- Also see: Titian (disambiguation).
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1485 – August 27, 1576), better known as Titian, was the leader of the
16th-century Venetian school of the Italian
Renaissance. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, in the Cadore territory, near Belluno (Veneto), in Most Serene Republic of Venice, and died in Venice. During his
lifetime he was often called Da Cadore, taken from the place of his birth.
Recognized by his contemporaries as "the sun amidst small stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most
versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits and landscapes (two genres that first brought him fame), mythological
and religious subjects. Had he died at the age of forty, he would still have to be regarded as one of the most influential
artists of his time. But he lived on for a further half century, changing his manner so drastically that some critics refuse to
believe that his early and later pieces could have been produced by the same man. What unites the two parts of his career is his
deep interest in colour. His later works may not contain vivid, luminous tints as his early pieces do, yet their loose brushwork
and subtlety of polychromatic modulations have no precedents in the history of Western art.
Biography
Early years
No one is sure of the exact date of Titian's birth; when old he claimed it was 1477 in a letter to Philip II, but this seems most unlikely.[1] Other writers contemporary to his old age give figures for his age which would equate to birth-dates
between 1473 to after 1482, but most modern scholars believe a date nearer 1490 is more likely. He was the eldest of a family of
four and son of Gregorio Vecelli, a distinguished councilor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia. His father was superintendent of
the castle of Pieve di Cadore and also managed local mines for their owners.[2] Many relatives, including Titian's grandfather, were
notaries, and the family were well-established in the area, which was ruled by Venice.
At the age of about ten to twelve he and his brother Francesco (who perhaps followed later) were sent to an uncle in Venice to
find an apprenticeship with a painter. The minor painter, Sebastian Zuccato, whose sons became well-known mosaicists, and who may
have been a family friend, arranged for the brothers to enter the studio of the elderly Gentile
Bellini, from which they later transferred to that of his brother Giovanni
Bellini.[2] At that time the Bellinis,
especially Giovanni, were the leading artists in the city. There he found a group of young men about his own age, among them
Giovanni Palma da Serinalta, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano Luciani, and Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione. Francesco Vecellio, his younger brother, later became a
painter of some note in Venice.
This early portrait (c. 1512) was long wrongly believed to be of
Ariosto; it is
more likely a self-portrait, and the composition was borrowed by
Rembrandt for his own
self-portraits.
A fresco of Hercules on the Morosini Palace is said to have
been one of his earliest works; others were the Virgin and Child (the Bellini-esque so-called Gypsy Madonna), in Vienna, and the
Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth (from the convent of S. Andrea), now in the Accademia,
Venice.
Titian joined Giorgione as an assistant, but many contemporary critics already found his work more impressive, for example in
the exterior frescoes (now lost) that they did for the Fondacio dei Tedeschi, and their relationship evidently had a significant
element of rivalry. Distinguishing between their work at this period remains a subject of scholarly controversy. The earliest
known work of Titian, the little Ecce Homo of the Scuola di San Rocco, was long regarded
as the work of Giorgione. The same confusion or uncertainty is connected with more than one of the Sacred
Conversations.
The two young masters were likewise recognized as the two leaders of their new school of "arte moderna", that is of painting
made more flexible, freed from symmetry and the remnants of hieratic conventions still to be found in the works of Giovanni
Bellini.
In 1507-1508 Giorgione was commissioned by the state to execute frescoes on the re-erected Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Titian and
Morto da Feltre worked along with him, and some fragments of Titian's paintings remain.
Some of their work is known, in part, through the engraving of Fontana.
Titian's talent in fresco is shown in those he painted in 1511 at Padua in the Carmelite church and in the Scuola del Santo, some of which have been preserved, among them the Meeting at
the Golden Gate, and three scenes from the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the Murder of a Young Woman by Her Husband,
A Child Testifying to Its Mother's Innocence, and The Saint Healing the Young Man with a Broken Limb.
From Padua in 1512, Titian returned to Venice; and in 1513 he obtained a broker's patent in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi
(state-warehouse for the German merchants), termed La Sanseria or Senseria (a privilege much
coveted by rising or risen artists), and became superintendent of the government works, being especially charged to complete the
paintings left unfinished by Giovanni Bellini in the hall of the great council in the
ducal palace. He set up an atelier on the Grand Canal at S. Samuele, the precise
site being now unknown. It was not until 1516, upon the death of Bellini, that he came into actual enjoyment of his patent. At
the same time he entered an exclusive arrangement for painting. The patent yielded him a good annuity of 20 crowns and exempted
him from certain taxes — he being bound in return to paint likenesses of the successive Doges of his time at the fixed price of eight crowns each. The actual number he executed was
five.
Growth
It took Titian two years (1516–1518) to complete the great fresco of
Assunta, whose
dynamic three-tier composition and gorgeous color scheme established him as the preeminent painter north of Rome.
Giorgione died in 1510 and the aged Bellini, 1516, leaving Titian unrivaled in the Venetian School. For sixty years he was to
be the undisputed master of Venetian painting, and as it were, the painter laureate of the Republic Serenissime. As early as 1516
he succeeded his old master Bellini in receiving a pension from the Senate.
During this period (1516-1530), which may be called the period of his mastery and maturity, the artist moved on from his early
Giorgionesque style, undertook larger and more complex subjects and for the first time
attempted a monumental style.
In 1518 he produced for the high altar of the church of the
Frari, his famous masterpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin, still in situ. This extraordinary piece of colorism,
executed on a grand scale rarely before seen in Italy, excited a sensation. The Signoria took
note, and observed that Titian was neglecting his work in the hall of the great council.
The pictorial structure of the Assumption — that of uniting in the same composition two or three scenes superimposed on
different levels, earth and heaven, the temporal and the infinite — was continued in a series of works such as the retable of San
Domenico at Ancona (1520), the retable of Brescia (1522), and
the retable of San Niccolò (1523), in the Vatican Museum), each time attaining to a
higher and more perfect conception, finally reaching a classic formula in the Pesaro
Madonna, (c. 1519-1526), at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei
Frari in Venice. This perhaps is his most studied work, whose patiently developed plan is set forth with supreme display
of order and freedom, originality and style. Here Titian gave a new conception of the traditional groups of donors and holy
persons moving in aerial space, the plans and different degrees set in an architectural framework.
Titian was now at the height of his fame, and towards 1521, following the production of a figure of St. Sebastian for the
papal legate in Brescia (a work of which there are numerous replicas), purchasers pessed for his work.
To this period belongs a more extraordinary work, The Death of St. Peter Martyr (1530), formerly in the Dominican
Church of San Zanipolo, and destroyed by an Austrian shell
in 1867. Only copies and engravings of this proto-Baroque
picture remain; it combined extreme violence and a landscape, mostly consisting of a great tree, that pressed into the scene and
seems to accentuate the drama in a way that looks forward to the Baroque.
The artist simultaneously continued his series of small Madonnas which he treated amid
beautiful landscapes in the manner of genre pictures or poetic pastorals, the Virgin with the Rabbit in the
Louvre being the finished type of these pictures. Another work of the same period, also in the
Louvre, is the Entombment. This was also the period of the large mythological scenes for the studiolo of
Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara, such as the famous
Bacchanals of the Prado, and the Bacchus and Ariadne of London, "...perhaps the most
brilliant productions of the neo-pagan culture or "Alexandrianism" of the Renaissance, many times imitated but never surpassed
even by Rubens himself."[3] Finally this was the period when the artist composed the half-length figures and busts of
young women, probably courtesans, such as Flora of the Uffizi, or The Young Woman at Her Toilet in the Louvre.
Titian's state portrait of Emperor Charles V
at Mühlberg (1548) established a new
genre, that of the grand equestrian portrait. The composition is steeped both in the Roman tradition of
equestrian sculpture and in the medieval representations of an ideal Christian knight, but the
weary figure and face have a subtlety few such representations attempt.
In 1525 he married a lady named Cecilia, thereby legitimizing their first child, Pomponio, and two (or perhaps three) others
followed, including Titian's favorite, Orazio, who became his assistant. About 1526 he became acquainted, and soon exceedingly
intimate, with Pietro Aretino, the influential and audacious figure who features so
strangely in the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to Gonzaga, duke of Mantua.
In August 1530 his wife died giving birth to a daughter, Lavinia, and with his three children he moved house, and got his
sister Orsa to come from Cadore and take charge of the household. The mansion, difficult to find now, is in the Bin Grande, then
a fashionable suburb, at the extreme end of Venice, on the sea, with beautiful gardens and a view towards Murano.
Maturity
During the next period (1530-1550), Titian developed the style introduced by his dramatic Death of St. Peter Martyr.
The Venetian government, dissatisfied with Titian's neglect of the work for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the
money which he had received, and Pordenone, his rival of recent years, was installed in his
place. However, at the end of a year Pordenone died, and Titian, who meanwhile applied himself diligently to painting in the hall
the Battle of Cadore, was reinstated. This major battle scene, was lost along with so many other major works by Venetian
artists by the great fire which destroyed all the old pictures in the great chambers of the Doge's Palace in 1577. It represented in life-size the moment at which the Venetian general,
D'Alviano attacked the enemy with horses and men crashing down into a stream, and
was the artist's most important attempt at a tumultuous and heroic scene of movement to rival Raphael's Battle of Constantine and the equally ill-fated Battle of Cascina of Michelangelo and The Battle of Anghiari of Leonardo (both
unfinished). There remains only a poor, incomplete copy at the Uffizi, and a mediocre engraving by Fontana. The Speech of the
Marquis del Vasto (Madrid, 1541) was also partly destroyed by fire. But this period of the master's work is still represented
by the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin (Venice, 1539), one of his most popular canvasses, and by the Ecce Homo
(Vienna, 1541). Despite its loss, the painting had a great influence on Bolgnese art and Rubens, both in the handling of details and the general effect of horses, soldiers, lictors,
powerful stirrings of crowds at the foot of a stairway, lit by torches with the flapping of banners against the sky.
Titian's unmatched handling of color is exemplified by his
Danaë, one of several
mythological paintings (or "poems" as the painter called them) commissioned by
Philip II of
Spain in 1554. Although
Michelangelo adjudged this piece deficient from the point of
view of drawing, Titian's studio reproduced it for other patrons more than once.
Less successful were the pendentives of the cupola at Sta. Maria della Salute (Death of
Abel, Sacrifice of Abraham, David and Goliath). These violent scenes viewed in perspective from below — like
the famous pendentives of the Sistine Chapel — were by their very nature in unfavorable
situations. They were nevertheless much admired and imitated, Rubens among others applying this system to his forty ceilings (the
sketches only remain) of the Jesuit church at Antwerp.
At this time also, the time of his visit to Rome, the artist began his series of reclining
Venuses (The Venus of Urbino of the Uffizi, Venus and Love at the same
museum, Venus and the Organ-Player, Madrid), in which is recognized the effect or the direct reflection of the impression
produced on the master by contact with ancient sculpture. Giorgione had already dealt with the
subject in his Dresden picture, finished by Titian, but here a purple drapery substituted for a landscape background changed, by
its harmonious coloring, the whole meaning of the scene.
Titian had from the beginning of his career shown himself to be a masterful portrait-painter, in works like La Bella
(Eleanora de Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, at the Pitti Palace). He painted the likenesses of princes, or Doges, cardinals or
monks, and artists or writers. "...no other painter was so successful in extracting from each physiognomy so many traits at once
characteristic and beautiful," according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Among portrait-painters Titian is compared to
Rembrandt and Velásquez, with the interior life of
the former, and the clearness, certainty, and obviousness of the latter.
The last-named qualities are sufficiently manifested in the Portrait of Paul III of
Naples, or the sketch of the same pope and his two nephews, the Portrait
of Aretino of the Pitti Palace, the Eleanora of Portugal (Madrid), and the series of King Charles V of the same museum, the Charles V with a Greyhound (1533), and
especially the Charles V at Mühlberg (1548), an equestrian picture which as a symphony of purples is perhaps the ne plus
ultra of the art of painting.
In 1532 after painting a portrait of the emperor Charles V in Bologna he was made a Count Palatine and knight of the Golden
Spur. His children were also made nobles of the Empire, which for a painter was an exceptional honor.
The Rape of Europa (1562) is a bold diagonal composition which was admired and
copied by
Rubens. In contrast to the clarity of Titian's early works, it is almost
baroque in its blurred lines, swirling colors, and vibrant brushstrokes.
As a matter of professional and worldly success his position from about this time is regarded as equal only to that of
Raphael, Michelangelo, and at a later date
Rubens. In 1540 he received a pension from D'Avalos, marquis del Vasto, and an annuity
of 200 crowns (which was afterwards doubled) from Charles V from the treasury of Milan.
Another source of profit, for he was always aware of money, was a contract obtained in 1542 for supplying grain to Cadore,
where he visited almost every year and where he was both generous and influential.
Titian had a favorite villa on the neighboring Manza Hill, from which (it may be inferred) he made his chief observations of
landscape form and effect. The so-called Titian's mill, constantly discernible in his studies, is at Collontola, near
Belluno.[4]
He visited Rome in 1546, and obtained the freedom of the city — his immediate predecessor in that honour having been
Michelangelo in 1537. He could at the same time have succeeded the painter Sebastiano del Piombo in his lucrative office as holder of the piombo or Papal seal, and he was prepared to take holy orders for the purpose; but the project
lapsed through his being summoned away from Venice in 1547 to paint Charles V and others in Augsburg. He was there again in 1550, and executed the portrait of Philip
II which was sent to England and proved useful in Philip's suit for the hand of Queen
Mary.
Final years
In Titian's later works, the forms lose their solidity and melt into the lush texture of shady, shimmering colors and unsettling
atmospheric effects. In addition to energetic brushwork, Titian was said to put paint on with his fingers toward the completion
of a painting.
During the last twenty-five years of his life (1550-1576) the artist worked mainly for Philip II and as a portrait-painter and
he became more self-critical, an insatiable perfectionist, keeping some pictures in his studio for ten years, never wearying of
returning to them and retouching them, constantly adding new expressions at once more refined, concise, and subtle. He also
finished off many copies of earlier works of his by his pupils, giving rise to many problems of attribution and priority among
versions of his works, which were also very widely copied and faked outside his studio, during his lifetime and afterwards.
For each of the problems which he successively undertook he furnished a new and more perfect formula. He never again equaled
the emotion and tragedy of the Crowning with Thorns (Louvre), in the expression of the
mysterious and the divine he never equaled the poetry of the Pilgrims of Emmaus, while in superb and heroic brilliancy he
never again executed anything more grand than The Doge Grimani adoring Faith (Venice, Doge's Palace), or the Trinity, of Madrid.
On the other hand from the standpoint of flesh tints, his most moving pictures are those of his old age, the Dan of
Naples and of Madrid, the Antiope of the Louvre, the Rape of Europa (Boston, Gardner collection), etc. He even attempted problems of chiaroscuro in
fantastic night effects (Martyrdom of St. Laurence, Church of the Jesuits, Venice; St. Jerome, Louvre). In the
domain of the real he always remained equally strong, sure, and master of himself; his portraits of Philip II (Madrid), those of
his daughter, Lavinia, and those of himself are numbered among his masterpieces.
Titian had engaged his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio
Sarcinelli of Serravalle. She had succeeded her aunt Orsa, then deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly
income that Titian made by this time, placed her on a corresponding footing. The marriage took place in 1554. She died in
childbirth in 1560.
Like so many of his late works, Titian's last painting, the
Pietà, is a dramatic scene of
suffering in a nocturnal setting. It was apparently intended for his own tomb chapel.
He was at the Council of Trent towards 1555, of which his admirable picture or
finished sketch in the Louvre bears record. Titian's friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate, the
sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, in 1570. In September 1565 Titian went to
Cadore and designed the decorations for the church at Pieve, partly executed by his pupils. One of these is a Transfiguration,
another an Annunciation (now in S. Salvatore, Venice), inscribed
Titianus fecit, by way of protest (it is said) against the disparagement of some persons who cavilled at the veteran's
failing handicraft.
He continued to accept commissions to the last. He had selected as the place for his burial the chapel of the Crucifix in the
church of the Fran; and, in return for a grave, he offered the Franciscans a picture of the
Pietà, representing himself and his son Orazio before the Saviour, another figure in the
composition being a sibyl. This work he nearly finished; but some differences arose regarding it, and he then settled to be
interred in his native Pieve.
Titian was extremely, and famously, old when the plague raging in Venice seized him,
and he died on 27 August 1576. He was the only victim of that
plague to be given a church burial and was interred in the Frari (Santa
Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), as at first intended, and his Pietà was finished by Palma the Younger. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di Ca' Pesaro. No memorial marked
his grave, until much later the Austrian rulers of Venice commissioned Canova to provide
the large monument.
Immediately after Titian's own death, his son and pictorial assistant, Orazio, died of the same epidemic. His sumptuous
mansion was plundered during the plague by thieves.
Printmaking
Titian himself never attempted engraving, but he was very conscious of the importance of
printmaking as a means of further expanding his reputation. In the period 1517–1520 he
designed a number of woodcuts, including an enormous and impressive one of The Crossing of
the Red Sea, and collaborated with Domenico Campagnola and others, who produced
further prints based on his paintings and drawings. Much later he provided drawings
based on his paintings to Cornelius Cort from the Netherlands, who brilliantly engraved
them.
Family
The Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence (c. 1565–1570) is thought to depict Titian, his son Orazio, and a young
cousin, Marco Vecellio.
Several other artists of the Vecelli family followed in the wake of Titian. Francesco
Vecellio, his elder brother, was introduced to painting by Titian (it is said at the age of twelve, but chronology will
hardly admit of this), and painted in the church of S. Vito in Cadore a picture of the titular saint armed. This was a noteworthy
performance, of which Titian (the usual story) became jealous; so Francesco was diverted from painting to soldiering, and
afterwards to mercantile life.
Marco Vecellio, called Marco di Tiziano, Titian's nephew, born in 1545, was constantly with
the master in his old age, and, learned his methods of work. He has left some able productions in the ducal palace, the
Meeting of Charles V. and Clement VII. in 1529 ; in S. Giacomo di Rialto,
an Annunciation ; in SS. Giovani e Paolo, Christ Fulminant. A son of Marco, named Tiziano (or Tizianello),
painted early in the 17th century.
From a different branch of the family came Fabrizio di Ettore, a painter who died in 1580. His
brother Cesare, who also left some pictures, is well known by his book of engraved costumes, Abiti antichi e moderni.
Tommaso Vecelli, also a painter, died in 1620. There was another relative, Girolamo Dante, who,
being a scholar and assistant of Titian, was called Girolamo di Tiziano. Various pictures of his
were touched up by the master, and are difficult to distinguish from originals.
Few of the pupils and assistants of Titian became well-known in their own right; for some being his assistant was probably a
lifetime career. Paris Bordone and Bonifazio were two of
superior excellence. El Greco (or Dominikos Theotokopoulos) was said (by Giulio Clovio) to have been employed by the master in his last years.
Trivia
The color titian is derived from the artist's frequent use of brownish orange, especially for the hair of his early
idealized portraits of courtesans.
Notes
- ^ Cecil Gould, The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools, National Gallery
Catalogues, London 1975, ISBN 0947645225
- ^ a b David Jaffé (ed), Titian, The National Gallery Company/Yale, London 2003, ISBN 1
857099036
- ^
- ^ R. F. Heath, Life of Titan, page 5.
In Mid July 2007 a previously unknown portrait rumoured to be a Titian work was sold for a little over £200,000 at a country
auctioneers in Leicestershire, UK. Stories appearing in the UK media give the portrait an estimated value of £5,000,000. See:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article2100048.ece for
more...
See also
External links
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In Mid July 2007 a previously unknown portrait rumoured to be a Titian work was sold for a little over £200,000 at a country
auctioneers in Leicestershire, UK. Stories appearing in the UK media give the portrait an estimated value of £5,000,000. See:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article2100048.ece for
more...
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