Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale
year passed. The government, desperate to economize wherever possible, filled loopholes in the taxation system, tightened the supervision of accounting methods and appointed special committees to eliminate all unnecessary expenditure. At the end of December 1515 an official from the Salt Office was given the task of auditing the accounts relating to the canvases for the Great Council Hall. He reported that as much money had been spent on them as would have completed the redecoration of the entire palace. Two canvases, for which there were only preliminary sketches, had cost more than 700 ducats, while there were masters willing to paint one canvas for 250 ducats. All the artists working in the Hall were immediately dismissed so that the terms of their employment could be renegotiated.
The new conditions suited Titian very well. Although he may or may not have been one of the artists who had offered to paint a canvas for 250 ducats, his nose for business told him that he could do better. On 8 January 1516 a new proposal from Titian, this one addressed directly to the doge, was read out at a meeting of the Collegio. He had been working on the battle scene for two years. It was the most difficult situation in the entire room, but he would finish it for 400 ducats, half the amount, so he claimed, that Perugino had refused. The Collegio, whose members were presumably aware that Perugino had been offered 400 ducats, not 800, voted to give Titian 300 on completion of the painting, as well as his colours and the monthly four-ducat salary for one assistant while he worked on it.
He was allowed to keep the government studio in the Ca’ del Duca, and it was here that he painted the succession of masterpieces that would make him rich enough by 1531 to buy a studio and house of his own. In the absence of detailed contemporary descriptions or inventories of Titian’s working environment we can only deduce from such scraps of information as we have, and from descriptions of other artists’ workshops, what his studio might have been like. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo,10 a Milanese painter who turned to writing after losing his sight, said that Titian kept models of wood, plaster, terracotta and wax, as well as sketches of contemporary and antique works. Among them, we can be sure, were sketches and perhaps small models of the Laocoön. And then there were the luscious girls, naked or en négligée, whom, according to a report written in the early 1520s by the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice, ‘he often paints in different poses and who arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits; but he denies it’.11
The meticulous account books kept by Titian’s contemporary Lorenzo Lotto from 1538 are the most informative source we have for the contents and atmosphere of a Venetian painter’s studio. Lotto, like Titian and indeed all sixteenth-century painters, worked from wooden lay figures, plaster and wax models of relief carvings, cameos and engravings, as well as from live models. He paid his models, usually poor people (he provided a bath for at least one girl), eight soldi for religious subjects, sometimes less to prostitutes who posed in the nude, although on one occasion he paid twelve soldi ‘for undressing a woman only to look’. His studio was equipped with powdered lapis lazuli (which he distilled himself), other colours, varnishes, oils, wax, glues, lacquers, mastic, turpentine, pitch and a stone mortar and pestle for grinding pigments.
The atmosphere in Titian’s studio must have been something like the back-stage of a theatre, full of props and costumes and models in various states of undress practising their poses. Unfortunately for us, however, sixteenth-century writers on art thought it inappropriate to describe the physical act of painting. Leonardo, in his campaign to promote painting as a more gentlemanly art than sculpture, described the painter who sits ‘in great comfort before his work, well dressed, and wields his light brush loaded with lovely colours. He can be dressed as well as he pleases, and his house can be clean and filled with beautiful paintings. He often works to the accompaniment of music, or listening to the reading of many fine works.’ Sculpture, by contrast, was an exhausting labour during which the artist is covered with dust and sweat, ‘so that he looks more like a baker’. Even Titian’s best friend Pietro Aretino, who knew very well how Titian worked, refrained from mentioning his messy habit of using his fingers. It was not until the seventeenth century that Marco Boschini12 recognized Titian’s intensely physical way of painting as evidence of his creativity when he attributed to him the observation that a timid artist who is afraid to experiment with mixing his colours in case he makes a mess will end up soiling his clothes, with nothing to show for his efforts. But even in the nineteenth century, when Christina Rossetti dreamed up a Pre-Raphaelite atelier for Titian in her short story ‘Titian’s Studio’,13 the reality of the messy work involved in producing a painted work of art – the noise of assistants grinding pigments, the smell of oils, the paint-spattered clothes – was considered unacceptable.
Titian ran his workshop in the Venetian tradition, as a business. He was not as patient or generous a teacher as Giovanni Bellini, and kept his shop relatively small. The only early assistants for whom we have names are Luca Antonio Buxei and Lodovico de Zuane. But it is likely that Domenico Campagnola, who had worked alongside Titian in Padua, also joined the studio for a while, until Titian discovered that Campagnola was forging what he passed off as preliminary drawings for Titian’s woodcuts by drawing on lightly printed counterproofs.14 Like all painters of the time, Titian used his assistants to do the preliminary preparations of his supports. It was not long, however, before he required them to collaborate with him on making copies, variants or paraphrases of what he considered to be his most marketable paintings destined for clients whom he knew would not object to the participation of his workshop, especially if a patron of high rank had commissioned the original. The earliest examples of this practice, which would later, with increasing fame, become an essential way of meeting the demand for his work, are the multiple versions of the Young Woman with a Mirror (two painted around 1513–15 are in the Munich Alte Pinakothek and the Paris Louvre).15
The most reassuring and trusted presence was that of his brother Francesco, the better part of himself and the only rival he feared, or so he apparently liked to say.16 Towards the end of the Cambrai war Francesco was wounded fighting bravely in hand-to-hand combat near Vicenza, but he recovered and returned to Venice in 1517. In the coming years he would divide his time between Venice, where we can assume he shared the studio with Titian and helped with its management, and the family home in Cadore, where he occupied increasingly important offices in the communal government while working in partnership with Titian on the expansion of the timber business and on investments in landed property. Of all the Vecellio clan of minor painters he was the most prolific, and continued painting at least until 1550, occasionally with what looks like some improving help from Titian, as an independent artist specializing in altarpieces which were extremely popular on the provincial mainland. Examples of his work can be seen in churches around Cadore, Belluno and Vittorio Veneto, as well as in the Venetian church of San Salvatore, the Berlin Staatliche Museen and the Texas Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. His style, at least compared to that of his brother, seems clumsy, retardataire and wholly lacking in originality or dynamism, which did not prevent Titian from calling on him for assistance from time to time.
Girolamo Dente, who entered the studio as an apprentice in the early 1520s, was to be the most faithful and the longest-lasting of Titian’s garzoni, so much so that he became almost one of the family and was often known as Girolamo da Tiziano. Like Francesco, he fulfilled commissions on the mainland as an autonomous painter, helped by his close association with the master. A story (for which there is no evidence) has it that the more ambitious and talented young Paris Bordone also worked for Titian. Not only did Titian refuse to teach him, he snatched from the hapless Bordone the commission for a Madonna and Saints from the monks of the Frari for the high altar of their Oratory of San Nicolò ai Frari. Bordone stalked out of the studio but remained, according to Vasari, ‘the one who more than all the others imitated Titian’. The Madonna and Saints remained in Titian’s studio until the early 1530s when, probably in collaboration with Francesco, Titian overpainted it with the different version, the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints (Vatican City, Pinacoteca Vaticana).17