Introduction

INTRODUCTION The several papers comprising the Bampton Lectures in America for 1976 treat a range of themes, of personalities and problems, that reflect the aesthetic, historical, and human richness of a very special world, a world whose deeply nuanced coloration has contributed a perpetually satisfying dimension to the Western imagination. At the center of their concern and uniting them in a common focus is the world of Titian—the artist, his art, and his culture; his friends, associates, and artistic heirs; and, above all, his city. Titian's world, however international, was very definitely based in cosmopolitan Venice; his career was intimately linked with the fate of the city. That career was launched in the years that witnessed the most serious threat to the very survival of Venice, the menacing alliance of the League of Cam- brai, which united the great powers of western Europe against the Most Serene Republic of St. Mark. Following the incredibly swift loss of nearly all its mainland dominions in 1509, and with the enemy approaching the gates of Mestre, Venice made an equally remarkable recovery; more through diplomatic than military prowess, Venice survived and eventually repossessed most of its former holdings. With that repossession of the Veneto came new attitudes toward the land, new possibilities of investment in the Terraferma, realized in part through officially sponsored programs of reclamation and most obviously manifest in that architectural synthesis of the economic and the aesthetic, the villa. And it was from the mainland that came the architects of what James Ackerman proposes to call the second, "Venetan" Renaissance—Falconetto, Sanmicheli, and, most importantly, Palladio— as the world of Venice embarked upon new building campaigns after the years of doubt. From the crisis of the wars with the League of Cambrai, Venice emerged chastened, despite its triumph of survival, and transformed. Less sure of itself than before, less confident in its might, the new Venice nonetheless put on a bolder face, learned a more polished and ambitious rhetoric, and articulated with ever greater purpose the "myth" of itself as a model state, exemplum virtutis to all the world. Venice set out deliberately to realize the image of Petrarch's panegyric of it as "a city rich in gold but richer in renown, mighty in works but mightier in virtue, founded on solid marble but established on the more solid foundations of civic concord, surrounded by the salty waves but more secure through her saltier councils."1 This, in effect, was the civic mood that nurtured and sustained Titian. Indeed, no other center of Europe could offer such stable support to an artist—certainly not the courts, papal or secular, with their vagaries of personal patronage and personal politics; nor the sadly transient republic of Flor- ence, which never saw the completion of the great pictorial projects it commissioned of its own sons XV INTRODUCTION of genius, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The stability of the Serenissima, mythic yet real, proved the ideal ground for a long and successful career. Born in Cadore, in that region of the Dolomites that remained fiercely loyal to Venice throughout those threatening years, Titian was sent to the capital at the age of nine, probably about 1497 or 1498. As was so often the case, Venice was less the cradle of genius than its foster home, a welcom- ing host to talent. So, too, it was a political haven. Following the upheaval of the Sack of Rome in 1527, Venice offered refuge to the uprooted, two of which, Jacopo Sansovino and Pietro Aretino, formed with Titian himself a cultural triumvirate that would rule the city on the lagoon. And these adopted sons—each in his way aspiring to a signorile manner of living, as Juergen Schulz docu- ments—showed their gratitude by placing their talents at the service of the state. Their very presence, attesting to its position as haven of liberty, contributed to the myth of Venice. Titian's official appointment to succeed Giovanni Bellini as painter to the Signoria (pictor nostri Domini]) signaled his arrival as a public personality on the Venetian scene. But that appointment also acknowledged the larger dimensions of the young painter's fame; in his petition of 1513 Titian could already boast of the offers he had received to join the papal court as well as those of other signori. As a loyal subject of Venice, however, he preferred to dedicate his genius to the Serenissima, volun- teering his brush for the decorations of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge's Palace.2 Washed up on the shores of the lagoon in the cultural diaspora created by the Sack of Rome, Sansovino, according to Giorgio Vasari, was on his way to offer his services to France; genius, however, was quickly recognized by the keen and ambitious eye of Doge Andrea Gritti, and the refugee found his professional welcome in Venice. His appointment asprotomaestro to the Procurators of San Marco gave him the architectural and sculptural control of most of the public places of the city; seizing that grand opportunity, he set out, it would seem, to redesign Venice, to give it an architectural and urban grandeur commensurate with its own self-image. The city's traditional architectural sense—quaintly naive and perversely unclassical, in the view of Sansovino's fellow Tus- can Vasari—was reformed by his example: "one began to build both public and private projects with new principles of design and better order, following the ancient precepts of Vitruvius."3 Sansovino did indeed transform the architectural face as well as the urban fabric of Venice, helping it to realize its own monumental ambitions. Sansovino's Tuscan language reshaped the monumental rhetoric of Venice, but it could itself hardly remain untouched by the local dialect. The elegant classicism of the central Italian traditions of Bramante and Raphael acquired an expressive range of new textures in architecture, as the tectonic art of Vitruvius came increasingly to interact with the figural art of sculpture. In Sansovino's designs for buildings like the Library, human anatomy and the classical orders join to create an architecture of festive variety, of profound plasticity. And on the smaller scale of sculpture itself, the central Italian conception of the figure was also modified by Sansovino's discovery, as it were, of the rich tactile potential of surfaces. His sense of touch is, in every way, analogous to the kind of painting Titian himself was exploring, which would flower so gloriously in the pittura di macchia of his late manner. Although he continued to sign himself as sculptor et architectus florentinus, Sansovino had nonetheless become a thoroughly Venetian artist—indeed, the "Sculptor of Venice." And the same was certainly true of that other Tuscan refugee, Pietro Aretino. Although he could hardly qualify for any official appointment, this self-appointed "scourge of princes" also functioned in the service of his adopted city. Beyond his roles in political and diplomatic intrigue and international flattery, as Patricia Labalme writes, his very existence confirmed Venice's claim to being a "nest of liberty," protector of free expression. As it had earlier invited foreign printers and publishers to set up their presses, offering the lure of the copyright privilege, and thereby establishing itself as XVI INTRODUCTION the printing house of Europe, so Venice found in Aretino a useful presence. And as with Sansovino's figural language, so the language of the writer flourished among the islands of the lagoon, finding a richness of expression and immediacy of experience that, too, is appropriately compared with the bold touch and carnal commitment of Titian's painting. In the art of all three compagni we discover a certain hedonism—not of limited self-indulgence, but rather of high rhetorical and expressive purpose. More deliberately and consistently than any other Renaissance state, Venice harnessed the arts, molding them into a seductive instrument of political propaganda. Within the rhetoric of that propaganda, music assumed a particularly relevant role, the appropriate symbol of a government well tempered, harmonious, consonant, balanced in the relationship of its parts. As one contemporary critic observed, it was the rule of "harmonic proportion that rendered this Republic beautiful and flourishing."4 Venice, of course, intentionally perpetuated this myth, cultivating its public image, seeking to maintain and enhance the spectacle of itself. The extent to which musical imagery figured in the official articulation of the myth is clearly attested by the iconography of Sansovino's Loggetta at the base of the Campanile of San Marco. The sculptor himself explicated the significance of the bronze statues within the four niches—Minerva, Apollo, Mercury, and Peace. As reported by his son, Sansovino explained that the figure of Apollo signifies the Sun, and the Sun is truly one, unique . thus this Republic by virtue of the constitution of its laws, its unity, and its uncorrupted liberty, is unique in the world, ruled with justice and with wisdom. In addition, it is known that this nation takes natural delight in music, and therefore Apollo is represented to signify music. And since from the union of its Magistrates joined together with inexpressible temperament issues extraordinary har- mony, which perpetuates this admirable government, Apollo was therefore represented.5 Yet the relationship between music and Venice was more than symbolic. On a specific practical level, music functioned as an important part of the political as well as cultural reality of the city, justifying Francesco Sansovino's statement that "music finds its proper home in this city."6 And in the course of the cinquecento, that home was centered in the church of San Marco, especially following the appointment in 1527 of Adrian Willaert as maestro di cappella.

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