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

      But in his eagerness to promote and doubtless to please Titian, Dolce gilded the lily, asserting that Titian had painted the Assunta before Giorgione had produced any oil paintings, which would put it a decade earlier than the date that was clearly visible on the frame. He was doubtless right, however, that ‘clumsy painters and the ignorant crowd, accustomed to the cold, dead works of the Bellini brothers and Alvise Vivarini, which were without movement and relief, spoke very ill of the finished work’. Ridolfi repeated an old story, that the friars including even the enlightened Fra Germano objected to the excessively large figures of the Apostles, ‘thereby causing the artist to endure making no small effort to correct their lack of understanding and to help them comprehend why the figures had to be in proportion to the extremely large location in which they were to be seen, as well as to discuss whether it would be advantageous to make them smaller’. (Ridolfi also claimed that the friars came to value the painting only after the emperor’s ambassador tried to buy it for an enormous sum. But about this he must have been mistaken, because the emperor’s ambassador was not in Venice at the time.)

      By the time Vasari saw the Assunta it was so obscured by an accumulation of dust and candle grease that he guessed it was on canvas and merely reported that it had not been looked after very well and was too dark to make out. When Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the Frari in 1752, he found it ‘most terribly dark but nobly painted’. It remained shrouded in grime and difficult to see against the light of the lancet windows until in 1817, during the Austrian occupation of Venice, the Assunta was removed from its frame and taken to the newly opened Accademia Gallery where it remained until after the First World War. It was displayed, along with other sixteenth-century paintings brought in from religious foundations and palaces in Venice and the Veneto, in the chapter room of the former Scuola della Carità (the first room at the top of the stairs, now hung with Venetian Primitives), where the ceiling was raised above it to accommodate its height.18 The sculptor Antonio Canova, who formally opened the room to the public in 1822, described Titian’s Assunta as the greatest painting in the world. The gallery was thronged. Artists queued up to copy it, writers to describe it. Some imagined they could hear its music.19

      Now cleaned and well lit, Titian’s Assunta is no longer a pilgrimage piece. As happens to all successfully original works of art, its impact has to some extent been diluted by its influence. Titian would be dismayed to know that the more popular painting in the Frari is Giovanni Bellini’s neo-Byzantine Sacred Conversation in the sacristy. But if you stand for a while, perhaps on a winter’s afternoon when you might have the church all to yourself, and watch Titian’s Virgin flying up to heaven beyond the apse, you will notice a detail that sometimes escapes attention: one of the angels flanking God the Father holds a crown. It is with this that He will crown the Virgin, the protector of Venice, as Queen of Heaven, just as He had made Venice, at the end of the long wars of Cambrai, once again queen of cities. It was a time for Allelujas. And if you listen to the painting you may hear a chorus singing in the monks’ choir, accompanied perhaps by both church organs.

      The unveiling took place on 19 May 1518. It was San Bernardino’s day, a public holiday, chosen to allow members of the government to attend. We know the date from Sanudo, whose maddeningly laconic diary entry however tells us nothing more than what we can see from Titian’s signature, ‘Ticianus’, and the inscription on the frame that records Brother Germano’s inspired patronage: ‘In 1516 Fra Germano arranged for the building of his altar to the Virgin Mother of the Eternal Creator assumed into Heaven.’ But Sanudo’s presence at the ceremony indicates that it was an important social event, attended by foreign dignitaries and members of government in their black togas or the brightly coloured robes and stoles worn by those who held high office. The papal legate to Venice, Altobello Averoldi, was evidently impressed: five months later he ordered an altarpiece from Titian for a church in his native city, Brescia. The following year Titian’s first private patron Jacopo Pesaro, to whom Fra Germano had recently conceded patronage rights to an altar in the left nave of the Frari, commissioned Titian to paint the altarpiece for it. Even before the formal unveiling, enthusiastic descriptions of the Assunta in progress may have reached the ears of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, a keen patron of contemporary artists who had, however, so far failed to recognize Titian as a painter of the first order.

      Titian had worked for the duke in 1516, when he lodged with two assistants in the ducal castle from 22 February until the end of March. (The ducal account book of expenditure for that period records that the party was provided with salad, salted meat, oil, chestnuts, oranges, tallow candles, cheese and five measures of wine.) The visit may have had a diplomatic purpose. As the war of Cambrai drew to a close, the Duchy of Ferrara had been linked to its former enemy Venice by the Franco-Venetian treaty negotiated at Blois in the spring of 1513. After the decisive battle at Marignano in 1515, the pope, Leo X, had no choice but to side with the victorious Francis I, who had taken Alfonso under his wing and was conducting exploratory negotiations about the possibility of restoring Reggio and Modena to Ferrara.

      Alfonso, who owed allegiance to both pope and emperor but who had more reason to fear the territorial ambitions of the pope, had minted gold coins the reverses of which were inscribed in Latin with the concluding words of the episode told in the three Synoptic Gospels about a Pharisee who, trying to trick Christ, asked: ‘Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?’ And Christ replied: ‘Show me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered, and said Caesar’s. And He said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.’20 This was the story the duke chose for Titian to paint on the door of a cabinet in which he kept his minted coins and collection of antique Roman coins and medals. It was a very rare subject. Titian’s Tribute Money (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), indeed, was the earliest Italian rendering of it, and he pulled out all the stops to produce a picture that would allude to the antiquarian interests of the Este dynasty and give an added dimension to the precious contents of the cabinet.

      The Tribute Money is Titian’s sleekest, most polished early work. Ridolfi claimed that when the emperor Charles V’s envoy to Ferrara saw it several years later he expressed his surprise that anyone could compete so successfully with Dürer. Vasari – who may have been recording Titian’s opinion rather than his own – described the head of Christ as ‘stupendous and miraculous’, and wrote that all artists who saw it considered it the most perfect painting Titian had ever produced. Although court painters did not normally sign pictures, this was the first of several works for the Duke of Ferrara that Titian, perhaps to emphasize that he was not a court painter, signed ‘TICIANUS F’. He placed his signature on the collar of the Pharisee; and if, as has been suggested,21 this malign figure is a self-portrait, the joke seems remarkably intimate coming from a young painter working for his first foreign prince.

      In 1517 Titian received another diplomatic commission from the Venetian government. It was a painting, now lost, of St George, St Michael and St Theodore, which was sent as an official