coNTeNTs - Sillabe

Contents
Venice
between
15th and16th Centuries
Beginnings
Growth
and
12
Fame
Portrait Painter
Titian
6
and
20
Biographer
between Italy and
Spain 28
36
The Final Phase
52
Essential Bibliography
62
B eginnings
So Titian arrived in this city that was in the process of
being transformed together with his elder brother Francesco, who for many years would be his right hand man in
painting and administering their patrimony. Here the
painter immediately entered Sebastiano Zuccato’s studio, a
mosaic worker and not an excellent painter, to move however very soon to Gentile Bellini’s.
Gentile was the Venetian Republic’s official painter,
entrusted by the Senate with the decoration of the Ducal
Palace, portraits of the doges, and when the Turkish sultan,
Mohammed ii asked Venice for a painter it was he that was
sent to portray him. Together with Vittore Carpaccio he
was the ‘chronicler’ of the Venetian life of the time and
with huge canvases commissioned especially by the
Schools and the state handed down to us in celebrations
and public ceremonies a crowd of characters immersed in
a suffused light that allows us to make out with precision
even details in jewellery in fashion of the period.
However, Titian wanted more.
Spurred on by youthful ardour and talent he was searching
relentlessly for an innovative pictorial style, a stimulus to
break with tradition in order to explore new wider artistic
fields and those that could give him this creative force were
12
Gentile’s half brother, Giovanni Bellini, first and then his
pupil, Giorgio da Castelfranco.
Giambellino, the mystical painter of Madonnas started off
from the strong drawing of his brother-in-low Andrea Mantegna and passing through the influence of Piero della
Francesca and Antonello da Messina (active in Venice
between 1475 and 1476) led to tonal painting that would
become the real strength of the Venetian school.
There where the Florentines had and continued to have a
fondness for drawing, the masters of Venetian art – perhaps
influenced by the impalpable atmosphere of the lagoon city
and the reflections of the water that could make evanescent
even the solid stones of Istria – made colour the real riches
of their paintings. If the unique scheme of a Piero della
Francesca painting was obtained by means of the rigorous
play of perspective and composition, in Giovanni Bellini’s
it was the light that caressed and merged shapes and figures, falling on very rich, mellow colours.
But it was Giorgione that brought this sequence to a conclusion before dying at just thirty-three leaving behind only
a few works of certain attribution where it was however
clear how he had indeed been able to suppress drawing to
spread the pigment directly on to the canvas and let nature
rise for the first time to the role of protagonist together with
the human beings that were immersed there as integral
parts of it. Giorgione therefore became Titian’s last “master” but the influence should be remembered of “western”
artists or rather North European ones like Albrecht Dürer
who was present in Venice between 1505 and 1506 to paint
the Madonna of the Rosary in the church of San Bartolomeo (today in Prague).
Over and above all the teaching he could have obtained by
attending other painters’ studios, Titian showed how to
stand out right from the start from any other master or
Beginnings
13
inspirer and in the year Michelangelo began the frescoes in
the Sistine Chapel in Rome he was working alongside
Giorgione on those on the facades of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. After a devastating fire that had destroyed it
in the night between the 27th and 28th of January 1505, the
commercial centre of the Germans in the city had been
rebuilt and the wall bearing its name, facing on to the
Grand Canal, had been entrusted to Giorgione followed by
the not yet twenty year old Titian for the one overlooking
the Buso calle, today the Fondaco calle.
Seeing fragments kept in the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice, the difference between the two painters immediately springs to
the eye and this makes even more incomprehensible the
misunderstanding of many Venetians of the time who congratulated Giorgione on work done by Titian, annoying
him so much that, as Vasari wrote “…from now on he
never wanted Titian to work with him or be his friend”.
From those fragments it is easy to note how Giorgione’s
The Nude still demonstrates his ideal of serene, composed
beauty whereas Titian’s Judith already shows the strong
dynamic feeling and sensual physical being that he knows
how to instil into his own characters.
The Fondaco frescoes of which few other Titian fragments
remain but which used to cover a surface of about 47
metres wide, were probably finished the following year
when the threat of an attack on Venice by a coalition made
up in Cambrai in France on 10th December 1508 became a
reality. Already in March, Venetian troops led by Titian’s
grandfather, Count Vecellio, had defeated at Cadore the
army of Maximilian i of Hapsburg who less than a month
previously had assumed at Trento the title of Holy Roman
Emperor with the blessing of Julius ii della Rovere. This
pope was the most bitter enemy of Venice which he excommunicated on 27th April of the following year but which
14Titian
however did not cause great chaos in the city: the Council
of Ten simply prevented publication of the papal bull and
the clergy completely ignored it.
Up to that moment Venice had acted astutely trying to set the
foreign states up against each other, thus feeling sure they
would never succeed in coming to agreement to attack it.
Instead consensus in the papal coalition was very strong.
Besides the German Emperor, the King of Spain, the King of
France, the King of Hungary and also the Sforzas, the
Estenses, the Florentines, the Savoias and the Gonzagas took
part all in the hope of taking for themselves – or re-taking – a
little piece of the rich Venetian Stato da terra (“land-state”).
The Venetian Republic was forced to raise the biggest army
ever from an Italian state to enter the field but through misunderstandings between the two commanders leading it the
daring Bartolomeo d’Alviano and the procrastinator Count
of Pitigliano – the troops of the former were wiped out by
the French army at Agnadello in Ghiara d’Adda on the 14th
May 1509. The enemy conquered cities like Brescia, Vicenza, Verona and Padua without effort, finally reaching the
lagoon where the Venetians were preparing for a siege.
In July, thanks to popular uprisings in the lost territories
and reorganisation of the army by the future Doge Andrea
Gritti, whose extraordinary portrait, now in Washington,
Titian would paint, the Venetians recaptured Padua and
defended it while political agreements between the parties
were unexpectedly changing. Thanks also to close diplomatic plots hatched by the city, the league disintegrated and
on 24th February 1510, with a solemn ceremony in St.
Peter’s, Julius ii withdrew the excommunication on Venice.
Before leaving for Padua, to carry out a cycle of three frescoes with Miracles of St. Anthony commissioned by the
School of the Saint (The Miracle of the Child, The Miracle
of the Cured Foot and The Miracle of the Wounded
Beginnings
15
Preceding pages:
The Concert, 1510-1512, oil on canvas,
86.5 × 123.5 cm. Florence,
(Pitti Palace), Palatine Gallery.
Inv.1912 no. 185
Portrait of a Knight of Malta,
circa 1515, oil on canvas, 80 × 64 cm.
Florence, Uffizi Gallery.
Inv. 1890 no. 942
Flora, 1515-1517,
oil on canvas,
79.7 × 63.5 cm. Florence,
Uffizi Gallery. Inv. 1890 no. 1462