Titian

And the End of the Venetian Renaissance

Tom Nichols

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780232270
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Titian is best known for paintings that embodied the tradition of the Venetian Renaissance—but how Venetian was the artist himself? In this study, Tom Nichols probes the tensions between the individualism of Titian's work and the conservative mores of the city, showing how his art undermined the traditional self-suppressing approach to painting in Venice and reflected his engagement with the individualistic cultures emerging in the courts of early modern Europe.
Ranging widely across Titian's long career and varied works, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance outlines his radical innovations to the traditional Venetian altarpiece; his transformation of portraits into artistic creations; and his meteoric breakout from the confines of artistic culture in Venice. Nichols explores how Titian challenged the city's communal values with his competitive professional identity, contending that his intensely personalized way of painting resulted in a departure that effectively brought an end to the Renaissance tradition of painting. Packed with 170 illustrations, this groundbreaking book will change the way people look at Titian and Venetian art history.

REFERENCES

Introduction

1 For Titian’s Pietà see Harold. E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. I: The Religious Paintings (London, 1969), cat. no. 86, pp. 122–3. A similar effect, though balancing ordered and disordered elements in the landscape with running or responsive figures, is evident in Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c. 1648, National Gallery, London). See T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006).

2 See Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr (c. 1526–30, illus. 64, 65), which featured a chaotic figure running headlong out of the picture. Titian’s Magdalene might also reflect his knowledge of fifteenth-century Bolognese precedents such as Niccolò dell’Arca’s rushing figure in the Lamentation Over the Body of Christ (1463, Sta Maria della Vita, Bologna) or Ercole de’ Roberti’s dramatic head of the Crying Magdalene from a lost fresco depicting the Crucifixion (before 1486, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna).

3 Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, CT, and London, 1993), cat. no. 27, pp. 203–7.

4 For the possibility that a 60-cm dado was originally placed at the bottom of the painted field, thus creating a measure of visual disjunction between spectator and image, see S. Sponza, ‘Osservazioni sulle pale di San Giobbe e di San Zaccaria di Giovanni Bellini’, Arte Veneta, 41 (1987), pp. 168–75. See also Tom Nichols, ‘The Cultural Dynamics of Representational Space in Venetian Renaissance Painting’, in Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400–1700, ed. Alexander Cowan (Exeter, 2000), pp. 176–9.

5 For the symbolism of Titian’s painted architecture in the painting see Kate Dorment, ‘Tomb and Testament: Architectural Significance in Titian’s Pietà’, Art Quarterly, 35 (1972), pp. 399–418.

6 See the further discussion in the Conclusion, pp. 201–3.

7 Titian great friend and propagandist, the poet Pietro Aretino, referred to Titian (and other artists) as ‘divine’, as did Ludovico Dolce in the longer title of his book Dialogo della Pittura di M. Lodovico Dolce, intolato l’Aretino . . . of 1557. For further discussion and references see Luba Freedman, Titian’s Portraits Through Aretino’s Lens (University Park, PA, 1995), pp. 145–51. For the Renaissance topos of the divino artista more generally, see Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, CT, and London, 1981), pp. 38–60.

8 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini, annotated by Paola Barocchi (Florence, 1987), vol. VI, p. 166. For further discussion of this passage see chapter Four below, pp. 149–51.

9 For this aspect of Titian’s late style see David Rosand, ‘Titian and the Eloquence of the Brush’, Artibus et Historiae, II/3 (1981), pp. 85–96; ‘The Stroke of the Brush’, in The Meaning of the Mark: Leonardo and Titian (Lawrence, KS, 1988), pp. 49–89.

10 This practice was first noted by Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco: Edizione critica con la ‘Breve Istruzione’, premessa alle ‘ricche minere della pittura veneziana’ (1660), ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice and Rome, 1966), pp. 711–12.

11 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. V: The Final Period (Princeton, NJ, 1971), pp. 149–52 and see discussion below. For Titian’s ongoing rivalry with Michelangelo, see Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), pp. 265–338; Paul Joannides, ‘Titian and Michelangelo / Michelangelo and Titian’, in The Cambridge Companion to Titian, ed. Patricia Meilman (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 121–45.

12 Titian references Michelangelo’s Moses (c. 1513–15, illus. 93) in the statue at the left, a sculpture he had referred to before after seeing it in Rome in 1545–6 (illus. 86, 92).

13 ‘But as the matter dragged on, possibly because, as some say, they [the friars] did not want it [the chapel] to lose the ancient devotion to the Crucifix that is seen there, he did not complete it [the altarpiece].’ Translated from Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte [1648], ed. Detlev von Hadeln (Berlin, 1914), vol. I, p. 206.

14 Charles Hope, ‘A New Document about Titian’s Pietà’, in Sight and Insight: Essays in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians (London, 1994), pp. 153–67.

15 Burial in the Frari was reserved exclusively for leading members of Venice’s patrician elite: doges, senators, soldiers and humanists had monuments there, including Federico Corner, Pietro Bernardo, Francesco Foscari, Niccolò Tron and Francesco Barbaro. For the Venetian patriciate more widely, see Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980); Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth (Urbana, IL, 1986); Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata’, in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore, MD, 2000), pp. 263–94.

16 In order to qualify as an ‘original citizen’ (cittadino originario) of Venice one had to be able to prove abstention from manual activity in a shop for three generations: see Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 99–131.

17 Debra Pincus, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice: Venetian State Imagery in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1999).

18 For Vittoria’s monument, begun by the artist himself in 1565 but only erected after his death in 1602, see Victoria Avery, ‘Alessandro Vittoria: The Michelangelo of Venice?’, in Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 170–77.

19 Nicholas De Marco, ‘Titian’s Pietà: The Living Stone’, Venezia Cinquecento, II/4 (1992), pp. 55–92, who also argues for a deliberate iconographic correspondence between the three altarpieces, based on the Virgin, to whom the Frari is dedicated.

20 It was recorded in Sant’Angelo by Marco Boschini in 1664: see Giovanna Nepi Scirè in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Venice, 2008), p. 308.

21 For a recent account of this sequence of events see Lionello Puppi, Su Tiziano (Milan, 2004), pp. 61–80. But see also Charles Hope, ‘Titian’s Family and the Dispersal of his Estate’, in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, ed. Ferino-Pagden, pp. 29–41, for a disagreement with certain details of Puppi’s interpretation, especially his suggestion that Pomponio’s greed was the main cause of the family dispute over the inheritance.

22 For Ridolfi’s lengthy account of the programme supposedly devised by Venetian painters for Titian’s funeral, see Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, ed. von Hadeln, vol. I, pp. 211–18. See David Rosand, ‘Titian and the Critical Tradition’, in Titian: His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), pp. 1–39. But for the programme as Ridolfi’s own literary invention see Charles Hope, ‘The Early Biographies of Titian’, in Titian 500, ed. Joseph Manca, Studies in the History of Art, 45 (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 170–71. For the homage to Michelangelo in Florence, see The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy’s Homage on His Death in 1564 (facsimile edition of Esequie del Divino Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florence, 1564), ed. and trans. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower (London, 1964).

23 As early as 1583, the lack of an adequate burial monument to Titian was ascribed to the fact that the ‘city was greatly tormented by the terrible plague’. See Raffaello Borghini, Il riposo (Florence, 1583), p. 432.

24 David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1–34.

25 Augusto Gentili, ‘Titian’s Venetian Commissions: Events, Contexts, Images, 1537–1576’, in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, ed. Ferino-Pagden, pp. 43–53. Titian’s main antagonist among the younger Venetian painters was Jacopo Tintoretto; see Tom Nichols, Tintoretto, Tradition and Identity (London, 1999), especially pp. 29–48.

26 Gentile was also knighted by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, probably on his visit to Ferrara in 1469. For his later ennoblement by sultan Mehmed II, see Franz Babinger, ‘Ein vorgeblicher Gnadenbrief Mehemeds II für Gentile Bellni’, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 5 (1962), pp. 85–10...