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Tiziano
Masterpieces of Tiziano
Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio (c. 1488-90 – August 27, 1576), known as Titian, is considered one of the great 16th century Renaissance painters of Venice, Italy.
He was born at Pieve di Cadore (Veneto) in Italy, and died at Venice.
During his lifetime he was often called Da Cadore, from the place of his
birth, and has also been designated Il Divino.
Childhood
Titian was one of a family of four and son of Gregorio Vecelli, a
distinguished councilor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia.
At age 10 his brother took him to Venice and placed him with celebrated
mosaicist, Sebastian Zuccato. At the end of four or five years he entered
the studio of the aged painter Giovanni Bellini, at that time the most
noted artist in the city. There he found a group of young men about his
own age, among them Giovanni Palma da Serinalta, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano
Luciani, and Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione. Francesco
Vecellio, his elder brother, was a painter of some note in Venice.
Early work
A fresco of Hercules on the Morosini Palace is said to have been one of
his earliest works; others were the Virgin and Child, in the Vienna
Belvedere, and the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth (from the convent of
S. Andrea), now in the Venetian Academy.
Titian entered into partnership with Giorgione, and it is difficult to
distinguish their early works. The earliest known work of Titian, the
little Ecce Homo of the Scuola di San Rocco, was long regarded as the work
of Giorgione. The same confusion or uncertainty is connected with more
than one of the Sacred Conversations.
The two young masters were likewise recognized as the two leaders of their
new school of "arte moderna", that is of painting made more
flexible, freed from symmetry and the remnants of hieratic conventions
still to be found in the works of Giovanni Bellini.
In 1507–1508 Giorgione was commissioned by the state to execute frescoes
on the re-erected Fondaco de Tedeschi. Titian and Morto da Feltre worked
along with him, and some fragments of Titian's paintings remain. Some of
their work is known, in part, through the engraving of Fontana.
Titian's talent in fresco is shown in those he painted in 1511 at Padua in
the Carmelite church and in the Scuola del Santo, some of which have been
preserved, among them the Meeting at the Golden Gate, and three scenes
from the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the Murder of a Young Woman by Her
Husband, A Child Testifying to Its Mother's Innocence, and The Saint
Healing the Young Man with a Broken Limb.He was the artist of his time.
From Padua in 1512, Titian returned to Venice; and in 1513 he obtained a
broker's patent in the Fondaco de Tedeschi (state-warehouse for the German
merchants), termed La Sanseria or Senseria (a privilege much coveted by
rising or risen artists), and became superintendent of the government
works, being especially charged to complete the paintings left unfinished
by Giovanni Bellini in the hall of the great council in the ducal palace.
He set up an atelier on the Grand Canal at S. Samuele, the precise site
being now unknown. It was not until 1516, upon the death of Bellini, that
he came into actual enjoyment of his patent. At the same time he entered
an exclusive arrangement for painting. The patent yielded him a good
annuity of 20 crowns and exempted him from certain taxes — he being
bound in return to paint likenesses of the successive Doges of his time at
the fixed price of eight crowns each. The actual number he executed was
five.
Growth
Giorgione died in 1510 and the aged Bellini in 1516, leaving Titian
after the production of such masterpieces without a rival in the Venetian
School. For 60 years he was to be the absolute and undisputed head, the
official master, and as it were, the painter laureate of the Republic
Serenissime. As early as 1516 he succeeded his old master Bellini as the
pensioner of the Senate.
During this period (1516–1530), which may be called the period of his
bloom and maturity, the artist freed himself from the traditions of his
youth, undertook a class of more complex subjects and for the first time
attempted the monumental style.
1518 he produced for the high altar of the church of the Frari, a
world-renowned masterpieces, the Assumption of the Madonna, now in the
Venetian Academy. It excited a vast sensation, being an extraordinary
piece of colourist execution on a great scale which Italy had not yet
seen. The signoria took note of the facts and did not fail to observe that
Titian was neglecting his work in the hall of the great council.
The theme of the Assumption – that of uniting in the same composition
two or three scenes superimposed on different levels, earth and heaven,
the temporal and the infinite — was continued in a series of works such
as the retable of San Domenico at Ancona (1520), the retable of Brescia
(1522), and the retable of San Niccolo (1523, at the Vatican), each time
attaining to a higher and more perfect conception, finally reaching an
unsurpassable formula in the Pesaro retable, (1526), in the Church of the
Frari at Venice. This perhaps is his most perfect and most studied work,
whose patiently developed plan is set forth with supreme display of order
and freedom, of originality and style. Here Titian gave a new conception
of the traditional groups of donors and holy persons moving in aerial
space, the plans and different degrees set in an architectural framework.
Vecelli was now at the height of his fame; and towards 1521, following the
production of a figure of St Sebastian for the papal legate in Brescia (a
work of which there are numerous replicas), purchasers became extremely
urgent for his productions.
To this period belongs a more extraordinary work, The Death of St. Peter
of Verona (1530), formerly in the Dominican Church of San Zanipolo, and
destroyed by an Austrian shell in 1867. Only copies of this sublime
picture remain — one in the Ecole des Beaux Arts). The association of
the landscape with a scene of murder — a rapidly brutal scene of
slaying, a cry rising above the old oak-trees, a Dominican escaping the
ambush, and overall the shudder and stir of the dark branches —
"...this is all, but never perhaps has tragedy more swift, startling,
and pathetic been depicted even by Tintoretto or Delacroix."[1]
The artist simultaneously continued his series of small Madonnas which he
treated amid beautiful landscapes in the manner of genre pictures or
poetic pastorals, the Virgin with the Rabbit in the Louvre being the
finished type of these pictures. Another work of the same period, also in
the Louvre, is the Entombment. This was likewise the period of the
mythological scenes, such as the famous Bacchanals of Madrid, and the
Bacchus and Ariadne of London, "...perhaps the most brilliant
productions of the neo-pagan culture or "Alexandrianism" of the
Renaissance, many times imitated but never surpassed even by Rubens
himself."[2] Finally this was the period of mastery when the artist
composed the half-length figures and busts of young women, such as Flora
of the Uffizi, or The Young Woman at Her Toilet in the Louvre (also
called, without reason, Laura de Dianti or The Mistress of Titian).
In 1525, after some irregular living and a consequent fever, he married a
lady named Cecilia, thereby legitimized their first child, Pornponio, and
two (or perhaps three) others followed. Towards 1526 he became acquainted,
and soon exceedingly intimate, with Pietro Aretino, the literary bravo, of
influence and audacity hitherto unexampled, who figures so strangely in
the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to Gonzaga, duke
of Mantua.
A great affliction befell him in August 1530 in the death of his wife. He
then, with his three children, one of them the infant Lavinia, whose birth
had been fatal to the mother, moved to a new home, and got his sister Orsa
to come from Cadore and take charge of the household. The mansion,
difficult to find now, is in the Bin Grande, then a fashionable suburb,
being in the extreme end of Venice, on the sea, with beautiful gardens and
a look-out towards Murano.
Maturity
During the next period (1530-1550), as was foreshadowed by his
Martyrdom of St. Peter, Titian devoted himself more and more to the
dramatic style. From this time come his historical scene, the most
characteristic of which have mutilated or destroyed; thus, the Battle of
Cadore, the artist's greatest efforts to master movement and to express
even tumult, his most violent attempt to go out of himself and achieve the
heroic, wherein he rivals the War of Pisa, The Battle of Anghiari, and the
Battle of Constantine, perished in 1577 in the fire which destroyed all
the old pictures adorning the Doge's Palace. There is extant only a poor,
incomplete copy at the Uffizi, and a mediocre engraving by Fontana. In
like manner the Speech of the Marquis del Vasto (Madrid, 1541) was partly
destroyed by fire. But this portion of the master's work is adequately
represented by the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin (Venice, 1539), one
of his most popular canvasses, and by Ecce Homo (Vienna, 1541), one of the
most pathetic and life-like of masterpieces.
The School of Bologna and Rubens many times borrowed the distinguished and
magisterial mise-en-scène, the grand and stirring effect, and these
horses, soldiers, lictors, these powerful stirrings of crowds at the foot
of a stairway, while over all are the light of torches and the flapping of
banners against the sky, have been often repeated.
Less successful were the pendentives of the cupola at Sta. Maria della
Salute (Death of Abel, Sacrifice of Abraham, David and Goliath). These
violent scenes viewed in perspective from below — like the famous
pendentives of the Sistine Chapel — were by their very nature in
unfavorable situations. They were nevertheless much admired and imitated,
Rubens among others applying this system to his 40 ceilings (the sketches
only remain) of the Jesuit church at Antwerp.
At this time also, the time of his visit to Rome, the artist began his
series of reclining Venuses (The Venus of Urbino of the Uffizi, Venus and
Love at the same museum, Venus and the Organ-Player, Madrid), in which is
recognized the effect or the direct reflection of the impression produced
on the master by contact with ancient sculpture. Giorgione had already
dealt with the subject in the Dresden picture, but here a purple drapery
substituted for its background of verdure was sufficient to change, by its
harmonious coloring, the whole meaning of the scene.
Furthermore Titian had from the beginning of his career shown himself to
be an masterful portrait-painter, in works like La Bella (Eleanora de
Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, at the Pitti Palace). He painted the
likenesses of princes, or Doges, cardinals or monks, and artists or
writers. "...no other painter was so successful in extracting from
each physiognomy so many traits at once characteristic and
beautiful," according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Among
portrait-painters Titian is compared to Rembrandt and Velásquez, with the
interior life of the former, and the clearness, certainty, and obviousness
of the latter.
The last-named qualities are sufficiently manifested in the Paul III of
Naples, or the sketch of the same pope and his two nephews, the Aretino of
the Pitti Palace, the Eleanora of Portugal (Madrid), and the series of
King Charles V of the same museum, the Charles V with a Greyhound (1533),
and especially the Charles V at Mühlberg (1548), an equestrian picture
which as a symphony of purples is perhaps the ne plus ultra of the art of
painting.
In 1532 after painting a portrait of the emperor Charles V in Bologna he
was made a count palatine and knight of the Golden Spur. His children were
also made nobles of the empire, which for a painter was an exceptional
honor.
The Venetian government, dissatisfied with Titian's neglect of the work
for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the money which he had
received for time unemployed, and Pordenone, his formidable rival of
recent years, was installed in his place. However, at the end of a year
Pordenone died, and Titian, who meanwhile applied himself diligently to
painting in the hall the battle of Cadore, was reinstated. This picture,
which was burned with several others in 1577?, represented in life-size
the moment at which the Venetian captain, D'Alviano fronted the enemy with
horses and men crashing down into a stream. Fontanas engraving, and a
sketch by Titian himself in the gallery of the Uffizi in Florence, record
the energetic composition.
As a matter of professional and worldly success his position from about
this time is regarded as only less than that of Raphael, Michelangelo, and
at a later date Rubens. In 1540 he received a pension from D'Avalos,
marquis del Vasto, and an annuity of 200 crowns (which was afterwards
doubled) from Charles V on the treasury of Milan.
Another source of profit, for he was always sufficiently keen after money,
was a contract obtained in 1542 for supplying grain to Cadore, where he
visited almost every year and where he was both generous and influential.
Titian had a favorite villa on the neighboring Manza Hill, from which (it
may be inferred) he made his chief observations of landscape form and
effect. The so-called Titian's mill, constantly discernible in his
studies, is at Collontola, near Belluno.[3]
He visited Rome in 1546, and obtained the freedom of the city — his
immediate predecessor in that honour having been Michelangelo in 1537. He
could at the same time have succeeded the painter Fra Sebastiano in his
lucrative office of the piombo, and he made no scruple of becoming a friar
for the purpose; but the project lapsed through his being summoned away
from Venice in 1547 to paint Charles V and others in Augsburg. He was
there again in 1550, and executed the portrait of Philip II which was sent
to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the prince for the
hand of Queen Mary.
Final years
During the last 25 years of his life (1550-1576) the artist, more and
more absorbed in his work as a portrait-painter and also more
self-critical, an insatiable perfectionist, finished only a few great
works.
Some of his pictures he kept in his studio for 10 years, never wearying of
returning to them and retouching them, constantly adding new expressions
at once more refined, concise, and subtle.
For each of the problems which he successively undertook he furnished a
new and more perfect formula. He never again equaled the emotion and
tragedy of the Crowning with Thorns (Louvre), in the expression of the
mysterious and the divine he never equaled the poetry of the Pilgrims of
Emmaus, while in superb and heroic brilliancy he never again executed
anything more grand than The Doge Grimani adoring Faith (Venice, Doge's
Palace), or the Trinity, of Madrid.
On the other hand from the standpoint of flesh tints, his most moving
pictures are those of his old age, the Dan of Naples and of Madrid, the
Antiope of the Louvre, the Rape of Europa (Boston, Gardner collection),
etc. He even attempted problems of chiaroscuro in fantastic night effects
(Martyrdom of St. Laurence, Church of the Jesuits, Venice; St. Jerome,
Louvre). In the domain of the real he always remained equally strong,
sure, and master of himself; his portraits of Philip II (Madrid), those of
his daughter, Lavinia, and those of himself are numbered among his
masterpieces.
Vecelli had affianced his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he
loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio Sarcinelli of
Serravalle. She had succeeded her aunt Orsa, then deceased, as the manager
of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made by this
time, placed her on a corresponding footing. The marriage took place in
1554. She died in childbirth in 1560.
He was at the Council of Trent towards 1555, of which his admirable
picture or finished sketch in the Louvre bears record.
Titian's friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate,
the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, in 1570.
In September 1565 Titian went to Cadore and designed the decorations for
the church at Pieve, partly executed by his pupils. One of these is a
Transfiguration, another an Annunciation (now in S. Salvatore, Venice),
inscribed Titianus fecit, by way of protest (it is said) against the
disparagement of some persons who cavilled at the veteran's failing
handicraft.
He continued to accept commissions to the last. He had selected as the
place for his burial the chapel of the Crucifix in the church of the Fran;
and, in return for a grave, he offered the Franciscans a picture of the
Pietà, representing himself and his son Orazio before the Saviour,
another figure in the composition being a sibyl. This work he nearly
finished; but some differences arose regarding it, and he then settled to
be interred in his native Pieve.
Titian was approaching 100-years-old when the plague raging in Venice
seized him, and he died on 27 August 1576. He was the only victim of that
plague to be given a church burial and was interred in the Frari (Santa
Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), as at first intended, and his Pietà was
finished by Palma Giovane. He lies near his own famous painting, the
Madonna di Ca' Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave, until by Austrian
command Canova executed the monument.
Immediately after Titian's own death, his son and pictorial assistant
Orazio died of the same epidemic. His sumptuous mansion was plundered
during the plague by thieves.
Family
Several other artists of the Vecelli family followed in the wake of
Titian. Francesco Vecelli, his elder brother, was introduced to painting
by Titian (it is said at the age of twelve, but chronology will hardly
admit of this), and painted in the church of S. Vito in Cadore a picture
of the titular saint armed. This was a noteworthy performance, of which
Titian (the usual story) became jealous; so Francesco was diverted from
painting to soldiering, and afterwards to mercantile life.
Marco Vecelli, called Marco di Tiziano, Titian's nephew, born in 1545, was
constantly with the master in his old age, and, learned his methods of
work. He has left some able productions in the ducal palace, the Meeting
of Charles V. and Clement VII. in 1529 ; in S. Giacomo di Rialto, an
Annunciation ; in SS. Giovani e Paolo, Christ Fulminant. A son of Marco,
named Tiziano (or Tizianello), painted early in the 17th century.
From a different branch of the family came Fabrizio di Ettore, a painter
who died in 1580. His brother Cesare, who also left some pictures, is well
known by his book of engraved costumes, Abiti antichi e moderni. Tommaso
Vecelli, also a painter, died in 1620. There was another relative,
Girolamo Dante, who, being a scholar and assistant of Titian, was called
Girolamo di Tiziano. Various pictures of his were touched up by the
master, and are difficult to distinguish from originals.
Apart from members of his family, the scholars of Titian were not
numerous; Paris Bordone and Bonifazio were the two of superior excellence.
El Greco (or Domenico Theotocopuli) was employed by the master to engrave
from his works. It is said that Titian himself engraved on copper and on
wood, but this may well be questioned.
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article "Italian Renaissance".
last update September 7th, 2006