Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale

      It is possible that this is the painting now known as the Man with a Quilted Sleeve. Although the sleeve is actually blue it may be that Vasari was referring to silvery light playing on it before the surface of the painting was abraded over time. Nevertheless, it is remarkably assured for the date Vasari suggests, which would date it in or before 1508.

      A doublet with voluminous sleeves was in any case the kind of luxurious garment that was frowned upon by the older, stricter seafaring generation. It went against the long-standing Venetian tradition of moderation intended to minimize jealousy within and without the ruling class. At a time when Venice was engaged in a crippling war, lavish clothes and foreign fashions were especially unpatriotic and indeed dangerous because offensive to God. Members of the patrician class, furthermore, were supposed to wear the toga or the robes that indicated higher office. In Titian’s portraits members of the nobility who had withdrawn from active trade and wished to be portrayed as gentlemen of refined taste are dressed instead in fashions that prevailed elsewhere in Italy and Europe. Some may indeed have been foreigners – Titian’s studio was already one of the many attractions of the much-visited city. But others were young Venetians emulating an ideal of how a gentleman should look and behave in a way that was gaining currency through drafts of Baldassare Castiglione’s popular and influential dialogue The Courtier. If some were, like Titian’s Barbarigo friend, members of the patrician class, their taste for avant-garde art would have been consistent with a subversive attitude to the dress code thought appropriate by their conservative elders. Perhaps some of them wished to be portrayed as they would like to be remembered before going off to war. The Man with a Red Cap (New York, Frick Collection) carries a sword and is dressed in furs, perhaps for campaigning in a northern winter.

      When Titian was young most of the men he painted were also young. They generally posed for him in black, with touches of a white shirt showing at the neck. The Spanish fashion for wearing black was recommended by Castiglione as the most suitable attire for courtiers, and black, the most expensive cloth because the dye was difficult to fix, was an indication of the sitter’s wealth. Venetians who dressed like foreign aristocrats were making a statement about their status as gentlemen who had abandoned the sea for a more civilized and contemplative life. The expensive clothes, the rings that draw attention to their expressive hands, and their gloves, which would have been scented with musk, further signify their position as aristocrats or quasi-aristocrats. By limiting his palette to the variations of black, white and the flesh tones at which he excelled Titian brought a new drama and mystery to his portraits, which would later inspire painters as different from one another as Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Velázquez and Whistler. The earliest portraits seem to catch their subjects off-guard, ‘heads inclined like too heavy flowers’,21 lost in melancholy musing. The gaunt, handsome features of the Young Man with a Red Sleeve (Earl of Halifax on loan to the London National Gallery),22 tired eyes staring into the distance, are those of a man so intensely preoccupied by his own thoughts that we feel he would be startled by the slightest interruption. The initial ‘C’ on the scroll in the background to his right may give a teasing clue to his identity. One of the earliest extant portraits, the elderly man in Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst) wearing the habit of a lay brother – he could be a member of the confraternity of St Anthony whom Titian knew in Padua23 – averts his eyes like saints in religious paintings of the previous century. The Frick Man in a Red Hat gazes up and away from the viewer as though he too is absorbed in otherworldly thoughts. Sometimes Titian gives the impression that his gentlemen are about to emerge from their dark backgrounds to go out for the evening, or that they have just returned. The Young Man with a Red Sleeve has removed one of his kid gloves and his broad-brimmed hat. The Man with a Quilted Sleeve has his black outdoor cloak slung over his left shoulder.

      The mysterious Concert,24 Titian’s first triple portrait and his last before the unfinished Paul III with his Grandsons of more than three decades later, has been one of the most discussed, analysed and admired of Titian’s paintings: Walter Pater (who thought it was by Giorgione) called it ‘among the most precious things in the world of art’.25 But after more than a century of conjecture about its meaning and the identity of the three musicians there is no consensus about who or what it represents.26 Three men of different ages – one elderly, one middle-aged, one young – are absorbed in making music. Their clothes provide the only clues to their identities. The elderly man on the right holding a stringed instrument is dressed as a cleric. The middle-aged man at the keyboard whom he interrupts wears what was thought to be a toga, indicating that he was a member of the government, until a restoration in 1976 showed it to be dark blue rather than black. The young man’s fancy hat would have been worn only for a theatrical production, probably during carnival. So is this a rehearsal? Is the oldest man suggesting that they start again from the previous bar while the impassive young man with the plumed hat – presumably a singer – waits for his cue? Did Titian intend his painting to signify, as one art historian has put it, that ‘sublime and harmonious time must contend with the powerful interference of real time in the world’?27 Would an artist still in his early twenties have thought that way? Or is it about the dual purpose of music, which gives both pleasure and spiritual edification?28 If only we knew who commissioned the Concert, we might be able to guess at some answers. As it is we can only marvel at how Titian managed to give, in this as in so many of his paintings, a sense of suspended narrative, akin to the way our memory sometimes condenses a past episode into a single image. Painting in the hands of a master, as Leonardo had observed, can capture the impression we gain from a single glance just as we do in reality. Titian’s sense of the moment, indeed his ability to capture ‘The Decisive Moment’,29 has rarely been matched by any photographer or painter, and is all the more impressive because we know from technical investigation that he planned and painted this picture of three figures all at the same time.

      Although fewer of Titian’s portraits have been scientifically examined than his other paintings, the work that has been done on them demonstrates that he used the same techniques and made similar changes as he went along. One of the portraits that has been thoroughly investigated is the so-called ‘The Slav’, La Schiavona, as it came to be called (London, National Gallery), of about 1511. Although Titian counted women among his close friends – Vasari used the word compare, pal or confidante, to describe his relationship with one of them, the beautiful young Giulia da Ponte, who was the subject of one of his lost portraits30 – there are far fewer identifiable portraits of Venetian women in his surviving oeuvre than of men. Venice, unlike the other Italian city-states, had no court. Female portraits, which elsewhere served to encourage or celebrate dynastic marriages with other courts, were of no use in a city where marriages were contracted within the local patriciate and where the doges and procurators were often very old, celibate or widowed. That women do not even appear in his later group portraits of noble Venetian families may indicate that there was also some prejudice, in the oriental tradition, about display