The Earlier Work of Titian

Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu Römischen Heldengedichten" (Jahrbuch der Königlich 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.

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.

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.

Life and Times of Titian, vol. i. p. 29.

Die Galerien zu München und Dresden, p. 75.

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 München und Dresden).

Vasari, Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco.

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 Fête Champêtre in the Salon Carré of the Louvre!

Magazine of Art, July 1895.

Life and Times of Titian, vol. i. p. 111.

Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken after his execution, as Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his son.

La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien, 1887.

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.

Kugler's Italian Schools of Painting, re-edited by Sir Henry Layard.

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 è 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).

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.

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).

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."

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 Pietà 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.

Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, Heft I. 1895.

See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the Notizia d' Opere di Disegno, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.

M. Thausing, Wiener Kunstbriefe, 1884.

Le Meraviglie dell' Arte.

The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is to be found among those publicly exhibited at the École 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.

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."

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.

Die Galerien zu München und Dresden, p. 74.

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.

Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1895.

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 Niccolò 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.

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.).

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.

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.

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.

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.).

Φιλοστρατου Εικονων Ερωτες

Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's Jardin à 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.

Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme, tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."

Moritz Thausing's Albrecht Dürer, Zweiter Band, p. 14.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Life and Times of Titian, vol. i. p. 212.

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."

"Tizian und Alfons von Este," Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, Fünfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Life and Times of Titian, vol. i. pp. 237-240.

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.

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.

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.

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 £120. By the latter it was made over to Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the same way.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Life and Times of Titian, vol. i. pp. 298, 299.

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.

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.