Titianus

“ Now, a man of real worth knows that it can be seen in his bearing, even when he treats one of us as an equal. Pontius does so, and Titianus, and you who are his friend, no less. It is a good thing that you should have come— but, as I said before, the architect up there can do very well without you. ”

“ We shall begin, with the help of God most high, the writing of the pure gospel, the blooming garden, called Diatessaron (a word meaning “fourfold”) , the work compiled by Titianus the Greek out of the four evangelists—Matthew the elect, whose symbol is M, Mark the chosen, whose symbol is R, Luke the approved, whose symbol is K, and John the beloved, whose symbol is H. The work was translated from Syriac into Arabic by the excellent and learned priest Abu’l Faraj ‘Abdulla ibn-at-Tayyib, [1] may God grant him his favour. ”

“ There they met with an unexpected hindrance, for across the paved court- yard, where the grass grew in tufts, and tall thistles were in bloom, a number of ropes were stretched aslant from the little house in which dwelt the gate-keeper; and on these ropes were hung newly-washed garments of every size and shape.
"A pretty residence for an Emperor," sighed Titianus, shrugging his shoulders, but stopping the lictor, who had raised his fasces to cut the ropes.
"It is not so bad as it looks," said the architect positively. "Gate- keeper! hi, gate-keeper! Where is the lazy fellow hiding himself?" ”

“ I know your true Greek!”
“Well, let him,” answered Titianus. “If you have taken his measure rightly he will not be able to give his attention without reserve to our questions till the other half of his hair is curled. I know, too, how to deal with a Hellene.”
“Better than I, I perceive,” said the architect in a tone of conviction. “A statesman is used to deal with men as we do with lifeless materials. Did you see the fat fellow turn pale when you said that it would be but a few days before the Emperor would make his entry here? Things must look well in the old house there. ”

“ Anthony Abbot of the Uffizi; the Bacchus and Ariadne, the Assunta, the St. Sebastian of Brescia (dated 1522) . The Virgin and Child with St. Catherine of the National Gallery, and the Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus of the Louvre—neither of them early works—are signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus F.," among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the great Madonna di San Niccolò now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. ”

“ It was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the Three Ages and the Sacred and Profane Love. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of earth and sky which enframe the figures in the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal, and, above all, the Bacchus and Ariadne; to give back his impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred Conversations. ”

“ There is not to be found in the whole life-work of Titian a clumsier or more disjointed composition as a whole, even making the necessary allowances for alterations, additions, and restorations. Though the figure of Faith is a sufficiently noble conception in itself, the group which it makes with the attendant angels is inexplicably heavy and awkward in arrangement; the flying pulli have none of the audacious grace and buoyancy that Lotto or Correggio would have imparted to them, none of the rush of Tintoretto. ”

“ Titian went to Rome in his later years, but declined to abandon for Rome the painter's native Venice, which had lavished her favours on her son. He lived in great splendour, paying annual summer visits to his birth-place of Cadore, and occasionally dwelling again for a time at Ferrara, Urbino, Bologna. In two instances he joined the Emperor at Augsburgh. When Henry III, of France landed at Venice, he was entertained en grand seigneur by Titian, then a very old man; and when the king asked the price of some pictures which pleased him, Titian at once presented them as a gift to his royal guest. ”

“ Yet in fulness and variety of life, in unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the life-work of the other—making the world the poorer by the loss of Titian or Tintoretto—can it be doubted for a moment what the choice would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face with the mighty genius of the latter? ”

“ Titian's friend and patron of that time, Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino, had at first opposed Titian's visit to the Roman court, striving to reserve to himself the services of the Venetian master until such time as he should have carried out for him the commissions with which he was charged. Yielding, however, to the inevitable, and yielding, too, with a good grace, he himself escorted his favourite with his son Orazio from Venice through Ferrara to Pesaro, and having detained him a short while there, granted him an escort through the Papal States to Rome. ”

“ About the compositions themselves, if we are to take them as the poesie that Titian loved to call them, there is a certain want of significance, neither the divine nor the human note being struck with any depth or intensity of vibration. The glamour, the mystery, the intimate charm of the early pieces is lost, and there is felt, enwrapping the whole, that sultry atmosphere of untempered sensuousness which has already, upon more than one occasion, been commented upon. ”

“ What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him from the life—a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square and yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it feared neither man nor fiend—and it has had good reason to fear both—and features which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant snub-nose. ”

“ Art itself could only add to it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which, in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek for a parallel. ”

“ We do not wonder that all the leading personages of Italy wished to be painted by [Pg 156] Titian. His are the portraits of a man of intellect. They show the subject at his best; grave, cultivated, stately, as he appeared and wished to appear; not taken off his guard in any way. What can be more sympathetic as a personality than the Ariosto of the National Gallery? We can enter into his mind and make a friend of him, and yet all the time he has himself in hand; he allows us to divine as much as he chooses, and draws a thin veil over all that he does not intend us to discover. ”

“ Pre-eminent inventive power or sublimity of intellect he never evinced. Even in energy of action and more especially in majesty or affluence of composition the palm is not his; it is (so far as concerns the Venetian school) assignable to Tintoretto. Titian is a painter who by wondrous magic of genius and of art satisfies the eye, and through the eye the feelings—sometimes the mind.
Titian’s pictures abound with memories of his home-country and of the region which led from the hill-summits of Cadore to the queen-city of the Adriatic. ”

“ As we study the face we are interested to read in it what we know of the man’s character and history. Titian was, as we have seen, a man who enjoyed very much the good things of life, and passed most of his days in luxurious surroundings. He was thoroughly a man of the world, at ease in the society of princes and noblemen, and a princely host in his own house. Our portrait shows that his courtly bearing did not fail him in his old age: we can fancy the ceremonious courtesy of his manner. The figure is extended well below the waist, perhaps that we may see how erect the old man is. ”

“ Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. ”

“ Nor has Titian ever done better; and it is quite certain that no one, Titian himself included, within the compass of the North Italian schools, reproduced the human shape with more nature and truth, and with greater delicacy of modelling. Amidst the profusion of locks that falls to Christ's shoulders, there are ringlets of which we may count the hairs, and some of these are so light that they seem to float in air, as if ready to wave at the spectator's breath. ”

“ No veracious biographer of Titian could pretend that he is always thus imaginative, that coming in contact with a commanding human individuality he always thus unfolds the outer wrappings to reveal the soul within. ”

“ Titian enjoyed the confidence of his imperial master during this second visit in a degree which excited surprise at the time; the intercourse with Charles at this tragic moment of his career, when, sick and disappointed, he aspired only to the consolations of faith, seeing his sovereign remedy in the soothing balm of utter peace, may have worked to deepen the gloom which was overspreading the painter's art if not his soul. ”

“ Whatever Titian chose to touch, whether it was classical mythology or portrait, history or sacred subject, he treated in this large and healthful style. It is easy to tire of Veronese; it is possible to be fatigued by Tintoretto. Titian, like nature, waits not for moods or humours in the spectator. He gives to the mind joy of which it can never weary, pleasures that cannot satiate, a satisfaction not to be repented of, a sweetness that will not pall. The least instructed and the simple feel his influence as strongly as the wise or learned. ”

“ Titian painted afterwards perhaps more wonderfully still—with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He never attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. ”

“ I claim, therefore, that any account of Titian's life based solely on such flimsy evidence as to his age as is found in this letter to Philip the Second is, to say the least, open to grave doubt. The whole superstructure raised by modern writers on this uncertain foundation is full of flaws and incongruities, and I am fully persuaded the future historian will have to begin de novo in any attempt at a chronological reconstruction of Titian's career. ”

“ Titian himself in the St. Sebastian of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted masterpiece, The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican, sins in the same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his better self.
Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art. [40] What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer opposition at the outset. ”

“ During the time of sitting, Titian happened to drop one of his pencils, the emperor took it up; and on the artist expressing how unworthy he was of such an honour, Charles replied, "that Titian was worthy of being waited upon by Cæsar." But, "to reckon up the protectors and friends of Titian, would be to name nearly all the persons of the age, to whom rank, talent, and exalted character, appertained. Being full of years and honours, he fell a victim to the plague in 1576, at the age of ninety-nine. ”

“ Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the Entombment of the Louvre, the Assunta, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, the St. Peter Martyr, to say that he has, take him all in all, been surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever overstepping the bounds of nature. ”

“ You have built a something, such as is to be found anywhere, and you have destroyed a wonder of the world."
The Emperor delighted to frequent the studio of Titian, on which occasions he treated him with ex [Pg 12] traordinary familiarity and condescension. The fine speeches which he lavished upon him, are as well known as his more substantial rewards. The painter one day happening to let fall his brush, the monarch picked it up, and presented it to the astonished artist, saying, "It becomes Cæsar to serve Titian." ”

“ This is another admirable example of the dignity and reserve which Titian combines with sumptuous colour at this stage of his practice. His mastery is not less but greater, subtler, than that of his more showy and brilliant contemporaries of the younger generation; the result is something that appears as if it must inevitably have been so and not otherwise. The central figure of the patriarch is robed in deep crimson with grayish fur, rather black in shadow; the man in the prime of manhood wears a more positive crimson, trimmed with tawnier fur, browner in shadow ”