Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale
have been identified, which, even allowing for the vulnerability of work on paper, is a tiny proportion of the 500 or so paintings he produced in the course of his long career. From the evidence we have, it seems that his painting technique from the beginning was to work and rework a compositional framework directly on to the primed support either in paint or black chalk and then more often than not ignore his own outlines. This does not mean, as his central Italian critics maintained, that Titian could not draw. Some of his sketches are masterpieces in their own right. One in particular, a Portrait of a Young Lady (Florence, Uffizi) of about 1511–12, in black chalk on blue paper covered with a yellowish wash, stands out from the other drawings not only because it is unique in his surviving oeuvre but because of its breathtaking beauty, the characterization of its moody introspective subject, and its vigorous and assured pictorial technique that looks strikingly modern when seen next to central Italian drawings of the same period. The rounded Slavic face of the model, whoever she was, evidently intrigued Titian at this time because it was a type he used also for the so-called Gypsy Madonna and the painting known as La Schiavona.
A nineteenth-century restoration of the Madonna of the Cherries (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) provided one of the first modern revelations of Titian’s way of working. When the painting was transferred from canvas to panel the conservators could see that the figure of the Madonna had been achieved only after trial and error while Titian tried different outlines with rough sketches, which he modified for the final design. Since he borrowed the motif of St John the Baptist grasping cherries from Dürer’s Madonna of the Siskin, which was painted in Venice in 1506, it is likely that he began his picture not long after he saw the Dürer. Then he seems to have lost interest or inspiration – or a patron – and abandoned the canvas. The two fathers, St Zacharias behind the Baptist and St Joseph behind the Christ child, were added, possibly at the request of a new patron, more than a decade later.
A restoration in the 1970s revealed that the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints5 is executed over two previous paintings.6 The first was a subject that included trees and water,7 which he never finished. He extended and reused the same panel for a new painting, which was commissioned for the high altar of the Oratory of San Nicolò ai Frari.8 This he set aside after sketching in rough outlines the figures of saints and filling in areas of colour before elaborating their poses or deciding how they would be arranged. He then abandoned the project for some years before in the 1530s completing on the same panel the painting we see today, with the help of an assistant, probably his brother Francesco. The thrifty habit of reusing the supports of discarded paintings continued throughout his career, even after he became well paid and famous.
In the Noli me tangere,9 the first and most delicate of his portrayals of the whore who was redeemed by her love for Christ, Titian evokes their close relationship during His lifetime, her yearning for Him and the drama of His miraculous reappearance to her after His Crucifixion with the balletic geometry of their poses, their limbs, Christ’s hoe and the tree planted in the centre of the painting which sways in counterpoint to Christ’s leaning torso. Here, as one writer put it, European painting has ‘become the richer by a new aerial quality due to nimbleness or expression in the touch itself’.10 Some scholars insist he must have worked out this highly complex composition on paper. There is no way of settling the question, but scientific examination has shown up the numerous changes that lie beneath the finished painting. A first attempt at a design evidently dissatisfied him because he cancelled part of it with a layer of white lead, apparently applied with a palette knife, and started again. He moved the ridge and buildings from lower down on the viewer’s left to their present position on the right, lopped off a branch of the tree, which was originally much smaller, and recast the agile figure of Christ, who originally wore a gardener’s hat and was shown upright and striding towards us away from the Magdalen rather than stepping towards her. The underdrawings sketched directly on the prepared canvas support are fine, free but very cursory scribbles describing some of the main elements, such as the curve of Christ’s back, hip and thigh but leaving details incomplete.11 The subject was so unusual in early sixteenth-century Venice and Titian treated it in such a wholly original manner that it is possible that he painted it for his own satisfaction without a commission as a way of exploring a depiction of the event that would emphasize the depth of feeling between the two protagonists.
The Three Ages of Man,12 the sexiest of all Venetian pastoral romances, was realized after unusually numerous revisions even by Titian’s standards. In a previous plan Cupid’s quiver was suspended from the top of the shattered tree; there was a tower in the central background; the old man holding two skulls was surrounded by four. The couple in the foreground – a naked young man and a girl who has not yet removed her white undershift, her pale bare arm resting on the brown flesh of his thigh while she points her flute at his groin – make love in the open air like the pagan shepherds and shepherdesses of the golden age described by Virgil and Ovid. But it was with one simple change – by twisting the girl’s head away from its original position facing the spectator towards her adoring lover so that, as Richard Wollheim put it, ‘their eyes copulate’13 – that he transformed a Giorgionesque mood painting into a Shakespearean poem about the most important and overwhelming of human emotions, for as long as youth and beauty last.
The Three Ages of Man (a seventeenth-century title) was commissioned by a goldsmith, Emiliano Targone,14 whom Benvenuto Cellini called ‘the finest jeweller in the world’. Vasari, who saw it in the late 1540s in the house in Faenza of Targone’s son-in-law Giovanni da Castel Bolognese, described it as ‘a naked shepherd and a country girl who is offering some pipes for him to play, with an extremely beautiful landscape’. A literary source has of course been endlessly discussed by modern scholars, but as with all Giorgionesque pastoral paintings it has never been possible to match the Three Ages of Man precisely to a particular text that would have been known at the time, and most of us are happy to accept it, with Titian’s nineteenth-century biographers,15 as a tale ‘merely half told … treated with such harmony of means as to create in its way the impression of absolute perfection’.16
It is in fact far from technically perfect. Titian, unable to fit in the girl’s legs, left the lower part of her body in an ungainly pose covered by the skirt of her red dress. The placing of the figures defies perspective: the old man is too small, the sleeping cupids too large. This is one of the first paintings in which Titian attempted the difficult challenge of grouping large figures seated directly on the ground within a landscape – a format that later became a hallmark of Venetian sixteenth-century painting but which continued to trouble Titian, who, even in his otherwise more assured pastoral paintings of the early 1530s,17 did not always quite bring off the anatomy of his seated figures. He had a similar problem with the Virgin’s pose in the Holy Family with a Shepherd of about the same date or a few years earlier,18 in which the disproportionately large head of St Joseph (apparently taken from the same model as St Mark in the St Mark Enthroned) looks as though it had been added on as an afterthought, perhaps for a patron or carpenters’ guild devoted to the popular cult of St Joseph. It was around the same time, or perhaps a few years earlier, that Titian painted the Baptism of Christ19 for Giovanni Ram, a Spanish collector resident in Venice who is portrayed in profile as the donor. The grandiose figures of Christ and the Baptist strike complicated, stagey poses, which look as though Titian was working from sketches or descriptions of classical and central Italian prototypes he had not seen in the original.20 The portrait of Ram is executed in a tight, explicit way that harks back to Giovanni Bellini.
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