The Splendor Of Venice

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Titian’s ideal of womanhood is seen not only in this picture, which inspired Mr Arnold Bennet’s novel with the same title, but in a number of exquisite portraits and figure paintings. According to Vasari, he painted mostly from his own imagination, and only used female models in case of necessity. Titian’s types have little in common with the small, brown, black-eyed maidens we usually associate with Venice. They are nearer akin to the fair-haired Lombard women or the Dianas and Junos of his Alpine home. Further, it is the proud majesty of the mature woman that Titian paints. His beautiful ‘Flora,’ in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, does not suggest spring time but, as Dr Muther has well said, ‘high summer in its rich, mature splendor.’ Never old, but never very young, Titian’s ‘mighty women’ seem to ‘beam in an eternal, powerful beauty.’

The same mature majesty characterises ‘The Magdalen’, to which Titian’s contemporary Vasari pays the following eloquent tribute: ‘Her hair falls about her neck and shoulders, her head is raised, and the eyes are fixed on Heaven, their redness and the tears still within them giving evidence of her sorrow for the sins of her past life. This picture, which is most beautiful, moves all who behold it to compassion.’

‘He touched nothing that he did not adorn.’ So it might be written of Titian, who ennobled all his sitters with something of his own majesty. The supreme example of his powers in this direction is the magnificent ‘Equestrian Portrait of Charles V’, now in the Prado at Madrid. In 1530, when the Emperor Charles V was in Bologna, Titian, by the intervention of his friend the poet Pietro Aretino, was invited to that city and commissioned to paint His Catholic Majesty in full armour. Vasari tells us the Emperor was so delighted with this portrait that he gave the artist a thousand gold crowns, declaring that he would never have his portrait done by any other painter; and he kept his imperial word, frequently employing Titian thereafter and always paying him a thousand crowns for each portrait.

Never was money better spent. This Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain still fires our imagination, thanks to Titian. The historical truth about Charles V is that he was a pale, scrofulous, emaciated man, a prey to melancholy, full of hesitations and superstitious fears; so world-weary that in the end he abdicated from his imperial position, and shut himself up in a monastery where, with morbid satisfaction, surrounded by coffins and ticking clocks, he constantly rehearsed his own funeral. Titian shows us nothing of this. His wonderful imagination fastens on one great moment in the Emperor’s life, the day when he was the victor at Augsburg. A Black Knight in steel armor, riding over the battlefield at daybreak, the Emperor in this painting becomes ‘the personification of the coldness of a great general in battle, and of Destiny itself approaching, silent and unavoidable.’ Charles is here Napoleonic—but Napoleon had no Titian to immortalize his grandeur. Who would not pay a thousand crowns to be so transfigured for posterity?

Still painting in his ninetieth year with unabated vigor, still able as a nonagenarian to play the host with undiminished magnificence to King Henry III of France, this grand old patriarch finally went down in 1576, like some battered but indomitable man-of-war, with his colors still proudly flying. Even then it was not of old age that he died; he was a victim to the same pestilence which, sixty six years earlier, had carried off his young fellow pupil Giorgione. All Venice went into mourning when the greatest of her sons passed away, and the Senate set aside the decree that excluded victims of the plague from burial within church walls, so that Titian might be laid to rest in the Church of the Frari, within sight of his own picture of ‘The Assumption’.

The Splendor Of Venice (continued)