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Title: The Later Works of Titian

Author: Sir Claude Phillips

Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #12657]
                Most recently updated: December 15, 2020

Language: English

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THE LATER WORK OF TITIAN

By

CLAUDE PHILLIPS

Keeper of the Wallace Collection

1898







[Illustration: Titian. From a photograph by G. Brogi.]



[Illustration]





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


COPPER PLATES

Portrait of Titian, by himself. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Frontispiece

La Bella di Tiziano. Pitti Palace, Florence.

Titian's daughter Lavinia. Berlin Gallery.

The Cornaro Family. Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.


ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN SEPIA

Drawing of St. Jerome. British Museum.

Landscape with Stag. Collection of Professor Legros.


ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Madonna and Child with St. Catherine and St. John the Baptist. In the
National Gallery.

Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. Pitti Palace, Florence.

Francis the First. Louvre.

Portrait of a Nobleman. Pitti Palace, Florence.

S. Giovanni Elemosinario giving Alms. In the Church of that name at
Venice.

The Girl in the Fur Cloak. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.

Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

The Battle of Cadore (from a reduced copy of part only). Uffizi Gallery,
Florence.

The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. Accademia delle Belle
Arti, Venice.

The Magdalen. Pitti Palace, Florence.

The Infant Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Royal Gallery, Berlin.

Ecce Homo. Imperial Gallery, Vienna

Aretino. Pitti Palace, Florence

Pope Paul III. with Cardinal Farnese and Ottavio Farnese. Naples Gallery

Danaë and the Golden Rain. Naples Gallery

Charles V. at the Battle of Mühlberg. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid

Venus with the Mirror. Gallery of the Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Christ crowned with Thorns. Louvre

The Rape of Europa

Portrait of Titian, by himself. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid

St. Jerome in the Desert. Gallery of the Brera, Milan

The Education of Cupid. Gallery of the Villa Borghese, Rome

Religion succoured by Spain. Gallery of the Prado, Madrid

Portrait of the Antiquary Jacopo da Strada. Imperial Gallery, Vienna

Madonna and Child. Collection of Mr. Ludwig Mond

Christ crowned with Thorns. Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Pietà. By Titian and Palma Giovine. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice




THE LATER WORK OF TITIAN




CHAPTER I

_Friendship with Aretino--Its effect on Titian's art--Characteristics of
the middle period--"Madonna with St. Catherine" of National
Gallery--Portraits not painted from life--"Magdalen" of the Pitti--First
Portrait of Charles V.--Titian the painter, par excellence, of
aristocratic traits--The "d'Avalos Allegory"--Portrait of Cardinal
Ippolito de' Medici--S. Giovanni Elemosinario altar-piece._


Having followed Titian as far as the year 1530, rendered memorable by
that sensational, and, of its kind, triumphant achievement, _The
Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, we must retrace our steps some
three years in order to dwell a little upon an incident which must
appear of vital importance to those who seek to understand Titian's
life, and, above all, to follow the development of his art during the
middle period of splendid maturity reaching to the confines of old age.
This incident is the meeting with Pietro Aretino at Venice in 1527, and
the gradual strengthening by mutual service and mutual inclination of
the bonds of a friendship which is to endure without break until the
life of the Aretine comes, many years later, to a sudden and violent
end. Titian was at that time fifty years of age, and he might thus be
deemed to have over-passed the age of sensuous delights. Yet it must be
remembered that he was in the fullest vigour of manhood, and had only
then arrived at the middle point of a career which, in its untroubled
serenity, was to endure for a full half-century more, less a single
year. Three years later on, that is to say in the middle of August
1530, the death of his wife Cecilia, who had borne to him Pomponio,
Orazio, and Lavinia, left him all disconsolate, and so embarrassed with
the cares of his young family that he was compelled to appeal to his
sister Orsa, who thereupon came from Cadore to preside over his
household. The highest point of celebrity, of favour with princes and
magnates, having been attained, and a certain royalty in Venetian art
being already conceded to him, there was no longer any obstacle to the
organising of a life in which all the refinements of culture and all the
delights of sense were to form the most agreeable relief to days of
continuous and magnificently fruitful labour. It is just because
Titian's art of this great period of some twenty years so entirely
accords with what we know, and may legitimately infer, to have been his
life at this time, that it becomes important to consider the friendship
with Aretino and the rise of the so-called Triumvirate, which was a kind
of Council of Three, having as its _raison d'être_ the mutual
furtherance of material interests, and the pursuit of art, love, and
pleasure. The third member of the Triumvirate was Jacopo Tatti or del
Sansovino, the Florentine sculptor, whose fame and fortune were so far
above his deserts as an artist. Coming to Venice after the sack of Rome,
which so entirely for the moment disorganised art and artists in the
pontifical city, he elected to remain there notwithstanding the pressing
invitations sent to him by Francis the First to take service with him.
In 1529 he was appointed architect of San Marco, and he then by his
adhesion completed the Triumvirate which was to endure for more than a
quarter of a century.

It has always excited a certain sense of distrust in Titian, and caused
the world to form a lower estimate of his character than it would
otherwise have done, that he should have been capable of thus living in
the closest and most fraternal intimacy with a man so spotted and in
many ways so infamous as Aretino. Without precisely calling Titian to
account in set terms, his biographers Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and above
all M. Georges Lafenestre in _La Vie et L'Oeuvre du Titien_, have
relentlessly raked up Aretino's past before he came together with the
Cadorine, and as pitilessly laid bare that organised system of
professional sycophancy, adulation, scurrilous libel, and blackmail,
which was the foundation and the backbone of his life of outward pomp
and luxurious ease at Venice. By them, as by his other biographers, he
has been judged, not indeed unjustly, yet perhaps too much from the
standard of our own time, too little from that of his own. With all his
infamies, Aretino was a man whom sovereigns and princes, nay even
pontiffs, delighted to honour, or rather to distinguish by honours. The
Marquess Federigo Gonzaga of Mantua, the Duke Guidobaldo II. of Urbino,
among many others, showed themselves ready to propitiate him; and such a
man as Titian the worldly-wise, the lover of splendid living to whom
ample means and the fruitful favour of the great were a necessity; who
was grasping yet not avaricious, who loved wealth chiefly because it
secured material consideration and a life of serene enjoyment; such a
man could not be expected to rise superior to the temptations presented
by a friendship with Aretino, or to despise the immense advantages which
it included. As he is revealed by his biographers, and above all by
himself, Aretino was essentially "good company." He could pass off his
most flagrant misdeeds, his worst sallies, with a certain large and
Rabelaisian gaiety; if he made money his chief god, it was to spend it
in magnificent clothes and high living, but also at times with an
intelligent and even a beneficent liberality. He was a fine though not
an unerring connoisseur of art, he had a passionate love of music, and
an unusually exquisite perception of the beauties of Nature.

To hint that the lower nature of the man corrupted that of Titian, and
exercised a disintegrating influence over his art, would be to go far
beyond the requirements of the case. The great Venetian, though he might
at this stage be much nearer to earth than in those early days when he
was enveloped in the golden glow of Giorgione's overmastering influence,
could never have lowered himself to the level of those too famous
_Sonetti Lussuriosi_ which brought down the vengeance of even a Medici
Pope (Clement VII.) upon Aretino the writer, Giulio Romano the
illustrator, and Marcantonio Raimondi the engraver. Gracious and
dignified in sensuousness he always remained even when, as at this
middle stage of his career, the vivifying shafts of poetry no longer
pierced through, and transmuted with their vibration of true passion,
the fair realities of life. He could never have been guilty of the
frigid and calculated indecency of a Giulio Romano; he could not have
cast aside all conventional restraints, of taste as well as of
propriety, as Rubens and even Rembrandt did on occasion; but as Van
Dyck, the child of Titian almost as much as he was the child of Rubens,
ever shrank from doing. Still the ease and splendour of the life at Biri
Grande--that pleasant abode with its fair gardens overlooking Murano,
the Lagoons, and the Friulan Alps, to which Titian migrated in 1531--the
Epicureanism which saturated the atmosphere, the necessity for keeping
constantly in view the material side of life, all these things operated
to colour the creations which mark this period of Titian's practice, at
which he has reached the apex of pictorial achievement, but shows
himself too serene in sensuousness, too unruffled in the masterly
practice of his profession to give to the heart the absolute
satisfaction that he affords to the eyes. This is the greatest test of
genius of the first order--to preserve undimmed in mature manhood and
old age the gift of imaginative interpretation which youth and love
give, or lend, to so many who, buoyed up by momentary inspiration, are
yet not to remain permanently in the first rank. With Titian at this
time supreme ability is not invariably illumined from within by the lamp
of genius; the light flashes forth nevertheless, now and again, and most
often in those portraits of men of which the sublime _Charles V. at
Mühlberg_ is the greatest. Towards the end the flame will rise once more
and steadily burn, with something on occasion of the old heat, but with
a hue paler and more mysterious, such as may naturally be the outward
symbol of genius on the confines of eternity.

The second period, following upon the completion of the _St. Peter
Martyr_, is one less of great altar-pieces and _poesie_ such as the
miscalled _Sacred and Profane Love_ (_Medea and Venus_), the
_Bacchanals_, and the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, than it is of splendid
nudities and great portraits. In the former, however mythological be the
subject, it is generally chosen but to afford a decent pretext for the
generous display of beauty unveiled. The portraits are at this stage
less often intimate and soul-searching in their summing up of a human
personality than they are official presentments of great personages and
noble dames; showing them, no doubt, without false adulation or cheap
idealisation, yet much as they desire to appear to their allies, their
friends, and their subjects, sovereign in natural dignity and
aristocratic grace, yet essentially in a moment of representation.
Farther on the great altar-pieces reappear more sombre, more agitated in
passion, as befits the period of the sixteenth century in which
Titian's latest years are passed, and the patrons for whom he paints. Of
the _poesie_ there is then a new upspringing, a new efflorescence, and
we get by the side of the _Venus and Adonis_, the _Diana and Actæon_,
the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, such pieces of a more
exquisite and penetrating poetry as the _Venere del Pardo_ of Paris, and
the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna.

This appears to be the right place to say a word about the magnificent
engraving by Van Dalen of a portrait, no longer known to exist, but
which has, upon the evidence apparently of the print, been put down as
that of Titian by himself. It represents a bearded man of some
thirty-five years, dressed in a rich but sombre habit, and holding a
book. The portrait is evidently not that of a painter by himself, nor
does it represent Titian at any age; but it finely suggests, even in
black and white, a noble original by the master. Now, a comparison with
the best authenticated portrait of Aretino, the superb three-quarter
length painted in 1545, and actually at the Pitti Palace, reveals
certain marked similarities of feature and type, notwithstanding the
very considerable difference of age between the personages represented.
Very striking is the agreement of eye and nose in either case, while in
the younger as in the older man we note an idiosyncrasy in which
vigorous intellect as well as strong sensuality has full play. Van
Dalen's engraving very probably reproduces one of the lost portraits of
Aretino by Titian. In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Biography_ (vol. i. pp.
317-319) we learn from correspondence interchanged in the summer of 1527
between Federigo Gonzaga, Titian, and Aretino, that the painter, in
order to propitiate the Mantuan ruler, sent to him with a letter, the
exaggerated flattery of which savours of Aretino's precept and example,
portraits of the latter and of Signor Hieronimo Adorno, another
"faithful servant" of the Marquess. Now Aretino was born in 1492, so
that in 1527 he would be thirty-five, which appears to be just about the
age of the vigorous and splendid personage in Van Dalen's print.

Some reasons were given in the former section of this monograph[1] for
the assertion that the _Madonna with St. Catherine_, mentioned in a
letter from Giacomo Malatesta to the Marchese Federigo Gonzaga, dated
February 1530, was not, as is assumed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the
_Madonna del Coniglio_ of the Louvre, but the _Madonna and Child with
St. John the Baptist and St. Catherine_, which is No. 635 at the
National Gallery.[2] Few pictures of the master have been more
frequently copied and adapted than this radiantly beautiful piece, in
which the dominant chord of the scheme of colour is composed by the
cerulean blues of the heavens and the Virgin's entire dress, the deep
luscious greens of the landscape, and the peculiar, pale, citron hue,
relieved with a crimson girdle, of the robe worn by the St. Catherine, a
splendid Venetian beauty of no very refined type or emotional intensity.
Perfect repose and serenity are the keynote of the conception, which in
its luxuriant beauty has little of the power to touch that must be
conceded to the more naïve and equally splendid _Madonna del
Coniglio_.[3] It is above all in the wonderful Venetian landscape--a
mountain-bordered vale, along which flocks and herds are being driven,
under a sky of the most intense blue--that the master shows himself
supreme. Nature is therein not so much detailed as synthesised with a
sweeping breadth which makes of the scene not the reflection of one
beautiful spot in the Venetian territory, but without loss of essential
truth or character a very type of Venetian landscape of the sixteenth
century. These herdsmen and their flocks, and also the note of warning
in the sky of supernatural splendour, recall the beautiful Venetian
storm-landscape in the royal collection at Buckingham Palace. This has
been very generally attributed to Titian himself,[4] and described as
the only canvas still extant in which he has made landscape his one and
only theme. It has, indeed, a rare and mysterious power to move, a true
poetry of interpretation. A fleeting moment, full of portent as well as
of beauty, has been seized; the smile traversed by a frown of the stormy
sky, half overshadowing half revealing the wooded slopes, the rich
plain, and the distant mountains, is rendered with a rare felicity. The
beauty is, all the same, in the conception and in the thing actually
seen--much less in the actual painting. It is hardly possible to
convince oneself, comparing the work with such landscape backgrounds as
those in this picture at the National Gallery in the somewhat earlier
_Madonna del Coniglio_, and the gigantic _St. Peter Martyr_, or, indeed,
in a score of other genuine productions, that the depth, the vigour, the
authority of Titian himself are here to be recognised. The weak
treatment of the great Titianesque tree in the foreground, with its too
summarily indicated foliage--to select only one detail that comes
naturally to hand--would in itself suffice to bring such an attribution
into question.

[Illustration: _Madonna and Child with St. Catherine and St. John the
Baptist. National Gallery. From a Photograph by Morelli._]

Vasari states, speaking confessedly from hearsay, that in 1530, the
Emperor Charles V. being at Bologna, Titian was summoned thither by
Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, using Aretino as an intermediary, and
that he on that occasion executed a most admirable portrait of His
Majesty, all in arms, which had so much success that the artist received
as a present a thousand scudi. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, however, adduce
strong evidence to prove that Titian was busy in Venice for Federigo
Gonzaga at the time of the Emperor's first visit, and that he only
proceeded to Bologna in July to paint for the Marquess of Mantua the
portrait of a Bolognese beauty, _La Cornelia_, the lady-in-waiting of
the Countess Pepoli, whom Covas, the all-powerful political secretary of
Charles the Fifth, had seen and admired at the splendid entertainments
given by the Pepoli to the Emperor. Vasari has in all probability
confounded this journey of Charles in 1530 with that subsequent one
undertaken in 1532 when Titian not only portrayed the Emperor, but also
painted an admirable likeness of Ippolito de' Medici presently to be
described. He had the bad luck on this occasion to miss the lady
Cornelia, who had retired to Nuvolara, indisposed and not in good face.
The letter written by our painter to the Marquess in connection with
this incident[5] is chiefly remarkable as affording evidence of his too
great anxiety to portray the lady without approaching her, relying
merely on the portrait, "che fece quel altro pittore della detta
Cornelia"; of his unwillingness to proceed to Nuvolara, unless the
picture thus done at second hand should require alteration. In truth we
have lighted here upon one of Titian's most besetting sins, this
willingness, this eagerness, when occasion offers, to paint portraits
without direct reference to the model. In this connection we are
reminded that he never saw Francis the First, whose likeness he
notwithstanding painted with so showy and superficial a magnificence as
to make up to the casual observer for the absence of true vitality;[6]
that the Empress Isabella, Charles V.'s consort, when at the behest of
the monarch he produced her sumptuous but lifeless and empty portrait,
now in the great gallery of the Prado, was long since dead. He
consented, basing his picture upon a likeness of much earlier date, to
paint Isabella d'Este Gonzaga as a young woman when she was already an
old one, thereby flattering an amiable and natural weakness in this
great princess and unrivalled dilettante, but impairing his own
position as an artist of supreme rank.[7] It is not necessary to include
in this category the popular _Caterina Cornaro_ of the Uffizi, since it
is confessedly nothing but a fancy portrait, making no reference to the
true aspect at any period of the long-since deceased queen of Cyprus,
and, what is more, no original Titian, but at the utmost an atelier
piece from his _entourage_. Take, however, as an instance the _Francis
the First_, which was painted some few years later than the time at
which we have now arrived, and at about the same period as the _Isabella
d'Este_. Though as a _portrait d'apparat_ it makes its effect, and
reveals the sovereign accomplishment of the master, does it not shrink
into the merest insignificance when compared with such renderings from
life as the successive portraits of _Charles the Fifth_, the _Ippolito
de' Medici_, the _Francesco Maria della Rovere_? This is as it must and
should be, and Titian is not the less great, but the greater, because he
cannot convincingly evolve at second hand the true human individuality,
physical and mental, of man or woman.

It was in the earlier part of 1531 that Titian painted for Federigo
Gonzaga a _St. Jerome_ and a _St. Mary Magdalene_, destined for the
famous Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, who had expressed to
the ruler of Mantua the desire to possess such a picture. Gonzaga writes
to the Marchioness on March 11, 1831[8]:--"Ho subito mandate a Venezia e
scritto a Titiano, quale è forse il piu eccellente in quell' arte che a
nostri tempi si ritrovi, ed è tutto mio, ricercandolo con grande
instantia a volerne fare una bella lagrimosa piu che si so puo, e
farmela haver presto." The passage is worth quoting as showing the
estimation in which Titian was held at a court which had known and still
knew the greatest Italian masters of the art.

It is not possible at present to identify with any extant painting the
_St. Jerome_, of which we know that it hung in the private apartments
of the Marchioness Isabella at Mantua. The writer is unable to accept
Crowe and Cavalcaselle's suggestion that it may be the fine moonlight
landscape with St. Jerome in prayer which is now in the Long Gallery of
the Louvre. This piece, if indeed it be by Titian, which is by no means
certain, must belong to his late time. The landscape, which is marked by
a beautiful and wholly unconventional treatment of moonlight, for which
it would not be easy to find a parallel in the painting of the time, is
worthy of the Cadorine, and agrees well, especially in the broad
treatment of foliage, with, for instance, the background in the late
_Venus and Cupid_ of the Tribuna.[9] The figure of St. Jerome, on the
other hand, does not in the peculiar tightness of the modelling, or in
the flesh-tints, recall Titian's masterly synthetic way of going to work
in works of this late period. The noble _St. Jerome_ of the Brera, which
indubitably belongs to a well-advanced stage in the late time, will be
dealt with in its right place. Though it does not appear probable that
we have, in the much-admired _Magdalen_ of the Pitti, the picture here
referred to--this last having belonged to Francesco Maria della Rovere,
Duke of Urbino, and representing, to judge by style, a somewhat more
advanced period in the painter's career--it may be convenient to mention
it here. As an example of accomplished brush-work, of handling careful
and yet splendid in breadth, it is indeed worthy of all admiration. The
colours of the fair human body, the marvellous wealth of golden blond
hair, the youthful flesh glowing semi-transparent, and suggesting the
rush of the blood beneath; these are also the colours of the picture,
aided only by the indefinite landscape and the deep blue sky of the
background. If this were to be accepted as the _Magdalen_ painted for
Federigo Gonzaga, we must hold, nevertheless, that Titian with his
masterpiece of painting only half satisfied the requirements of his
patron. _Bellissima_ this Magdalen undoubtedly is, but hardly _lagrimosa
pin che si puo_. She is a _belle pécheresse_ whose repentance sits all
too lightly upon her, whose consciousness of a physical charm not easily
to be withstood is hardly disguised. Somehow, although the picture in
no way oversteps the bounds of decency, and cannot be objected to even
by the most over-scrupulous, there is latent in it a jarring note of
unrefinement in the presentment of exuberant youth and beauty which we
do not find in the more avowedly sensuous _Venus of the Tribuna_. This
last is an avowed act of worship by the artist of the naked human body,
and as such, in its noble frankness, free from all offence, except to
those whose scruples in matters of art we are not here called upon to
consider. From this _Magdalen_ to that much later one of the Hermitage,
which will be described farther on, is a great step upwards, and it is a
step which, in passing from the middle to the last period, we shall more
than once find ourselves taking.

[Illustration: ST. JEROME. PEN DRAWING BY TITIAN (?) _British Museum_.]

It is impossible to give even in outline here an account of Titian's
correspondence and business relations with his noble and royal patrons,
instructive as it is to follow these out, and to see how, under the
influence of Aretino, his natural eagerness to grasp in every direction
at material advantages is sharpened; how he becomes at once more humble
and more pressing, covering with the manner and the tone appropriate to
courts the reiterated demands of the keen and indefatigable man of
business. It is the less necessary to attempt any such account in these
pages--dealing as we are chiefly with the work and not primarily with
the life of Titian--seeing that in Crowe and Cavalcaselle's admirable
biography this side of the subject, among many others, is most patiently
and exhaustively dealt with.

In 1531 we read of a _Boy Baptist_ by Titian sent by Aretino to Maximian
Stampa, an imperialist partisan in command of the castle of Milan. The
donor particularly dwells upon "the beautiful curl of the Baptist's
hair, the fairness of his skin, etc.," a description which recalls to
us, in striking fashion, the little St. John in the _Virgin and Child
with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, which belongs, as has been
shown, to the same time.

It was on the occasion of the second visit of the Emperor and his court
to Bologna at the close of 1532 that Titian first came in personal
contact with Charles V., and obtained from that monarch his first
sitting. In the course of an inspection, with Federigo Gonzaga himself
as cicerone, of the art treasures preserved in the palace at Mantua, the
Emperor saw the portrait by Titian of Federigo, and was so much struck
with it, so intent upon obtaining a portrait of himself from the same
brush, that the Marquess wrote off at once pressing our master to join
him without delay in his capital. Titian preferred, however, to go
direct to Bologna in the train of his earlier patron Alfonso d'Este. It
was on this occasion that Charles's all-powerful secretary, the greedy,
overbearing Covos, exacted as a gift from the agents of the Duke of
Ferrara, among other things, a portrait of Alfonso himself by Titian;
and in all probability obtained also a portrait from the same hand of
Ercole d'Este, the heir-apparent. There is evidence to show that the
portrait of Alfonso was at once handed over to, or appropriated by, the
Emperor.

Whether this was the picture described by Vasari as representing the
prince with his arm resting on a great piece of artillery, does not
appear. Of this last a copy exists in the Pitti Gallery which Crowe and
Cavalcaselle have ascribed to Dosso Dossi, but the original is nowhere
to be traced. The Ferrarese ruler is, in this last canvas, depicted as a
man of forty or upwards, of resolute and somewhat careworn aspect. It
has already been demonstrated, on evidence furnished by Herr Carl Justi,
that the supposed portrait of Alfonso, in the gallery of the Prado at
Madrid, cannot possibly represent Titian's patron at any stage of his
career, but in all probability, like the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_ of
Castle Howard, is a likeness of his son and successor, Ercole II.

Titian's first portrait of the Emperor, a full-length in which he
appeared in armour with a generalissimo's baton of command, was taken in
1556 from Brussels to Madrid, after the formal ceremony of abdication,
and perished, it would appear, in one of the too numerous fires which
have devastated from time to time the royal palaces of the Spanish
capital and its neighbourhood. To the same period belongs, no doubt, the
noble full-length of Charles in gala court costume which now hangs in
the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_ in the Prado Gallery, as a pendant to
Titian's portrait of Philip II. in youth. Crowe and Cavalcaselle assume
that not this picture, but a replica, was the one which found its way
into Charles I.'s collection, and was there catalogued by Van der Doort
as "the Emperor Charles the Fifth, brought by the king from Spain, being
done at length with a big white Irish dog"--going afterwards, at the
dispersal of the king's effects, to Sir Balthasar Gerbier for _£_150.
There is, however, no valid reason for doubting that this is the very
picture owned for a time by Charles I., and which busy intriguing
Gerbier afterwards bought, only to part with it to Cardenas the Spanish
ambassador.[10] Other famous originals by Titian were among the choicest
gifts made by Philip IV. to Prince Charles at the time of his runaway
expedition to Madrid with the Duke of Buckingham, and this was no doubt
among them. Confirmation is supplied by the fact that the references to
the existence of this picture in the royal palaces of Madrid are for the
reigns of Philip II., Charles II., and Charles III., thus leaving a
large gap unaccounted for. Dimmed as the great portrait is, robbed of
its glow and its chastened splendour in a variety of ways, it is still a
rare example of the master's unequalled power in rendering race, the
unaffected consciousness of exalted rank, natural as distinguished from
assumed dignity. There is here no demonstrative assertion of _grandeza_,
no menacing display of truculent authority, but an absolutely serene and
simple attitude such as can only be the outcome of a consciousness of
supreme rank and responsibility which it can never have occurred to any
one to call into question. To see and perpetuate these subtle qualities,
which go so far to redeem the physical drawbacks of the House of
Hapsburg, the painter must have had a peculiar instinct for what is
aristocratic in the higher sense of the word--that is, both outwardly
and inwardly distinguished. This was indeed one of the leading
characteristics of Titian's great art, more especially in portraiture.
Giorgione went deeper, knowing the secret of the soul's refinement, the
aristocracy of poetry and passion; Lotto sympathetically laid bare the
heart's secrets and showed the pathetic helplessness of humanity.
Tintoretto communicated his own savage grandeur, his own unrest, to
those whom he depicted; Paolo Veronese charmed without _arrière-pensée_
by the intensity of vitality which with perfect simplicity he preserved
in his sitters. Yet to Titian must be conceded absolute supremacy in the
rendering not only of the outward but of the essential dignity, the
refinement of type and bearing, which without doubt come unconsciously
to those who can boast a noble and illustrious ancestry.

Again the writer hesitates to agree with Crowe and Cavalcaselle when
they place at this period, that is to say about 1533, the superb
_Allegory_ of the Louvre (No. 1589), which is very generally believed to
represent the famous commander Alfonso d'Avalos, Marqués del Vasto,
with his family. The eminent biographers of Titian connect the picture
with the return of d'Avalos from the campaign against the Turks,
undertaken by him in the autumn of 1532, under the leadership of Croy,
at the behest of his imperial master. They hazard the surmise that the
picture, though painted after Alfonso's return, symbolises his departure
for the wars, "consoled by Victory, Love, and Hymen." A more natural
conclusion would surely be that what Titian has sought to suggest is the
return of the commander to enjoy the hard-earned fruits of victory.

[Illustration: _Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. Pitti Palace, Florence.
From a Photograph by G. Brogi_.]

The Italo-Spanish grandee was born at Naples in 1502, so that at this
date he would have been but thirty-one years of age, whereas the mailed
warrior of the _Allegory_ is at least forty, perhaps older. Moreover,
and this is the essential point, the technical qualities of the picture,
the wonderful easy mastery of the handling, the peculiarities of the
colouring and the general tone, surely point to a rather later date, to
a period, indeed, some ten years ahead of the time at which we have
arrived. If we are to accept the tradition that this Allegory, or
quasi-allegorical portrait-piece, giving a fanciful embodiment to the
pleasures of martial domination, of conjugal love, of well-earned peace
and plenty, represents d'Avalos, his consort Mary of Arragon, and their
family--and a comparison with the well-authenticated portrait of Del
Vasto in the _Allocution_ of Madrid does not carry with it entire
conviction--we must perforce place the Louvre picture some ten years
later than do Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Apart from the question of
identification, it appears to the writer that the technical execution of
the piece would lead to a similar conclusion.[11]

To this year, 1533, belongs one of the masterpieces in portraiture of
our painter, the wonderful _Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici in a Hungarian
habit_ of the Pitti. This youthful Prince of the Church, the natural
son of Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours, was born in 1511, so that
when Titian so incomparably portrayed him, he was, for all the perfect
maturity of his virile beauty, for all the perfect self-possession of
his aspect, but twenty-two years of age. He was the passionate
worshipper of the divine Giulia Gonzaga, whose portrait he caused to be
painted by Sebastiano del Piombo. His part in the war undertaken by
Charles V. in 1532, against the Turks, had been a strange one. Clement
VII., his relative, had appointed him Legate and sent him to Vienna at
the head of three hundred musketeers. But when Charles withdrew from the
army to return to Italy, the Italian contingent, instead of going in
pursuit of the Sultan into Hungary, opportunely mutinied, thus affording
to their pleasure-loving leader the desired pretext for riding back with
them through the Austrian provinces, with eyes wilfully closed the while
to their acts of depredation. It was in the rich and fantastic habit of
a Hungarian captain that the handsome young Medici was now painted by
Titian at Bologna, the result being a portrait unique of its kind even
in his life-work. The sombre glow of the supple, youthful flesh, the
red-brown of the rich velvet habit which defines the perfect shape of
Ippolito, the red of the fantastic plumed head-dress worn by him with
such sovereign ease, make up a deep harmony, warm, yet not in the
technical sense hot, and of indescribable effect. And this effect is
centralised in the uncanny glance, the mysterious aspect of the man
whom, as we see him here, a woman might love for his beauty, but a man
would do well to distrust. The smaller portrait painted by Titian about
the same time of the young Cardinal fully armed--the one which, with the
Pitti picture, Vasari saw in the closet (_guardaroba_) of Cosimo, Duke
of Tuscany--is not now known to exist.[12]

[Illustration: _Francis the First. Louvre. From a Photograph by
Neurdein_.]

[Illustration: _Portrait of a Nobleman. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a
Photograph by E. Alinari_.]

It may be convenient to mention here one of the most magnificent among
the male portraits of Titian, the _Young Nobleman_ in the Sala di Marte
of the Pitti Gallery, although its exact place in the middle time of the
artist it is, failing all data on the point, not easy to determine. At
Florence there has somehow been attached to it the curious name _Howard
duca di Norfolk_,[13] but upon what grounds, if any, the writer is
unable to state. The master of Cadore never painted a head more finely
or with a more exquisite finesse, never more happily characterised a
face, than that of this resolute, self-contained young patrician with
the curly chestnut hair and the short, fine beard and moustache--a
personage high of rank, doubtless, notwithstanding the studied
simplicity of his dress. Because we know nothing of the sitter, and
there is in his pose and general aspect nothing sensational, this
masterpiece is, if not precisely not less celebrated among connoisseurs,
at any rate less popular with the larger public, than it deserves to
be.[14]

[Illustration: _S. Giovanni Elemosinario giving Alms. In the Church of
that name at Venice. From a Photograph by Naya._]

The noble altar-piece in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario at
Venice showing the saint of that name enthroned, and giving alms to a
beggar, belongs to the close of 1533 or thereabouts, since the
high-altar was finished in the month of October of that year. According
to Vasari, it must be regarded as having served above all to assert once
for all the supremacy of Titian over Pordenone, whose friends had
obtained for him the commission to paint in competition with the
Cadorine an altar-piece for one of the apsidal chapels of the church,
where, indeed, his work is still to be seen.[15] Titian's canvas, like
most of the great altar-pieces of the middle time, was originally arched
at the top; but the vandalism of a subsequent epoch has, as in the case
of the _Madonna di S. Niccola_, now in the Vatican, made of this arch a
square, thereby greatly impairing the majesty of the general effect.
Titian here solves the problem of combining the strong and simple
decorative aspect demanded by the position of the work as the central
feature of a small church, with the utmost pathos and dignity, thus
doing incomparably in his own way--the way of the colourist and the
warm, the essentially human realist--what Michelangelo had, soaring high
above earth, accomplished with unapproachable sublimity in the
_Prophets_ and _Sibyls_ of the Sixtine Chapel.

The colour is appropriately sober, yet a general tone is produced of
great strength and astonishing effectiveness. The illumination is that
of the open air, tempered and modified by an overhanging canopy of
green; the great effect is obtained by the brilliant grayish white of
the saint's alb, dominating and keeping in due balance the red of the
rochet and the under-robes, the cloud-veiled sky, the marble throne or
podium, the dark green hanging. This picture must have had in the years
to follow a strong and lasting influence on Paolo Veronese, the keynote
to whose audaciously brilliant yet never over-dazzling colour is this
use of white and gray in large dominating masses. The noble figure of S.
Giovanni gave him a prototype for many of his imposing figures of
bearded old men. There is a strong reminiscence, too, of the saint's
attitude in one of the most wonderful of extant Veroneses--that
sumptuous altar-piece _SS. Anthony, Cornelius, and Cyprian with a Page_,
in the Brera, for which he invented a harmony as delicious as it is
daring, composed wholly of violet-purple, green, and gold.




CHAPTER II

_Francesco Maria della Rovere--Titian and Eleonora Gonzaga--The "Venus
with the Shell"--Titian's later ideals--The "Venus of Urbino"--The
"Bella di Tiziano"--The "Twelve Cæsars"--Titian and Pordenone--The
"Battle of Cadore"--Portraits of the Master by himself--The
"Presentation in the Temple"--The "Allocation" of Madrid--The Ceiling
Pictures of Santo Spirito--First Meeting with Pope Paul III.--The "Ecce
Homo" of Vienna--"Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus_."


Within the years 1532 and 1538, or thereabouts, would appear to fall
Titian's relations with another princely patron, Francesco Maria della
Rovere, Duke of Urbino, the nephew of the redoubtable Pope Julius II.,
whose qualities of martial ardour and unbridled passion he reproduced in
an exaggerated form. By his mother, Giovanna da Montefeltro, he
descended also from the rightful dynasty of Urbino, to which he
succeeded in virtue of adoption. His life of perpetual strife, of
warfare in defence of his more than once lost and reconquered duchy, and
as the captain first of the army of the Church, afterwards of the
Venetian forces, came to an abrupt end in 1538. With his own hand he
had, in the ardent days of his youth, slain in the open streets of
Ravenna the handsome, sinister Cardinal Alidosi, thereby bringing down
upon himself the anathemas of his uncle, Julius II., and furnishing to
his successor, the Medici pope Leo X., the best possible excuse for the
sequestration of the duchy of Urbino in favour of his own house. He
himself died by poison, suspicion resting upon the infamous Pier Luigi
Farnese, the son of Paul III.

Francesco Maria had espoused Eleonora Gonzaga, the sister of Titian's
protector, Federigo, and it is probably through the latter that the
relations with our master sprang up to which we owe a small group of
his very finest works, including the so-called _Venus of Urbino_ of the
Tribuna, the _Girl in a Fur Cloak_ of the Vienna Gallery, and the
companion portraits of Francesco Maria and Eleonora which are now in the
Venetian Gallery at the Uffizi. The fiery leader of armies had, it
should be remembered, been brought up by Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, one
of the most amiable and enlightened princes of his time, and, moreover,
his consort Eleonora was the daughter of Isabella d'Este Gonzaga, than
whom the Renaissance knew no more enthusiastic or more discriminating
patron of art.

[Illustration: _The Girl in the Fur Cloak. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
From a Photograph by Löwy._]

A curious problem meets us at the outset. We may assume with some degree
of certainty that the portraits of the duke and duchess belong to the
year 1537. Stylistic characteristics point to the conclusion that the
great _Venus_ of the Tribuna, the so-called _Bella di Tiziano_, and the
_Girl in the Fur Cloak_--to take only undoubted originals--belong to
much the same stage of Titian's practice as the companion portraits at
the Uffizi. Eleonora Gonzaga, a princess of the highest culture, the
daughter of an admirable mother, the friend of Pietro Bembo, Sadolet,
and Baldassarre Castiglione, was at this time a matron of some twenty
years' standing; at the date when her avowed portrait was painted she
must have been at the very least forty. By what magic did Titian manage
to suggest her type and physiognomy in the famous pictures just now
mentioned, and yet to plunge the duchess into a kind of _Fontaine de
Jouvence_, realising in the divine freshness of youth and beauty beings
who nevertheless appear to have with her some kind of mystic and
unsolved connection? If this was what he really intended--and the
results attained may lead us without temerity to assume as much--no
subtler or more exquisite form of flattery could be conceived. It is
curious to note that at the same time he signally failed with the
portrait of her mother, Isabella d'Este, painted in 1534, but showing
the Marchioness of Mantua as a young woman of some twenty-five years,
though she was then sixty. Here youth and a semblance of beauty are
called up by the magic of the artist, but the personality, both physical
and mental, is lost in the effort. But then in this last case Titian was
working from an early portrait, and without the living original to refer
to.

But, before approaching the discussion of the _Venus of Urbino_, it is
necessary to say a word about another _Venus_ which must have been
painted some years before this time, revealing, as it does, a
completely different and, it must be owned, a higher ideal. This is the
terribly ruined, yet still beautiful, _Venus Anadyomene_, or _Venus of
the Shell_, of the Bridgewater Gallery, painted perhaps at the
instigation of some humanist, to realise a description of the
world-famous painting of Apelles. It is not at present possible to place
this picture with anything approaching to chronological exactitude. It
must have been painted some years after the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the
National Gallery, some years before the _Venus_ of the Tribuna, and that
is about as near as surmise can get. The type of the goddess in the
Ellesmere picture recalls somewhat the _Ariadne_ in our masterpiece at
the National Gallery, but also, albeit in a less material form, the
_Magdalens_ of a later time. Titian's conception of perfect womanhood is
here midway between his earlier Giorgionesque ideal and the frankly
sensuous yet grand luxuriance of his maturity and old age. He never,
even in the days of youth and Giorgionesque enchantment, penetrated so
far below the surface as did his master and friend Barbarelli. He could
not equal him in giving, with the undisguised physical allurement which
belongs to the true woman, as distinguished from the ideal conception
compounded of womanhood's finest attributes, that sovereignty of amorous
yet of spiritual charm which is its complement and its corrective.[16]
Still with Titian, too, in the earlier years, woman, as presented in the
perfection of mature youth, had, accompanying and elevating her bodily
loveliness, a measure of that higher and nobler feminine attractiveness
which would enable her to meet man on equal terms, nay, actively to
exercise a dominating influence of fascination. In illustration of this
assertion it is only necessary to refer to the draped and the undraped
figure in the _Medea and Venus (Sacred and Profane Love)_ of the
Borghese Gallery, to the _Herodias_ of the Doria Gallery, to the _Flora_
of the Uffizi. Here, even when the beautiful Venetian courtesan is
represented or suggested, what the master gives is less the mere votary
than the priestess of love. Of this power of domination, this feminine
royalty, the _Venus Anadyomene_ still retains a measure, but the _Venus
of Urbino_ and the splendid succession of Venuses and Danaës, goddesses,
nymphs, and heroines belonging to the period of the fullest maturity,
show woman in the phase in which, renouncing her power to enslave, she
is herself reduced to slavery.

These glowing presentments of physical attractiveness embody a lower
ideal--that of woman as the plaything of man, his precious possession,
his delight in the lower sense. And yet Titian expresses this by no
means exalted conception with a grand candour, an absence of
_arrière-pensée_ such as almost purges it of offence. It is Giovanni
Morelli who, in tracing the gradual descent from his recovered treasure,
the _Venus_ of Giorgione in the Dresden Gallery,[17] through the various
Venuses of Titian down to those of the latest manner, so finely
expresses the essential difference between Giorgione's divinity and her
sister in the Tribuna. The former sleeping, and protected only by her
sovereign loveliness, is safer from offence than the waking goddess--or
shall we not rather say woman?--who in Titian's canvas passively waits
in her rich Venetian bower, tended by her handmaidens. It is again
Morelli[18] who points out that, as compared with Correggio, even
Giorgione--to say nothing of Titian--is when he renders the beauty of
woman or goddess a realist. And this is true in a sense, yet not
altogether. Correggio's _Danaë_, his _Io_, his _Leda_, his _Venus_, are
in their exquisite grace of form and movement farther removed from the
mere fleshly beauty of the undraped model than are the goddesses and
women of Giorgione. The passion and throb of humanity are replaced by a
subtler and less easily explicable charm; beauty becomes a perfectly
balanced and finely modulated harmony. Still the allurement is there,
and it is more consciously and more provocatively exercised than with
Giorgione, though the fascination of Correggio's divinities asserts
itself less directly, less candidly. Showing through the frankly human
loveliness of Giorgione's women there is after all a higher
spirituality, a deeper intimation of that true, that clear-burning
passion, enveloping body and soul, which transcends all exterior grace
and harmony, however exquisite it may be in refinement of
voluptuousness.[19]

It is not, indeed, by any means certain that we are justified in
seriously criticising as a _Venus_ the great picture of the Tribuna.
Titian himself has given no indication that the beautiful Venetian woman
who lies undraped after the bath, while in a sumptuous chamber,
furnished according to the mode of the time, her handmaidens are seeking
for the robes with which she will adorn herself, is intended to present
the love-goddess, or even a beauty masquerading with her attributes.
Vasari, who saw it in the picture-closet of the Duke of Urbino,
describes it, no doubt, as "une Venere giovanetta a giacere, con fieri e
certi panni sottili attorno." It is manifestly borrowed, too--as is now
universally acknowledged--from Giorgione's _Venus_ in the Dresden
Gallery, with the significant alteration, however, that Titian's fair
one voluptuously dreams awake, while Giorgione's goddess more divinely
reposes, and sleeping dreams loftier dreams. The motive is in the
borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised
in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would
have brought it to the verge of triviality. Still as an example of his
unrivalled mastery in rendering the glow and semi-transparency of flesh,
enhanced by the contrast with white linen--itself slightly golden in
tinge; in suggesting the appropriate atmospheric environment; in giving
the full splendour of Venetian colour, duly subordinated nevertheless to
the main motive, which is the glorification of a beautiful human body as
it is; in all these respects the picture is of superlative excellence, a
representative example of the master and of Venetian art, a piece which
it would not be easy to match even among his own works.

More and more, as the supreme artist matures, do we find him disdaining
the showier and more evident forms of virtuosity. His colour is more and
more marked in its luminous beauty by reticence and concentration, by
the search after such a main colour-chord as shall not only be beautiful
and satisfying in itself, but expressive of the motive which is at the
root of the picture. Play of light over the surfaces and round the
contours of the human form; the breaking-up and modulation of masses of
colour by that play of light; strength, and beauty of general
tone--these are now Titian's main preoccupations. To this point his
perfected technical art has legitimately developed itself from the
Giorgionesque ideal of colour and tone-harmony, which was essentially
the same in principle, though necessarily in a less advanced stage, and
more diversified by exceptions. Our master became, as time went on, less
and less interested in the mere dexterous juxtaposition of brilliantly
harmonising and brilliantly contrasting tints, in piquancy, gaiety, and
sparkle of colour, to be achieved for its own sake. Indeed this phase of
Venetian sixteenth-century colour belongs rather to those artists who
issued from Verona--to the Bonifazi, and to Paolo Veronese--who in this
respect, as generally in artistic temperament, proved themselves the
natural successors of Domenico and Francesco Morone, of Girolamo dai
Libri, of Cavazzola.

Yet when Titian takes colour itself as his chief motive, he can vie with
the most sumptuous of them in splendour, and eclipse them all by the
sureness of his taste. A good example of this is the celebrated _Bella
di Tiziano_ of the Pitti Gallery, another work which, like the _Venus of
Urbino_, recalls the features without giving the precise personality of
Eleonora Gonzaga. The beautiful but somewhat expressionless head with
its crowning glory of bright hair, a waving mass of Venetian gold, has
been so much injured by rubbing down and restoration that we regret what
has been lost even more than we enjoy what is left. But the surfaces of
the fair and exquisitely modelled neck and bosom have been less cruelly
treated; the superb costume retains much of its pristine splendour. With
its combination of brownish-purple velvet, peacock-blue brocade, and
white lawn, its delicate trimmings of gold, and its further adornment
with small knots, having in them, now at any rate, but an effaced note
of red, the gown of _La Bella_ has remained the type of what is most
beautiful in Venetian costume as it was in the earlier half of the
sixteenth century. In richness and ingenious elaboration, chastened by
taste, it far transcends the over-splendid and ponderous dresses in
which later on the patrician dames portrayed by Veronese and his school
loved to array themselves. A bright note of red in the upper jewel of
one earring, now, no doubt, cruder than was originally intended, gives a
fillip to the whole, after a fashion peculiar to Titian.

[Illustration: _La Bella di Tiziano. From a photograph by Aplinari.
Walter L. Cells. Ph._]

The _Girl in the Fur Cloak_, No 197 in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna,
shows once more in a youthful and blooming woman the features of
Eleonora. The model is nude under a mantle of black satin lined with
fur, which leaves uncovered the right breast and both arms. The picture
is undoubtedly Titian's own, and fine in quality, but it reveals less
than his usual graciousness and charm. It is probably identical with the
canvas described in the often-quoted catalogue of Charles I.'s pictures
as "A naked woman putting on her smock, which the king changed with the
Duchess of Buckingham for one of His Majesty's Mantua pieces." It may
well have suggested to Rubens, who must have seen it among the King's
possessions on the occasion of his visit to London, his superb, yet
singularly unrefined, _Hélène Fourment in a Fur Mantle_, now also in the
Vienna Gallery.

The great portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi
belong, as has already been noted, to 1537. Francesco Maria, here
represented in the penultimate year of his stormy life, assumes
deliberately the truculent warrior, and has beyond reasonable doubt made
his own pose in a portrait destined to show the leader of armies, and
not the amorous spouse or the patron of art and artists. Praise
enthusiastic, but not excessive, has ever been and ever will be lavished
on the breadth and splendid decision of the painting; on the magnificent
rendering of the suit of plain but finely fashioned steel armour, with
its wonderful reflections; on the energy of the virile countenance, and
the appropriate concentration and simplicity of the whole. The superb
head has, it must be confessed, more grandeur and energy than true
individuality or life. The companion picture represents Eleonora Gonzaga
seated near an open window, wearing a sombre but magnificent costume,
and, completing it, one of those turbans with which the patrician ladies
of North Italy, other than those of Venice, habitually crowned their
locks. It has suffered in loss of freshness and touch more than its
companion. Fine and accurate as the portrait is, much as it surpasses
its pendant in subtle truth of characterisation, it has in the opinion
of the writer been somewhat overpraised. For once, Titian approaches
very nearly to the northern ideal in portraiture, underlining the truth
with singular accuracy, yet with some sacrifice of graciousness and
charm. The daughter of the learned and brilliant Isabella looks here as
if, in the decline of her beauty, she had become something of a
_précieuse_ and a prude, though it would be imprudent to assert that she
was either the one or the other. Perhaps the most attractive feature of
the whole composition is the beautiful landscape so characteristically
stretching away into the far blue distance, suggested rather than
revealed through the open window. This is such a picture as might have
inspired the Netherlander Antonio Moro, just because it is Italian art
of the Cinquecento with a difference, that is, with a certain admixture
of northern downrightness and literalness of statement.

About this same time Titian received from the brother of this princess,
his patron and admirer Federigo Gonzaga, the commission for the famous
series of the _Twelve Cæsars_, now only known to the world by stray
copies here and there, and by the grotesquely exaggerated engravings of
Ægidius Sadeler. Giulio Romano having in 1536[20] completed the Sala di
Troja in the Castello of Mantua, and made considerable progress with the
apartments round about it, Federigo Gonzaga conceived the idea of
devoting one whole room to the painted effigies of the _Twelve Cæsars_
to be undertaken by Titian. The exact date when the _Cæsars_ were
delivered is not known, but it may legitimately be inferred that this
was in the course of 1537 or the earlier half of 1538. Our master's
pictures were, according to Vasari, placed in an _anticamera_ of the
Mantuan Palace, below them being hung twelve _storie a olio_--histories
in oils--by Giulio Romano.[21] The _Cæsars_ were all half-lengths,
eleven out of the twelve being done by the Venetian master and the
twelfth by Giulio Romano himself.[22] Brought to England with the rest
of the Mantua pieces purchased by Daniel Nys for Charles I., they
suffered injury, and Van Dyck is said to have repainted the _Vitellius_,
which was one of several canvases irretrievably ruined by the
quicksilver of the frames during the transit from Italy.[23] On the
disposal of the royal collection after Charles Stuart's execution the
_Twelve Cæsars_ were sold by the State--not presented, as is usually
asserted--to the Spanish Ambassador Cardenas, who gave £1200 for them.
On their arrival in Spain with the other treasures secured on behalf of
Philip IV., they were placed in the Alcazar of Madrid, where in one of
the numerous fires which successively devastated the royal palace they
must have perished, since no trace of them is to be found after the end
of the seventeenth century. The popularity of Titian's decorative
canvases is proved by the fact that Bernardino Campi of Cremona made
five successive sets of copies from them--for Charles V., d'Avalos, the
Duke of Alva, Rangone, and another Spanish grandee. Agostino Caracci
subsequently copied them for the palace of Parma, and traces of yet
other copies exist. Numerous versions are shown in private collections,
both in England and abroad, purporting to be from the hand of Titian,
but of these none--at any rate none of those seen by the writer--are
originals or even Venetian copies. Among the best are the examples in
the collection of Earl Brownlow and at the royal palace of Munich
respectively, and these may possibly be from the hand of Campi. Although
we are expressly told in Dolce's _Dialogo_ that Titian "painted the
_Twelve Cæsars_, taking them in part from medals, in part from antique
marbles," it is perfectly clear that of the exact copying of
antiques--such as is to be noted, for instance, in those marble
medallions by Donatello which adorn the courtyard of the Medici Palace
at Florence--there can have been no question. The attitudes of the
_Cæsars_, as shown in the engravings and the extant copies, exclude any
such supposition. Those who have judged them from those copies and the
hideous grotesques of Sadeler have wondered at the popularity of the
originals, somewhat hastily deeming Titian to have been here inferior to
himself. Strange to say, a better idea of what he intended, and what he
may have realised in the originals, is to be obtained from a series of
small copies now in the Provincial Museum of Hanover, than from anything
else that has survived.[24] The little pictures in question, being on
copper, cannot well be anterior to the first part of the seventeenth
century, and they are not in themselves wonders. All the same they have
a unique interest as proving that, while adopting the pompous attitudes
and the purely decorative standpoint which the position of the pictures
in the Castello may have rendered obligatory, Titian managed to make of
his Emperors creatures of flesh and blood; the splendid Venetian warrior
and patrician appearing in all the glory of manhood behind the
conventional dignity, the self-consciousness of the Roman type and
attitude.

[Illustration: _Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Uffizi
Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by E. Alinari_.]

These last years had been to Titian as fruitful in material gain as in
honour. He had, as has been seen, established permanent and intimate
relations not only with the art-loving rulers of the North Italian
principalities, but now with Charles V. himself, mightiest of European
sovereigns, and, as a natural consequence, with the all-powerful
captains and grandees of the Hispano-Austrian court. Meanwhile a serious
danger to his supremacy had arisen. At home in Venice his unique
position was threatened by Pordenone, that masterly and wonderfully
facile _frescante_ and painter of monumental decorations, who had on
more than one occasion in the past been found in competition with him.

The Friulan, after many wanderings and much labour in North Italy, had
settled in Venice in 1535, and there acquired an immense reputation by
the grandeur and consummate ease with which he had carried out great
mural decorations, such as the façade of Martin d'Anna's house on the
Grand Canal, comprising in its scheme of decoration a Curtius on
horse-back and a flying Mercury which according to Vasari became the
talk of the town.[25] Here, at any rate, was a field in which even
Titian himself, seeing that he had only at long intervals practised in
fresco painting, could not hope to rival Pordenone. The Friulan, indeed,
in this his special branch, stood entirely alone among the painters of
North Italy.

The Council of Ten in June 1537 issued a decree recording that Titian
had since 1516 been in possession of his _senseria_, or broker's patent,
and its accompanying salary, on condition that he should paint "the
canvas of the land fight on the side of the Hall of the Great Council
looking out on the Grand Canal," but that he had drawn his salary
without performing his promise. He was therefore called upon to refund
all that he had received for the time during which he had done no work.
This sharp reminder operated as it was intended to do. We see from
Aretino's correspondence that in November 1537 Titian was busily engaged
on the great canvas for the Doges' Palace. This tardy recognition of an
old obligation did not prevent the Council from issuing an order in
November 1538 directing Pordenone to paint a picture for the Sala del
Gran Consiglio, to occupy the space next to that reserved for Titian's
long-delayed battle-piece.

That this can never have been executed is clear, since Pordenone, on
receipt of an urgent summons from Ercole II., Duke of Ferrara, departed
from Venice in the month of December of the same year, and falling sick
at Ferrara, died so suddenly as to give rise to the suspicion of foul
play, which too easily sprang up in those days when ambition or private
vengeance found ready to hand weapons so many and so convenient. Crowe
and Cavalcaselle give good grounds for the assumption that, in order to
save appearances, Titian was supposed--replacing and covering the
battle-piece which already existed in the Great Hall--to be presenting
the Battle of Spoleto in Umbria, whereas it was clear to all Venetians,
from the costumes, the banners, and the landscape, that he meant to
depict the Battle of Cadore fought in 1508. The latter was a Venetian
victory and an Imperial defeat, the former a Papal defeat and an
Imperial victory. The all-devouring fire of 1577 annihilated the _Battle
of Cadore_ with too many other works of capital importance in the
history both of the primitive and the mature Venetian schools. We have
nothing now to show what it may have been, save the print of Fontana,
and the oil painting in the Venetian Gallery of the Uffizi, reproducing
on a reduced scale part only of the big canvas. This last is of Venetian
origin, and more or less contemporary, but it need hardly be pointed out
that it is a copy from, not a sketch for, the picture.

[Illustration: _The Battle of Cadore (from a reduced copy of part only).
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by G. Brogi._]

To us who know the vast battle-piece only in the feeble echo of the
print and the picture just now mentioned, it is a little difficult to
account for the enthusiasm that it excited, and the prominent place
accorded to it among the most famous of the Cadorine's works. Though the
whole has abundant movement and passion, and the _mise-en-scène_ is
undoubtedly imposing, the combat is not raised above reality into the
region of the higher and more representative truth by any element of
tragic vastness and significance. Even though the Imperialists are armed
more or less in the antique Roman fashion, to distinguish them from the
Venetians, who appear in the accoutrements of their own day, it is still
that minor and local combat the _Battle of Cadore_ that we have before
us, and not, above and beyond this battle, War, as some masters of the
century, gifted with a higher power of evocation, might have shown it.
Even as the fragment of Leonardo da Vinci's _Battle of Anghiari_
survives in the free translation of Rubens's well-known drawing in the
Louvre, we see how he has made out of the unimportant cavalry combat,
yet without conventionality or undue transposition, a representation
unequalled in art of the frenzy generated in man and beast by the clash
of arms and the scent of blood. And Rubens, too, how incomparably in the
_Battle of the Amazons_ of the Pinakothek at Munich, he evokes the
terrors, not only of one mortal encounter, but of War--the hideous din,
the horror of man let loose and become beast once more, the pitiless
yell of the victors, the despairing cry of the vanquished, the
irremediable overthrow! It would, however, be foolhardy in those who can
only guess at what the picture may have been to arrogate to themselves
the right of sitting in judgment on Vasari and those contemporaries who,
actually seeing, enthusiastically admired it. What excited their delight
must surely have been Titian's magic power of brush as displayed in
individual figures and episodes, such as that famous one of the knight
armed by his page in the immediate foreground.

Into this period of our master's career there fit very well the two
portraits in which he appears, painted by himself, on the confines of
old age, vigorous and ardent still, fully conscious, moreover, though
without affectation, of pre-eminent genius and supreme artistic rank.
The portraits referred to are those very similar ones, both of them
undoubtedly originals, which are respectively in the Berlin Gallery and
the Painters' Gallery of the Uffizi. It is strange that there should
exist no certain likeness of the master of Cadore done in youth or
earlier manhood, if there be excepted the injured and more than doubtful
production in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, which has pretty generally
been supposed to be an original auto-portrait belonging to this period.
In the Uffizi and Berlin pictures Titian looks about sixty years old,
but may be a little more or a little less. The latter is a half-length,
showing him seated and gazing obliquely out of the picture with a
majestic air, but also with something of combativeness and disquietude,
an element, this last, which is traceable even in some of the earlier
portraits, but not in the mythological _poesie_ or any sacred work. More
and more as we advance through the final period of old age do we find
this element of disquietude and misgiving asserting itself in male
portraiture, as, for instance, in the _Maltese Knight_ of the Prado, the
_Dominican Monk_ of the Borghese, the _Portrait of a Man with a Palm
Branch_ of the Dresden Gallery. The atmosphere of sadness and foreboding
enveloping man is traceable back to Giorgione; but with him it comes
from the plenitude of inner life, from the gaze turned inwards upon the
mystery of the human individuality rather than outwards upon the
inevitable tragedies of the exterior life common to all. This same
atmosphere of passionate contemplativeness enwraps, indeed, all that
Giorgione did, and is the cause that he sees the world and himself
lyrically, not dramatically; the flame of aspiration burning steadily at
the heart's core and leaving the surface not indeed unruffled, but
outwardly calm in its glow. Titian's is the more dramatic temperament in
outward things, but also the more superficial. It must be remembered,
too, that arriving rapidly at the maturity of his art, and painting all
through the period of the full Renaissance, he was able with far less
hindrance from technical limitations to express his conceptions to the
full. His portraiture, however, especially his male portraiture, was and
remained in its essence a splendid and full-blown development of the
Giorgionesque ideal. It was grander, more accomplished, and for obvious
reasons more satisfying, yet far less penetrating, less expressive of
the inner fibre, whether of the painter or of his subject.

But to return to the portrait of Berlin. It is in parts unfinished, and
therefore the more interesting as revealing something of the methods
employed by the master in this period of absolute mastery, when his
palette was as sober in its strength as it was rich and harmonious;
when, as ever, execution was a way to an end, and therefore not to be
vain-gloriously displayed merely for its own sake. The picture came,
with very many other masterpieces of the Italian and Netherlandish
schools, from the Solly collection, which formed the nucleus of the
Berlin Gallery. The Uffizi portrait emerges noble still, in its
semi-ruined state, from a haze of restoration and injury, which has not
succeeded in destroying the exceptional fineness and sensitiveness of
the modelling. Although the pose and treatment of the head are
practically identical with that in the Berlin picture, the conception
seems a less dramatic one. It includes, unless the writer has misread
it, an element of greater mansuetude and a less perturbed
reflectiveness.

The double portrait in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at
Windsor Castle, styled _Titian and Franceschini_[26] has no pretensions
whatever to be even discussed as a Titian. The figure of the Venetian
senator designated as Franceschini is the better performance of the two;
the lifeless head of Titian, which looks very like an afterthought, has
been copied, without reference to the relation of the two figures the
one to the other, from the Uffizi picture, or some portrait identical
with it in character. A far finer likeness of Titian than any of these
is the much later one, now in the Prado Gallery; but this it will be
best to deal with in its proper chronological order.

We come now to one of the most popular of all Titian's great canvases
based on a sacred subject, the _Presentation in the Temple_ in the
Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice. This, as Vasari expressly states,
was painted for the Scuola di S. Maria della Carità, that is, for the
confraternity which owned the very building where now the Accademia
displays its treasures. It is the magnificent scenic rendering of a
subject lending itself easily to exterior pomp and display, not so
easily to a more mystic and less obvious mode of conception. At the root
of Titian's design lies in all probability the very similar picture on a
comparatively small scale by Cima da Conegliano, now No. 63 in the
Dresden Gallery, and this last may well have been inspired by
Carpaccio's _Presentation of the Virgin_, now in the Brera at Milan.[27]
The imposing canvases belonging to this particular period of Titian's
activity, and this one in particular, with its splendid architectural
framing, its wealth of life and movement, its richness and variety in
type and costume, its fair prospect of Venetian landscape in the
distance, must have largely contributed to form the transcendent
decorative talent of Paolo Veronese. Only in the exquisitely fresh and
beautiful figure of the childlike Virgin, who ascends the mighty flight
of stone steps, clad all in shimmering blue, her head crowned with a
halo of yellow light, does the artist prove that he has penetrated to
the innermost significance of his subject. Here, at any rate, he
touches the heart as well as feasts the eye. The thoughts of all who are
familiar with Venetian art will involuntarily turn to Tintoretto's
rendering of the same moving, yet in its symbolical character not
naturally ultra-dramatic, scene. The younger master lends to it a
significance so vast that he may be said to go as far beyond and above
the requirements of the theme as Titian, with all his legitimate
splendour and serene dignity, remains below it. With Tintoretto as
interpreter we are made to see the beautiful episode as an event of the
most tremendous import--one that must shake the earth to its centre. The
reason of the onlooker may rebel against this portentous version, yet he
is dominated all the same, is overwhelmed with something of the
indefinable awe that has seized upon the bystanders who are witnesses of
the scene.

[Illustration: _The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. Accademia
delle Belle Arti, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya._]

But now to discuss a very curious point in connection with the actual
state of Titian's important canvas. It has been very generally
assumed--and Crowe and Cavalcaselle have set their seal on the
assumption--that Titian painted his picture for a special place in the
Albergo (now Accademia), and that this place is now architecturally as
it was in Titian's time. Let them speak for themselves. "In this room
(in the Albergo), which is contiguous to the modern hall in which
Titian's _Assunta_ is displayed, there were two doors for which
allowance was made in Titian's canvas; twenty-five feet--the length of
the wall--is now the length of the picture. When this vast canvas was
removed from its place, the gaps of the doors were filled in with new
linen, and painted up to the tone of the original...."

That the pieces of canvas to which reference is here made were new, and
not Titian's original work from the brush, was of course well known to
those who saw the work as it used to hang in the Accademia. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle give indeed the name of a painter of this century who is
responsible for them. Within the last three years the new and
enterprising director of the Venice Academy, as part of a comprehensive
scheme of rearrangement of the whole collection, caused these pieces of
new canvas to be removed and then proceeded to replace the picture in
the room for which it is believed to have been executed, fitting it into
the space above the two doors just referred to. Many people have
declared themselves delighted with the alteration, looking upon it as a
tardy act of justice done to Titian, whose work, it is assumed, is now
again seen just as he designed it for the Albergo. The writer must own
that he has, from an examination of the canvas where it is now placed,
or replaced, derived an absolutely contrary impression. First, is it
conceivable that Titian in the heyday of his glory should have been
asked to paint such a picture--not a mere mural decoration--for such a
place? There is no instance of anything of the kind having been done
with the canvases painted by Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, Mansueti, and
others for the various _Scuole_ of Venice. There is no instance of a
great decorative canvas by a sixteenth century master of the first
rank,[28] other than a ceiling decoration, being degraded in the first
instance to such a use. And then Vasari, who saw the picture in Venice,
and correctly characterises it, would surely have noticed such an
extraordinary peculiarity as the abnormal shape necessitated by the two
doors. It is incredible that Titian, if so unpalatable a task had indeed
been originally imposed upon him, should not have designed his canvas
otherwise. The hole for the right door coming in the midst of the
monumental steps is just possible, though not very probable. Not so that
for the left door, which, according to the present arrangement, cuts the
very vitals out of one of the main groups in the foreground. Is it not
to insult one of the greatest masters of all time thus to assume that he
would have designed what we now see? It is much more likely that Titian
executed his _Presentation_ in the first place in the normal shape, and
that vandals of a later time, deciding to pierce the room in the Scuola
in which the picture is now once more placed with one, or probably two,
additional doors, partially sacrificed it to the structural requirements
of the moment. Monstrous as such barbarism may appear, we have already
seen, and shall again see later on, that it was by no means uncommon in
those great ages of painting, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

When the untimely death of Pordenone, at the close of 1538, had
extinguished the hopes of the Council that the grandiose facility of
this master of monumental decoration might be made available for the
purposes of the State, Titian having, as has been seen, made good his
gravest default, was reinstated in his lucrative and by no means onerous
office. He regained the _senseria_ by decree of August 28, 1539. The
potent d'Avalos, Marqués del Vasto, had in 1539 conferred upon Titian's
eldest son Pomponio, the scapegrace and spendthrift that was to be, a
canonry. Both to father and son the gift was in the future to be
productive of more evil than good. At or about the same time he had
commissioned of Titian a picture of himself haranguing his soldiers in
the pompous Roman fashion; this was not, however, completed until 1541.
Exhibited by d'Avalos to admiring crowds at Milan, it made a sensation
for which there is absolutely nothing in the picture, as we now see it
in the gallery of the Prado, to account; but then it would appear that
it was irreparably injured in a fire which devastated the Alcazar of
Madrid in 1621, and was afterwards extensively repainted. The Marquis
and his son Francesco, both of them full-length figures, are placed on a
low plinth, to the left, and from this point of vantage the Spanish
leader addresses a company of foot-soldiers who with fine effect raise
their halberds high into the air.[29] Among these last tradition places
a portrait of Aretino, which is not now to be recognised with any
certainty. Were the pedigree of the canvas a less well-authenticated
one, one might be tempted to deny Titian's authorship altogether, so
extraordinary are, apart from other considerations, the disproportions
in the figure of the youth Francesco. Restoration must in this instance
have amounted to entire repainting. Del Vasto appears more robust, more
martial, and slightly younger than the armed leader in the _Allegory_ of
the Louvre. If this last picture is to be accepted as a semi-idealised
presentment of the Spanish captain, it must, as has already been pointed
out, have been painted nearer to the time of his death, which took place
in 1546. The often-cited biographers of our master are clearly in error
in their conclusion that the painting described in the collection of
Charles I. as "done by Titian, the picture of the Marquis Guasto,
containing five half-figures so big as the life, which the king bought
out of an Almonedo," is identical with the large sketch made by Titian
as a preparation for the _Allocution_ of Madrid. This description, on
the contrary, applies perfectly to the _Allegory_ of the Louvre, which
was, as we know, included in the collection of Charles, and subsequently
found its way into that of Louis Quatorze.

[Illustration: _The Magdalen. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph
by Anderson._]

It was in 1542 that Vasari, summoned to Venice at the suggestion of
Aretino, paid his first visit to the city of the Lagoons in order to
paint the scenery and _apparato_ in connection with a carnival
performance, which included the representation of his fellow-townsman's
_Talanta.[30]_ It was on this occasion, no doubt, that Sansovino, in
agreement with Titian, obtained for the Florentine the commission to
paint the ceilings of Santo Spirito in Isola--a commission which was
afterwards, as a consequence of his departure, undertaken and performed
by Titian himself, with whose grandiose canvases we shall have to deal a
little later on. In weighing the value of Vasari's testimony with
reference to the works of Vecellio and other Venetian painters more or
less of his own time, it should be borne in mind that he paid two
successive visits to Venice, enjoying there the company of the great
painter and the most eminent artists of the day, and that on the
occasion of Titian's memorable visit to Rome he was his close friend,
cicerone, and companion. Allowing for the Aretine biographer's
well-known inaccuracies in matters of detail and for his royal disregard
of chronological order--faults for which it is manifestly absurd to
blame him over-severely--it would be unwise lightly to disregard or
overrule his testimony with regard to matters which he may have learned
from the lips of Titian himself and his immediate _entourage_.

To the year 1542 belongs, as the authentic signature and date on the
picture affirm, that celebrated portrait, _The Daughter of Roberto
Strozzi_, once in the splendid palace of the family at Florence, but
now, with some other priceless treasures having the same origin, in the
Berlin Museum. Technically, the picture is one of the most brilliant,
one of the most subtly exquisite, among the works of the great
Cadorine's maturity. It well serves to show what Titian's ideal of
colour was at this time. The canvas is all silvery gleam, all splendour
and sober strength of colour--yet not of colours. These in all their
plentitude and richness, as in the crimson drapery and the distant
landscape, are duly subordinated to the main effect; they but set off
discreetly the figure of the child, dressed all in white satin with hair
of reddish gold, and contribute without fanfare to the fine and
harmonious balance of the whole. Here, as elsewhere, more particularly
in the work of Titian's maturity, one does not in the first place pause
to pick out this or the other tint, this or the other combination of
colours as particularly exquisite; and that is what one is so easily
led to do in the contemplation of the Bonifazi and of Paolo Veronese.

[Illustration: _The Infant Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Royal Gallery,
Berlin. From a Photograph by F. Hanfstängl._]

As the portrait of a child, though in conception it reveals a marked
progress towards the _intimité_ of later times, the Berlin picture lacks
something of charm and that quality which, for want of a better word,
must be called loveableness. Or is it perhaps that the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries have spoilt us in this respect? For it is only in
these latter days that to the child, in deliberate and avowed
portraiture, is allowed that freakishness, that natural _espièglerie_
and freedom from artificial control which has its climax in the
unapproached portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is the more curious
when it is remembered how tenderly, with what observant and sympathetic
truth the relation of child to mother, of child to child, was noted in
the innumerable "Madonnas" and "Holy Families" of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; how both the Italians, and following them the
Netherlanders, relieved the severity of their sacred works by the
delightful roguishness, the romping impudence of their little angels,
their _putti_.

It has already been recorded that Titian, taking up the commission
abandoned by Vasari, undertook a great scheme of pictorial decoration
for the Brothers of Santo Spirito in Isola. All that he carried out for
that church has now found its way into that of the Salute. The three
ceiling pictures, _The Sacrifice of Isaac, Cain and Abel_, and _David
victorious over Goliath_, are in the great sacristy of the church; the
_Four Evangelists_ and _Four Doctors_ are in the ceiling of the choir
behind the altar; the altar-piece, _The Descent of the Holy Spirit_, is
in one of the chapels which completely girdle the circular church
itself. The ceiling pictures, depicting three of the most dramatic
moments in sacred history, have received the most enthusiastic praise
from the master's successive biographers. They were indeed at the time
of their inception a new thing in Venetian art. Nothing so daring as
these foreshortenings, as these scenes of dramatic violence, of physical
force triumphant, had been seen in Venice. The turbulent spirit was an
exaggeration of that revealed by Titian in the _St. Peter Martyr_; the
problem of the foreshortening for the purposes of ceiling decoration was
superadded. It must be remembered, too, that even in Rome, the
headquarters of the grand style, nothing precisely of the same kind
could be said to exist. Raphael and his pupils either disdained, or it
may be feared to approach, the problem. Neither in the ceiling
decorations of the Farnesina nor in the Stanze is there any attempt on a
large scale to _faire plafonner_ the figures, that is, to paint them so
that they might appear as they would actually be seen from below.
Michelangelo himself, in the stupendous decoration of the ceiling to the
Sixtine Chapel, had elected to treat the subjects of the flat surface
which constitutes the centre and climax of the whole, as a series of
pictures designed under ordinary conditions. It can hardly be doubted
that Titian, in attempting these _tours de force_, though not
necessarily or even probably in any other way, was inspired by
Correggio. It would not be easy, indeed, to exaggerate the Venetian
master's achievement from this point of view, even though in two at
least of the groups--the _Cain and Abel_ and the _David and
Goliath_--the modern professor might be justified in criticising with
considerable severity his draughtsmanship and many salient points in his
design. The effect produced is tremendous of its kind. The power
suggested is, however, brutal, unreasoning, not nobly dominating force;
and this not alone in the _Cain and Abel_, where such an impression is
rightly conveyed, but also in the other pieces. It is as if Titian, in
striving to go beyond anything that had hitherto been done of the same
kind, had also gone beyond his own artistic convictions, and thus, while
compassing a remarkable pictorial achievement, lost his true balance.
Tintoretto, creating his own atmosphere, as far outside and above mere
physical realities as that of Michelangelo himself, might have succeeded
in mitigating this impression, which is, on the whole, a painful one.
Take for instance the _Martyrdom of St. Christopher_ of the younger
painter--not a ceiling picture by the way--in the apse of S. Maria del
Orto. Here, too, is depicted, with sweeping and altogether irresistible
power, an act of hideous violence. And yet it is not this element of the
subject which makes upon the spectator the most profound effect, but the
impression of saintly submission, of voluntary self-sacrifice, which is
the dominant note of the whole.

It may be convenient to mention here _The Descent of the Holy Spirit_,
although in its definitive form, as we see it in its place in the Church
of the Salute, it appears markedly more advanced in style than the works
of the period at which we have now arrived, giving, both in manner and
feeling, a distinct suggestion of the methods and standpoint which mark
the later phase of old age. Vasari tells us that the picture, originally
painted in 1541, was seriously damaged and subsequently repainted; Crowe
and Cavalcaselle state that the work now seen at the Salute was painted
to replace an altar-piece which the Brothers of Santo Spirito had
declined to accept. Even as the picture now appears, somewhat faded, and
moreover seen at a disadvantage amid its cold surroundings of polished
white marble, it is a composition of wonderful, of almost febrile
animation, and a painting saturated with light, pierced through
everywhere with its rays. The effect produced is absolutely that which
the mystical subject requires.[31] Abandoning the passionless serenity
which has been the rule in sacred subjects of the middle time, Titian
shows himself more stimulated, more moved by his subject.

It was in the spring of 1543 that the master first came into personal
contact with Pope Paul III. and the Farnese family. The meeting took
place at Ferrara, and our painter then accompanied the papal court to
Busseto, and subsequently proceeded to Bologna. Aretino's correspondence
proves that Titian must at that time have painted the Pope, and that he
must also have refused the sovereign pontiff's offer of the _Piombo_,
which was then still, as it had been for years past, in the possession
of Sebastiano Luciani. That Titian, with all his eagerness for wealth
and position, could not find it in his heart to displace his
fellow-countryman, a friend no doubt of the early time, may legitimately
excite admiration and sympathy now, as according to Aretino it actually
did at the time. The portraits of the Farnese family included that of
the Pope, repeated subsequently for Cardinal Santafiore, that of Pier
Luigi, then that of Paul III. and this monstrous yet well-loved son
together,[32] and a likeness of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Upon the
three-quarter length portrait of Paul III. in the Naples Museum, Crowe
and Cavalcaselle have lavished their most enthusiastic praise, placing
it, indeed, among his masterpieces. All the same--interesting as the
picture undoubtedly is, remarkable in finish, and of undoubtedly
Titianesque origin--the writer finds it difficult, nay impossible, to
accept this _Paul III._ as a work from the hand of Titian himself.
Careful to excess, and for such an original too much wanting in
brilliancy and vitality, it is the best of many repetitions and
variations; of this particular type the original is not at present
forthcoming. Very different is the "Paul III." of the Hermitage, which
even in a reproduction loudly proclaims its originality.[33] This is by
no means identical in design with the Naples picture, but appears much
less studied, much more directly taken from the life. The astute Farnese
Pope has here the same simiesque type, the same furtive distrustful
look, as in the great unfinished group now to be described.[34] This
Titian, which doubtless passed into the Hermitage with the rest of the
Barbarigo pictures, may have been the first foundation for the series of
portraits of the Farnese Pope, and as such would naturally have been
retained by the master for his own use. The portrait-group in the Naples
Museum, showing, with Paul III., Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese (afterwards Duke of Parma), is, apart from its extraordinary
directness and swift technical mastery, of exceptional interest as being
unfinished, and thus doubly instructive. The composition, lacking in its
unusual momentariness the repose and dignity of Raphael's _Leo X. with
Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and de' Rossi_ at the Pitti, is not wholly
happy. Especially is the action of Ottavio Farnese, as in reverence he
bends down to reply to the supreme Pontiff, forced and unconvincing; but
the unflattered portrait of the pontiff himself is of a bold and quite
unconventional truth, and in movement much happier. The picture may
possibly, by reason of this unconventional conception less than
perfectly realised, have failed to please the sitters, and thus have
been left in its present state.[35]

Few of Titian's canvases of vast dimensions have enjoyed a higher degree
of popularity than the large _Ecce Homo_ to which the Viennese proudly
point as one of the crowning ornaments of the great Imperial Gallery of
their city. Completed in 1543[36] for Giovanni d'Anna, a son of the
Flemish merchant Martin van der Hanna, who had established himself in
Venice, it was vainly coveted by Henri III. on the occasion of his
memorable visit in 1574, but was in 1620 purchased for the splendid
favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by the English envoy Sir
Henry Wotton. From him the noblest and most accomplished of English
collectors, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, sought to obtain the prize with the
unparalleled offer of £7000, yet even thus failed. At the time of the
great _débâcle_, in 1648, the guardians and advisers of his youthful son
and successor were glad enough to get the splendid gallery over to the
Low Countries, and to sell with the rest the _Ecce Homo_, which brought
under these circumstances but a tenth part of what Lord Arundel would
have given for it. Passing into the collection of the Archduke Leopold
William, it was later on finally incorporated with that of the Imperial
House of Austria. From the point of view of scenic and decorative
magnificence combined with dramatic propriety, though not with any depth
or intensity of dramatic passion, the work is undoubtedly imposing. Yet
it suffers somewhat, even in this respect, from the fact that the
figures are not more than small life-size. With passages of Titianesque
splendour there are to be noted others, approaching to the acrid and
inharmonious, which one would rather attribute to the master's
assistants than to himself. So it is, too, with certain exaggerations of
design characteristic rather of the period than the man--notably with
the two figures to the left of the foreground. The Christ in His
meekness is too little divine, too heavy and inert;[37] the Pontius
Pilate not inappropriately reproduces the features of the worldling and
_viveur_ Aretino. The mounted warrior to the extreme right, who has been
supposed to represent Alfonso d'Este, shows the genial physiognomy made
familiar by the Madrid picture so long deemed to be his portrait, but
which, as has already been pointed out, represents much more probably
his successor Ercole II. d'Este, whom we find again in that superb piece
by the master, the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_ of Castle Howard. The
_Ecce Homo_ of Vienna is another of the works of which both the
general _ordonnance_ and the truly Venetian splendour must have
profoundly influenced Paolo Veronese.

[Illustration: _Ecce Homo. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph
by Löwy_.]

[Illustration: _Aretino. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by E.
Alinari_.]

To this period belongs also the _Annunciation of the Virgin_ now in the
Cathedral of Verona--a rich, harmonious, and appropriate altar-piece,
but not one of any special significance in the life-work of the painter.

Shall we not, pretty much in agreement with Vasari, place here, just
before the long-delayed visit to Rome, the _Christ with the Pilgrims at
Emmaus_ of the Louvre? A strong reason for dating this, one of the
noblest, one of the most deeply felt of all Titian's works, before
rather than after the stay in the Eternal City, is that in its
_naïveté_, in its realistic episodes, in its fulness of life, it is so
entirely and delightfully Venetian. Here again the colour-harmony in its
subdued richness and solemnity has a completeness such as induces the
beholder to accept it in its unity rather than to analyse those infinite
subtleties of juxtaposition and handling which, avoiding bravura,
disdain to show themselves on the surface. The sublime beauty of the
landscape, in which, as often elsewhere, the golden radiance of the
setting sun is seen battling with masses of azure cloud, has not been
exceeded by Titian himself. With all the daring yet perfectly
unobtrusive and unconscious realism of certain details, the conception
is one of the loftiest, one of the most penetrating in its very
simplicity, of Venetian art at its apogee. The divine mansuetude, the
human and brotherly sympathy of the Christ, have not been equalled since
the early days of the _Cristo della Moneta_. Altogether the _Pilgrims at
Emmaus_ well marks that higher and more far-reaching conception of
sacred art which reveals itself in the productions of Titian's old age,
when we compare them with the untroubled serenity and the conventional
assumptions of the middle time.[38]

To the year 1545 belongs the supremely fine _Portrait of Aretino_, which
is one of the glories of the Pitti Gallery. This was destined to
propitiate the Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, the son of his passionately
attached friend of earlier days, Giovanni delle Bande Nere. Aretino,
who had particular reasons for desiring to appear before the obdurate
Cosimo in all the pomp and opulence of his later years, was obviously
wounded that Titian, true to his genius, and to his method at this
moment, should have made the keynote of his masterpiece a dignified
simplicity. For once unfaithful to his brother Triumvir and friend, he
attacks him in the accompanying letter to the Tuscan ruler with the
withering sarcasm that "the satins, velvets, and brocades would perhaps
have been better if Titian had received a few more scudi for working
them out." If Aretino's pique had not caused the momentary clouding over
of his artistic vision, he would have owned that the canvas now in the
Pitti was one of the happiest achievements of Titian and one of the
greatest things in portraiture. There is no flattery here of the "Divine
Aretino," as with heroic impudence the notorious publicist styles
himself. The sensual type is preserved, but rendered acceptable, and in
a sense attractive, by a certain assurance and even dignity of bearing,
such as success and a position impregnable of its unique and unenviable
kind may well have lent to the adventurer in his maturity. Even Titian's
brush has not worked with greater richness and freedom, with an effect
broader or more entirely legitimate than in the head with its softly
flowing beard and the magnificent yet not too ornate robe and vest of
plum-coloured velvet and satin.




CHAPTER III

_The Visit to Rome--Titian and Michelangelo--The "Danaë" of Naples--"St.
John the Baptist in the Desert"--Journey to Augsburg--"Venus and Cupid"
of the Tribuna--"Venus with the Organ Player" of Madrid--The Altar-piece
of Serravalle--"Charles V. at the Battle of Mühlberg"--"Prometheus
Bound" and companion pictures--Second Journey to Augsburg--Portraits of
Philip of Spain--The so-called "Marqués del Vasto" at Cassel--The "St.
Margaret"--"Danaë" of Madrid--The "Trinity"--"Venus and Adonis"--"La
Fede."_


At last, in the autumn of 1545, the master of Cadore, at the age of
sixty-eight years, was to see Rome, its ruins, its statues, its
antiquities, and what to the painter of the Renaissance must have meant
infinitely more, the Sixtine Chapel and the Stanze of the Vatican. Upon
nothing in the history of Venetian art have its lovers, and the many
who, with profound interest, trace Titian's noble and perfectly
consistent career from its commencement to its close, more reason to
congratulate themselves than on this circumstance, that in youth and
earlier manhood fortune and his own success kept him from visiting Rome.
Though his was not the eclectic tendency, the easily impressionable
artistic temperament of a Sebastiano Luciani--the only eclectic,
perhaps, who managed all the same to prove and to maintain himself an
artist of the very first rank--if Titian had in earlier life been lured
to the Eternal City, and had there settled, the glamour of the grand
style might have permanently and fatally disturbed his balance. Now it
was too late for the splendid and gracious master, who even at
sixty-eight had still before him nearly thirty fruitful years, to
receive any impressions sufficiently deep to penetrate to the root of
his art. There is some evidence to show that Titian, deeply impressed
with the highest manifestations of the Florentine and Umbro-Florentine
art transplanted to Rome, considered that his work had improved after
the visit of 1545-1546. If there was such improvement--and certainly in
the ultimate phases of his practice there will be evident in some ways
a wider view, a higher grasp of essentials, a more responsive
sensitiveness in the conceiving anew of the great sacred subjects--it
must have come, not from any effort to assimilate the manner or to
assume the standpoint which had obtained in Rome, but from the closer
contact with a world which at its centre was beginning to take a deeper,
a more solemn and gloomy view of religion and life. It should not be
forgotten that this was the year when the great Council of Trent first
met, and that during the next twenty years or more the whole of Italy,
nay, the whole of the Catholic world, was overshadowed by its
deliberations.

Titian's friend and patron of that time, Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino,
had at first opposed Titian'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 Titian'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 Titian in his apartments at the Belvedere,
as it is recalled by Vasari with that naïve 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
noble 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!

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

Titian 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 friendship!

Let Vasari himself be heard as to this meeting. "Michelangelo and Vasari
going one day to pay a visit to Titian in the Belvedere, saw, in a
picture which he had then advanced towards completion, a nude female
figure representing _Danaë_ as she receives the embrace of Jove
transformed into a rain of gold, and, as the fashion is in people's
presence, praised it much to him. When they had taken leave, and the
discussion was as to the art of Titian, 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
probité de l'art," and how his illustrious 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 _Danaë_, seen and admired with reservations by Buonarroti in the
painting-room of Titian 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
assimilation 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 Titian and the design
of Michelangelo--than his impetuous pupil and rival ever did. While
preserving in the _Danaë_ 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.

[Illustration: _Danaë and the Golden Rain. Naples Gallery. From a
Photograph by E. Alinari._]

Titian, 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. Titian 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 attitude was taken up by the duke in order not to do
wrong to the "many noble 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 Titian 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,
Titian 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 noble 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 Titian. 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 Titian'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 Titian'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 Titian 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
Titian, 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 classic myth, of the nude in goddess 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-goddess. 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 worship
of fleshly loveliness which then existed in Venice. It has been pointed
out that the later Venus has the features of Titian's fair daughter
Lavinia, and this is no doubt to a certain extent true. The goddesses,
nymphs, and women of this time bear a sort of general family resemblance
to her and to each other. This piece illustrates the preferred type of
Titian's old age, as the _Vanitas, Herodias_, and _Flora_ illustrate the
preferred type of his youth; as the paintings which we have learnt to
associate with the Duchess of Urbino illustrate that of his middle time.
The dignity and rhythmic outline of Eros in the _Danaë_ 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 _Worship 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
repetition 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 Titian ascribe to his own brush. Among these
are the tiresome, formal landscape, the wooden little dog petted by
Venus, and perhaps some other passages. The goddess 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 passage of the work when he depicts the
youthful, supple form of the Venetian courtesan, as in a merely passive
pose she personates the goddess 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 Danaë herself by gold.

If we are to assume with Crowe and Cavalcaselle that the single figure
_Ecce Homo_ 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 assistants. 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 Titian 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 Titian for the Cardinal of Trent
at Augsburg. It is significant to find the writer mentioning the
painter, not by any of the styles and titles which he had a right to
bear, especially at the court of Charles V., but extolling him as
"Messer Titiano Pittore et il primo huomo della Christianita."[40]

It might be imagined that it would be a terrible wrench for Titian, 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 assumed that
he presided over the studio and workshop at Biri Grande during his
father's absence. Titian 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 Mühlberg,
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 circumstances, 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 Titian'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, Cæsar advances with a mien impassive 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 God. 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 assumptions of an Alexander,
how theatrical the Olympian airs of an Augustus, how merely vulgar and
ill-worn the imperial poses of a Napoleon.

[Illustration: _Charles V. at the Battle of Mühlberg. Gallery of the
Prado, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie._]

No veracious biographer of Titian 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 assume that Titian 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 Titian 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 ambassador 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 Mühlberg. The picture has, as a portrait by
Titian, 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 naïve
directness of the presentment. This mode of conception may well have
been dictated to the courtly Venetian by sturdy 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 classed 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 Titian," 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).

Titian, 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
accumulation 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.
Titian 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 Titian's
sacred works. There was in this respect kinship of spirit between the
mighty ruler and his servant; Titian's art had already become sadder and
more solemn, had already shown a more sombre passion. The tragic gloom
is now to become more and more intense, until we come to the climax in
the astonishing _Pietà_ 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. Titian 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 unennobled 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 passion as in the fervour of his faith, would receive
encouragement to develop to the full these seemingly conflicting
tendencies of sacred and amorous passion.

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 circumstances, of so unlovable
a personage--Titian 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 grass 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 Titian'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 Cassel. In the days when it
was sought to obtain _quand même_ a striking designation for a great
picture, it was christened _Alfonso d'Avalos, Marqués del Vasto_.
More recently, with some greater show of probability, it has
been called _Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino_. In the _Jahrbuch der
königlich-preussischen Kunstsammlungen_,[43] Herr Carl Justi, ever bold
and ingenious in hypothesis, strives, with the support of a mass of
corroborative evidence that cannot be here quoted, to prove that the
splendid personage presented is a Neapolitan nobleman 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 Titian. 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 astonishing 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 noble
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 Titian 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 Titian'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 authorship one would
expect. But then, on the other hand, take the magnificent execution in
the most important passages: 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 pronounced 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
circumstances the young nobleman would naturally desire to affirm his
rank and pretensions as emphatically as might be; to outdo in splendour
and _prestance_ all previous sitters to Titian; to record himself apt in
war, in the chase, in love, and more choice in the fashion of his
appointments than any of his compeers in France or Italy.

An importance to which it is surely not entitled 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 Titian's more
important works belonging to the same class. Perhaps the elaborate
legend inscribed on the paper held by the prelate, including the unusual
form of signature "Titianus 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, Titian'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 Ambassador
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 assume 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 Titian's late but
not latest manner in sacred art. In the most striking fashion 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.

[Illustration: _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
_Danaë_ of Madrid; for Mary, Queen of Hungary, a _Madonna Addolorata_;
for Charles V. the _Trinity_, to which he had with Titian devoted so
much anxious thought. The _Danaë_ of the Prado, less grandiose, less
careful in finish than the Naples picture, is painted with greater
spontaneity and _élan_ than its predecessor, and vibrates with an
undisguisedly fleshly passion. Is it to the taste of Philip or to a
momentary touch of cynicism in Titian 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-fashioned divinity of more or less classic aspect, presides; in
the Madrid and subsequent interpretations of the legend, a grasping hag,
the attendant of Danaë, 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 _Danaë_ 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 Titian'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 Titian, and the _Ecce
Homo_ 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.

[Illustration: Landscape drawing in pen and bistre by Titian.]

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
entitled, in virtue of the perfect achievement of all that has been
sought for, to rank with such earlier masterpieces as the _Assunta_ 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 Titian 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 _Danaë_, 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 shimmer, 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 Titian, 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 fashion in which he recommends it to his royal patron. He says
that "if in the _Danaë_ 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 Titian 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 Titian, 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 assistants. 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
Titian 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 noble 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 noble figure of St. Mark
must be of Titian'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 naïve 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 Titian's daughter Lavinia--Death of Aretino--"Martyrdom of
St. Lawrence"--Death of Charles V.--Attempted assassination 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 Titian's latest manner--"St. Jerome" of
the Brera--"Education of Cupid"--"Jacopo da Strada"--Impressionistic
manner of the end--"Ecce Homo" of Munich--"Nymph and Shepherd" of
Vienna--The unfinished "Pietà"--Death of Titian_.


It was in the month of March 1555 that Titian 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 Titian has
immortalised the thoroughly Venetian beauty of his daughter. First we
have in the great _Ecce Homo_ 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 passed 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
Titian's works, the Berlin picture cannot be allowed to take the highest
rank among his performances of the same class. 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 substitute 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 assuredly Titian'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 naïve 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 assumption, if accepted, would fix the time of origin of the
picture at about 1565, and, reasoning from analogies of technique, this
appears to be a more acceptable date than the year 1570-72, at which
Morelli would place it.

[Illustration: _Titian'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
analysis 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-scène_
more classical than anything else from Titian'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.

The _Christ crowned with Thorns_, which long adorned the church of S.
Maria delle Grazie at Milan, and is now in the Long Gallery of the
Louvre, may belong to about this time, but is painted with a larger and
more generous brush, with a more spontaneous energy, than the carefully
studied piece at the Gesuiti. The tawny harmonies finely express in
their calculated absence of freshness the scene of brutal and unholy
violence so dramatically enacted before our eyes. The rendering of
muscle, supple and strong under the living epidermis, the glow of the
flesh, the dramatic momentariness of the whole, have not been surpassed
even by Titian. Of the true elevation, of the spiritual dignity that the
subject calls for, there is, however, little or nothing. The finely
limbed Christ is as coarse in type and as violent in action as his
executioners; sublimity is reached, strange to say, only in the bust of
Tiberius, which crowns the rude archway through which the figures have
issued into the open space. Titian is here the precursor of the
_Naturalisti_--of Caravaggio and his school. Yet, all the same, how
immeasurable is the distance between the two!

[Illustration: _Christ crowned with Thorns. Louvre. From a Photograph by
Neurdein_.]

On the 21st of September 1558 died the imperial recluse of Yuste, once
Charles V., and it is said his last looks were steadfastly directed
towards that great canvas _The Trinity_, which to devise with Titian had
been one of his greatest consolations at a moment when already earthly
glories held him no more. Philip, on the news of his father's death,
retired for some weeks to the monastery of Groenendale, and thence sent
a despatch to the Governor of Milan, directing payment of all the
arrears of the pensions "granted to Titian by Charles his father (now in
glory)," adding by way of unusual favour a postscript in his own
hand.[49] Orazio Vecellio, despatched by his father in the spring of
1559 to Milan to receive the arrears of pension, accepted the
hospitality of the sculptor Leone Leoni, who was then living in splendid
style in a palace which he had built and adorned for himself in the
Lombard city. He was the rival in art as well as the mortal enemy of
Benvenuto Cellini, and as great a ruffian as he, though one less
picturesque in blackguardism. One day early in June, when Orazio, having
left Leoni's house, had returned to superintend the removal of certain
property, he was set upon, and murderously assaulted by the perfidious
host and his servants. The whole affair is wrapped in obscurity. It
remains uncertain whether vengeance, or hunger after the arrears of
Titian's pension, or both, were the motives which incited Leoni to
attempt the crime. Titian's passionate reclamations, addressed
immediately to Philip II., met with but partial success, since the
sculptor, himself a great favourite with the court of Spain, was
punished only with fine and banishment, and the affair was afterwards
compromised by the payment of a sum of money.

Titian's letter of September 22, 1559, to Philip II. announces the
despatch of the companion pieces _Diana and Calisto_ and _Diana and
Actæon_, as well as of an _Entombment_ intended to replace a painting of
the same subject which had been lost on the way. The two celebrated
canvases,[50] now in the Bridgewater Gallery, are so familiar that they
need no new description. Judging by the repetitions, reductions, and
copies that exist in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, the Prado Gallery,
the Yarborough Collection, and elsewhere, these mythological _poesie_
have captivated the world far more than the fresher and lovelier painted
poems of the earlier time--the _Worship of Venus_, the _Bacchanal_, the
_Bacchus and Ariadne_. At no previous period has Titian wielded the
brush with greater _maestria_ and ease than here, or united a richer or
more transparent glow with greater dignity of colour. About the
compositions themselves, if we are to take them as the _poesie_ that
Titian loved to call them, there is a certain want of significance,
neither the divine nor the human note being struck with any depth or
intensity of vibration. The glamour, the mystery, the intimate charm of
the early pieces is lost, and there is felt, enwrapping the whole, that
sultry atmosphere of untempered sensuousness which has already, upon
more than one occasion, been commented upon. That this should be so is
only natural when creative power is not extinguished by old age, but is
on the contrary coloured with its passion, so different in quality from
that of youth.

The _Entombment_, which went to Madrid with the mythological pieces just
now discussed, serves to show how vivid was Titian's imagination at this
point, when he touched upon a sacred theme, and how little dependent he
was in this field on the conceptions of his earlier prime. A more living
passion informs the scene, a more intimate sympathy colours it, than we
find in the noble _Entombment_ of the Louvre, much as the picture which
preceded it by so many years excels the Madrid example in fineness of
balance, in dignity, in splendour and charm of colour. Here the
personages are set free by the master from all academic trammels, and
express themselves with a greater spontaneity in grief. The colour, too,
of which the general scheme is far less attractive to the eye than in
the Louvre picture, blazes forth in one note of lurid splendour in the
red robe of the saint who supports the feet of the dead Christ.

In this same year Titian painted on the ceiling of the ante-chamber to
Sansovino's great Library in the Piazzetta the allegorical figure
_Wisdom_, thus entering into direct competition with young Paolo
Veronese, Schiavone, and the other painters who, striving in friendly
rivalry, had been engaged a short time before on the ceiling of the
great hall in the same building. This noble design contains a pronounced
reminiscence of Raphael's incomparable allegorical figures in the Camera
della Segnatura, but excels them as much in decorative splendour and
facile breadth of execution as it falls behind them in sublimity of
inspiration.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle are probably right in assigning the great
_Cornaro Family_ in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland to the
year 1560 or thereabouts. Little seen of late years, and like most
Venetian pictures of the sixteenth century shorn of some of its glory by
time and the restorer, this family picture appears to the writer to rank
among Titian's masterpieces in the domain of portraiture, and to be
indeed the finest portrait-group of this special type that Venice has
produced. In the simplicity and fervour of the conception Titian rises
to heights which he did not reach in the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, where
he is hampered by the necessity for combining a votive picture with a
series of avowed portraits. It is pretty clear that this _Cornaro_
picture, like the Pesaro altar-piece, must have been commissioned to
commemorate a victory or important political event in the annals of the
illustrious family. Search among their archives and papers, if they
still exist, might throw light upon this point, and fix more accurately
the date of the magnificent work. In the open air--it may be outside
some great Venetian church--an altar has been erected, and upon it is
placed a crucifix, on either side of which are church candles, blown
this way and the other by the wind. Three generations of patricians
kneel in prayer and thanksgiving, taking precedence according to age,
six handsome boys, arranged in groups of three on either side of the
canvas, furnishing an element of great pictorial attractiveness but no
vital significance. The act of worship acquires here more reality and a
profounder meaning than it can have in those vast altar-pieces in which
the divine favour is symbolised by the actual presence of the Madonna
and Child. An open-air effect has been deliberately aimed at and
attained, the splendid series of portraits being relieved against the
cloud-flecked blue sky with a less sculptural plasticity than the master
would have given to them in an indoor scheme. This is another admirable
example of the dignity and reserve which Titian combines with sumptuous
colour at this stage of his practice. His mastery is not less but
greater, subtler, than that of his more showy and brilliant
contemporaries of the younger generation; the result is something that
appears as if it must inevitably have been so and not otherwise. The
central figure of the patriarch is robed in deep crimson with grayish
fur, rather black in shadow; the man in the prime of manhood wears a
more positive crimson, trimmed with tawnier fur, browner in shadow; a
lighter sheen is on the brocaded mantle of yet another shade of crimson
worn by the most youthful of the three patricians. Just the stimulating
note to break up a harmony which might otherwise have been of a richness
too cloying is furnished--in the master's own peculiar way--by the
scarlet stockings of one boy in the right hand group, by the cinnamon
sleeve of another.[51]

[Illustration: The Cornaro Family. In the Collection of the Duke of
Northumberland.]

To the year 1561 belongs, according to the elaborate inscription on the
picture, the magnificent _Portrait of a Man_ which is No. 172 in the
Dresden Gallery. It presents a Venetian gentleman in his usual habit,
but bearing a palm branch such as we associate with saints who have
endured martyrdom. Strangely sombre and melancholy in its very reserve
is this sensitive face, and the tone of the landscape echoes the
pathetic note of disquiet. The canvas bears the signature "Titianus
Pictor et Aeques (sic) Caesaris." There group very well with this
Dresden picture, though the writer will not venture to assert positively
that they belong to exactly the same period, the _St. Dominic_ of the
Borghese Gallery and the _Knight of Malta_ of the Prado Gallery. In all
three--in the two secular portraits as in the sacred piece which is also
a portrait--the expression given, and doubtless intended, is that of a
man who has withdrawn himself in his time of fullest physical vigour
from the pomps and vanities of the world, and sadly concentrates his
thoughts on matters of higher import.

On the 1st of December 1561 Titian wrote to the king to announce the
despatch of a _Magdalen_, which had already been mentioned more than
once in the correspondence. According to Vasari and subsequent
authorities, Silvio Badoer, a Venetian patrician, saw the masterpiece on
the painter's easel, and took it away for a hundred scudi, leaving the
master to paint another for Philip. This last has disappeared, while the
canvas which remained in Venice cannot be identified with any
certainty. The finest extant example of this type of _Magdalen_ is
undoubtedly that which from Titian's ne'er-do-well son, Pompinio, passed
to the Barbarigo family, and ultimately, with the group of Titians
forming part of the Barbarigo collection, found its way into the
Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. This answers in
every respect to Vasari's eloquent description of the _magna peccatrix_,
lovely still in her penitence. It is an embodiment of the favourite
subject, infinitely finer and more moving than the much earlier
_Magdalen_ of the Pitti, in which the artist's sole preoccupation has
been the alluring portraiture of exuberant feminine charms. This later
_Magdalen_, as Vasari says, "ancorchè che sia bellissima, non muove a
lascivia, ma a commiserazione," and the contrary might, without
exaggeration, be said of the Pitti picture.[52] Another of the Barbarigo
heirlooms which so passed into the Hermitage is the ever-popular _Venus
with the Mirror_, the original of many repetitions and variations. Here,
while one winged love holds the mirror, the other proffers a crown of
flowers, not to the goddess, but to the fairest of women. The rich
mantle of Venetian fashion, the jewels, the coiffure, all show that an
idealised portrait of some lovely Cytherean of Venice, and no true
mythological piece, has been intended.

At this date, or thereabouts, is very generally placed, with the _Rape
of Europa_ presently to be discussed, the _Jupiter and Antiope_ of the
Louvre, more popularly known as the _Venere del Pardo_.[53] Seeing that
the picture is included in the list[54] sent by Titian to Antonio Perez
in 1574, setting forth the titles of canvases delivered during the last
twenty-five years, and then still unpaid for, it may well have been
completed somewhere about the time at which we have arrived. To the
writer it appears nevertheless that it is in essentials the work of an
earlier period, taken up and finished thus late in the day for the
delectation of the Spanish king. Seeing that the _Venere del Pardo_ has
gone through two fires--those of the Pardo and the Louvre--besides
cleanings, restorations, and repaintings, even more disfiguring, it
would be very unsafe to lay undue stress on technique alone. Yet compare
the close, sculptural modelling in the figure of Antiope with the
broader, looser handling in the figure of Europa; compare the two
landscapes, which are even more divergent in style. The glorious sylvan
prospect, which adds so much freshness and beauty to the _Venere del
Pardo_, is conspicuously earlier in manner than, for instance, the
backgrounds to the _Diana and Actæon_ and _Diana and Calisto_ of
Bridgewater House. The captivating work is not without its faults, chief
among which is the curious awkwardness of design which makes of the
composition, cut in two by a central tree, two pictures instead of one.
Undeniably, too, there is a certain meanness and triviality in the
little nymph or mortal of the foreground, which may, however, be due to
the intervention of an assistant. But then, with an elasticity truly
astounding in a man of his great age, the master has momentarily
regained the poetry of his youthful prime, and with it a measure of that
Giorgionesque fragrance which was evaporating already at the close of
the early time, when the _Bacchanals_ were brought forth. The Antiope
herself far transcends in the sovereign charm of her beauty--divine in
the truer sense of the word--all Titian's Venuses, save the one in the
_Sacred and Profane Love_. The figure comes in some ways nearer even in
design, and infinitely nearer in feeling, to Giorgione's _Venus_ at
Dresden than does the _Venus of Urbino_ in the Tribuna, which was
closely modelled upon it. And the aged Titian had gone back even a step
farther than Giorgione; the group of Antiope with Jupiter in the guise
of a Satyr is clearly a reminiscence of a _Nymph surprised by a
Satyr_--one of the engravings in the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ first
published in 1499, but republished with the same illustrations in
1545.[55]

[Illustration: _The Rape of Europa. From the Engraving by J.Z.
Delignon_.]

According to the correspondence published by Crowe and Cavalcaselle
there were completed for the Spanish King in April 1562 the _Poesy of
Europa carried by the Bull_, and the _Christ praying in the Garden_,
while a _Virgin and Child_ was announced as in progress.

These paintings, widely divergent as they are in subject, answer very
well to each other in technical execution, while in both they differ
very materially from the _Venere del Pardo_. The _Rape of Europa_, which
has retained very much of its blond brilliancy and charm of colour,
affords convincing proof of the unrivalled power with which Titian still
wielded the brush at this stage which precedes that of his very last and
most impressionistic style. For decorative effect, for "go," for
frankness and breadth of execution, it could not be surpassed. Yet
hardly elsewhere has the great master approached so near to positive
vulgarity as here in the conception of the fair Europa as a strapping
wench who, with ample limbs outstretched, complacently allows herself to
be carried off by the Bull, making her appeal for succour merely _pour
la forme_. What gulfs divide this conception from that of the Antiope,
from Titian's earlier renderings of female loveliness, from Giorgione's
supreme Venus![56]

[Illustration: _Portrait of Titian, by himself. Gallery of the Prado,
Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clément, & Cie_.]

The _Agony in the Garden_, which is still to be found in one of the
halls of the Escorial, even now in its faded state serves to evidence
the intensity of religious fervour which possessed Titian when, so late
in life, he successfully strove to renew the sacred subjects. If the
composition--as Crowe and Cavalcaselle assert--does more or less
resemble that of the famous _Agony_ by Correggio now at Apsley House,
nothing could differ more absolutely from the Parmese master's amiable
virtuosity than the aged Titian's deep conviction.[57]

To the year 1562 belongs the nearly profile portrait of the artist,
painted by himself with a subtler refinement and a truer revelation of
self than is to be found in those earlier canvases of Berlin and the
Uffizi in which his late prime still shows as a green and vigorous
manhood. This is now in the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_ of the Prado. The
pale noble head, refined by old age to a solemn beauty, is that of one
brought face to face with the world beyond; it is the face of the man
who could conceive and paint the sacred pieces of the end, the _Ecce
Homo_ of Munich and the last _Pietà_, with an awe such as we here read
in his eyes. Much less easy is it to connect this likeness with the
artist who went on concurrently producing his Venuses, mythological
pieces, and pastorals, and joying as much as ever in their production.

Vasari, who, as will be seen, visited Venice in 1566, when he was
preparing that new and enlarged edition of the _Lives_ which was to
appear in 1568, had then an opportunity of renewing his friendly
acquaintance with the splendid old man whom he had last seen, already
well stricken in years, twenty-one years before in Rome. It must have
been at this stage that he formed the judgment as to the latest manner
of Titian which is so admirably expressed in his biography of the
master. Speaking especially of the _Diana and Actæon_, the _Rape of
Europa_, and the _Deliverance of Andromeda_,[58] he delivers himself as
follows:--"It is indeed true that his technical manner in these last is
very different from that of his youth. The first works are, be it
remembered, carried out with incredible delicacy and pains, so that they
can be looked at both at close quarters and from afar. These last ones
are done with broad coarse strokes and blots of colour, in such wise
that they cannot be appreciated near at hand, but from afar look
perfect. This style has been the cause that many, thinking therein to
play the imitators and to make a display of practical skill, have
produced clumsy, bad pictures. This is so, because, notwithstanding that
to many it may seem that Titian's works are done without labour, this is
not so in truth, and they who think so deceive themselves. It is, on the
contrary, to be perceived that they are painted at many sittings, that
they have been worked upon with the colours so many times as to make the
labour evident; and this method of execution is judicious, beautiful,
astonishing, because it makes the pictures seem living."

No better proof could be given of Vasari's genuine _flair_ and intuition
as a critic of art than this passage. We seem to hear, not the Tuscan
painter bred to regard the style of Michelangelo as an article of faith,
to imitate his sculptural smoothness of finish and that of Angelo
Bronzino, but some intelligent exponent of impressionistic methods,
defending both from attack and from superficial imitation one of the
most advanced of modernists.

Among the sacred works produced in this late time is a _Crucifixion_,
still preserved in a damaged state in the church of S. Domenico at
Ancona. To a period somewhat earlier than that at which we have arrived
may belong the late _Madonna and Child in a Landscape_ which is No.
1113 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. The writer follows Giovanni
Morelli in believing that this is a studio picture touched by the
master, and that the splendidly toned evening landscape is all his. He
cannot surely be made wholly responsible for the overgrown and inflated
figure of the divine _Bambino_, so disproportionate, so entirely wanting
in tenderness and charm.

The power of vivid conception, the spontaneous fervour which mark
Titian's latest efforts in the domain of sacred art, are very evident in
the great _St. Jerome_ of the Brera here reproduced. Cima, Basaiti, and
most of the Bellinesques had shown an especial affection for the
subject, and it had been treated too by Lotto, by Giorgione, by Titian
himself; but this is surely as noble and fervent a rendering as Venetian
art in its prime has brought forth. Of extraordinary majesty and beauty
is the landscape, with its mighty trees growing out of the abrupt
mountain slope, close to the naked rock.

In the autumn of 1564 we actually find the venerable master, then about
eighty-seven years of age, taking a journey to Brescia in connection
with an important commission given to him for the decoration of the
great hall in the Palazzo Pubblico at Brescia, to which the Vicentine
artist Righetto had supplied the ceiling, and Palladio had added columns
and interior wall-decorations. The three great ceiling-pictures, which
were afterwards, as a consequence of the contract then entered upon,
executed by the master, or rather by his assistants, endured only until
1575, when in the penultimate year of Titian's life they perished in a
great fire.

The correspondence shows that the vast _Last Supper_ painted for the
Refectory of the Escorial, and still to be found there, was finished in
October 1564, and that there was much haggling and finessing on the part
of the artist before it was despatched to Spain, the object being to
secure payment of the arrears of pension still withheld by the Milanese
officials. When the huge work did arrive at the Escorial the monks
perpetrated upon it one of those acts of vandalism of which Titian was
in more than one instance the victim. Finding that the picture would not
fit the particular wall of their refectory for which it had been
destined, they ruthlessly cut it down, slicing off a large piece of the
upper part, and throwing the composition out of balance by the
mutilation of the architectural background.

[Illustration: _St. Jerome in the Desert. Gallery of the Brera, Milan.
From a Photograph by Anderson_.]

Passing over the _Transfiguration_ on the high altar of San Salvatore
at Venice, we come to the _Annunciation_ in the same church with the
signature "Titianus fecit fecit," added by the master, if we are to
credit the legend, in indignation that those who commissioned the canvas
should have shown themselves dissatisfied even to the point of
expressing incredulity as to his share in the performance. Some doubt
has been cast upon this story, which may possibly have been evolved on
the basis of the peculiar signature. It is at variance with Vasari's
statement that Titian held the picture in slight esteem in comparison
with his other works. It is not to be contested that for all the fine
passages of colour and execution, the general tone is paler in its
silveriness, less vibrant and effective on the whole, than in many of
the masterpieces which have been mentioned in their turn. But the
conception is a novel and magnificent one, contrasting instructively in
its weightiness and majesty with the more naïve and pathetic renderings
of an earlier time.

The _Education of Cupid_, popularly but erroneously known as _The Three
Graces_[59] is one of the pearls of the Borghese Gallery. It is clearly
built in essentials on the master's own _d'Avalos Allegory_, painted
many years before. This later allegory shows Venus binding the eyes of
Love ere he sallies forth into the world, while his bow and his quiver
well-stocked with arrows are brought forward by two of the Graces. In
its conception there is no great freshness or buoyancy, no pretence at
invention. The aged magician of the brush has interested himself more in
the execution than in the imagining of his picture. It is a fine and
typical specimen of the painting _di macchia_, which Vasari has praised
in a passage already quoted. A work such as this bears in technique much
the same relation to the productions of Titian's first period that the
great _Family Picture_ of Rembrandt at Brunswick does to his work done
some thirty-five or forty years before. In both instances it is a
life-time of legitimate practice that has permitted the old man to
indulge without danger in an abridgment of labour, a synthetic
presentment of fact, which means no abatement, but in some ways an
enhancement of life, breadth, and pictorial effect. To much about the
same time, judging from the handling and the types, belongs the curious
allegory, _Religion succoured by Spain_--otherwise _La Fé_--now No. 476
in the gallery of the Prado. This canvas, notwithstanding a marked
superficiality of invention as well as of execution, is in essentials
the master's own; moreover it can boast its own special decorative
qualities, void though it is of any deep significance. The showy figure
of Spain holding aloft in one hand a standard, and with the other
supporting a shield emblazoned with the arms of the realm, recalls the
similar creations of Paolo Veronese. Titian has rarely been less happily
inspired than in the figure of Religion, represented as a naked female
slave newly released from bondage.

[Illustration: _The Education of Cupid. Gallery of the Villa Borghese,
Rome. From a Photograph by E. Alinari_.]

When Vasari in 1566 paid the visit to Venice, of which a word has
already been said, he noted, among a good many other things then in
progress, the _Martyrdom of St. Lawrence_, based upon that now at the
Gesuiti in Venice. This was despatched nearly two years later to the
Escorial, where it still occupies its place on the high altar of the
mighty church dedicated to St. Lawrence. The Brescian ceiling canvases
appeared, too, in his list as unfinished. They were sent to their
destination early in 1568, to be utterly destroyed, as has been told, by
fire in 1575.

The best proof we have that Titian's artistic power was in many respects
at its highest in 1566, is afforded by the magnificent portrait of the
Mantuan painter and antiquary Jacopo da Strada, now in the Imperial
Gallery at Vienna. It bears, besides the usual late signature of the
master, the description of the personage with all his styles and titles,
and the date MDLXVI. The execution is again _di macchia_, but
magnificent in vitality, as in impressiveness of general effect, swift
but not hasty or superficial. The reserve and dignity of former male
portraits is exchanged for a more febrile vivacity, akin to that which
Lotto had in so many of his finest works displayed. His peculiar style
is further recalled in the rather abrupt inclination of the figure and
the parallel position of the statuette which it holds. But none other
than Titian himself could have painted the superb head, which he himself
has hardly surpassed.

It is curious and instructive to find the artist, in a letter addressed
to Philip on the 2nd of December 1567, announcing the despatch,
together with the just now described altar-piece, _The Martyrdom of St.
Lawrence_, of "una pittura d'una Venere ignuda"--the painting of a nude
Venus. Thus is the peculiar double current of the aged painter's genius
maintained by the demand for both classes of work. He well knows that to
the Most Catholic Majesty very secular pieces indeed will be not less
acceptable than those much-desired sacred works in which now Titian's
power of invention is greatest.

[Illustration: _Religion succoured by Spain. Gallery of the Prado,
Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clément, & Cie_.]

Our master, in his dealings with the Brescians, after the completion of
the extensive decorations for the Palazzo Pubblico, was to have proof
that Italian citizens were better judges of art than the King of Spain,
and more grudging if prompter paymasters. They declared, not without
some foundation in fact, that the canvases were not really from the hand
of Titian, and refused to pay more than one thousand ducats for them.
The negotiation was conducted--as were most others at that time--by the
trusty Orazio, who after much show of indignation was compelled at last
to accept the proffered payment.

[Illustration: _Portrait of the Antiquary Jacopo da Strada. Imperial
Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Löwy_.]

[Illustration: _Madonna and Child. Collection of Mr. Ludwig Mond_.]

The great victory of Lepanto, gained by the united fleets of Spain and
Venice over the Turk on the 7th of October 1571, gave fitting occasion
for one of Paolo Veronese's most radiant masterpieces, the celebrated
votive picture of the Sala del Collegio, for Tintoretto's _Battle of
Lepanto_, but also for one of Titian's feeblest works, the allegory
_Philip II. offering to Heaven his Son, the Infant Don Ferdinand_, now
No. 470 in the gallery of the Prado. That Sanchez Coello, under special
directions from the king, prepared the sketch which was to serve as the
basis for the definitive picture may well have hampered and annoyed the
aged master. Still this is but an insufficient excuse for the
absurdities of the design, culminating in the figure of the descending
angel, who is represented in one of those strained, over-bold attitudes,
in which Titian, even at his best, never achieved complete success. That
he was not, all the same, a stranger to the work, is proved by some
flashes of splendid colour, some fine passages of execution.

In the four pieces now to be shortly described, the very latest and most
impressionistic form of Titian's method as a painter is to be observed;
all of them are in the highest degree characteristic of this ultimate
phase. In the beautiful _Madonna and Child_ here reproduced,[60] the
hand, though it no longer works with all trenchant vigour of earlier
times, produces a magical effect by means of unerring science and a
certainty of touch justifying such economy of mere labour as is by the
system of execution suggested to the eye. And then this pathetic motive,
the simple realism, the unconventional treatment of which are
spiritualised by infinite tenderness, is a new thing in Venetian, nay in
Italian art. Precisely similar in execution, and equally restrained in
the scheme of colour adopted, is the _Christ crowned with Thorns_ of the
Alte Pinakothek at Munich, a reproduction with important variations of
the better-known picture in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. Less
demonstratively and obviously dramatic than its predecessor, the Munich
example is, as a realisation of the scene, far truer and more profound
in pathos. Nobler beyond compare in His unresisting acceptance of insult
and suffering is the Munich Christ than the corresponding figure, so
violent in its instinctive recoil from pain, of the Louvre picture.

[Illustration: _Christ crowned with Thorns. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
From a Photograph by F. Hanfstängl_.]

It is nothing short of startling at the very end of Titian's career to
meet with a work which, expressed in this masterly late technique of
his, vies in freshness of inspiration with the finest of his early
_poesie_. This is the _Nymph and Shepherd_[61] of the Imperial Gallery
at Vienna, a picture which the world had forgotten until it was added,
or rather restored, to the State collection on its transference from the
Belvedere to the gorgeous palace which it now occupies. In its almost
monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver the canvas embodies more
absolutely than any other, save perhaps the final _Pietà_, the ideal of
tone-harmony towards which the master in his late time had been steadily
tending. Richness and brilliancy of local colour are subordinated, and
this time up to the point of effacement, to this luminous monotone, so
mysteriously effective in the hands of a master such as Titian. In the
solemn twilight which descends from the heavens, just faintly flushed
with rose, an amorous shepherd, flower-crowned, pipes to a nude nymph,
who, half-won by the appealing strain, turns her head as she lies
luxuriously extended on a wild beast's hide, covering the grassy knoll;
in the distance a strayed goat browses on the leafage of a projecting
branch. It may not be concealed that a note of ardent sensuousness still
makes itself felt, as it does in most of the later pieces of the same
class. But here, transfigured by a freshness of poetic inspiration
hardly to be traced in the master's work in pieces of this order, since
those early Giorgionesque days when the sixteenth century was in its
youth, it offends no more than does an idyll of Theocritus. Since the
_Three Ages_ of Bridgewater House, divided from the _Nymph and Shepherd_
by nearly seventy years of life and labour, Titian had produced nothing
which, apart from the question of technical execution, might so nearly
be paralleled with that exquisite pastoral. The early _poesia_ gives,
wrapped in clear even daylight, the perfect moment of trusting,
satisfied love; the late one, with less purity, but, strange to say,
with a higher passion, renders, beautified by an evening light more
solemn and suggestive, the divine ardours fanned by solitude and
opportunity.

And now we come to the _Pietà_,[62] which so nobly and appropriately
closes a career unexampled for duration and sustained achievement.
Titian had bargained with the Franciscan monks of the Frari, which
contained already the _Assunta_ and the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, for a
grave in the Cappella del Crocifisso, offering in payment a _Pietà_, and
this offer had been accepted. But some misunderstanding and consequent
quarrel having been the ultimate outcome of the proposed arrangements,
he left his great canvas unfinished, and willed that his body should be
taken to Cadore, and there buried in the chapel of the Vecelli.

[Illustration: _Pietà. By Titian and Palma Giovine. Accademia delle
Belle Arti, Venice. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]

The well-known inscription on the base of the monumental niche which
occupies the centre of the _Pietà_, "Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit,
Palma reverenter absolvit, Deoque dicavit opus," records how what Titian
had left undone was completed as reverently as might be by Palma
Giovine. At this stage--the question being much complicated by
subsequent restorations--the effort to draw the line accurately between
the work of the master on one hand and that of his able and pious
assistant on the other, would be unprofitable. Let us rather strive to
appreciate what is left of a creation unique in the life-work of Titian,
and in some ways his most sublime invention. Genius alone could have
triumphed over the heterogeneous and fantastic surroundings in which he
has chosen to enframe his great central group. And yet even these--the
great rusticated niche with the gold mosaic of the pelican feeding its
young, the statues of Moses on one side and of the Hellespontic Sibyl on
the other--but serve to heighten the awe of the spectator. The
artificial light is obtained in part from a row of crystal lamps on the
cornice of the niche, in part, too, from the torch borne by the
beautiful boy-angel who hovers in mid-air, yet another focus of
illumination being the body of the dead Christ. This system of lighting
furnishes just the luminous half-gloom, the deeply significant
chiaroscuro, that the painter requires in order to give the most
poignant effect to his last and most thrilling conception of the world's
tragedy. As is often the case with Tintoretto, but more seldom with
Titian, the eloquent passion breathed forth in this _Pietà_ is not to be
accounted for by any element or elements of the composition taken
separately; it depends to so great an extent on the poetic
suggestiveness of the illumination, on the strange and indefinable power
of evocation that the aged master here exceptionally commands.

Wonderfully does the terrible figure of the Magdalen contrast in its
excess of passion with the sculptural repose, the permanence of the main
group. As she starts forward, almost menacing in her grief, her loud and
bitter cry seems to ring through space, accusing all mankind of its
great crime. It is with a conviction far more intense than has ever
possessed him in his prime, with an awe nearly akin to terror, that
Titian, himself trembling on the verge of eternity, and painting, too,
that which shall purchase his own grave, has produced this profoundly
moving work. No more fitting end and crown to the great achievements of
the master's old age could well be imagined.

There is no temptation to dwell unnecessarily upon the short period of
horror and calamity with which this glorious life came to an end. If
Titian had died a year earlier, his biographer might still have wound
up with those beautiful words of Vasari's peroration: "E stato Tiziano
sanissimo et fortunate quant' alcun altro suo pari sia stato ancor mai;
e non ha mai avuto dai cieli se non favori e felicità." Too true it is,
alas, that no man's life may be counted happy until its close! Now comes
upon the great city this all-enveloping horror of the plague, beginning
in 1575, but in 1576 attaining to such vast proportions as to sweep away
more than a quarter of the whole population of 190,000 inhabitants. On
the 17th of August, 1576, old Titian is attacked and swept
away--surprised, as one would like to believe, while still at work on
his _Pietà_. Even at such a moment, when panic reigns supreme, and the
most honoured, the most dearly beloved are left untended, he is not to
be hurried into an unmarked grave. Notwithstanding the sanitary law
which forbids the burial of one who has succumbed to the plague in any
of the city churches, he receives the supreme and at this awful moment
unique honour of solemn obsequies. The body is taken with all due
observance to the great church of the Frari, and there interred in the
Cappella del Crocifisso, which Titian has already, before the quarrel
with the Franciscans, designated as his final resting-place. He is
spared the grief of knowing that the favourite son, Orazio, for whom all
these years he has laboured and schemed, is to follow him immediately,
dying also of the plague, and not even at Biri Grande, but in the
Lazzaretto Vecchio, near the Lido; that the incorrigible Pomponio is to
succeed and enjoy the inheritance after his own unworthy fashion. He is
spared the knowledge of the great calamity of 1577, the destruction by
fire of the Sala del Gran Consiglio, and with it, of the _Battle of
Cadore_, and most of the noble work done officially for the Doges and
the Signoria. One would like to think that this catastrophe of the end
must have come suddenly upon the venerable master like a hideous dream,
appearing to him, as death often does to those upon whom it descends,
less significant than it does to us who read. Instead of remaining fixed
in sad contemplation of this short final moment when the radiant orb
goes suddenly down below the horizon in storm and cloud, let us keep
steadily in view the light as, serene in its far-reaching radiance, it
illuminated the world for eighty splendid years. Let us think of Titian
as the greatest painter, if not the greatest genius in art, that the
world has produced; as, what Vasari with such conviction described him
to be, "the man as highly favoured by fortune as any of his kind had
ever been before him."[63]


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "The Earlier Work of Titian," _Portfolio_, October 1897.]

[Footnote 2: According to the catalogue of 1892, this picture was
formerly in the sacristy of the Escorial in Spain. It can only be by an
oversight that it is therein described as "possibly painted there,"
since Titian never was in Spain.]

[Footnote 3: It is especially to be noted that there is not a trace of
red in the picture, save for the modest crimson waistband of the St.
Catherine. Contrary to almost universal usage, it might almost be said
to orthodoxy, the entire draperies of the Virgin are of one intense
blue. Her veil-like head-gear is of a brownish gray, while the St.
Catherine wears a golden-brown scarf, continuing the glories of her
elaborately dressed hair. The audacity of the colour-scheme is only
equalled by its success; no calculated effort at anything unusual being
apparent. The beautiful naked _putto_ who appears in the sky, arresting
the progress of the shepherds, is too trivial in conception for the
occasion. A similar incident is depicted in the background of the much
earlier _Holy Family_, No. 4. at the National Gallery, but there the
messenger angel is more appropriately and more reverently depicted as
full-grown and in flowing garments.]

[Footnote 4: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp. 396, 397; _Tizian_, von
H. Knackfuss, p. 55.]

[Footnote 5: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Appendix to vol. i. p. 448.]

[Footnote 6: No. 1288 in the Long Gallery of the Louvre.]

[Footnote 7: See the canvas No. 163 in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna.
The want of life and of a definite personal character makes it almost
repellent, notwithstanding the breadth and easy mastery of the
technique. Rubens's copy of a lost or unidentified Titian, No. 845 in
the same gallery, shows that he painted Isabella from life in mature
middle age, and with a truthfulness omitting no sign of over-ripeness.
This portrait may very possibly have been done in 1522, when Titian
appeared at the court of the Gonzagas. Its realism, even allowing for
Rubens's unconscious exaggeration, might well have deterred the Gonzaga
princess from being limned from life some twelve years later still.]

[Footnote 8: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i., Appendix, p. 451.]

[Footnote 9: The idea of painting St. Jerome by moonlight was not a new
one. In the house at Venice of Andrea Odoni, the dilettante whose famous
portrait by Lotto is at Hampton Court, the Anonimo (Marcantonio Michiel)
saw, in 1532, "St. Jerome seated naked in a desert landscape by
moonlight, by ---- (sic), copied from a canvas by Zorzi da Castelfranco
(Giorgione)."]

[Footnote 10: See "The Picture Gallery of Charles I.," _The Portfolio_,
January 1896, pp. 49 and 99.]

[Footnote 11: The somewhat similar _Allegories_ No. 173 and No. 187 in
the Imperial Gallery at Vienna (New Catalogue, 1895), both classed as by
Titian, cannot take rank as more than atelier works. Still farther from
the master is the _Initiation of a Bacchante_, No. 1116 (Cat. 1891), in
the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. This is a piece too cold and hard, too
opaque, to have come even from his studio. It is a _pasticcio_ made up
in a curiously mechanical way, from the Louvre _Allegory_ and the quite
late _Education of Cupid_ in the Borghese Gallery; the latter
composition having been manifestly based by Titian himself, according to
what became something like a custom in old age, upon the earlier
_Allegory_.]

[Footnote 12: A rather tiresome and lifeless portrait of Ippolito is
that to be found in the picture No. 20 in the National Gallery, in which
it has been assumed that his companion is his favourite painter,
Sebastiano del Piombo, to whom the picture is, not without some
misgivings, attributed.]

[Footnote 13: It has been photographed under this name by Anderson of
Rome.]

[Footnote 14: In much the same position, since it hardly enjoys the
celebrity to which it is entitled, is another masterpiece of portraiture
from the brush of Titian, which, as belonging to his earlier middle
time, should more properly have been mentioned in the first section of
this monograph. This is the great _Portrait of a Man in Black_, No. 1591
in the Louvre. It shows a man of some forty years, of simple mien yet of
indefinably tragic aspect; he wears moderately long hair, is clothed
entirely in black, and rests his right hand on his hip, while passing
the left through his belt. The dimensions of the canvas are more
imposing than those of the _Jeune Homme au Gant_. No example in the
Louvre, even though it competes with Madrid for the honour of possessing
the greatest Titians in the world, is of finer quality than this
picture. Near this--No. 1592 in the same great gallery--hangs another
_Portrait of a Man in Black_ by Titian, and belonging to his middle
time. The personage presented, though of high breeding, is cynical and
repellent of aspect. The strong right hand rests quietly yet menacingly
on a poniard, this attitude serving to give a peculiarly aggressive
character to the whole conception. In the present state of this fine and
striking picture the yellowness and want of transparency of the
flesh-tones, both in the head and hands, gives rise to certain doubts as
to the correctness of the ascription. Yet this peculiarity may well
arise from injury; it would at any rate be hazardous to put forward any
other name than that of Titian, to whom we must be content to leave the
portrait.]

[Footnote 15: This is the exceedingly mannered yet all the same rich and
beautiful _St. Catherine, St. Roch, with a boy angel, and St.
Sebastian_.]

[Footnote 16: See Giorgione's _Adrastus and Hypsipyle (Landscape with
the Soldier and the Gipsy)_ of the Giovanelli Palace, the _Venus_ of
Dresden, the _Concert Champêtre_ of the Louvre.]

[Footnote 17: It is unnecessary in this connection to speak of the
Darmstadt _Venus_ invented by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and to which as a
type they so constantly refer. Giovanni Morelli has demonstrated with
very general acceptance that this is only a late adaptation of the
exquisite _Venus_ of Dresden, which it is his greatest glory to have
restored to Barbarelli and to the world.]

[Footnote 18: _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden von Ivan Lermolieff_,
p. 290.]

[Footnote 19: Palma Vecchio, in his presentments of ripe Venetian
beauty, was, we have seen, much more literal than Giorgione, more
literal, too, less the poet-painter, than the young Titian. Yet in the
great _Venus_ of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge--not, indeed, in that
of Dresden--his ideal is a higher one than Titian's in such pieces as
the _Venus of Urbino_ and the later _Venus_, its companion, in the
Tribuna. The two Bonifazi of Verona followed Palma, giving, however, to
the loveliness of their women not, indeed, a more exalted character, but
a less pronounced sensuousness--an added refinement but a weaker
personality. Paris Bordone took the note from Titian, but being less a
great artist than a fine painter, descended a step lower in the scale.
Paolo Veronese unaffectedly joys in the beauty of woman, in the sheen of
fair flesh, without any under-current of deeper meaning. Tintoretto,
though like his brother Venetians he delights in the rendering of the
human form unveiled, is but little disquieted by the fascinating problem
which now occupies us. He is by nature strangely spiritual, though he is
far from indulging in any false idealisation, though he shrinks not at
all from the statement of the truth as it presents itself to him. Let
his famous pictures in the Anticollegio of the Doges' Palace, his
_Muses_ at Hampton Court, and above all that unique painted poem, _The
Rescue_, in the Dresden Gallery, serve to support this view of his art.]

[Footnote 20: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life of Titian_, vol. i. p. 420.]

[Footnote 21: Two of these have survived in the _Roman Emperor on
Horseback_, No. 257, and the similarly named picture, No. 290, at
Hampton Court Palace. These panels were among the Mantua pieces
purchased for Charles I. by Daniel Nys from Duke Vincenzo in 1628-29. If
the Hampton Court pieces are indeed, as there appears no valid reason to
doubt, two of the canvases mentioned by Vasari, we must assume that
though they bore Giulio's name as _chef d'atelier_, he did little work
on them himself. In the Mantuan catalogue contained in d'Arco's
_Notizie_ they were entered thus:--"Dieci altri quadri, dipintovi un
imperatore per quadro a cavallo--opera di mano di Giulio Romano" (see
_The Royal Gallery of Hampton Court_, by Ernest Law, 1898).]

[Footnote 22: The late Charles Yriarte in a recent article, "Sabionneta
la petite Athènes," published in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, March
1898, states that Bernardino Campi of Cremona, Giulio's subordinate at
the moment, painted the Twelfth _Cæsar_, but adduces no evidence in
support of this departure from the usual assumption.]

[Footnote 23: See "The Picture Gallery of Charles I.," _The Portfolio_,
October 1897, pp. 98, 99.]

[Footnote 24: Nos. 529-540--Catalogue of 1891--Provincial Museum of
Hanover. The dimensions are 0.19 _c._ by 0.15 _c._]

[Footnote 25: Of all Pordenone's exterior decorations executed in Venice
nothing now remains. His only works of importance in the Venetian
capital are the altar-piece in S. Giovanni Elemosinario already
mentioned; the _San Lorenzo Giustiniani_ altar-piece in the Accademia
delle Belle Arti; the magnificent though in parts carelessly painted
_Madonna del Carmelo_ in the same gallery; the vast _St. Martin and St.
Christopher_ in the church of S. Rocco; the _Annunciation_ of S. Maria
degli Angeli at Murano.]

[Footnote 26: No. 108 in the Winter Exhibition at Burlington House in
1896. By Franceschini is no doubt meant Paolo degli Franceschi, whose
portrait Titian is known to have painted. He has been identified among
the figures in the foreground of the _Presentation of the Virgin_.]

[Footnote 27: See a very interesting article, "Vittore Carpaccio--La
Scuola degli Albanesi," by Dr. Gustav Ludwig, in the _Archivio Storico
dell' Arte_ for November-December 1897.]

[Footnote 28: A gigantic canvas of this order is, or rather was, the
famous _Storm_ of the Venetian Accademia, which has for many years past
been dubitatively assigned to Giorgione. Vasari described it as by Palma
Vecchio, stating that it was painted for the Scuola di S. Marco in the
Piazza SS. Giovanni e Paolo, in rivalry with Gian Bellino(!) and
Mansueti, and referring to it in great detail and with a more fervent
enthusiasm than he accords to any other Venetian picture. To the writer,
judging from the parts of the original which have survived, it has long
appeared that this may indeed be after all the right attribution. The
ascription to Giorgione is mainly based on the romantic character of the
invention, which certainly does not answer to anything that we know from
the hand or brain of Palma. But then the learned men who helped
Giorgione and Titian may well have helped him; and the structure of the
thick-set figures in the foreground is absolutely his, as is also the
sunset light on the horizon.]

[Footnote 29: This is an arrangement analogous to that with the aid of
which Tintoretto later on, in the _Crucifixion_ of San Cassiano at
Venice, attains to so sublime an effect. There the spears--not
brandished but steadily held aloft in rigid and inflexible
regularity--strangely heighten the solemn tragedy of the scene.]

[Footnote 30: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life of Titian_, vol. vi. p. 59.]

[Footnote 31: The writer is unable to accept as a genuine design by
Titian for the picture the well-known sepia drawing in the collection of
the Uffizi. The composition is too clumsy in its mechanical repetition
of parts, the action of the Virgin too awkward. The design looks more
like an adaptation by some Bolognese eclectic.]

[Footnote 32: This double portrait has not been preserved. According to
Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the full length of Pier Luigi still exists in
the Palazzo Reale at Naples (not seen by the writer).]

[Footnote 33: The writer, who has studied in the originals all the other
Titians mentioned in this monograph, has had as yet no opportunity of
examining those in the Hermitage. He knows them only in the
reproductions of Messrs. Braun, and in those new and admirable ones
recently published by the Berlin Photographic Company.]

[Footnote 34: This study from the life would appear to bear some such
relation to the finished original as the _Innocent X._ of Velazquez at
Apsley House bears to the great portrait of that Pope in the Doria
Panfili collection.]

[Footnote 35: This portrait-group belongs properly to the time a few
years ahead, since it was undertaken during Titian's stay in Rome.]

[Footnote 36: The imposing signature runs _Titianus Eques Ces. F.
1543._]

[Footnote 37: The type is not the nobler and more suave one seen in the
_Cristo della Moneta_ and the _Pilgrims of Emmaus_; it is the much less
exalted one which is reproduced in the _Ecce Homo_ of Madrid, and in the
many repetitions and variations related to that picture, which cannot
itself be accepted as an original from the hand of Titian.]

[Footnote 38: Vasari saw a _Christ with Cleophas and Luke_ by Titian,
above the door in the Salotta d'Oro, which precedes the Sala del
Consiglio de' Dieci in the Doges' Palace, and states that it had been
acquired by the patrician Alessandro Contarini and by him presented to
the Signoria. The evidence of successive historians would appear to
prove that it remained there until the close of last century. According
to Crowe and Cavalcaselle the Louvre picture was a replica done for
Mantua, which with the other Gonzaga pictures found its way into Charles
I.'s collection, and thence, through that of Jabach, finally into the
gallery of Louis XIV. At the sale of the royal collection by the
Commonwealth it was appraised at £600. The picture bears the signature,
unusual for this period, "Tician." There is another _Christ with the
Pilgrims at Emmaus_ in the collection of the Earl of Yarborough, signed
"Titianus," in which, alike as to the figures, the scheme of colour, and
the landscape, there are important variations. One point is of especial
importance. Behind the figure of St. Luke in the Yarborough picture is a
second pillar. This is not intended to appear in the Louvre picture; yet
underneath the glow of the landscape there is just the shadow of such a
pillar, giving evidence of a _pentimento_ on the part of the master.
This, so far as it goes, is evidence that the Louvre example was a
revised version, and the Yarborough picture a repetition or adaptation
of the first original seen by Vasari. However this may be, there can be
no manner of doubt that the picture in the Long Gallery of the Louvre is
an original entirely from the hand of Titian, while Lord Yarborough's
picture shows nothing of his touch and little even of the manner of his
studio at the time.]

[Footnote 39: Purchased at the sale of Charles I.'s collection by Alonso
de Cardenas for Philip IV. at the price of £165.]

[Footnote 40: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life of Titian_, vol. ii.,
Appendix (p. 502).]

[Footnote 41: Moritz Thausing has striven in his _Wiener Kunstbriefe_ to
show that the coat of arms on the marble bas-relief in the _Sacred and
Profane Love_ is that of the well-known Nuremberg house of Imhof. This
interpretation has, however, been controverted by Herz Franz Wickhoff.]

[Footnote 42: Cesare Vecellio must have been very young at this time.
The costume-book, _Degli abiti antichi e moderni_, to which he owes his
chief fame, was published at Venice in 1590.]

[Footnote 43: "Das Tizianbildniss der königlichen Galerie zu Cassel,"
_Jahrbuch der königlich-preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Funfzehnter Band,
III. Heft.]

[Footnote 44: See the _Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino_ at the Uffizi;
also, for the modish headpiece, the _Ippolito de' Medici_ at the Pitti.]

[Footnote 45: A number of fine portraits must of necessity be passed
over in these remarks. The superb if not very well-preserved _Antonio
Portia_, within the last few years added to the Brera, dates back a good
many years from this time. Then we have, among other things, the
_Benedetto Varchi_ and the _Fabrizio Salvaresio_ of the Imperial Museum
at Vienna--the latter bearing the date 1558. The writer is unable to
accept as a genuine Titian the interesting but rather matter-of-fact
_Portrait of a Lady in Mourning_, No. 174 in the Dresden Gallery. The
master never painted with such a lack of charm and distinction. Very
doubtful, but difficult to judge in its present state, is the _Portrait
of a Lady with a Vase_, No. 173 in the same collection. Morelli accepts
as a genuine example of the master the _Portrait of a Lady in a Red
Dress_ also in the Dresden Gallery, where it bears the number 176. If
the picture is his, as the technical execution would lead the observer
to believe, it constitutes in its stiffness and unambitious _naïveté_ a
curious exception in his long series of portraits.]

[Footnote 46: It is impossible to discuss here the atelier repetitions
in the collections of the National Gallery and Lord Wemyss respectively,
or the numerous copies to be found in other places.]

[Footnote 47: For the full text of the marriage contract see Giovanni
Morelli, _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_, pp. 300-302.]

[Footnote 48: Joshua Reynolds, who saw it during his tour in Italy,
says: "It is so dark a picture that, at first casting my eyes on it, I
thought there was a black curtain before it."]

[Footnote 49: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 272.]

[Footnote 50: They were, with the _Rape of Europa_, among the so-called
"light pieces" presented to Prince Charles by Philip IV., and packed for
transmission to England. On the collapse of the marriage negotiations
they were, however, kept back. Later on Philip V. presented them to the
Marquis de Grammont. They subsequently formed part of the Orleans
Gallery, and were acquired at the great sale in London by the Duke of
Bridgewater for £2500 apiece.]

[Footnote 51: This great piece is painted on a canvas of peculiarly
coarse grain, with a well-defined lozenge pattern. It was once owned by
Van Dyck, at the sale of whose possessions, in 1556, a good number of
years after his death, it was acquired by Algernon Percy, Earl of
Northumberland. In 1873 it was in the exhibition of Old Masters at the
Royal Academy.]

[Footnote 52: The best repetition of this Hermitage _Magdalen_ is that
in the Naples Museum; another was formerly in the Ashburton Collection,
and yet another is in the Durazzo Gallery at Genoa. The similar, but not
identical, picture in the Yarborough Collection is anything but "cold in
tone," as Crowe and Cavalcaselle call it. It is, on the contrary, rich
in colour, but as to the head of the saint, much less attractive than
the original.]

[Footnote 53: This picture was presented by Philip IV. to Prince Charles
of England, and was, at the sale of his collection, acquired by Jabach
for £600, and from him bought by Cardinal Mazarin, whose heirs sold it
to Louis XIV. The Cardinal thus possessed the two finest representations
of the _Jupiter and Antiope_ legend--that by Correggio (also now in the
Louvre) and the Titian. It was to these pictures especially that his
touching farewell was addressed a few hours before his death.]

[Footnote 54: See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii., Appendix, p. 340.]

[Footnote 55: See as to the vicissitudes through which the picture has
passed an article, "Les Restaurations du tableau du Titien, _Jupiter et
Antiope_" by Fernand Engerand, in the _Chronique des Arts_ of 7th May
1898.]

[Footnote 56: This picture came to England with the Orleans Gallery, and
was until lately at Cobham Hall in the collection of the Earl of
Darnley. It has now passed into that of Mrs J.L. Gardner of Boston, U.S.
It is represented in the Prado Gallery by Rubens's superb copy. A
Venetian copy on a very small scale exists in the Wallace Collection.]

[Footnote 57: A very clever adaptation of this work is No. 490 in the
Prado Gallery under the name of the master. It is remarkable for the
contrast between the moonlight which irradiates the Christ and the
artificial light supplied by the lantern carried by one of the
soldiers.]

[Footnote 58: This picture is mentioned in the list of 1574 furnished by
Titian to Secretary Antonio Perez. A _Perseus and Andromeda_ by, or
attributed to, Titian was in the Orleans Gallery. Is this the canvas now
in the Wallace Collection, but not as yet publicly exhibited there? This
last piece was undoubtedly produced in the _entourage_ and with the
assistance of Titian, and it corresponds perfectly to Vasari's
description of the _Deliverance of Andromeda_. It has the loose easy
touch of the late time, but obscured as it at present is by dirt and
successive coats of now discoloured varnish, no more definite opinion
with regard to its merits can be given. No. 135 in the Hermitage is a
canvas identical in subject and dimensions with this last-named picture.
It was once attributed to Tintoretto, but is now put down to the school
of Titian.]

[Footnote 59: Somewhat earlier in the order of the late works should
come in, if we may venture to judge from the technique of a work that is
practically a ruin, the _Adam and Eve_ of the Prado, in which, for the
usual serpent with the human head of the feminine type, Titian has
substituted as tempter an insignificant _amorino_. Far more enjoyable
than this original in its present state is the magnificent copy, with
slight yet marked variations, left behind by Rubens. This is also to be
found in the Prado. A drawing by the great Antwerper from Titian's
picture is in the Louvre. This is more markedly Flemish in aspect than
the painted canvas, and lacks the foolish little Love.]

[Footnote 60: Formerly in the collection of the Earl of Dudley, upon the
sale of which it was acquired by Mr. Ludwig Mond. It was in the Venetian
exhibition at the New Gallery. There is an engraving of it by Pieter de
Jode, jun.]

[Footnote 61: This is No. 186 in the catalogue of 1895. An etching of
the picture appeared with an article "Les Écoles d'Italie au Musée de
Vienne," from the pen of Herr Franz Wickhoff, in the _Gazette des Beaux
Arts_ for February 1893. It was badly engraved for the Teniers Gallery
by Lissebetius.]

[Footnote 62: Now in the Accademia delle Belle Arti of Venice.]

[Footnote 63: It was the intention of the writer to add to this
monograph a short chapter on the drawings of Titian. The subject is,
however, far too vast for such summary treatment, and its discussion
must therefore be postponed. Leaving out of the question the very
numerous drawings by Domenico Campagnola which Morelli has once for all
separated from those of the greater master, and those also which, while
belonging to the same class and period, are neither Titian's nor even
Campagnola's, a few of the genuine landscapes may be just lightly
touched upon. The beautiful early landscape with a battlemented castle,
now or lately in the possession of Mr. T.W. Russell (reproduction in the
British Museum marked 1879-5-10-224) is in the opinion of the writer a
genuine Titian. _The Vision of St. Eustace_, reproduced in the first
section of this monograph ("The Earlier Work of Titian") from the
original in the British Museum, is a noble and pathetic example of the
earlier manner. Perhaps the most beautiful of the landscape drawings
still preserving something of the Giorgionesque aroma is that with the
enigmatic female figure, entirely nude but with the head veiled, and the
shepherds sheltering from the noonday sun, which is in the great
collection at Chatsworth (No. 318 in Venetian Exhibition at New
Gallery). Later than this is the fine landscape in the same collection
with a riderless horse crossing a stream (No. 867 in Venetian Exhibition
at New Gallery). The well-known _St. Jerome_ here given (British Museum)
is ascribed by no less an authority than Giovanni Morelli to the master,
but the poor quality of the little round trees, and of the background
generally, is calculated to give pause to the student. A good example of
the later style, in which the technique is more that of the painter and
less that of the draughtsman, is the so-called _Landscape with the
Pedlar_ at Chatsworth. But, faded though it is, the finest extant
drawing of the later period is that here (p. 78) for the first time
reproduced by the kind permission of the owner, Professor Legros, who
had the great good fortune and good taste to discover it in a London
book-shop. There can be no doubt that this ought to be in the Print Room
at the British Museum. A good instance, on the other hand, of a drawing
which cannot without demur be left to Titian, though it is a good deal
too late in style for Domenico Campagnola, and moreover, much too fine
and sincere for that clever, facile adapter of other people's work, is
the beautiful pastoral in the Albertina at Vienna (B. 283), with the
shepherd piping as he leads his flock homewards.] INDEX

"Agony in the Garden, The" (Escorial), 94
Alfonso d'Avalos, Marqués del Vasto (Madrid), 46
Alfonso d'Avalos, with his Family, Portrait of (Louvre), 17, 18
"Alfonso d'Este" (Madrid), 16, 54
"Annunciation, The" (Venice), 98
"Annunciation of the Virgin" (Verona), 56
Aretino, Portrait of (Pitti Gallery), 9, 46, 57, 58
Acquaviva, Duke of Arti, Portrait of, 74


"Bacchanals, The" (Madrid), 8, 87, 92
"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery), 8, 29, 87
"Battle of Cadore, The," 38, 39
Beccadelli, Legate, Portrait of (Uffizi), 75, 76
"Bella, La" (Pitti), 32
"Boy Baptist," 15


"Cain and Abel" (Venice), 50, 51
Charles V., Portrait of (Munich), 70
"Charles V. at Mühlberg" (Madrid), 8, 68-70
"Christ crowned with Thorns" (Louvre), 84
"Christ crowned with Thorns" (Munich), 104
"Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus" (Louvre), 57
Cornaro Family (Duke of Northumberland's Collection), 88
Cornaro, Portrait of (Castle Howard), 54
"Cornelia, La," Portrait of, 12


"Danaë and the Golden Rain" (Naples Museum), 62, 66
"Danaë with Venus and Adonis" (Madrid), 78-80
"David victorious over Goliath" (Venice),50, 51
"Deliverance of Andromeda, The," 95
"Descent of the Holy Spirit, The" (Venice), 50, 51
"Destruction of Pharaoh's Host, The," 72
"Diana and Actæon" (Bridgewater Gallery), 9, 86, 91, 95
"Diana and Calisto" (Bridgewater Gallery), 9, 86, 91


"Ecce Homo" (Madrid), 67;
  (Munich), 94;
  (Vienna), 53, 54.
"Education of Cupid, The" (Rome), 98
"Entombment, The" (Louvre), 87
"Entombment, The" (Madrid), 87
Ercole d'Este, Portrait of, 16, 54


Farnese Family, Portrait of, 52
"Flora" (Uffizi), 29, 66
Francis the First, Portrait of (Louvre), 12, 13
Frederick of Saxony, Portrait of (Vienna), 71


"Girl in a Fur Cloak" (Vienna), 28, 83
Gonzaga, Eleonora, Portraits of, 28, 33, 34
Gonzaga, Federigo, Portrait of, 15
Gonzaga, Isabella d'Este, Portrait of, 12, 13


"Herodias" (Doria Gallery), 29, 66


"Ixion," 71


"Jupiter and Antiope," 76, 90, 92


Lavinia, Titian's daughter, 82, 83


"Madonna Addolorata," 78, 79
"Madonna and Child in a Landscape" (Munich), 95, 96
"Madonna and Child" (Mr. Ludwig Mond's Collection), 104
"Madonna and Child with St. Catherine and St. John"
     (National Gallery), 9, 10, 11
"Madonna and Child with St. Peter and St. Andrew" (Serravalle), 65
"Madonna del Coniglio" (Louvre), 9-11
"Magdalen" (Florence), 14, 15
"Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, The" (Venice), 84, 100, 101
Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de' (Pitti), 12, 13, 18-21


"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna), 9, 106


"Ottavio Farnese with his Beloved": see _Venus with Organ Player_


Philip II., Portrait of (Madrid), 16
"Pietà," 73, 94, 106, 107
Pope Paul III., Portrait of (Naples), 52;
  (Hermitage), 53
Pope Paul III. with Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio Farnese (Naples), 53, 60
"Portrait of a Man" (Dresden), 89
"Portrait of a Man in Black" (Louvre), 22 (footnote)
"Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple" (Venice), 42-45
"Prometheus Bound to the Rock," 71
"Prince Philip of Austria in Armour" (Madrid), 73;
  (Pitti), 74;
  (Naples), 74


"Rape of Europa," 9, 90, 92, 95
"Religion succoured by Spain" (Madrid), 100


"Sacred and Profane Love" (Borghese Gallery), 8, 29, 92
"Sacrifice of Isaac" (Venice), 50
"St. Jerome in Prayer" (Louvre), 14
"St. Jerome in the Desert" (Milan), 96
"St. John in the Desert" (Venice), 64
"St. Margaret in a Landscape" (Madrid), 76
"St. Peter Martyr," 8, 11, 50, 79, 84
"Sisyphus" (Madrid), 71
Strada, Jacopo da, Portrait of (Vienna), 100


"Tantalus" (Madrid), 71
"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery), 106
Titian, Portrait of, by himself (Berlin), 40, 41;
  (Madrid), 94;
  (Pitti), 9;
  (Uffizi), 40, 41
"Titian and Franceschini" (Windsor Castle), 42
"Trinity, The," 86
"Twelve Cæsars, Series of," 34-36


Vasto, Marqués del: see _Alfonso d' Avalos_
"Venere del Pardo" (Paris), 9; see also _Jupiter and Antiope_
"Venetian Storm Landscape" (Buckingham Palace), 10
"Venus Anadyomene" (Bridgewater Gallery), 29
"Venus and Cupid" (Tribuna), 14, 15, 29, 65
"Venus of Urbino," 28, 29, 32, 66, 92
"Venus with the Mirror" (Hermitage), 90
"Venus with the Organ Player" (Madrid), 66
"Virgen de los Dolores" (Madrid), 79


"Worship of Venus" (Madrid), 65, 66, 87


"Young Nobleman, Portrait of" (Florence), 22





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