Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale
none of his surviving portraits that have been hopefully identified as Ariosto – the Man with a Quilted Sleeve, and the portraits of men in Indianapolis (Herron Art Institute) and New York (Metropolitan Museum) – look anything like the woodcut portrait, or for that matter like each other.
They may not have known one another particularly well in the 1520s when both men came and went to and from the court where Ariosto was often employed as an extraordinary ambassador. They were, however, certainly aware of one another, and shared, as well as a vigorously modern spirit, similar tastes in feminine beauty. The golden hair, dark eyes and eyebrows of some of Titian’s models are the features that Ariosto most admired in women. For the last edition of Orlando Furioso he added a new story, in which the erotic charms of the heroine, Olimpia – her eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth, shoulders, hair, breasts, belly, hips, thighs and ‘Those other parts which to conceal she tries’15 – seem to echo the brazen sexuality of the women Titian painted for the Duke of Ferrara.
On 24 June 1519, in the summer before Titian came to Ferrara to finish his Worship of Venus, Lucrezia Borgia died in childbirth of puerperal fever. She was thirty-nine and had borne Alfonso eight children, four of whom would outlive him. Alfonso was beside her at her deathbed and was said to have fainted at her funeral. Nevertheless, at forty-three he knew himself well enough to see that without a consort he would return to his old whoring ways, which, according to his contemporary biographer,16 he realized ‘would not be good for his reputation nor would it be safe for him to stain the honoured families of citizens with seductions and adultery’. So he took ‘as his woman a person of decent habits and of dignified bearing who was, like himself, very fecund’. The woman was Laura Eustochia Dianti, known as la bella berettarina because she was the daughter of a hat maker. Nobody knew whether the duke ever made her his legitimate duchess. Vasari and Pietro Aretino thought they were married, but Alfonso described their two sons, born in 1527 and 1530 – and both confusingly named Alfonso – as the natural children of an unmarried woman. Titian’s splendid (but now very ruined) Portrait of Laura Dianti (Kreuzlingen, Klisters Collection) could have been painted late in her first pregnancy.17 At a time when childbirth was dangerous, Alfonso, who had lost both his wives to puerperal fever, must have feared for Laura’s life and requested from Titian a record of her beauty. Whether or not she was the legitimate Duchess of Ferrara, the bleached skin in Titian’s portrait, which he enjoyed contrasting with the black face of her charming little Ethiopian page, was a fashion that signified patrician purity, while her magnificent but provocatively dishevelled dress suggests a favoured mistress. Her piled-up hair is about to escape the pearl and gold headdress fashioned in the shape of a spray of laurel leaves. She has pushed up one sleeve of her jewel-studded blue dress, where Titian placed his signature on the armband.18
In the November after Titian’s arrival in Ferrara he and Dosso Dossi made a short study visit to nearby Mantua, where they admired the Gonzaga Mantegnas and the paintings in Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the ducal palace. Alfonso, who had fallen seriously ill earlier in the month, was somewhat recovered when the two painters returned to his court on 22 November, although his lack of appetite worried his doctors. In January 1520 his condition was still weak enough to prompt Leo X to sponsor an attack on Ferrara and even to try to bribe a corruptible guardian of one of the gates to the city. The plot was foiled by Alfonso’s nephew, Federico Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua, who had close papal connections and sent a warning through to Ferrara.
The Worship of Venus was finished by mid-January, when Titian returned to Venice. It is a close transcription of one of the pictures described in Demetrios Moschos’s Italian translation of Philostratus’ Imagines, which had been commissioned by Alfonso’s sister Isabella d’Este: a classical divertissement in which rollicking little cupids imitate the joys and mysteries of every kind of adult erotic experience for a Renaissance patron who imagined he could see and hear in it the very heartbeat of the antique world. To one side of the action two courtesans dressed as nymphs worship a shrine of their patron goddess, the unchaste Venus.19 The apples with which the cupids play their love games – plucking them from the tree tops, gathering them in bejewelled baskets, biting into them, playing catch with them – would have been interpreted by contemporaries as euphemisms for the female pudenda: in classical texts to catch an apple meant to be smitten with love. One of the cupids has captured a hare, symbol of fecundity, and seems to be riding it. Another bites the ear of his companion, an indication of rule-breaking or homoerotic love, in contrast with the cupids in the foreground happily throwing and catching their apples.
When Raphael died on 6 April without having made a start on the Triumph of Bacchus, the duke was so satisfied with Titian’s work that he was perhaps not as distressed as he might have been. Raphael’s pupils offered to take over his commission, but Alfonso refused the offer, demanded the return of his advance of fifty ducats, and transferred the order to Titian, from whom, however, he requested a different, more unusual episode from the Bacchanalian myth, the story of Bacchus and Ariadne. In Titian, however, the Duke of Ferrara had met his match. The painter’s sense of humour was subtler than the duke’s; he had better manners and more charm. He was every bit as wily and stubborn as his aristocratic patron, and he continued, just as he had started, to oblige him whenever he asked for small errands while working on the big commissions in his own good time. Now in his early thirties, his international reputation established by the Assunta, and the Worship of Venus admired by Alfonso d’Este’s circle of influential friends, Titian knew that the duke needed him as much as he needed the duke. And the duke, who would often be reduced to cajoling, threatening and trying to bribe Titian with favours – anything to get him to finish and deliver his paintings – never again referred to him as ‘the painter’.
… Mad for you, Ariadne, flushed with love …
And, all around, the maenads pranced in frenzy …
Tossing their heads; some of them brandishing
The sacred vine-wreathed rod, some bandying
Gobbets of mangled bullock, others twining
Their waists with belts of writhing snakes …
CATULLUS, CARMINA, FIRST CENTURY BC1
He who wraps the vision in lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, until form be half lost in pattern, may, as did Titian in his ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, create a talisman as powerfully charged with intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city seen on Patmos.
W. B. YEATS, CITED BY RONALD SCHUCHARD, ‘YEATS, TITIAN AND THE NEW FRENCH PAINTING’, 1989
As Alfonso d’Este’s ambassador in Venice, Jacopo Tebaldi was required to spend much of his time shadowing Titian. When Titian was away Tebaldi made it his business to discover where, why and for how long. When Titian was in Venice he haunted his studio. He brought messages from the duke, and sent back up-to-the-minute reports of Titian’s replies, questions, moods and current state of health. The more Titian procrastinated, the more obsessively the duke pursued the painter he now recognized as an unequalled master, and the more Tebaldi had to use his diplomatic skills to see through Titian’s excuses and think up ways of persuading him to deliver the paintings he had promised the duke. Tebaldi was no more interested in art than most ambassadors then or now, but he was a good detective. Not all of his correspondence with the duke survives, but enough remains to allow us, too, to follow Titian, sometimes week by week, over the next years; and to understand the forceful, self-assured, shrewd and charismatic personality of an artist born in a small house in the mountains who from then on would be pursued by the powerful rulers of his day.2 Although we know nothing for certain