdom itself, and of a huge torch fastened to the carved shaft of a pedestal; on the other, that of an effulgence from the skies, celestial in brightness, shedding its consoling beams on the victim.