William Michael Rossetti

“ He gave splendid entertainments at times; and it is related that, when Henry III. of France passed through Venice on his way from Poland to take the French throne, he called on Titian with a train of nobles, and the painter presented him as a gift with all the pictures of which he inquired the price. He was not a man of universal genius or varied faculty and accomplishment, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of painting. ”

“ It has been said, and probably with truth, that he tried to emulate Palma Vecchio in softness as well as Giorgione in richness. Michelangelo’s verdict after inspecting the picture of “Danae in the Rain of Gold,” executed in 1546, has often been quoted. He said, “That man would have had no equal if art had done as much for him as nature.” He was thinking principally of severity and majesty of draughtsmanship, for he added, “Pity that in Venice they don't learn how to draw well.” ”

“ As a draughtsman of the human figure Titian was not only competent but good and fine, and he is reported to have studied anatomy deeply; but one can easily understand that he fell not a little short of the standard of Michelangelo, and even of other leading Florentines. He was wont to paint in a nude figure with Venetian red, supplemented by a little lake in the contour and towards the extremities. He observed that a colourist ought to manipulate white, black and red, and that the carnations cannot be done in a first painting, but by replicating various tints and mingling the colours. ”

“ The near mountain—all this range of hills being of dolomite formation—is called Marmarolo. At the neighbouring village of Valle was fought in Titian’s lifetime the battle of Cadore, a Venetian victory which he recorded in a painting. In the 12th century the count of Camino became count also of Cadore. He was called Guecello; and this name descended in 1321 to the podestà (or mayor) of Cadore, of the same stock to which the painter belonged. Titian, one of a family of four, and son of Gregorio Vecelli, a distinguished councillor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia, was born in 1477. ”

“ The later pictures were touched off rapidly, telling well from a distant view. He himself averred that after his visit to Rome in 1546 he had greatly improved in art; and in his very last days he said—certainly with the modesty of genius, perhaps also with some of the tenacity of old age—that he was then beginning to understand what painting meant. In his earlier pictures the gamut of colour rests mainly upon red and green, in the later ones upon deep yellow and blue. ”

“ The “St Jerome” of the Brera Gallery in Milan, a work of wonderful energy, spirit and force, especially for a more than octogenarian hand, was probably rather earlier than this; there is a replica of it in the Escorial. One of the master's latest pictures (1574–1575) is in Madrid, and commemorates the “Battle of Lepanto "; it is a work of failing power—but still the power of a Titian. Two of the mosaics in St Mark's church, Venice—the Mark in pontifical and the sword-sheathing angel on the right of the high altar—are after Vecelli's designs ”

“ The “Flora” of the Uffizi, the “Venus” of Darmstadt, and the lovely “Venus Anadyomene” of the Bridgewater Gallery may date a year or so earlier. Another work of 1523 is the stupendous “Entombment of Christ” in the Louvre, whose depth of colour and of shadow stands as the pictorial equivalent of individual facial expression; the same composition, a less admirable work, appears in the Manfrini Gallery. ”

“ According to one account, Giorgione was nettled at this superiority, and denied Titian admittance to his house thenceforth. Stories of jealousies between painters are rife in all regions, and in none more than in the Venetian—various statements of this kind applying to Titian himself. One should neither accept nor reject them uninquiringly; counter-evidence of some weight can be cited for Vecelli’s vindication in relation to Moroni, Correggio, Lotto and Coello. ”

“ He was highly distinguished, courteous and winning in society, personally unassuming, and a fine speaker, enjoying (as is said by Vasari, who saw him in the spring of 1566) health and prosperity unequalled. The numerous heads currently named 'Titian's Mistress might dispose us to regard the painter as a man of more than usually relaxed morals ”

“ Indeed he gave to landscape generally a new and original vitality, expressing the quality of the objects of nature and their control over the sentiments and imagination with a force that had never before been approached. The earliest Italian picture expressly designated as “landscape” was one which Vecelli sent in 1552 to Philip II. His productive faculty was immense, even when we allow for the abnormal length of his professional. career. In Italy, England and elsewhere more than a thousand pictures figure as Titian’s ”

“ Sansovino Eleonora duchess of Urbino, Francesco duke of Urbino, Caterina Cornaro queen of Cyprus (these four are in the Uffizi) ; Charles V. on horseback (Madrid) ; Cardinal Bembo (Naples) , discovered in an uncared-for condition in 1878, very unlike the portrait in the Barberini Gallery. The female portraits done by Titian are few, and are almost invariably of women of exalted rank. Of Ariosto, with whom Titian was intimate in Ferrara, though there may probably have been nothing approaching to a romantic friendship between them, the painter is said to have done three portraits. ”

“ In fact, there is ground for thinking that all his pensions and privileges, large as they were nominally, brought in but precarious returns. It has been pointed out that in the summer of 1566 (when he was elected into the Florentine Academy) he made an official declaration of his income, and put down the various items apparently below their value, not naming at all his salary or pensions. ”