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diff --git a/old/12626.txt b/old/12626.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..96c7253 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/12626.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3404 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Earlier Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: The Earlier Work of Titian + +Author: Claude Phillips + +Release Date: June 15, 2004 [eBook #12626] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: US-ASCII + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN*** + + +E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Wilelmina Malliere, and the Project +Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + + +Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this + file which includes the original illustrations. + See 12626-h.htm or 12626-h.zip: + (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h/12626-h.htm) + or + (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h.zip) + + + + + +THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN + +By + +CLAUDE PHILLIPS + +Keeper of the Wallace Collection + +1897 + + + + + + + +[Illustration: _Flora_] + + +[Illustration: The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many +Illustrations] + + + + +LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS + +PLATES + PAGE + +Flora. Uffizi Gallery, Florence ....................... Frontispiece + +Sacred and Profane Love. Borghese Gallery, Rome..................... 36 + +Virgin and Child, with Saints. Louvre............................... 54 + +Le Jeune Homme au Gant. Louvre...................................... 62 + + +ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN COLOUR + +Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth................................ 86 + +Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina.................... 96 + + +ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT + +The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice............... 23 + +Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial Gallery, Vienna 25 + +The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome................. 29 + +The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery ................................ 35 + +Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome..... 39 + +Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.................................... 41 + +St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the +Scuola del Santo, Padua............................................. 43 + +"Noli me tangere." National Gallery................................. 45 + +St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. 49 + +The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna............. 51 + +PAGE +Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery, + Florence......................................................... 53 + +St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. British +Museum ............................................................ 55 + +The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery......................... 57 + +Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery............... 59 + +A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence.............. 63 + +Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich......................... 65 + +Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court................... 67 + +The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid........................ 71 + +The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice.................... 75 + +The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso............................. 79 + +Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery.............................. 81 + +St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso, +Brescia............................................................. 85 + +La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre......................................... 87 + +St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace, +Venice ............................................................ 89 + +The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice... 93 + +Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican............................... 97 + +Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice........................ 99 + + + + +THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN + +INTRODUCTION + + +There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in +art--than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high +as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so +mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil +them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect +balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael +an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is +wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the +poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any +one of these. 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. The sacred art of no other painter of +the full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to an +equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the +world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion +must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not +necessarily a distortion of truth. + +And then as a portraitist--we are dealing, be it remembered, with +Italian art only--there must be conceded to him the first place, as a +limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in +his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the +disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of +Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on +occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the +Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del +Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic +truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of +Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective +and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the +other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic +charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the +Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no +indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements which +go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There +is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having +vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite, +will not end--with a sigh perhaps--by according the palm to Titian. + +In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned. He +had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long +afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of +expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties +without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts. +Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had, +unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and +the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque +influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric +conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions; +and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of +the landscape in the great _Pieta_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset in +our own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerful +all-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at the +Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ in +the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of the +landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well +as the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the few +well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of +expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of +his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from +such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of +Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the +Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three +Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a +slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. 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. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St. +Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic +amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame. +The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be +said to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ of +the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and +Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, the +bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the +much earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd and +Nymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone of +quite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time +reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as +in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that +solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final +years of Titian's old age. + +Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in art +and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore, +since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope +of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Duerer; +it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than any +first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one +branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival, +in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial +decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger +rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more +practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch. + +To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such +parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go +to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had +been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be +styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian +predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during +the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of +supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period +during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of +those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned +them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an +accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who, +in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraits +d'apparat_ of princes, nobles, and splendid dames--knew no superior, +though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and +Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more +demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a +more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some +of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a +realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere +outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was +everywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of +his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had +ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine +harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that +distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that +is not Italian. + +The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of the +world's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each +city in its different way represented the highest point that modern +Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as +distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the +transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above +the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains, +the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with +all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But +it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method +of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could +add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the +splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the +genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. 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. + +Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist +our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some +special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselves +invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them--taking _him_ as +the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and +successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be, +combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his +creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has +never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then +Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the +poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a +higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been +able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so +incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of +a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme +limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great +_Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent +_Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may +be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms +to the painter of the _Assunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ at +Emmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination, +a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and +placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not +altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art. +All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the +two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even +though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the +supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred +drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not +dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of +Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the golden +prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him, +while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality +submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own +tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the +sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in +deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar +temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental +characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2] + +Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of these +exquisite productions on the same level as _Le Jeune Homme au Gant_ and +_L'Homme en Noir_ of the Louvre, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Bella +di Tiziano_, the _Aretino_ of the Pitti, the _Charles V. at the Battle +of Muehlberg_ and the full-length _Philip II._ of the Prado Museum at +Madrid? + +Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has +serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elder +Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of +painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in +frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an art +more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper, +graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating +gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself +pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant +colourist of the Venetian school; and the _Dives and Lazarus_ of the +Venice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to give +solid support to such an assertion. + +In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the +greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be +found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal +principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters such +as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri, +Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliari +dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as +well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors, +however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the +abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and +tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant +grey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through with +silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriage +of St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegory +on the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze di +Cana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in one +sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris +Bordone--constituting as it does more particularly a further development +of painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just a +little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler, +graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of +Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto, +colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to +give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of +the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian +principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very +body and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature. + +To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would all +the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art. +He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of +them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions +on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and +makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece +_The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the too +little known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceiling +compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful +_Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from the +sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it +deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the +colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject, +but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties of +unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, which +are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present +century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping +altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same time +profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in +colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian, +and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art. +Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetian +colourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or to +select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most +legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just +because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in +legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest +use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the +applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set +difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate +expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to +himself. + + + + +CHAPTER I + +Cadore and Venice--Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of the +residence in Padua--New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian's +pictures. + + +Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di Cadore, a +district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice, +and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di +Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an +ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in the +valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had +been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tiziano +would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others +we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note +concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of +obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello +who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of +Titian known as Tizianello's _Anonimo_, and died at Venice in 1650, was +Titian's cousin thrice removed. + +Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery in +the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be +assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like +Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of +the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,--supposed, though without +substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,--Caterina, and +Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the _Dialogo della +Pittura_, or of ten, according to Tizianello's _Anonimo_, Titian was +taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of +painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the +rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become +a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point, +indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our study +of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his +native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in what +way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet +of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality +in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed +that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of +Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the +great _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in a +reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi, +and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a +modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces, +Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings +of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find +the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In the +majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to +these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts, +its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain +sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer +vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the +beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian +plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the +play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian +art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery +of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for +studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and +back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland. +How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy +mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to +reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his +unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be +got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah +Gilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Might +this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd +Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the +spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and +voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his +career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle, +an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting, +placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a +proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his _Dialogo +della Pittura_, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first +master; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and +thence into that of the _caposcuola_ Giovanni Bellini; to take, however, +the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he +becomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli[5] +would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian's +artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's +influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especially +in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical +execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings +suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's +pupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describing +themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the +fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the +influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his +following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of +Venice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind than +that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions +during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the +works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the +painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and +Borgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and, +indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for +the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini, +the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento +development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S. +Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna +Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr. +Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the +paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece +of S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in the +Ellesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_ +in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ at +Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards +exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour, +essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's +death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could, +faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his +later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of +Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to +the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent +overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point +of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary. + +What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of +Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not +so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean +on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of +them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely +dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a +time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest +manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also +of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called +_Danae_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of the +Louvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through +successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less +enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del +Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be +accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out +of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Pieta_ in +the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic +inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus +(sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of +documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next, he becomes +the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps +Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a +quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque, +that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have +acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul +to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early +training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself, +he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the +very end of his career. + +Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being +both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be +placed about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw +the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So +that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier +half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight +years--between 1477 and 1485. + +In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of Titian_ a revolutionary +theory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for the +first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They +sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that +Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and +shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been +influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists +would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's +theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli +appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be +found on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset, +and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now +proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in +question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of +conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern +technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in +the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance +methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular +theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art +owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death, +if it be not, indeed, already defunct. More and more will the view so +forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in many +of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon the +master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality +in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or to +leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such, +Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though +they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence. +This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the +other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder +Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in the +rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter must, +in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian. + +It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influence +imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such +absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time, +both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are +dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the +same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio--issuing, +at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a +situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age--two or +three years at the most, one way or the other--that is to be taken into +account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of +influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought +about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example, +operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open +to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of +sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was +the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his +youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence +widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino +himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could +be no question of light received back from painters of his own +generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian and +Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here +in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous +plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a +quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to +its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a +new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in +nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than +Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that +element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way +counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets +the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic +attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself +beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this +frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre a +terre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of +Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was +influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the +Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the +everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and +this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in +which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular +resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the +important _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the Brunswick +Gallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--and +the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in +Titian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred and +Profane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred +pieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the Prado +Gallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ at +Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped +of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid +sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We +notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group +another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because +Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and +similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the +muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the +uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy +gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess +or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing +characteristics as these--and others that could easily be singled +out--as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought +to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma +came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to +have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less +subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not +such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main, +be made with all the allowances which the situation demands? + +That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn +barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to +unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines +everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may +roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that +developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful +Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: the +one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, the +frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the +English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with +the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman +who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the +P.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _ex +cathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether +the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of +their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the +third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who +should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round +the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapist +Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant +spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after +his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain +characteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of which +it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated +them. + +In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the +fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_ +must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most +influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply +rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be +doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first +sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its +glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran +like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his +contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff to +ignite and flame like his own. + +The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question +merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a +brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who were +excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of +life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of +flesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and +style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the +Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life +aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as +the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of +lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in +Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first +years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take one +instance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian +Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance +with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In +that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's +courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty, +Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa +illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius, +the leaflets which, under the title _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona +d' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy. + +[Illustration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. +From a Photograph by Naya_.] + +The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are acquainted +is the curious _Man of Sorrows_ of the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice, a +work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its +technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches, +among the numerous versions of the _Pieta_ by and ascribed to Giovanni +Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini. +Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of +painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at +any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet +earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with +which we are at present acquainted. This _Man of Sorrows_ itself may +well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to +form a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is reserved in the future to +some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do +for the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done for +Correggio--that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in +date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been +content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art. +Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful +Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione, +though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so +entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the +painter himself. The _Virgin and Child_ in the Imperial Gallery of +Vienna, popularly known as _La Zingarella_, which, by general consent, +is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class, +is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and +arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the +colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape +background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already +Giorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts _himself_, and +lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino +differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of +Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman +beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione +and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as +compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as +Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But +Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the +goddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the +everyday world in which both artists lived. + +In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a +beautiful _Madonna and Child_ in a niche of coloured marble mosaic, +which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni +Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by +Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest +elsewhere[9]--prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is not +acquainted with the picture itself--that we may have here, not an early +Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the +former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the +most superficial comparison with, for instance, _La Zingarella_ +suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the +New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and +7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently +from the same hand. These were a _Virgin and Child_ from the collection, +so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the +Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved _Virgin and Child +with Saints_ from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House. +The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of +the master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and +their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand +of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing +midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian--one who, while +imitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporaries +of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial +prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm. + +[Illustration: _Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial +Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Loewy_.] + +The famous _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Chiesa di S. Rocco at +Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by +Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to +that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The +biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be +from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice, +and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and +Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This +too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps +the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the _Man +of Sorrows_ in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents "Christ +dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the +background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the +_Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The +resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this +last--one of the earliest of Giorgiones--still recalls Giovanni Bellini, +and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception. +In both renderings of the divine countenance there is--or it may be the +writer fancies that there is--underlying that expression of serenity and +humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister, +disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called +attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as +compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar +disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the _Christ +between St. Andrew and St. Catherine_ in the Church of SS. Ermagora and +Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the +infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two +saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest. +Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine +Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place +among the early works. + +Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _Three +Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to place +the _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St. +Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the Antwerp +Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in +imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not +very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a +high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in +the _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his +immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo +Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture +of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--an +ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of +fleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristic +portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity, +contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same +_Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-three +years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It +is the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ of +Cobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the Alte +Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti, +ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges +Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested +Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot +well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man +who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI. +into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it +possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that +the _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art, +was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the +latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione +himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted +his Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers +(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered +upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S. +Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13] + +It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed account +of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the facades +of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on +the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and +Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and +disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not +predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained +relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular +business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated +with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the +exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being +apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of +these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and +facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged +condition--the few fragments that remained of those facing the side +canal having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgione +angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty +of some work on the "_facciata di verso la Merceria,_" which in reality +belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their +connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but +refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's _Anonimo_. Of +what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have +not such stories been told, and--the worst of it is--told with a certain +foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved +itself from the internal evidence supplied by the _Baptism of Christ_ of +Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact +supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to +Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to +very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry +in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman, +Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile e partito il mio caro +Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of April +1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and good +fortune!") + +[Illustration: _The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome. +From a Photograph by Anderson._] + +There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on +developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological +arrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted +_poesie_ of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be found +in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with +Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of +the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his +sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of +Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian, +but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed, +even in the late time of our master--checking an unveiled sensuousness +which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright +sensuality--the influence of the master and companion who vanished half +a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this _renouveau_ +of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so +exquisite a charm to the _Venere del Pardo_, so strange a pathos to that +still later _Nymph and Shepherd,_ which was a few years ago brought out +of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at +Vienna. + +The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a +difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a +majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation, +very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and +reserve which informs such creations as the _Madonna of Castelfranco_ +and the _Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch_ of the Prado Museum. +Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque +ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the _Assunta_, the true +passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre _Entombment_, the +rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the _St. Peter Martyr_. + +The _Baptism of Christ_, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery of +the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from +Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led +him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian. Internal +evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must be +assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15] +Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ +more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn +hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries. +The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here and +there a naked branch among the leafage--and on one of them the +woodpecker--strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust, +round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here +as St. John the Baptist, who in the _Three Ages_, presently to be +discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The +Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant +hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine +_Cristo della Moneta_. The question at once arises here, Did Titian in +the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini's +splendid _Baptism of Christ_, finished in 1510 for the Church of S. +Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a +year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the +workshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh naivete, and its +rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the +conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty, so +consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset +colour![16] Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram, +placed in the picture with an awkwardness attractive in its naivete, +but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing +alone. + +The beautiful _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,_ placed in +the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially +restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to +Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at any +rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the +student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure +provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other +attribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the present +day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful _a ban marche_, +forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he +starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of +scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It is +in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art +of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as +"Palmesque." The _St. Bridget_ and the _St. Ulphus_ are both types +frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and +it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with +hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. This +can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione +did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type of +the beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hair +of his women--both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally +classic or wholly Venetian--is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the +most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers +with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general +physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the +execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high +yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic +of this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back of +the picture are such as are very generally associated with the +colour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with a slight variation in +the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long +bore--indeed it does so still on the frame--the name of Palma Vecchio. + +It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the _Tobias and the Angel_ +in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507, describing +it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by +Titian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John the +Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of +light." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by +Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing +the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the +picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this +weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view +just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and +Cavalcaselle, who assign to the _Tobias and the Angel_ a place much +later on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high in +the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to +those who interrogate it without _parti pris_. Neither in the +figures--the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the +more naive and realistic Tobias--nor in the rich landscape with St. John +the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque +manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power +of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many +evidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe, +therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.[17] + +The _Three Ages_ in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called _Sacred +and Profane Love_ in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of +Titian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the +spirit of the master-poet among Venetian painters, yet falling short a +little, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably +of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces carry +the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the +inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the +trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to +the last--not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm--the naivete, +the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely +full-fledged. + +The _Three Ages_, from its analogies of type and manner with the +_Baptism_ of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the two +imaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than that +picture.[18] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite +silveriness--that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relative +paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a little +disconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral only +from hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name of +Giorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongs +to Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with the +deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his +school, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The shepherdess +has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint more +nearly approach to the _blond cendre_ which distinguishes so many of +Palma's _donne_ than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generally +affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the +eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his +hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds in +her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as +it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here +the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned--a reversal, this, of +Giorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, where the +women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete +and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque +amorini--the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor +himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged +round him on the ground--obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at +which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between +the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of +the personages--the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause +in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all +that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be +pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks, +and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age +awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and they +profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint +notes of music borne on the still, warm air. + +[Illustration: _The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in +Lafenestre's "Vie et Oeuvre du Titien" (May, Paris.)_] + +The _Sacred and Profane Love_ of the Borghese Gallery is one of the +world's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or +Giorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay +Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so +incomparably sums up--not at the beginning, when its perfection would be +as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other +early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the +Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity +for a detailed description. 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. He +never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own +genius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset landscape +has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines of +a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian _donna_ who sits +sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured +classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one +of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy +the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who, +insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and +troubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to any +forerunner. The divinely beautiful _Profane Love_--or, as we shall +presently see, _Venus_--is the most flawless presentment of female +loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save only +the _Venus_ of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to which it +can be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with its +glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign +loveliness of the Dresden _Venus_ or the disquieting charm of the +Giovanelli _Zingarella_ (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all on the +surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The +body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and +movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true +Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous +drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high +lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian +ever achieved. Only in the late _Venere del Pardo_, which so closely +follows the chief motive of Giorgione's _Venus_, does he approach it in +frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit, +because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than +anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in +their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19] + +[Illustration: _Sacred and Profane Love._] + +It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural +explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular +of all Venetian pictures--least of all that strange one brought forward +by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Artless and Sated Love_, for which they +have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in +an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to +solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures +described by Marcantonio Michiel (the _Anonimo_ of Jacopo Morelli), in +the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the _Inferno with +Aeneas and Anchises_ and _Landscape with the Birth of Paris_, Herr Franz +Wickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring +crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of +Barbarelli's best known works. The _Three Philosophers_ he calls +_Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas_, the Giovanelli _Tempest with the Gipsy +and the Soldier_ he explains anew as _Admetus and Hypsipyle_.[21] The +subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and +popularly called, or rather miscalled, the _Dream of Raphael_, is +recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione. +He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the +commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping +side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it), +the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in +peaceful sleep. + +Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to +work on the world-famous _Sacred and Profane Love_, and shows us the +Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned +humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the +_Argonautica_ of Valerius Flaccus--that wearisome imitation of the +similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea--the sumptuously +attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)--sits at the fountain in +unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and +holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not +yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love +is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes +Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father, +irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits in +the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the +toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the +subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible--in Titian's realisation +of the legend--to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme +upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] had +already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he +described the Borghese picture as _The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the +Well_. The _vraisemblance_ of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant interpretation +becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice +afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his +_Worship of Venus_, now at Madrid, from the _Erotes_ of Philostratus, +and our own wonderful _Bacchus and Ariadne_ at the National Gallery from +the _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ of Catullus. In the future it is +quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise +interpretations for the _Three Ages_ and for Giorgione's _Concert +Champetre_ at the Louvre. + +[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria +Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._] + +It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of +Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him +at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young +poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly +allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard, +clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours. +It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and +quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take +possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their +radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we +need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our +whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years +of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not +less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and +Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the +lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they +have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no +doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more +fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular +to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic +legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of +the golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciously +shrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic +and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione +embodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the +_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of those +ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with +them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical +atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich +and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly +human fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as for +identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close +to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But +for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for +the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast of +female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has +presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a +delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to +decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite +idylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously or +unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly +quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the +environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poems +mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man, +much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by its +undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very +personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we +may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations, +not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first +acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old +ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from +another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal, +standpoint. + +[Illustration: _Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by +Hanfstaengl_.] + + + + +CHAPTER II + +Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo--The "Herodias" type of picture--Holy +Families and Sacred Conversations--Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is +the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?--The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick +Castle. + + + +It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which +followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all +over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation. +It was not long after this--on the death of his master Giorgione--that +Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off +his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian +temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua +and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-like +wood-engraving, _The Triumph of Faith_, be accepted, it must be held +that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[23] cites +painted compositions of the _Triumph_ as either the originals or the +repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the +blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on +the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished; +but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any +direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the +process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at +variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the +movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This mighty, +onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the +Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with +Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled +forward by the Emblems of the four Evangelists, with a great company of +Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all +the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo. +It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the _Triumphs_ of +Mantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings. +Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviously +intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the +apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not far +distant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like the +famous _Cristo detta Moneta,_ with which we shall have to deal +presently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," which +was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his +gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more careful +consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion. Hardly +again, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacred +passion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earlier +section of his life-work the _Triumph of Faith_ constitutes a striking +exception. + +[Illustration: _St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. +Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari_.] + +Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in the +much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now +to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of the +sixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with Domenico +Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are +from the brush of the master himself:--_St. Anthony causes a new-born +Infant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthony +heals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife, whom +the Saint afterwards restores to life._ Here the figures, the +composition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the +trace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity, +the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of +Barbarelli. The figures have his naive truth, his warmth and splendour +of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the +uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The _Nobleman putting to +death his Wife_ is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward +realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what +our neighbours would to-day call the _drame passionel._ The interest is +much the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature by +that study of murder, _Arden of Feversham_, not that higher attraction +that he feels--horrors notwithstanding--for _The Maid's Tragedy_ of +Beaumont and Fletcher, or _The Duchess of Malfi_ of Webster.[24] + +[Illustration: _"Noli me tangere." National Gallery. From a Photograph +published by the Autotype Company._] + +A convenient date for the magnificent _St. Mark enthroned, with SS. +Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus_, is 1512, when Titian, having +completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to +Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the +truculent _St. Mark_; but, then, as essentially so were the frescoes +just terminated. The noble altar-piece[25] symbolises, or rather +commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the +terrors of the League of Cambrai:--on the one side St. Sebastian, +standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch for +plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas and +Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is +Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to be +described. Especially does it show points of contact with that of the +so-called _Three Philosophers_, which, on the authority of Marcantonio +Michiel (the _Anonimo_), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the +last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both +sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity +of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by +any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques. +Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione +successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a +more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last +are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of +Titian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni +Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and +flexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful among +the youthful male figures, as the _Venus_ of Giorgione and the Venus of +the _Sacred and Profane Love_ are the most beautiful among the female +figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such +presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something +androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength +and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its +suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a +delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form +proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many +Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had +coloured the whole art of Greece. + +Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yet +a little puzzling, _Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd_, +which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is +early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for +Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the +projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against +the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The +noble type and the stilted attitude of the _St. Joseph_ suggest the _St. +Mark_ of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of +the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of +Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the +Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by +a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no +means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly +in the _St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak_, of the Scuola. +Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of +the early time before complete freedom of design was attained. + +[Illustration: _St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della +Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.] + +[Illustration: _The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. +From a Photograph by Loewy_.] + +The splendidly beautiful _Herodias with the head of St. John the +Baptist_, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by +Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian, +belongs to about the same time as the _Sacred and Profane Love_, and +would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua +and Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic +character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the +voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing +for Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this _Herodias_ exist in the +Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, which +is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in +one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here, +failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner. +A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not +only this Doria picture, but that _Herodias_ which at Dorchester House +is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another +similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in the +collection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community of +origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears +in each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance in +this particular respect to the interesting full-length _Judith_ at the +Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length +_Judith_ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to Hollar's +print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of +Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.[26] +The sumptuous but much-injured _Vanitas_, which is No. 1110 in the Alte +Pinakothek of Munich--a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the +_Herodias_, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other symbols of +earthly vanity--may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it +to Morelli[27] that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and +Cavalcaselle--as the _Herodias_ was ascribed--to Pordenone, has been +with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The +popular _Flora_ of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though all the +bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in +this section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a technique +more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher +individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served for +the Venus of the _Sacred and Profane Love_, though the picture comes +some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called _Alfonso +d'Este and Laura Dianti_, as to which something will be said farther on. +Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "_Noli me tangere_" of the +National Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere here +among the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and most +markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the +execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that +period. The _Magdalen_ is, appropriately enough, of the same type as the +exquisite, golden blond courtezans--or, if you will, models--who +constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly +anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and subtlety +of brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is so +finely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies. +The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only local +tint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen's +robe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of fluttering +movement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first, and +neutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a wave +of some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at this +moment, then again to be dissipated. + +[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. +Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi._] + +But to turn now once more to the series of our master's Holy Families +and Sacred Conversations which began with _La Zingarella_, and was +continued with the _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ of +Madrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early time +is the _Virgin with the Cherries_ in the Vienna Gallery. Here the +painter is already completely himself. He will go much farther in +breadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not in +attractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate, +practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonna +of Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yet +calm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his master +and friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seeming +repose. Pretty close on this must have followed the _Madonna and Child +with St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice_, No 439 in the Louvre, in +which the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. An +atelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the Vienna +Gallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-named +example being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta, we +have St. Jerome bareheaded. + +Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it may +safely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved _Holy Family_ +in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed to +Palma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on the +groundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the _Three Ages_. Deep +glowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness of +finish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of any +deeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration of +the early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the _Madonna and +Child with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot_, which adorns the +Venetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship to +Giorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families of +the first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placed +very early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series. +The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the _Madonna +with the Cherries_ of Vienna, or the _Madonna with Saints_, No. 439 in +the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The +magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged +with sadness of his contemplative mood. + +[Illustration: From a photograph by Brauen-Clement & Cie. Virgin and +Child with Saints.] + +Last of all in this particular group--another work in respect of which +Morelli has played the rescuer--is the _Madonna and Child with four +Saints_, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but eminently +Titianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series to +within a couple of years or so of the _Assunta_--that great landmark of +the first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still very +similar to that in the _Madonna with the Cherries_. + +[Illustration: _St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the +Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum._] + +Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an exceptional +production, is the world-famous _Cristo della Moneta_ of the Dresden +Gallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among the +early works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeing +with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard the +testimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was painted +in or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508. +Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is strongly +inclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certain +indications furnished by the picture itself, to return to the date 1514 +or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the _Christ of +the Tribute-Money_ was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the less +so, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on his +coins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According to +Vasari, it was painted _nella porta d'un armario_--that is to say, in +the door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken in +its most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage that +the picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516, +since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year. +There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did not +execute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion--that is to say, at +home in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have been +given to it _in situ_, as they were to Bellini's _Bacchanal_, done also +for the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting, which +is hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of the +artist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his new +patron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish is +not of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the +_Leonardo Loredano_ of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of Cima, or +the early _Christ bearing the Cross_ of Giorgione. In it exquisite +polish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined with +the utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfect +freedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, to +imagine that this masterpiece--so eminently a work of the Cinquecento, +and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to all +influences, even to that of Giorgione--could have been painted in 1508, +that is some two years before Bellini's _Baptism of Christ_ in S. +Corona, and in all probability before the _Three Philosophers_ of +Giorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which it +appears to the writer to have most in common--not so much in technique, +indeed, as in general style--is the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and than +this it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the _Cristo della +Moneta_ anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems almost +an impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches the +tempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; the +spirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, is so +happily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour of +Renaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well be +simpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex harmonies +which Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrasts +are established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen in +all the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the son +of the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yet +tempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the golden +glow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and the +contrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to the +whole.[28] + +[Illustration: _The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery. From a +Photograph by Hanfstaengl._] + +A small group of early portraits--all of them somewhat difficult to +place--call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest +portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our +painter--leaving out of the question the _Baffo_ and the +portrait-figures in the great _St. Mark_ of the Salute--is the +magnificent _Ariosto_ in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at Cobham +Hall.[29] There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to +whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara, +but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here +conceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yet +sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone, +and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of +Giorgione's _Antonio Broccardo_ at Buda-Pesth, of his _Knight of Malta_ +at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general +lines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra +_Violin-Player_ by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of Baron +Alphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given to +Raphael.[30] The handsome, manly head has lost both subtlety and +character through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art +has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the +quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a +place in the picture. + +[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery. +From a Photograph by Hanfstaengl_.] + +The so-called _Concert_ of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a young +Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side +of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded +clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally +looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[31] The most gifted +of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian +Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this _Concert_ his +exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt, +notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of +Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so +subtly attractive and pathetic _Concert_ to the early time of Titian. To +express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state of +the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modish +young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness +renders tonsure impossible--that is just those portions of the canvas +which are least well preserved--are also those that least conclusively +suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of the +young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque +creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco +master's just now cited _Antonio Broccardo_, to his male portraits in +Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of +Evander, in the _Three Philosophers_. Closer to it, all the same, are +the _Raffo_ and the two portraits in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and +closer still is the supremely fine _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the Salon +Carre, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The _Concert_ of +the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover +it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in its +technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything +that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The +large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in +type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful +motive--music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of +sympathy three human beings--is akin to that in the _Three Ages_, though +there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be +found also in Giorgione's _Concert Champetre_, in the Louvre, in which +the thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights appealing +to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which youth +revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with +unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the early +Titianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the _Antonio Broccardo_ +of the first, by the _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the second. Altogether +other, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the exquisite +sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters +those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own +highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret, +indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the +Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra +_Violin-Player_ of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is already +tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and +Roman portraiture. There is little or nothing to add after this as to +the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, except that as a representation of +aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's works +except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less +distinguished, portrait in the Pitti. + +[Illustration: From a Photograph by Brauen Clement & Cie. Walter L. +Colls. ph. sc. + +Jeune Homme au gant] + +[Illustration: _A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence. +From a Photograph by Alinari_.] + +Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the +Venetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ mood his portraits of high-bred +English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood, +was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with +the same felicity.[32] + +To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader must be referred for a +detailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against the +venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of +broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how, +on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo +proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the +Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a +step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to +petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for +life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as +are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31st +of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a +resolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached. +Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old +Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent +power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which +is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still +under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than +himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten +revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that +Titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, but +must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again, +asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will +become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer, +which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is +accepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of the +much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to +receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures, +the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office. +Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of +January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at the +end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passed +postponing the grant to Titian of Bellini's patent; notwithstanding +which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is +allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi" +(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close of +this same year, 1516. + +[Illustration: _Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a +Photograph by Hanfstaengl_.] + +It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and +entered into relations with Alfonso I., which were to become more +intimate as the position of the master became greater and more +universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume, +that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's last +picture, the great _Bacchanal_ or _Feast of the Gods on Earth_, now at +Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two +famous works, the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, designed, in +continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's _Feast of the Gods_, +to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the +series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the +whole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery. + +Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of his +magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date, +1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be read. +Much less Giorgionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--and +more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding +altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less +interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four +beautiful _Allegories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice, +which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole excursion +into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong, +however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a +fire which in the _Bacchanal_ has died out.[33] Vasari describes this +_Bacchanal_ as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by Gian +Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain +angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He +strangely attributes this to an imitation of Duerer's _Rosenkranzfest_, +painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo, +adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the +author of the _Vite_, and, in some passages, a certain hardness and +opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of +the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be +traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the +figure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in the +preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a +great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the +Bellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of San +Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in +the _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino's +finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the +main group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti. +Some passages of the _Bacchanal_, however--especially the figures of the +two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the +trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are as +beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has +produced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive of +Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is +dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by +artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his +earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid. +Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be found +more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in +the _Allegories_ just mentioned. + +[Illustration: _Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a +Photograph by Spooner & Co._] + +Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into the +chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An +atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying +life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire +through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The +audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic +festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of +mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it +would seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picture +substantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ was +painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many +passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that +Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the +younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the +elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left +unfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours +of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the +carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the +branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the +picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with +its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a +castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and +its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By +Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to +betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the +cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the +upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the +right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most +probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in +completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well, +indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is +nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the +exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred +and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the +technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which +opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the +"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of +Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces +at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The +"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter +Martyr." + + +In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto +brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A +greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters +been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career, +when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being +as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that +in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we +have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who +infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian +Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in +their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very +pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process +of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a +broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and +unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation +to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous +eccentricity. + +[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a +Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_.] + +In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind +already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the +Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its +bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some +evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more +delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_ +might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of +Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a +renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman +Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the +Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of +paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but +by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the +author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the +Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named +the "Townley Venus" and the "Venus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport, +kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them +shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer +is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the +life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the +splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner) +dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the +angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the +Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly +beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North, +in touch with the South, as Albrecht Duerer, Mabuse, and Jacob +Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred +works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier +and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To +say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish +sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at +their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in +similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37] + +The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the +commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less +delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From +certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus, +it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of +the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus, +whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is, +however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour +to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious +abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have +retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain +agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the +Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues +then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead +the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so +lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its +attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped +Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian's +lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's +dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or +Titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity +spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise +defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque +colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed +dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the +spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find +again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture, +and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_. + +The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna +Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just +now described, but rather before than after them. + +What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumption +of the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but not +shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the +20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian +altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and +what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world. +Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of +Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_ +Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, the +Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years +earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in +Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as +Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at +S. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in the +following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of +fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S. +Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of these +masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by +Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be +derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had +any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one +altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might +possibly have obtained a hint. This was the _Assumption of the Virgin_ +painted by Duerer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by Paul +Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the +Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and +the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its +fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising a +too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact +between this group and the corresponding one in the _Assunta_. But +Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller +altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it +remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _Assumption_ in the +_Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a +definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more +formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The +_Assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficult +to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he +visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most +terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle +Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently +restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the +greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre, +passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well +adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly +contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is +triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and +awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of +which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the +Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling +of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with +awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in +her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and +not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which +her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the +climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous, +more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure +in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual +character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised. + +[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.] + +Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of +Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it +undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern +connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely +triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual, +more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that +unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its +agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right +to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his +subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above +the earth than the elder master. 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? + +But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of +dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group +of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It +carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable, +without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime +beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank +with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a +higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of +vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is +the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not +always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere +adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated +last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. 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. In this case the public, admitted on the high +festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel, +showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than +the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari, +and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to +the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against +the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful +achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians. + +To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso, +the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly +overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits +the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the +foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely +ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the +beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to +the Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south of +the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of +the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the +Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic +_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear +dignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the +Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up +on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and +appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better +known picture. + +[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a +Photograph by Alinari_.] + +Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--the +passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character +has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our +master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we +are told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appears +to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part +of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at +Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus and +Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too +late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its +freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further +advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must be +deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_ +of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described +our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has +not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the +golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the +_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has +been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naivete remains, but not the +infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and +Ariadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as +will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of +this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the +_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we +descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance, +though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its +power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the +_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna, +is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier +times, with its exquisite naivete and mitigated sensuousness. + +[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph +published by the Autotype Company._] + +The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum +of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master's +works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most +readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested +in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or +subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose +_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did +not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of +the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had +animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At +parte ex alia florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque +incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager +movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to +paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars +tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra +iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown of +stars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of the +poem--shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds +perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of +Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled in +its happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge au +Lapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did +the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here, +however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights +of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his +imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic +harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the +sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those +Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari; +or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the +more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the +mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the +highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment, +are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in +the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be +considered the supreme exponent. + +The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carre of the Louvre now known as +_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of +Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian's +Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The +exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound +hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities +inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most +consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still +to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue, +myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole +enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here +and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted, +_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, the +Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who +afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che e opera stupenda_. It is +upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between +the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid +_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the +popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably, +like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a +lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the +accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward +with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_ +personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's +picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost +universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his +son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the +Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the +"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A +comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_ +of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a +hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the +recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something like +certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only +that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the +same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly +well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression +of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This +means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious +Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle +Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter +canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later +signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two +older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is, +or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater +Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority of +which it bears its present designation. + +The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St. +Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly in +San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "Titianus +Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the +later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it +cannot rank with the San Niccolo and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it +presents some special points of interest which make it easily +distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar +intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and +hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a +passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one +expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic +force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under +control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was +acquainted with Raphael's _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic and +real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still +Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness +and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the +humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento +altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a +master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portion +of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the +clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccolo altar-piece. + +[Illustration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. +Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.] + +Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal +Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church +of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and +sentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, constituting +the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43] +and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of +Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the +much-talked-of piece for his master. Titian succumbed to an offer of +sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor +the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of +his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy +of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the +profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia +altar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the left +and right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depicts +the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor, +Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] in +the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch. +The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificent +academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to +bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his +splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the +beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting +the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the +mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful +charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or the +healthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccolo +altar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those who +admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular, +its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature, +must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a +conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face +with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and +against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and +richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and +painting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ and +the _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position of +the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and +the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance, +notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon +in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made +by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was +kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied. + +[Illustration: DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY. CHATSWORTH. _From a photograph +by Braun, Clement & Cie_.] + +[Illustration: _La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by +Neurdein._] + +In the _Madonna di S. Niccolo_, which was painted or rather finished in +the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolo de' +Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is +suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance +of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before +the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the +circular top which it had in common with the _Assunta_, the Ancona, and +the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these +great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and +sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his +subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that +its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt +expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St. +Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian +loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St. +Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump +young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if +anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto +dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a +sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning +elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del +Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with +St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery. + +The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the +infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the +Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate +Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we +know, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion, +twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua. +As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and +brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in +fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and +Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the +rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject +is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of +personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly +transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is +greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened +with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum. +Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant +Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town +Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy. + +[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the +Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.] + +Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the +_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than +altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded +which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular +subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious +patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of +that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este +Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a +"Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed +that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some +correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted +at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the +style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels +strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or +thereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely +following upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ +were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the +last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were +saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type +and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea +has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the _Assunta_, +the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such +as we meet with in the _Bacchanal_. The Magdalen, with her features +distorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differences +imposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-goddess +in the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand, +enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type +which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his +school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the +_Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty. +What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and +enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is +perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of +informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of +the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--the +well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate +the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound +together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them +communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring, +while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole, +each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own +splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the +Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the +embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of +Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white +of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the +Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial +magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous +tragedy. + +Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's +chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about +the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the +kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the +altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion. + +[Illustration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de' +Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.] + +The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, after +having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the +masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of +exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the +Frari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp +and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite +sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages, +it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet, +apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties +overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole, +many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we +should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more +splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand. +It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less +interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin +and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an +invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed +crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's +_Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in +their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of +Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the +sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to +impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a +condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a +decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme +or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so +many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this +occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro +is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic +pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the +main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the +divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking +cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the +two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of +the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is an +unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces the +spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian +went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion +note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer +is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virgin +and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliminary +sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original +sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the +Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a +like original study for the kneeling Baffo. + +[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO. ALBERTINA, VIENNA. +_From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie_.] + +[Illustration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving +by Henri Laurent.] + +By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing +of Titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on the +altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS. +Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of +the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On +the 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for +the lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the +Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of +Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with +Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused +the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during +the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now +the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their +estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and +prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the +picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression +may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be +more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by +a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has +conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the +good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the +marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle +minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by +the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape, +in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance +falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single +startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore, +with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the +composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing, +notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the +overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and +unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its +Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing +influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months +at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who, +returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had +remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the +exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of +passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it +culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of +the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on +through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to +consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a +pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much +less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_ +and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the +sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The +_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the +reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it +are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we +take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two +failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame. +Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here +stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the +attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all +fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on +nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied +attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the +same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in +the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and +conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. 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. Still, could one come face +to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St. +Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic +of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously it +is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico +Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS. +Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the original +would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The +best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware, +to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which +hangs in the great hall of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even +through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially +in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without +further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism +notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who, +perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower +rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be +discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la piu compiuta, la +piu celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la +quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_. + +[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a +Photograph by Anderson_.] + +It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone, +instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great +commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the +end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of +Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished +drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either +by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any +rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in +some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it +represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in +its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely +touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still +asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be +preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink +sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the +victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the +saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet +thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual +massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the +drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the +impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titian +for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_, +which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts +of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer +feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian +himself.[50] + + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu +Roemischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der Koeniglich Preussischen +Kunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, and +upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesque +of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius, +_Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted as +convincing for entitling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar +incident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas +contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious +explanation of Titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a +little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in +connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first +time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of +Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of +the Venetian idyll generally. + +[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a +sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo +Lotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "Les +Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol. +i. + +[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian, see +Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of Titian_ (second +edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general and +local authorities on the subject. + +[4] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 29. + +[5] _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_, p. 75. + +[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of +art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states that +Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "_C' egli apprese +certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso +Tiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_). + +[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_. + +[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over +by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the +capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This +gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider +in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman. +A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly +sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the +basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the Salon +Carre of the Louvre! + +[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895. + +[10] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 111. + +[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken +after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his +son_. + +[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien_, 1887. + +[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture, +"Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Sta +chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than the +work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with the +marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of the +background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely +repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form +"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli. +"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earlier +time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms +overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned. + +[14] Kugler's _Italian Schools of Painting_, re-edited by Sir Henry +Layard. + +[15] Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this _Baptism_ in the year 1531 in the +house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus describes it: "La +tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano, che e nel fiume +insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso M. Zuanne Ram ritratto +sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li spettatori, fu de man de +Tiziano" (_Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da J. Jacopo +Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884). + +[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima's +great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the +Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the +inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school +borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been +looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, in +the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two +altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental +and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, of +a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates +back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder +master is more passionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St. +Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more +perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful +_Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to +Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that +of an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of the +Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that +of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much +less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume. The idea of an +actual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that of +Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. The +earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to +that of Bartolommeo Montagna. + +[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contact +with the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ by +Titian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S. +Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St. +Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John, +though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and +movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a +kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian, +assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to +Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter +has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial +archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy +of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of +the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the +present monograph (p. 99). + +[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara, +that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S. +Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed +una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni." + +[19] From an often-cited passage in the _Anonimo_, describing +Giorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525, +when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that +it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda, +che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da +Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The +Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the +landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to +those which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and Profane +Love_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same +_Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a +_Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which, +according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be +pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in +common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supported +by Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Pieta of Treviso. The +engraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M. +Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du Titien_ as having possibly been derived +from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of Titian +as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the +extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of +Pordenone or to that of his imitators. + +[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895. + +[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Opere +di Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884. + +[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884. + +[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_. + +[24] The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is to +be found among those publicly exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of +Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, and +curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie et +Oeuvre du Titien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the fresco +that it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is in +the style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque +phase, so assiduously imitates. + +[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian +is to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco a +sedere in mezzo a certi santi." + +[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to +the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be +mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known +_Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani, +bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed into the rich collection +of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purely +Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was +painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groups +therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni +Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely +_Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and with +the four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al +Rialto. + +[27] _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_, p. 74. + +[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour, +relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn +beauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. In +both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head of +the Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim +its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one +of Titian's loveliest. + +[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal +Academy in 1895. + +[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was last +publicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman of +the House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, Titian painted with +wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique of +the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's +description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of +eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's +"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey +sleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with +silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone +balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the +portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems +likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which +curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful +_Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such by +Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the +collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticianus" +occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first +period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear +to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription being +admittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the +"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional +argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari +(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good +many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the +_Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonna +with St. 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 Niccolo_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. It +has been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brera +bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The +signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual +character. + +[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not its +equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting in +North Italy_, vol. ii.). + +[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, but +to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact place, are +the so-called _Titian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery; +the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _Pietro +Aretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called +_Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-named +portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force and +conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in the +characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yet +been discovered. + +[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framed +with the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and far +inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called +_Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the +signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo. + +[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remind +the beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in the +Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned to the +great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of his +late pupils or followers. + +[35] The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of Ariosto +by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then made were +the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the greatest +painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, +Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and Raffael (33rd +canto, 2nd ed.). + +[36] [Greek: Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.] + +[37] Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's +_Jardin a Amour_, made familiar by so many repetitions and +reproductions, and to Van Dyck's _Madone aux Perdrix_ at the Hermitage +(see Portfolio: _The Collections of Charles I._). Rubens copied, indeed, +both the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, some time between 1601 +and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the +Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the _Bacchanal_ proved +particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one +instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic _Bacchus +seated on a Barrel_, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, +contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's +picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic +figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from +that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes. + +[38] Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme, +tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure." + +[39] Moritz Thausing's _Albrecht Duerer_, Zweiter Band, p. 14. + +[40] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 212. + +[41] It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour and +reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise, +red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.," +should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselle +assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the _Madonna with St. +Catherine_, mentioned in a letter of that year written by Giacomo +Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last picture be +more properly identified with our own superb _Madonna and Child with St. +John and St. Catherine_, No. 635 in the National Gallery, the style of +which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of the girlish +Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a larger +generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed +"Tician." + +[42] "Tizian und Alfons von Este," _Jahrbuch der Koeniglich Preussischen +Kunstsammlungen_, Fuenfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894. + +[43] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp. +237-240. + +[44] On the circular base of the column upon which the warrior-saint +rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat MDXXII." This, taken +in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on the Ancona altar-piece +painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of demarcation between the +two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed. + +[45] Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's +workshop, of the _St. Sebastian_, slightly smaller than the Brescia +original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort as +among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest +version of the _St. Sebastian_, preceding the definitive work, showed +the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of +St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers +shooting. + +[46] Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, +sees in the upturned face of the _St. Nicholas_ a reflection of that of +Laocoon in the Vatican group. + +[47] It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the collection +of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the Commonwealth to +the banker and dealer Jabach for L120. By the latter it was made over to +Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the same +way. + +[48] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp. +298, 299. + +[49] The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by Baffo in +the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some twenty-three years +before. This gives a special significance to the position in the picture +of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet, stands midway between the +Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in one of Titian's earliest +works (_circa_ 1503) recommended to St. Peter by Alexander VI. just +before his departure for this same expedition. + +[50] It has been impossible in the first section of these remarks upon +the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very important question +of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him. Some attempt will +be made in the second section, to be entitled _The Later Work of +Titian_, to deal summarily with this branch of the subject, which has +been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni Morelli disentangled +the genuine landscape drawings of the master from those of Domenico +Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further study. + + + + +INDEX + +"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre) +Altar-piece at Brescia +"Annunciation, The" (Treviso) +"Annunciation, The" (Venice) +"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence) +"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall) +"Assumption of the Virgin, The," +"Bacchanal, A," +"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery), +"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome), +"Battle of Cadore, The" +"Bella, La" (Florence) +"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The" (Antwerp) + + +"Christ at Emmaus" +"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice) +"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice) +"Charles V. at Muehlberg" (Madrid) +"Concert, A" (Florence) +"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard) +"Cristo della Moneta, Il" (Dresden) + + +"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The" +"Diana and Actaeon" +"Diana and Calisto" + + +"Entombment, The" (Louvre) + + +"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle) +"Flora" (Florence) +Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace +Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua +Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice + + +"Herodias" +"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery) +"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery) + + +"Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre) + + +"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice) +"Madonna di San Niccolo, The" (Rome) +"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich) +"Man in Black, The" (Louvre) +"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice) +"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre) +"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'" + + +"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery) +"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna) + + +"Philip II., Portrait of" +"Pieta" (Milan) + + +"Rape of Europa, The" + + +"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome) +"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly) +"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence) +"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice) +"St. Sebastian": see _Altar-piece at Brescia_ + + +"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna) +"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery) +"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice) +"Tribute-Money, The": see _Cristo della Moneta_ +"Triumph of Faith, The" + + +"Vanitas" (Munich) +"Venere del Pardo": see _Jupiter and Antiope_ +"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson) +"Virgin and Child" (Florence) +"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg) +"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see _Zingarella, La_ +"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford) +"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden) +"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot" + (Florence) +"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National Gallery) +"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona) +"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice" (Louvre) +"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid) +"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna) +"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre) + + +"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid) + + +"Zingarella, La" (Vienna) + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN*** + + +******* This file should be named 12626.txt or 12626.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626 + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. 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