Titian. Sir Claude Phillips

      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, nor 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 such as Pietro Bembo, no less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry for Titian and Giorgione, 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 and their classical legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of the golden prime disdained to represent – or possibly unconsciously shrank from representing – the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. In such pictures as the Adrastus and Hypsipyle and Aeneas and Evander, Giorgione represents less that which has been related to him of those ancient legends so much as his own mood when he is brought into contact with them. He transposes his motif 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 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 and 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 have consciously or unconsciously achieved in these exquisite idylls is the indissoluble union of humanity with nature; outwardly quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion. It is nature herself that mysteriously responds in these painted poems, that interprets for the beholder the moods of man, much as a mighty orchestra – nature ordered and controlled. This is so that it 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 Wickhoff for his interpretations, no 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, nor force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from another more prosaic, precise and literal standpoint.

      Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Saint Mark with Saints Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian, 1511.

      Oil on wood panel, 230 × 119 cm. Santa Maria della Salute, Venice.

      Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Virgin with Saint Francis, Saint Blaise, and the Donor Alvise Gozzi, called the Gozzi Retable, 1520.

      Oil on wood panel, 312 × 215 cm. Pinacoteca Civica Francesco Podesti, Ancona.

      It has been pointed out by Titian’s biographers that the wars which followed the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation all over northern Italy. It was not long after this – on the death of his master Giorgione – that Sebastiano del Piombo 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 his adoptive city 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, is to be accepted, it must be held that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[21] cites painted compositions of the Triumph of Faith as either the originals or the repetitions of the wood engravings, for which Titian himself drew the blocks. The frescos themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished; but there does not appear to be any direct evidence that they ever came into existence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the process of translation into wood engraving, are not materially at variance with those in the frescos 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 frescos of the Scuola del Santo. It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the Triumphs of Mantegna, then already widely popularised by numerous engravings. Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked obviously intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in nearby Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like the famous Tribute Money, 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. It was not until he reached extreme old age that such an impulse of sacred passion would again colour the art of the painter of Cadore as it did here. In the earlier period of his working life the Triumph of Faith constitutes a striking exception.

      Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Daniel and Suzanne (Christ and the Adulterous Wife), 1508–1510.

      Oil

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