Jeune Homme au gant]
[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Concert. Probably by t.i.tian. Pitti Palace, Florence.
From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the Venetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ mood his portraits of high-bred English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood, was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with the same felicity.[32]
To Crowe and Cavalcaselle"s pages the reader must be referred for a detailed and interesting account of t.i.tian"s intrigues against the venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de" Tedeschi. We see there how, on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo proposed to t.i.tian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the Tenth (Giovanni de" Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a step. t.i.tian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to pet.i.tion the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker"s patent for life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The pet.i.tion is presented on the 31st of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a resolution accepting t.i.tian"s offer with all the conditions attached.
Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still under the encroachments of his dangerous compet.i.tor, younger than himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that t.i.tian is not to receive his broker"s patent on the first vacancy, but must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, t.i.tian pet.i.tions again, asking for the reversion of the particular broker"s patent which will become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer, which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is accepted by the Council. t.i.tian, like most other holders of the much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures, the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.
Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at the end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are pa.s.sed postponing the grant to t.i.tian of Bellini"s patent; notwithstanding which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"
(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close of this same year, 1516.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfstangl_.]
It is in this year that t.i.tian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and entered into relations with Alfonso I., which were to become more intimate as the position of the master became greater and more universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely a.s.sume, that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini"s last picture, the great _Baccha.n.a.l_ or _Feast of the G.o.ds on Earth_, now at Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two famous works, the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Baccha.n.a.l_, designed, in continuation of the series commenced with Bellini"s _Feast of the G.o.ds_, to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso"s castle of Ferrara; the series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the whole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery.
Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of his magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date, 1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be read.
Much less Giorgionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--and more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four beautiful _Allegories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice, which const.i.tute, besides the present picture, almost his sole excursion into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong, however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a fire which in the _Baccha.n.a.l_ has died out.[33] Vasari describes this _Baccha.n.a.l_ as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by Gian Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He strangely attributes this to an imitation of Durer"s _Rosenkranzfest_, painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo, adjacent to the Fondaco de" Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the author of the _Vite_, and, in some pa.s.sages, a certain hardness and opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the figure of St. Jerome in the master"s altar-piece finished in the preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the Bellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of San Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in the _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino"s finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the main group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti.
Some pa.s.sages of the _Baccha.n.a.l_, however--especially the figures of the two blond, fair-breasted G.o.ddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are as beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has produced up to the date of the picture"s appearance. Very suggestive of Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be found more or less throughout the master"s career. It is very noticeable in the _Allegories_ just mentioned.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alessandro de" Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a Photograph by Spooner & Co._]
Infinitely pathetic is the old master"s vain attempt to infuse into the chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and t.i.tian. The audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic festival, in which the G.o.ds unbend and, after the homelier fashion of mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it would seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picture substantially confirms Vasari"s story that the _Feast of the G.o.ds_ was painted upon by t.i.tian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many pa.s.sages a t.i.tianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left unfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the picture, a woodp.e.c.k.e.r; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By t.i.tian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the right. If it is t.i.tian that we have here, as certainly appears most probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well, indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_.
CHAPTER III
The "Worship of Venus" and "Baccha.n.a.l" Place in Art of the "a.s.sunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The "Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among t.i.tian"s works of "St. Peter Martyr."
In the year in which t.i.tian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Arios...o...b..ought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of t.i.tian"s career, when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Baccha.n.a.l_, painted for Alfonso, we have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the pa.s.sionate and unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous eccentricity.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_.]
In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Baccha.n.a.l_ we have left behind already the fresh morning of t.i.tian"s genius, represented by the Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_ might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the h.e.l.lenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the author"s fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named the "Townley Venus" and the "Venus d"Arles"--myriads of Loves sport, kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner) dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North, in touch with the South, as Albrecht Durer, Mabuse, and Jacob Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred works these l.u.s.ty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in similar subjects from these Loves of t.i.tian.[37]
The sumptuous _Baccha.n.a.l_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From certain points of a.n.a.logy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus, it has been very generally a.s.sumed that we have here a representation of the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus, whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is, however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour to the G.o.d, Ariadne"s new lover. The revel in a certain audacious abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late cla.s.sic statues then, and until lately, ent.i.tled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its att.i.tude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped Bacchante, or G.o.ddess, in Bellini"s _Baccha.n.a.l_ at Alnwick. t.i.tian"s lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio"s dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione"s _Venus_ or t.i.tian"s own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively t.i.tianesque colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture, and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.
The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just now described, but rather before than after them.
What that is new remains to be said about the _a.s.sunta_, or _a.s.sumption of the Virgin_, which was ordered of t.i.tian as early as 1516, but not shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de" Frari until the 20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world.
Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_ Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, the Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at S. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in the following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of these masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by t.i.tian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which t.i.tian might possibly have obtained a hint. This was the _a.s.sumption of the Virgin_ painted by Durer in 1509 for Jacob h.e.l.ler, and now only known by Paul Juvenel"s copy in the Munic.i.p.al Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising a too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact between this group and the corresponding one in the _a.s.sunta_. But t.i.tian could not at that time have seen the original of the h.e.l.ler altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _a.s.sumption_ in the _Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a definite relation to the h.e.l.ler altar-piece, is much stiffer and more formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The _a.s.sunta_ was already in Vasari"s time much dimmed, and thus difficult to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most terribly dark but n.o.bly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre, pa.s.sionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the climax, to subst.i.tute for t.i.tian"s conception anything more diaphanous, more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure in the mind"s eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The a.s.sunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]
Placed as the _a.s.sunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of Tintoretto"s best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely triumphant. t.i.tian"s turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual, more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, t.i.tian stands infinitely above his younger compet.i.tor. If, unhappily, it were necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of t.i.tian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face with the mighty genius of the latter?
But to return for a moment to the _a.s.sunta_. The enlargement of dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable, without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank with the finest of those in Raphael"s _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. t.i.tian himself in the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in the same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his better self.
Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]
What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high festival of St. Bernardino"s Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel, showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de" Frari, and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired t.i.tian"s wonderful achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.
To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso, the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits the divine message, is of unsurpa.s.sable suavity and beauty; but the foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to the Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south of the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto"s pathetic _Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear dignified by comparison. t.i.tian"s own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better known picture.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso"s d.u.c.h.ess,--the pa.s.sive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we are told, the finished _Baccha.n.a.l_, already described above. He appears to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at Ferrara (?) the last of the Baccha.n.a.lian series, our _Bacchus and Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too late in the earlier section of Vecelli"s work, though, with all its freshness of inspiration and still youthful pa.s.sion, it shows a further advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Baccha.n.a.l_, and must be deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the G.o.ds_ of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of t.i.tian already described our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Baccha.n.a.l_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the navete remains, but not the infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ t.i.tian"s genius flames up with an intensity of pa.s.sion such as will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of this cla.s.s. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the _Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance, though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the _Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna, is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier times, with its exquisite navete and mitigated sensuousness.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company._]
The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a t.i.tian which even the Louvre, the Museum of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master"s works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested in Italian art. This time t.i.tian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of the subject, thrilling through with the same n.o.ble frenzy that had animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At parte ex alia florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager movement of the all-conquering G.o.d in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne"s crown of stars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of the poem--shines in t.i.tian"s sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled in its happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did the prescribed limits of s.p.a.ce admit of such an indulgence. Even here, however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari; or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the more violent and self-a.s.sertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With t.i.tian the highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment, are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be considered the supreme exponent.
The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carre of the Louvre now known as _Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _t.i.tian"s Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue, myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how t.i.tian painted, _ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d" artiglieria_, the Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che e opera stupenda_. It is upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid _donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably, like so many of its cla.s.s, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_ personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in t.i.tian"s picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has. .h.i.therto been almost universally a.s.sumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the "stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_ of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by t.i.tian of a gentleman holding a hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something like certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle Howard picture is Alfonso"s son and successor portrayed. In the latter canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later signature "t.i.tia.n.u.s F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is, or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority of which it bears its present designation.
The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly in San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "t.i.tia.n.u.s Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the later spelling "t.i.tia.n.u.s" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it cannot rank with the San Niccol and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it presents some special points of interest which make it easily distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a pa.s.sionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in t.i.tian, whose dramatic force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was acquainted with Raphael"s _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic and real where the Urbinate"s masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still t.i.tian"s St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portion of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccol altar-piece.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.
Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and sentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, const.i.tuting the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43]
and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the much-talked-of piece for his master. t.i.tian succ.u.mbed to an offer of sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy of the Legate, drew back and left to t.i.tian the discredit without the profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia altar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the left and right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depicts the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor, Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] in the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificent academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or the healthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccol altar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those who admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of t.i.tian in particular, its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature, must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and painting.[45] a.n.a.logies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ and the _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position of the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance, notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laoc.o.o.n in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was kept in t.i.tian"s workshop, from which he is said to have studied.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY. CHATSWORTH. _From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie_.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: _La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein._]
In the _Madonna di S. Niccol_, which was painted or rather finished in the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccol de"
Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the circular top which it had in common with the _a.s.sunta_, the Ancona, and the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and sentiment, by no such pa.s.sionate identification of the artist with his subject. It is only in pa.s.sing from one of its beauties to another that its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St.
Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.
Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto dal" vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.
The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge"s private apartments to the Senate Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we know, t.i.tian"s first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion, twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.
As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge"s Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
Where exactly in the life-work of t.i.tian are we to place the _Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular subjects? It was in 1523 that t.i.tian acquired a new and ill.u.s.trious patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d"Este Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a "Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally a.s.sumed that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or thereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely following upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Baccha.n.a.l_ were painted. Mature as t.i.tian"s art here is, it reveals, not for the last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea has the robustness and the pa.s.sion of the Apostles in the _a.s.sunta_, the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such as we meet with in the _Baccha.n.a.l_. The Magdalen, with her features distorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differences imposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-G.o.ddess in the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand, enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the _Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.
What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--the well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring, while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole, each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily a.s.serting, its own splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the Magdalen"s dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the embrowned flesh of st.u.r.dy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of Nicodemus"s garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the Virgin"s robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous tragedy.
Of the frescoes executed by t.i.tian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge"s chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de"
Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.]