Titian. Sir Claude Phillips
on the superior beauty of some work on the “facciata di verso la Merceria” which in reality belonged to Titian, thereupon implacably cutting short their connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but refuted by Tizianello’s Anonimo. There is one factor that makes it particularly difficult to make even a tentative chronological arrangement of Titian’s early works. This is that in the painted poesie of the earlier Venetian art of which the seeds are to be found in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, and the development of which 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 Titian’s later period – 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 renewal of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives such an exquisite charm to the Venus of the Pardo, such a strange pathos to that still later Nymph and Shepherd.
The sacred works of the early period are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a majestic placidity, a fullness of life, a splendour of representation, very different from the tremulous sweetness and spirit of aloofness and reserve which inform such creations as the Madonna of Castelfranco and the Madonna with Saint Francis and Saint Roch of the Prado Museum. Later, leaving ever farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, we have the overpowering force and majesty of the Assunta, the true passion going hand-in-hand with the beauty of the Louvre’s Entombment, the rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the Saint Peter Martyr.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and an Unidentified Saint, c. 1517–1520.
Oil on canvas, transferred from panel, 62.7 × 93 cm. National Gallery of Scotland (on loan from the collection of the Duke of Sutherland), Edinburgh.
Palma Vecchio (Giacomo or Jacopo Palma), The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1527–1528.
Oil on canvas, 127 × 195 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
The Baptism of Christ, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome, was attributed to Paris Bordone by Crowe and Cavalcaselle instead of to Titian, but the keen insight of Morelli led him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to the Venetian master. Internal evidence is indeed conclusive, as the picture must be assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[13] 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 foliage – 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 Saint John the Baptist, who in the Three Ages appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The image of Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine Tribute Money. The question at once arises: Did Titian derive inspiration for this type of figure from Giovanni Bellini’s splendid Baptism of Christ? It was finished in 1510 for the Church of Santa Corona at Vicenza, but the younger artist might well have seen it a year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the workshop of the venerable master. Apart from its fresh naivety and rare pictorial charm, Titian’s conception appears trivial and merely anecdotal next to that of Bellini, so lofty, so consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset colour![14] Only in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram, placed awkwardly in the picture which is attractive in its naivety, but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing alone.
The beautiful Virgin and Child with Saints Dorothy and George, placed in the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now officially restored to Titian, having been for years ascribed to Giorgione, whose style it echoes. It is in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle defined as “Palmesque”. The Saint Dorothy and the Saint George are both types frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamo painter, and it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with hair of wavy gold must have sat for 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 classical 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 finicky, and the high yellowish lights on the crimson draperie are all very characteristic of the first manner of Titian. The green hangings at the back of the picture are generally associated with the colour schemes of Palma. An old replica, with a slight variation in the image of the Child, 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.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Holy Family with a Shepherd, c. 1510.
Oil on canvas, 99.1 × 139.1 cm. The National Gallery, London.
Vasari assigns the exact date 1507 to the Tobias and the Angel now in the Galleria dell’Accademia, describing it with greater accuracy than he does any other work by Titian. He mentions even “the thicket, in which is Saint 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 this view, and in this instance to follow Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who assign Tobias and the Angel to the a much later time 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 classical yet living archangel Raphael and the more naive and realistic Tobias – nor in the rich landscape with Saint 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 and the glow of the colour from within, we have so much evidence of a style in its fullest maturity. It would be safe, therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian’s middle period.[15]
The Three Ages in the National Gallery of Scotland and the 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 possibly falling short a little 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 naivety, the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely fully fledged.
Palma Vecchio (Giacomo or Jacopo Palma), The Holy Family with Mary Magdalene and the
Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this
This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima’s great altarpiece with the same subject, behind the high altar in the Church of San 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 altarpieces 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 Bellini, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder master is more passionate, more human. The