001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:17 Page 1 titian and the end of the venetian renaissance 001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:17 Page 2 001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:17 Page 3 TITIAN and the end of the Venetian Renaissance om ichols reaktion books 001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:17 Page 4 For Kerr¥ Published by reaktion books ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk Copyright © Tom Nichols 2013 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China by C&C OΩset Printing Co., Ltd British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data isbn 978 1 78023 186 0 001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:17 Page 5 CONTENTS * Introdu±ion Titian’s Last Painting: The Sight of Death 7 – An Inglorious Passing; or, The Difficult Case of the Pietà 9 – How ‘Venetian’ was Titian? 12 Surrogate Monuments to the Leader of a Tradition 15 one: Art as Appropriation: The Rise of Titian Giovanni Bellini: The Model Venetian 19 – Bellini and Titian: Master and Pupil 20 Titian and the Venetian Istoria 23 – Titian and Giorgione 30 – Giorgione and Titian’s Early Portraiture 35 – The Early Mythologies 43 – Titian Repaints Palma Vecchio 55 two: Remaking Tradition: Icons and Altarpieces Anachronic Titian 59 – The Modern Icon 60 – The Cultural Dynamics of Space in Two Altarpieces for Venice 64 – Private Values in a Public Picture Type 72 Altarpiece or Artwork? 78 three: Portraiture and Non-venezianità Portraiture in Renaissance Venice 83 – Titian’s Portraits to 1530: Accommodation of the Courts 87 – Habsburg and Related Portraits of the 1530s 95 Historical Portraits 99 – Natura Potentior Ars 117 four: Sacred Painting, the Poesie and the Late Style Titian as Tradition 123 – Titian’s Hybrid Poesie 134 – Two Late Mythologies 146 Early Responses to Titian’s Late Style 149 – The Late Style in Critical and Historical Perspective 153 five: Titian and Venice: Surviving the Father of Art Patrons and Prices 157 – Titian versus the Rest: A Literary Self-image 159 Pictor et eques: Titian’s Self-portraits 161 – Images of Succession 167 – Images of Attachment 173 – The Darker Side of Titian; or, The Anti-image 179 Venetian Responses to Titian: Veronese and Tintoretto 186 Conclusion Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance 199 – Titian in Disguise 201 references 207 bibliograph\ 238 acknowledgements 247 photo acknowledgements 248 index 249 001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:17 Page 6 1 Titian, Pietà, c. 1570–76. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. 001_017_Titian_Intro_ROB 17/09/2013 15:18 Page 17 6 Luigi Zandomeneghi and Pietro Zandomeneghi, Monument to Titian, 1838–52, marble. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. 018_057_Titian_Ch 1_ROB 17/09/2013 15:31 Page 18 7 Vittore Belliniano, Portrait of Giovanni Bellini, charcoal, wash and bistre on paper, 1505. Musée Condé, Chantilly. 8 Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Gentile Bellini, c. 1496, charcoal on paper. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. 018_057_Titian_Ch 1_ROB 17/09/2013 15:31 Page 19 chapter one Art as Appropriation: The Rise of Titian Confronted by a rival . Titian* responded by engorging him (Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 1987) Giovanni Bellini: The Model Venetian When Titian arrived in the metropolis of Venice from their constant demand for official portraits, votive paint- the remote mountain village of Cadore around 1500, ings and histories.4 Like his brother, Giovanni’s later painting was dominated by two local artists, the broth- career was dominated by the production of large-scale ers Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. They were the sons of paintings for major Venetian public buildings and insti- Jacopo Bellini, the leading master in Venice in the tutions: that is, for the state, the lay religious brother hoods decades before his death in 1471, and had inherited his known as the Scuole, and the Church. social status as cittadini originari, ‘original citizens’ of the The narrow geographical parameters of Giovanni’s city.1 Of the two, the younger brother Giovanni was the career may have owed more to his Venetian identity and more self-effacing, and in this sense, at least, conformed ideology than to lack of opportunities for expansion. more absolutely to the presiding cultural value of medi- When Isabella d’Este, marchesa of the Gonzaga court, ocritas, which promoted society and state over individual approached Giovanni for a contribution to her studiolo, accomplishment. If Gentile had worked abroad for or study, in the Ducal Palace at Mantua, the painter sultan Mehmed ii in Constantinople and sometimes proved less than willing to supply a painting following signed himself as ‘knight’ on his paintings, Giovanni re- her instructions.5 And it seems that even when Giovanni mained quite comfortably in his brother’s shadow.2 did provide a painting for a foreign court very late in He made his name producing modest half-length his career, for Isabella’s brother Alfonso d’Este, Duke paintings of the Madonna and Child. These were rela- of Ferrara, his work proved not to be to his patron’s taste tively small-scale works intended primarily for devotional (illus. 38).6 As we shall see, Titian’s career proves a sharp purposes within the home and were more usually asso- contrast: it developed around his ability to form congenial ciated with the less successful painters in Venice known relationships with leading courtly rulers and their families, as ‘Madonneri’.3 Giovanni quickly transformed the stand- and his related capacity to anticipate their artistic tastes. ing of the Madonna and Child as a subject and expanded But he often argued with local patrons. Giovanni, on his range into more high-profile and large-scale painting the contrary, focussed his attention on the home market types, such as the altarpiece and the istoria, or ‘history’ and seems to have felt that local commissions offered painting. But his career remained relatively narrowly him more room for creative manoeuvre. In a letter of focussed on the needs of local patrons. Though Giovanni 1506, his friend, the poet Pietro Bembo, informed the was exempted from paying dues to the Venetian painter’s irritated Isabella that he liked ‘to wander at will’ in his guild in 1483, this was not necessarily an attempt to paintings rather than to follow detailed prescriptions distance himself from the local community of painters. from his patrons. Seen as an expression of Giovanni’s It reflected the Venetian state’s attempt to help him fulfil ‘Venetianness’, or venezianità, his assumption of a right 19 018_057_Titian_Ch 1_ROB 17/09/2013 15:31 Page 20 titian to creative licence appears as an artistic analogue to a leading political virtue of Venice itself. Freedom was, Bellini and Titian: Master and Pupil after all, a key concept within the so-called ‘myth of Among Titian’s early works there are surprisingly few Venice’ and was perhaps the primary way in which the that continue or develop the type of the half- or three- Republic defined itself in ideological terms against the quarter-length Madonna and Child for which Giovanni oppression or ‘tyranny’ of the courts.7 Bellini had become renowned. Indeed, there is remark- By the final decade of the fifteenth century Giovanni ably little reference to Bellini’s work per se, a striking ran one of the largest and most successful workshops in fact given that the young painter was certainly a pupil Italy; his growing fame and professional prominence in the old master’s workshop.13 The young Titian, who was, in part at least, dependent on the range and extent quickly became enamoured with the work of the elusive of his activity as a teacher with many pupils. Giovanni Giorgione, is never overtly ‘anti-Bellinesque’. But from and his brother were particularly renowned among Italian the outset he makes clear his difference, resisting the artists and humanist intellectuals for their teaching of expected formative impress of master on pupil. Titian’s perspective in the workshop, which was understood as immediate escape from his artistic ‘father’, his dis- a quasi-scientific topic and therefore as a key element avowal of the conventional bond between old and in the training of young artists.8 In 1506 the visiting young formed in the workshop immediately limits the German artist Albrecht Dürer, whose interest in the common idea that he simply inherited the values of the new ‘science’ of art is well documented, firmly identified Venetian tradition through his training.14 Titian’s break Giovanni as the best painter in Venice.9 But as a portrait with the past was enacted through the transitional figure drawing by a devoted pupil, Vittore Belliniano, shows, of Giorgione, a slightly older contemporary in Bellini’s the old master’s professional identity hardly changed in shop, much of whose work offered a kind of poetic later life (illus. 7). Sensitive as the drawing is, it reveals withdrawal from the civic-minded culture of the older relatively little about Giovanni as an individual, picturing generation. The extent of Giorgione’s influence over him as a dutiful master and faithful civil servant rather the young painter has led some to argue that Titian than an inspired genius.10 Belliniano’s drawing contrasts was his pupil, though there is little evidence to support a little with the portrait that Giovanni himself made of this idea.15 But Giorgione might nonetheless have acted his older brother, which hints at Gentile’s more expansive as surrogate master or artistic father figure, perhaps international and personal profile (illus. 8). Yet even mediating the antagonism between Bellini and Titian.