Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale
was much less common in central Italy where artists were supposed to learn how the body works by study and dissection and how it should ideally look from classical examples. (Raphael, for example, never used human models for his bodies.) Four decades or so after Botticelli painted the first heroic and timeless mythological women of the Italian Renaissance, Titian, as a feminist art historian has put it, ‘reinvented womankind’.42
Titian warmed the flesh of his women – Dolce quoted Pordenone as saying that Titian put flesh not colour on to a nude – and softened the voluptuous contours of their bodies. Even if some of his models were common whores, their faces tell us that he wanted to explore their personalities as well as their bodies. Seen next to any one of Titian’s girls, the numerous beauties painted by his Venetian contemporaries – Paris Bordone, Palma Vecchio or Giovanni Cariani – look like hardened professionals. The Reclining Nude in a Landscape (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie) and Venus Anadyomene (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland)43 (anadyomene is the Greek word for ‘rising from the sea’) – which was inspired by Pliny’s description of a Venus Anadyomene painted by Apelles, the lower half of which had been damaged – adopt the pudica pose of antique sculptures of the goddess, at once voluptuous and modest, the position of their hands drawing attention to what they conceal. The ravishing Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and prostitutes, whose name was often adopted by Renaissance courtesans, is only partially successful in preventing her pleated white shift – a costume worn by actresses in the contemporary theatre to identify them as nymphs or goddesses – from tumbling further off her plump shoulders. Her modestly averted glance was a second thought: in the original version she looked straight out at the viewer.
The Salome (Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilj), for which Titian seems to have used the same model who posed for the naked Dresden Venus, is not the first Renaissance painting to exploit the erotic subtext of the biblical story,44 in which the seductive daughter of Herodias displays the decapitated head of St John the Baptist on a salver. But Titian’s version, which is based on the composition of a more sombre Salome by Sebastiano Luciani of 1510, is surely the most explicitly sensuous of them all. Salome45 is associated with Venus by the little winged cupid perched on the arch behind her. Like a prostitute in the pornography of the period46 she allows a lock of hair to stray flirtatiously over her fresh young cheek, while the hair of the decapitated Baptist caresses her bare arm as she clutches his head to her breast. It looks as though Titian, who seems to have enjoyed playing the occasional walk-on role in his productions, may have portrayed himself as the Baptist47 – the arched nose and the contour of the forehead resemble those in his late self-portraits, and the receding hairline may anticipate early balding. If this is the young Titian, could we be witnessing a private joke between Titian and a sexually voracious mistress? Perhaps the painting was in lieu of payment for her services? Or might she have been a courtesan rich and cultivated enough, as some courtesans were, to commission her own portrait?
Of course writers and critics have been speculating since his lifetime about Titian’s relationships with his female models. When in 1522 the Duke of Ferrara’s ambassador in Venice reported that he had found Titian looking exhausted, he assumed, although Titian denied it, that he had been sleeping with the models he often painted in provocative poses. Even a diplomat with limited imagination would have guessed that powerfully creative artists usually have powerful libidos, and that the act of tracing the contours of a desirable woman’s body with a brush laden with paint is a kind of sublimated love-making. Sperone Speroni writing about love in 1537 named Titian as the painter who best visualized the concept that ‘a lover is actually a reflection of that which he loves’.48 Alas, Titian, the artist who knew better then any other how to paint heterosexual passion, seems only rarely to have written or spoken about his private life and personal feelings, and then mainly about his family and friends. According to Pietro Aretino, the close friend with whom he spent many companionable evenings, Titian seemed never to have met a woman he didn’t like, but whereas Aretino claimed to be so fond of brothels that it almost killed him to be elsewhere, Titian, at least when in society, fondled and made a great show of kissing the ladies, and entertained them with a thousand juvenile pranks,49 but remained faithful to his wife or current mistress.
But the temptation to find and name a mistress for Titian was irresistible, and by the end of the sixteenth century, when Titian and Aretino were both long dead, the pretty redhead with violets tucked into her décolletage in Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (Madrid, Prado), painted early in his career for Duke Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara, had given rise to the notion that Titian’s beloved was called Violante.50 In the next century Carlo Ridolfi, in his biography of Titian, wrote that Titian had had an innamorata called Violante, who was the daughter of his friend Palma Vecchio. Ridolfi may or may not have picked that idea up from someone who told him about the rumour in Ferrara. But it was his reference that generated claims that Violante was also the model for a number of early sixteenth-century Venetian paintings of women, especially the so-called Violante (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), a hard-faced, bleached blonde, who also has a violet tucked into her bodice, but looks more like the work of Palma than Titian. The Vienna Violante is in any case a different physical type from other candidates who have been proposed for Violante, all of whom, like the girl in the Andrians, have auburn hair and brown eyes. One is the beautiful Flora. Another is the Venus Anadyomene, whose head Titian altered, possibly putting one woman’s face on another’s body. She appears again in the Woman with a Mirror, her long auburn hair over one shoulder like the Venus Anadyomene, but now en négligée and closely observed by the man who holds a second mirror for her. Although the man looks nothing like Titian, the painting entered the collection of Charles I of England as ‘Titian and his Mistress’. But then came the age of legend-busting Titian scholarship, when it was discovered that Palma never married, and that there is no record of an illegitimate daughter. And so, although Titian’s women leave us in no doubt that he loved them, blonde or brunette, slim or buxom, whores, courtesans or high-ranking girlfriends of his patrons, we are forced to respect his reticence about his private life. He may, like his great modern admirer Lucian Freud, have needed to sleep with his models before painting them. But we will never know which, if any of them, shared his bed.
Titian appears, and art takes a step in advance, and we feel that there may be some further perfection of which as yet we do not dream.
JOSEPH A. CROWE AND GIOVANNI BATTISTA CAVALCASELLE, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TITIAN, 1881
The Assumption is a noble picture, because Titian believed in the Madonna. But he did not paint it to make any one else believe in her. He painted it, because he enjoyed rich masses of red and blue, and faces flushed with sunlight.
RUSKIN, MODERN PAINTERS, VOL. 5, 1843–60
A year or so after Titian had refused Pietro Bembo’s invitation to Rome and the Council of Ten had voted to accept his proposed battle scene for the Great Council Hall he received a private commission to paint a picture for Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Council of Ten. Aurelio was the civil servant who in 1507 had signed the payment order to Giorgione for the Fondaco frescos, and it is possible that he helped Titian with the phrasing of his petition and influenced the Council’s decision in his favour. He had risen through the ranks of the ducal chancery, starting his career as an advisory notary with a salary of twenty ducats a year to his present powerful position, which paid 200 plus bonuses. The son of a professor at the University of Padua, he was an educated man and evidently good at his job, which was one of the most important in the ducal chancery. He was a close friend of Pietro Bembo, who had written him a warm letter of congratulation on his appointment and who, some think,