The Splendor Of Venice

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The Art of Titian, Tintoretto, Lotto, Moroni, And Paul Veronese

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We never think of Titian as a young man; to all of us he is the Grand Old Man of Italian art, and there is something patriarchal in his figure. He was, indeed, very old when he died. Some would make out that he lived to be ninety-nine, but there is considerable doubt whether he was really as old as he pretended to be. The National Gallery catalogue queries 1477 as the year of Titian’s birth, but few modern historians consider this to be accurate. The date 1477 is only given by the artist in a begging letter to King Philip of Spain, when it was to Titian’s advantage to make himself out to be older than he was, because he was trying to squeeze money out of rather tight-fisted monarch on the score of his great age.

Vasari and other contemporary writers give 1489 as the date of birth, but probably the nearest approach to the truth is given in a letter (dated December 8, 1567) from the Spanish Consul in Venice (Thomas de Cornoca), which fixes the year of Titian’s birth as 1482. This would make Titian to have been ninety-four when he died.

Whether Titian lived to be ninety-four or, as Sir Herbert Cook thinks, only eighty-nine, is a small matter compared to the greater fact that he was born in the hill-town of Cadore on a spur of the Alps, and spent his boyhood amid solemn pinewoods and Alpine solitudes. Breathing the keen mountain air, he grew up a young Hercules, deep-chested, his features ‘sun-browned as if cast in bronze,’ his eyes clear, with an eagle glance bred of Alpine distances.

So the young Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) came to Venice, hardy mountaineer among the children of the plain, and all his art bears the impress of his origin. What we call the idealism of Titian is not the result of aesthetic reflection, but, as Muther has pointed out, ‘the natural point of view of a man who wandered upon the heights of life, never knew trivial care, nor even experienced sickness; and therefore saw the world healthy and beautiful, in gleaming and majestic splendor.’

By the early death of Giorgione in 1510, Titian was left without a rival in his own generation, and six years later (1516), when Bellini died, Titian was elected to succeed him as the official painter of Venice. Thenceforward his career was a royal progress. ‘All princes, learned men, and distinguished persons who came to Venice visited Titian,’ says Vasari, for ‘not only in his art was he great, but he was a nobleman in person.’ He lived in a splendid palace, where he received Royalty, and was able to give his beautiful daughter and his two sons every conceivable luxury, for Titian, says Vasari, ‘gained a fair amount of wealth, his labors having always been well paid.’

Of the dramatic quality in Titian’s art we have a splendid instance at the National Gallery in the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, which, painted about 1520, is also a famous example of Venetian color. Nobody before had ever given so dramatic and impassioned a rendering of Bacchus, the God of Wine, leaping from his chariot to console and cherish Ariadne, the beautiful maiden forsaken by her false lover Theseus. There is action not only in the drawing, in the spirited rendering of movements, but there is life also in the color; the amber, ruby, and sapphire of the following draperies, sparkle quiver, and radiate.

Whence came these qualities so new to Venetian painting? They came from the great painter’s memories of his birthplace, his boyhood’s home beside the River Piave roaring down from storm-capped heights, from memories of the wind that swept through the tree-tops and rattled the rafters of the house. Familiar from childhood with the awe-inspiring, dramatic elements of Nature, Titian expressed her majesty and drama in his art.

Amid the wealth of pictorial beauty left by Titian it is difficult indeed to say which is his supreme masterpiece. According to Vasari, Titian’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ was held by his fellow citizens to be the ‘the best modern painting,’ and though it is no longer modern but an ‘old master,’ we cannot conceive a more impressive rendering of the subject than this picture, in which we almost hear the wind caused by the soaring ascent of the Virgin, her garments grandly swelling in the breeze by which the encircling cherubs waft her upwards.

Yet to this great painting of his mature years (1541) at least one of his earlier pictures is equal in beauty. To the transitional period in Titian’s life, while the direct influence of Giorgeione yet lingered, belongs the picture in the Borghese Gallery, Rome, known as ‘Sacred and Profane Love’. But the title is only a makeshift. Nobody knows the true meaning of this picture of two lovely women, one lightly draped, the other in the full splendor of Venetian dress, seated on either side of a well in the midst of a smiling landscape. There is a tradition that the one represents ‘Heavenly Love,’ the other ‘Earthly Love,’ but on the other hand a passage in Vasari about another painting by Titian, now lost, gives countenance to the theory that these figures are personifications of Grace and Beauty, or more probably Grace and Truth. A third theory is that the picture illustrates a passage in some lost poem.

The Splendor Of Venice (continued)