Titian His World and His Legacy 9780231898485

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Titian: His World and His Legacy

Number 2 1 Bampton Lectures in America Delivered at Columbia University

TITIAN

His World and His Legacy Edited by DAVID ROSAND

New York

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Titian: His World and His Legacy

1.1

Titian, Self-portrait Berlin-Dahlem, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie

DAVID ROSAND

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TITIAN A N D THE CRITICAL TRADITION

When Titian died, probably at the age of eighty-eight, on August 27, 1576, the plague was raging through Venice. Special permission of the Venetian government was required in order to accord the great painter the ceremonial burial denied to the mass of victims of the pestilence. According to the oldest printed sources—beginning with Francesco Sansovino's account published in 1581—the master was buried beneath the venerated Altar of the Crucifix in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, although no trace of his remains was found during the nineteenth-century excavations for the foundation of his modern monument there (figs. 1.2, 1.3). This was the site for which Titian had earlier been negotiating with the monks of the Frari and for which he had intended the altarpiece of the Pietà (fig. 1.4); those negotiations seem to have broken down, however, and the canvas remained, not quite fully finished, in the painter's studio at his death.1 The plague also frustrated the plans of the Venetian painters to pay full honors to their departed capoxuola with a public funeral and obsequies at the church of their patron saint, San Luca. In clear emulation of the Florentines' tribute to Michelangelo, they had conceived an elaborate catafalque in memory of Titian. 2 This was to have been a temporary structure of eight Ionic columns supporting a frieze decorated with a series of alternating putto heads and crossed bones. Above this cornice would have been putti with extinguished torches, a sign of mourning, alternating with burning lamps ("fatte all'uso antico"). A single female figure was to have crowned the entire structure, her head bowed and her face covered by a long mantle: this was Pittura, the personification of painting, shown mourning her great loss; from the chain about her neck hung a mask, and the emblematic inscription at the base of her throne read, I M I T A T I O . 3 Below, within this monument draped in black and edged in gold, was to stand a statue of Titian himself, dressed "in habito di Cavaliere," wearing sword and spurs, badges of his status as Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur. The rest of the figurai decoration—ranging from further personifications and allegories to scenes from the master's biography ("le attioni più degne di Titiano")—would have filled out this celebration of Titian as the most honored painter of the age. And although the program—preserved, according to Ridolfi, among the records of the Venetian painters' guild—was never actually realized, there can be no doubt that, for all its rhetoric, it reflected accurately the esteem in which Titian was universally held. No other artist, not even Michelangelo, enjoyed such an international fame and clientele. From

1.2

Venice, Santa Maria dei Frari, Monument to Titian

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Venice, Santa Maria dei Frari, Monument to Titian (detail)

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Titian, Pietà Venice, Galleria dell'Accademia

his base in Venice Titian reached out with his brush to dominate the entire European scene. Two facts, chronologically proximate, offer us some sense of this range, of the social extremes of his career. In 1531 Titian was elected to a twelve-member commission of the painters' guild in Venice, charged with overseeing the distribution of a small charitable fund left to the guild to provide modest—indeed, very modest—dowries of twenty ducats each to the daughters of twelve impoverished 4

TITIAN AND THE CRITICAL

TRADITION

brothers of the Arte dei Depentori. 4 (Parenthetically, we may note that when in 1555 Titian married off his own daughter, Lavinia, he provided her with a noble dowry of 1,400 ducats. 5 ) T w o years after his election to that charitable committee, on May 10, 1533, Titian was ennobled by die Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (fig. 1.5), who conferred upon the painter the tides of Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur. 6 Already the official painter to the Republic of Venice, Titian now became as well official court painter to the most powerful ruler in Europe (fig. 1.6), the new Apelles to the new Alexander the Great. 7 And just that parallel, redounding to the fame of both parties and explicidy cited in the patent of nobility, assumed in this case a more than rhetorical significance: from then on only Titian would paint the features of the emperor, and the moving full-length portrait of the seated Charles (fig. 1.7) seems to document the special bond of sympathy that developed between those two extraordinary individuals. Even in his latest self-portrait (fig. 1.8), probably executed toward 1570, Titian continued proudly to wear the golden chain of honor that had been given to him by the emperor. 8 With the courdy know-how of a Raphael and the almost arrogant self-confidence of a Michelangelo, Titian seemed to have achieved the social status that had been a goal of Renaissance painters at least since Alberti's first articulation of such a program in 1435. Titian's name was synonymous with the art of painting; acclaimed the highest representative of the art, he seemed its very embodiment, in effect, becoming himself the personification of painting. 9 Indeed, the major issues of cinquecento art criticism were expressed in just such personified terms: Michelangelo and Titian—the chief exponents of the Tuscan and Venetian schools, respectively, or, in a slightly different context, of the arts of sculpture (fig. 1.9) and painting (fig. 1.10)—embodied the complementary, yet antithetical, principles of disegno and colorito—two of the components, along with invenzione, of the standard definition of painting. 10 Perhaps no concept of Italian art criticism in the sixteenth century was so laden with significance and so fruitfully ambiguous as the term disegno. Referring both to the art of drawing in the strict technical sense, draftsmanship, as well as to a much larger and more fundamental aesthetic principle, disegno was simultaneously a constituent element in the definition of painting and, paradoxically, the essential foundation of that art—indeed, of all the fine arts: in Giorgio Vasari's influential formulation, disegno was the "father" of the three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting. This notion, formed on the double experience of certain Platonizing tendencies in Renaissance aesthetic thought and of the grand tradition of central Italian fresco decoration, asserted the theoretical and practical primacy of drawing. "Proceeding from the intellect," in Vasari's words, it was the key to the entire imaginative process, the medium of the painter's thought as well as of its concrete expression. From the initial conception of an idea, through its formal statement in sketches, to its final execution in the finished cartoon, the creative procedure is defined essentially in terms of disegno. According to this system, the quality of its drawing provides the critical measure of a painting, and the significant criteria of final judgment for an observer like Vasari are basically graphic and plastic values—line and modeling, form and proportion (fig 1 . 1 1 ) . T o the painter's primary concern, the representation of the human figure, color contributes only superficially to the basic design. Vasari quite explicitly defines painting as "a plane, the surface of which is covered by fields of color," which, significantly, are bounded by well-defined contours. Painting in Venice, developing its own indigenous traditions and responding to the exigencies of a unique environment, obviously failed to conform to such critical presuppositions—predicated, as they were, upon the use of a smooth ground, one that would encourage and preserve the clarity of a fine contour. T h e Venetians, instead, had begun to explore and exploit the physical qualities of the oil medium and the rough texture of canvas. Led by Giorgione, they had opened up new ex5

1.5

After T i t i a n , Charles V, woodcut M i d d l e t o w n , Davison Art C e n t e r , W e s l e y a n U n i v e r s i t y

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Titian, Equestrian Portrait of Charles V Madrid, Museo del Prado

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Titian, Charles V in an Armchair Munich, Alte Pinakothek

Titian, Self-portrait Madrid, Museo del Prado

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Michelangelo, David Florence. Galleria dell'Accademia

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Bronzino, Allegory with Venus and Cupid London, National Gallery

TITIAN

AND THE CRITICAL

1.12

TRADITION

Titian, Danae Madrid, Museo del Prado

pressive possibilities: paint stroked over the woven ground left a broken, interrupted mark, informing the surface itself with a new vibrancy (fig. 1.12). Such a style had little use for the precise contour, the discretely bounded forms of the cartoon; compositional ideas were developed and changed, decisions made and modified, not in an ever more refined sequence of preparatory drawings on paper, culminating in the finished cartoon, but on the canvas itself, in the actual course of execution—as has been so dramatically documented by x-ray investigation of so many paintings by Giorgione and, particularly, Titian (figs. 1 . 1 3 , 1 . 1 4 ) . " The full potential of this manner of painting directly on the canvas—without that determining guidance of thorough graphic preparation—would be most eloquently realized in the pittura di macchia of Titian's late style. Vasari, despite his recognition of the historical significance of Giorgione's technical innovations and his response to the example of Titian's art, was constantly frustrated in his attempts to deal critically with the alternative of Venice's painterly aesthetic. Impatient with the Venetians for their •3

TITIAN

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AND THE CRITICAL

TRADITION

Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, x-ray composite

practical circumvention of drawing, for their failure to master the fundamentals of disegno—a failure that they tried to hide under the superficial appeal of color—he finally pitied them as an underprivileged group, attributing their collective weaknesses to the fact that they had been deprived of the opportunity of perfecting their art by the direct study of the marvels of Rome, modern as well as ancient. 12 Not even Titian escaped this stigma. Several times in Vasari's life of the master, praise for his work is seriously undermined by criticism of his Venetian faults—criticism that the biographer strategically expresses by quotation, offering it as the opinion of other artists, of Sebastiano del Piombo and, most powerfully, Michelangelo himself. Titian, it is agreed, stands as the undisputed master of the imitation of nature with colors, but it is surely a shame that, like his fellow Venetians, he never learned to draw properly, that he never came to Rome as a young artist, when he might have profited from the study of the best of antiquity and the modern era; without that inspiring experience '5

DAVID ROSAND no one can expect to "improve upon the things he copies from life, giving them that grace and perfection that elevate art above die order of nature," which unfortunately did not endow all its creations with beauty. Without distgno and Roman study, the Venetian painter was condemned to practice a lower form of his art, to be merely a faithful copyist of nature—-pictor simia naturae.13 Raw naturalism, then, the direct imitation of nature without the corrective guide of antique models, was the corollary vice of the Venetians. Venetian apologists, however, did not retreat on this issue; rather, they accepted the challenge and defended and exalted Titian's art in precisely these terms. Within the trinitarian definition of painting—invenzione, distgno, colorito—distgno was replaced by colorito as the fundamental component. And in coloring, Titian, of course, was without peer: so declared Lodovico Dolce, whose Dialogo delta pittura was published in 1557 in response to the first edition of Vasari's Lives and on behalf of the entire cultural community of Venice. "For Titian walks in step with nature," Dolce continues, "so that every one of his figures is alive, moves, its flesh quivers. In his works Titian has displayed no empty charm, but the required appropriateness of colors; not artificial ornament, but masterly concreteness; not crudity, but the mellowness and softness of nature" 14 (fig. 1.15). Deliberately setting up a Michelangelo-Titian paragone, Dolce distinguishes two basic figural modes: one muscular (fig. 1.16), the other more delicate. And he then quite understandably proceeds to declare that the latter presents the greater challenge to the painter; the painting of flesh demands control of softness, and that is the most difficult part of painting. The blending of colors must be diffused and unified in such a way that it appears natural; contour lines should be avoided, since they do not occur in nature—and painting had already been defined as "nothing other than the imitation of nature." 15 Dolce's pre- and proscriptions are calculated to define an aesthetic standard based upon the assumed superiority of Titian. His critical rhetoric derives generally from the traditional language of Renaissance criticism; but, as acknowledged in the tide of his dialogue, PAretino, the specific inspiration for much of this paean to Titian is the painter's close friend and publicist, Pietro Aretino (fig. 1.17). One of these professional writers, Dolce or Aretino, may have been responsible for the selection of an appropriate impresa for the noble painter. The device chosen, very likely inspired by a commonplace in the ancient biographies of Vergil, was that of a bear licking her still unformed cub into shape—the legend of the maternal molding becoming a metaphor of artistic creation—and the motto accompanying this image read, NATVRA POTENTIOR ARS, "Art more powerful than nature." The identification of this device (fig. 1.18) as Titian's goes back at least to 1562, when it was so published in Battista Pittoni's engraved anthology of Imprest di diversi prencipt . . . e efaltri personaggi et buomini letterati et illustri. The verse below, by Dolce, expectedly extolls its subject as the culmination of the ancient and traditional competition between nature and art: but Titian has triumphed over art and genius as well as nature. 16 The doggerel rhyme may be Dolce's, but its basic theme, like that of his dialogue on paindng, owes much to the example of Aretino's critical propaganda on behalf of Titian. Soon after his arrival in Venice, in 1527, Aretino began to confirm and enhance the painter's reputation as he fit Titian into the bantering dialogue of his comedies—and inserted his name into the literature of the cinquecento as a synonym for painting. In II Marescalco (v,3) of 1533, for example, the caricatured pedant initiates one of his dog Latin declamations, this one a list of great artists, with: "Si pictoribus, un Tiziano emulus naturae immo magister. . . . " 1 7 And in the Cortigiana (111,7) ° f following year a similar list, now of notable personalities of the Venetian art world, hails "the glorious, marvelous, and great Titian, whose coloring breathes no differently than flesh."18 16

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Titian, Pietro Aretino N e w York, Frick Collection

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Titian's impresa (from Battista Pittoni, Imprese di diversi prencipì . . . , 1568)

TITIAN AND THE CRITICAL

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T h e naturalism of Titian's brush became a lietmotif in Aretino's poetry and prose, a major resource in his rhetorical arsenal. And he praised not only its imitative but also its life-giving powers: a portrait by Titian undermines the reasons for believing in death. 1 9 One of Aretino's favorite tags discovered in Titian's brush "the idea of a new nature." 2 0 Loved by all the world for the life bestowed by his art, Titian was hated by a Nature jealous of the competition. 21 Throughout Aretino's letters and the sonnets they frequendy introduced, Titian and his painting served the author as both subject and substance of his own literary production. Vaunting his friendship with Titian ("un altro me medesimo"), he constandy associated his pen with the master's brush ("il pennello di Messer Tiziano e la penna mia"). 22 And we must acknowledge that, inspired by his friend's painting, Aretino achieved, if somewhat indirectly, a critical language adequate to that art. I am thinking, of course, of the famous letter of May 1544 addressed to Titian. Looking out from his window on the Grand Canal, Aretino views the spectacle of its traffic, its noises, the variety of vessels and commerce, the facades of its architectural boundaries. Then, he writes, . . . like a man who has begun to be bored with himself, not knowing what to do with his mind and his thoughts, I lifted my eyes to the sky, which never, since the day on which God created it, was adorned by such beautiful painting of lights and shades. T h e air was of the sort that those [painters] would like to express who envy you because they cannot be you. N o w try to see, in my recounting of it, first the houses, which though made of solid stone seemed to be of unreal substance. And then imagine the atmosphere that I saw, in some parts limpid and fresh, in others turbid and somber. Imagine also the wonder I felt at the sight of those great clouds, masses of condensed humidity: partly low and heavy on the roofs of the houses and partly in middle distance, so that the right of the scene was all a mixture of grays and blacks. I was amazed by the variety of colors revealed in those clouds: those in the foreground were ablaze with the flames of the sun; those farther off, less ignited, glowed with the subdued heat of red-lead. Oh, with what beautiful strokes did Nature's brush sweep back the atmosphere, clearing it away from the palaces in the way that Titian distances it in his landscapes! In certain areas there appeared a bluish green, and in others a greenish blue, truly mixed by the fancy of Nature, the mistress of masters. With lights and darks she created the effects of distance and relief so convincingly that I, who know how your brush is the very soul of her spirits, cried out three or four times: " O h , Titian, where are you now?" For I swear that if you had painted the scene I have described, you would have provoked the same astonishment in men that so moved me; in contemplating what I have just depicted for you, one was sorry that the wonder of such a painting could not last longer. 23 In this transformation of nature into art, it is obvious just how much Aretino's pen found its inspiration in Titian's brush: the painter, in effect, had taught the writer how to see and, at the same time, had given him the proper metaphor with which to describe the dynamics of that meteorological spectacle—which, Aretino concludes, only Titian's brush might fix for permanent enjoyment: a portrait of Nature, immortalizing her at a height of her ever-changing career. Aretino's intimate friendship with the painter does seem to have given him a special insight into the style of Titian's art; for in this passage he transcends the rhetorical formulae and common topoi of Renaissance criticism to achieve the direct response that was the professed aim of all his writing. Perhaps more than any other writer of the sixteenth century, Aretino, himself a literary artisan, recognized that a basic source of Titian's mimetic power was the structure and process of his brushwork. And he took the example of the painter's art—with its breadth of form and energy of execution, its disdain, as he saw it, of punctilious finish—as the model and, indeed, apology for the shape of his own craft. 24 21

DAVID

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ROSAND

Titian, Sacred and Profane Love Rome, Gallería Borghese

Only one other critical passage of the period rivals Aretino's in its comprehension of Titian's achievement, and that is Vasari's well-known observations on the differences between the master's early and later styles (figs. 1 . 1 9 , 1.20). From an appreciation of thepoesie for Philip I I , in which with colors alone Titian created figures that seemed almost alive and natural, Vasari continues: But it is quite true that his method in these later works is rather different from that of his youth: his early paintings are executed with a certain fineness and incredible diligence and can be viewed both from close up and from afar; these recent works, on the other hand, are dashed off in bold strokes, broadly applied in great patches in such a manner that they cannot be looked at closely but from a distance appear perfect. A n d this method has been the reason that many, wishing to imitate Titian and so demonstrate their own ability, have only produced clumsy pictures. This happens because they think that such paintings are done without effort, but such is not the case and they delude themselves; for Titian's pictures are often repainted, gone over and retouched repeatedly, so that the work involved is evident. Carried out in this w a y , the method is judicious, beautiful, and magnificent, because the pictures seem to come alive and are executed with great skill, hiding the effort that went into them. 2 5 Overcoming all his innate critical prejudices, Vasari displays a true sensitivity to the pittura di maccbia of Titian's late manner, that style comprised of broken touches and broad masses, of thick impasto and stained canvas weave—the negation of all Vasari's cherished values of disegno and the ultimate triumph of Venetian colorito. Beyond his appreciation of the affective force of those highly irregular surfaces, however, Vasari also recognized the uniqueness of this inimitable model—a point to which we must return. T h e fullest and most satisfying account that has come down to us concerning Titian's working

TITIAN

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A N D THE CRITICAL

TRADITION

Titian, Nympb and Shepherd Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

methods was published a full century after the painter's death; this is a passage in Marco Boschini's Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana, issued in 1674. Artist, poet, and passionate critic, Boschini was a true spiritual heir to the traditions of the Venetian Renaissance, and his writings provide the most eloquent dilation on the concept of Venetian colorito, as well as the most partisan defense and explication of the styles of the great masters of the cinquecento. Needless to say, colorito reigns supreme 2

3

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ROSAND

in his definition of painting, the aim of which is imitation. Convincing imitation is impossible without chiaroscuro and color; therefore, he concludes ironically, without colorito, disegno itself remains imperfect. Although he adheres to the traditional tripartite definition of painting, Boschini's criticism is refreshingly free of rhetorical formulae. His stature as a critic—perhaps the most perfect critic of the Venetian tradition—derives from the concreteness of his language, which, in turn, although always poetic, records the empirical directness of his experience of painting. Boschini's theoretical definition of colorito, for instance, already involves the pratica itself; the concept assumes a certain vitality in his analysis of its components. These include: impasto, which, he says, is the foundation; the rough sketch (la maccbia), which is style (maniera); the blending of colors, which is softness; the working of colors, to distinguish the individual parts; the highlighting and deepening of tones, which is modeling; the bold stroke (/7 colpo sprezzante), which is freedom of coloring; muting or scumbling to create greater tonal unity. From these and other similar techniques derives il colorito alia veneziana—which is nothing less than the very act of painting.26 Boschini began his own studies with Palma il Giovane, whom he credits as the source of his account of the aged Titian's methods. According to this report, Titian blocked in his pictures with a mass of colors, which served as a bed or foundation for what he wished to express, and upon which he would then build. I myself have seen such underpainting, vigorously applied with a loaded brush, of pure red ochre, which would serve as the middle ground; then with a stroke of white lead, with the same brush then dipped in red, black, or yellow, he created the light and dark areas of the relief effect. And in this way with four strokes of the brush he was able to suggest a magnificent figure. . . . After having thus established this crucial foundation, he turned the pictures to the wall and left them there, without looking at them, sometimes for several months. When he later returned to them, he scrutinized them as though they were his mortal enemies, in order to discover any faults; and if he did find anything that did not accord with his intentions, like a surgeon treating a patient he would remove some swelling or excess flesh, set an arm if the bone were out of joint, or adjust a foot if it were misshapen, without the slightest pity for the victim. By thus operating on and re-forming these figures, he brought them to the highest degree of perfection . . . and then, while that picture was drying, he turned to another. And he gradually covered with living flesh those bare bones, going over them repeatedly until all they lacked with breath itself. . . . For the final touches he would blend the transitions from highlights to halftones with his fingers, blending one tint with another, or with a smear of his finger he would apply a dark accent in some corner to strengthen it, or with a dab of red, like a drop of blood, he would enliven some surface—in this way bringing his animated figures to completion. . . . In the final stages he painted more with his fingers than with the brush.27 Boschini's descriptive language quite effectively captures that visceral quality of Titian's painting, the sense in which paint seems to transcend its metaphoric or correlative relation to flesh and appears instead a convincing physical substitute for it. Molding carnal effigies out of oily pigment, Titian extended the direct tactile experience of his painting by even abandoning the mediating implement, the brush, to work directly with his hands. "Wishing to imitate the operation of the Supreme Creator," Boschini's account concludes, Titian "used to observe that he too, in forming this human body, created it out of earth with his hands." We are reminded inevitably of Michelangelo's vital rapport with his living marble and, eventually, of the old Rembrandt's intimate knowledge of the medium he inherited from Titian. The rhetorical celebration of the living qualities of Titian's imagery does 24

TITIAN AND THE CRITICAL TRADITION indeed find a basis in fact—in the physical nature of oil painting as he developed it, il colorito alla veneziana, in which one very tangible and organic substance substitutes for another. "When Titian arranges a purely carnal Venus," observed Paul Valéry, softly stretched out on purple, in all the fullness of her perfection as goddess and as subject for paint, it is obvious that, for him, to paint meant to caress, a conjunction of two voluptuous sensations in one supreme act in which self-mastery and mastery of his medium were identified with a masterful possession of the beauty herself, in every sense.28 Finally, we may call upon another professional witness, a contemporary of ours, Willem de Kooning, who managed to epitomize the traditions, theoretical and practical, with which we have been concerned in his declaration that "flesh was the reason . . . oil painting was invented." And de Kooning's own work (fig. 1.21), with its vital and active re-formation of the organic stuff of paint, is, of course, in so many ways an extension of the aesthetic celebrated by Boschini. 29 Vasari was quite right when he wrote that Titian had no true followers, although many young painters came to work and learn in his studio. Titian, he observes, "did not actually instruct, but each disciple learned more or less what he could, whatever he was able to carry away from the study of the master's works." 30 How indeed could that sustained surgical technique described by Boschini—the result of a lifelong relationship to pigments, oil, and canvas—be taught? How could such experience be transmitted? The commercial success of a large bottega like Titian's demanded that assistants be capable of approximating the style of the master; but even during Titian's lifetime a discrepancy was observed in the production of his workshop between the personal masterpieces he himself executed for patrons like Philip II (fig. 1.22) and the routine canvases rather mechanically turned out by the assistants (fig. 1.23), who could imitate the compositional models of the master, the basic figurai types, and even, to a degree, his chiaroscuro. What they could not duplicate, of course, was that life-giving process of the old man's colorito, his brushwork, and, so we must imagine, his fingerwork. That must have been well beyond the grasp of the practical intellect.31 Even so astute and practised a student of Venetian painting as Delacroix had to admit frustration in the face of Titian's working methods. "It is hard to say how a man like Titian . . . set about his lay-in," he noted in his journal on January 25, 1857. The touch is so difficult to see in his work, the hand of the craftsman so completely concealed, that the steps he took to arrive at such perfection remain a mystery. There still exist underpaintings from pictures by Titian [fig. 1.24]. . . . But I do not think that any of these underpaintings can give us the clue to the methods which Titian used in order to bring them to that always consistent style so remarkable in his finished works. 32 Ever since Vasari, critics have noted how deceptively easy Titian's method seemed, and how unfortunate were the results of those who sought to emulate it. We ought to be quite sympathetic toward the plight of those young painters who hoped to learn their art from Titian, for we, as critics, actually share their dilemma. How are we to describe, let alone analyze, those complex surface structures? We are better able to characterize the fluid course of Veronese's brush (fig. 1.25), to isolate the riches of his palette, and to describe the chromatic distribution on his canvases. Similarly, the directed energies of Tintoretto's brushwork (fig. 1.26), the dynamics of his tonal contrasts and of his spatial conflicts seem accessible to the critical enterprise. Titian's, however, remains a secret chromatic art. 33 His stroke—and especially his late stroke—is more varied and not so easily characterized. At times the brush is dragged across the canvas, and the stroke thereby acquires direction 25

1.21

Willem de Kooning, Woman, / N e w York, Museum of Modern Art

1.24

Titian, Death of Actaeon (detail) London, National Gallery

1.25

Veronese, Lucretia Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

1.26

Tintoretto, St. Mark Rescuing a Saracen Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia

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and velocity; but sometimes the painted mark appears to have been the result of a frontal attack, actually rather sustained and even quiet, produced by the direct application of brush to canvas, its precise quality dependent only upon the internal variations of pressure, complicated, perhaps, by several colors simultaneously present on a single brush. And how are we to deal with those dabs of red, like drops of blood, presumably applied with the fingers? In comparison, the boldness of execution to be encountered in a late Rembrandt, with its thicker impasto and more consistently structured brushwork, seems to present us with clearer issues—the magic transformation of his glazes notwithstanding. Within the dialectic of the disegno-colorito controversy, one of the chief attractions of disegno as a critical concept was its commensurability; it was susceptible of measure and hence open to rational discourse. Coloring was—and remains—subjective, beyond the reach of an objective intellection that would retain its validity in the context of the studio. Already in 1548 the minor Venetian painter Paolo Pino acknowledged in his dialogue on painting that "the elements that make up coloring are infinite and impossible to express in words. For each color either alone or mixed can create innumerable effects, but no single color in and of itself is capable of producing the least effect of nature." 3 4 (And such a judgment, recalling with less sophistication the views of Leonardo, precludes serious consideration of the marvelous artistry of the purest Florentine colore—as in the tradition of Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Bronzino.) T h e search for words adequate to express the effects of coloring has been a constant challenge to critics, who have usually responded by taking refuge in metaphor, evoking analogy to other, nonpictorial experience, and, above all, to music. Boschini, for example, in describing the colorito of Tintoretto, talks about the "armonia del concerto," and he summarizes Veronese's achievement as the ability to "concertar l'Armonia della Musica di Pittura." 3 5 And in the following centuries critics as otherwise different as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Baudelaire speak quite naturally of "harmony of colouring." Here is Baudelaire on this theme in his Salon of 1846: When the great brazier of the sun dips beneath the waters, fanfares of red surge forth on all sides; a harmony of blood flares up at the horizon, and greens turn richly crimson. Soon vast blue shadows are rhythmically sweeping before them the host of orange and rose-pink tones which are like a faint and distant echo of the light. This great symphony of today, which is an eternal variation of the symphony of yesterday, this succession of melodies whose variety ever issues from the infinite, this complex hymn is called colour. In colour are to be found harmony, melody and counterpoint. 36 Aretino and Boschini would surely have understood, and might well have envied, this language, which continues a critical tradition initiated—rather, provoked—by Titian himself. But such enthusiasm, totally convincing in its generality, can rarely be directed to the analysis or criticism of a specific painting. Indeed, insofar as such rhetoric is applied to critical analysis, a special case of formalism, it only serves to truncate the experience of an art like Titian's. This, I think, is what happens in perhaps the most ambitious, sustained critical effort in modern Titian studies: Theodor Hetzer's analytical history of Titian's color. 37 Titian, needless to say, was not creating pictures to be analyzed. Imitation was his aim: paint should seem alive. And we, in responding to his art, were meant to see and feel that life—whether in the flesh of an erotically appealing Venus (see figure 7.12) or in the blood of a tormented Christ (fig. 1.27). Titian's success, as we have seen, became the source of disapproving academic criticism: his figures were too real—too much nature and not enough art. Joshua Reynolds's eleventh discourse

32

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Titian, Man of Sorroirs Madrid, Museo del Prado

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illustrates the dilemma of a critic trying to come to terms with Titian's naturalism, to reconcile it with an idealizing system of aesthetic value. After praising the Venetian masters mimetic power and then lamenting his failure to correct the imperfect forms of nature—and Reynolds, like Vasari, assumes Raphael as a proper standard—he tries to absolve Titian of blame by appealing to a higher order of decorum, one beyond the hierarchy of genres: Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however unpromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a Painter of genius. What was said of Virgil, that he threw even the dung about the ground with an air of dignity, may be applied to Titian: whatever he touched, however naturally mean, and habitually familiar, by a kind of magick he invested with grandeur and importance. 38 We, however, find it more difficult to speak of "dignity" and "grandeur"; these are not normal terms of value or reference in our world. Nor is "imitation" at the center of our aesthetics; we are not willing to suspend our disbelief before a flat surface of colored shapes. Our dilemma may be epitomized in some of the most perceptive pages written on Titian in our time: Erwin Panofsky's introduction to his Wrightsman Lectures. According to Panofsky's reading, Titian conceived of pigments as inducing an aesthetic effect sui generis and sui iuris; he interpreted color neither as a mere reference to reality . . . nor, if I may say so, as undigested paint. We can enjoy his colors, singly and in relation to each other, just as we may enjoy precious stones; yet we do not think of them as material substances applied to an equally material surface. 39 To what degree, we may wonder, does such a passage share with Sir Joshua's the need to idealize the material, the merely substantial? On the same page Panofsky stresses what he called "the autonomy or integrity of color values as opposed to such textural values as the specific qualities of glass, metal, velvet, silk, or hair." But, we are tempted to interrupt, what about flesh? The critical challenge posed by Titian's coloring is inextricably bound up with the question of imitation: colorito and mimesis are, in effect, one. And we ought not to attempt to aestheticize either to some level of pure ideality or spirituality. 4 0 It will not do to elevate Titian above the naturalism of his art, that fundamental "reference to reality" that so universally impressed his contemporaries. We must come to terms with it if we are ever to enjoy an adequate, that is, a full appreciation of that art. Our post-Impressionist tendency is to assign primary value to the paint itself, "material substance . . . applied to an equally material surface." And Panofsky's caveat against such a modernization of Titian is well taken: we must indeed recognize the signifying role of that substance. But its complex of references seems to me to require going beyond Panofsky's own limiting concept of "the autonomy . . . of color values," a concept that, despite the real beauty of Panofsky's analysis, returns us to an anachronistic aestheticism—embarrassed, as much as Reynolds' classicism, by the organic matter of life and its imitation in paint. Let me conclude by recalling one of our earlier witnesses, Delacroix, whose appreciation of Titian, acknowledging all the difficulties in getting to know the old Venetian master, was slow in developing: "Titian!" he exclaimed in the pages of his journal. Now there is a man who seems made to be enjoyed by those who are growing old; I confess that when I had a great admiration for Michelangelo and Lord Byron I never appreciated 34

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Titian. It is not, I believe, by the depth of his expression, nor by his great understanding of the subject that he moves one, but by his simplicity and his total absence of affectation. In his art the painterly qualities are carried to the highest possible degree. Whatever he does is done thoroughly and completely; when he paints eyes, for instance, they see, they are quickened by the fire of life; life and logic abound in every part of his work. 4 1 If we are to achieve a full appreciation of Titian's art, then our criticism must eventually acknowledge and account for both that life and that logic.

NOTKS

1. T h e problem of the date of Titian's birth—now generally, but not universally, accepted as c.1488—is reviewed in F.ruin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly ¡cartographic (New York, 1969), pp. 176-79, and by Harold K. Wcthey, The Paintings of Titian (London, 1969-75), 1, 40-42. For the literary sources concerning Titian's death, his burial on the following day, and the problem of his final sepulchral wishes, see the references and discussion in David Rosand, "Titian in the Frari," Art Bulletin ( 1971), 5 3 : 1 9 6 - 2 1 3 , esp. pp. 2o8ff. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, an epitaph was inscribed in the pavement near the Altar of the Crucifix: QLI C.IACI 11 (¿RAN T I Z I A N O DK'VKCH.I.I/ KMLLATOR u s i K r>M,i.i APPKi.i.1. When in the middle of the following century the site was transformed by the present monument to Titian, another inscription was added beneath this epitaph: LAPIDI- ANTICA U T R O V A T A K U U RICOLLOCATA B L N C H L SKNZA T R A C C I A DKI.LA MORTAI.*: SPOGLIA DKI. PITTORI- MOCCCI.II. On the modern monument: Francesco Beltrame, Cenni illustrativi sul monumento a Tiziano (Vcnice, 1852). T h e most recent literature on Titian's Pietà is briefly reviewed in Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 111, 26if.; sec also David Rosand, Titian (New York, 1978), plates 47, 48. 2. T h e program for the catafalque was published by Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell'arte (1648), Detlev von Hadcln, ed. (Berlin, 1914-24), 1, 2 1 1 - 1 8 . T h e authenticity of this account has been recently challenged by Charles Hope, who, for no very apparent reason, declares that it was "unquestionably devised by Ridolfi himself to provide a fictitious counterpart to the famous obsequies of Michelangelo in Florence" ("Titian as a Court Painter," Oxford Art fourna! | April 1979I, 2:7). For the Michelangelo obsequies: Rudolf and Margot Wittkower. The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy's Homage on His Death (London, 1964). 3. Cf. Cesare Ripa's description of Pittura as "Donna, bella . . . con una catena d'oro al collo, dalla quale penda una maschera, et habbia scritto nella fronte, imitatio"; Iconologia (Rome, 1603), p. 404. 4. Further on the Arte dei Depentori: David Rosand, " T h e Crisis of the Venetian Renaissance Tradition," l.'Artc (1970). 1 1/12:25-34, a r | d. for the comessaria di Vincenzo Catena in particular, p. 29. See also F.lena Favaro, L'Arte dei Pittori in Venezia e i suoi statuti (Florence, 1975). 5. On Lavinia's marriage to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle, see J . A . Crowe and G . B. Cavalcaseli, The Life and Times of Titian (1877), 2d imp. (London, 1881), 11, 248, 510. Their transcription of the document of March 20, 1555—which allowed a reading of 2,400 ducats—was corrected by Giovanni Morelli, Italian Masters in German Galleries, A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich, Dresden, Berlin, Mrs. Louise M. Richter, trans. (London, 1883), p. 175, n. 1. 6. For Titian's patent of nobility—which would serve as important precedent for Rubens, Velazquez, and other ambitious artists of the seventeenth century—see Ridolfi, Maraviglie, 1, 180-82, and, more recently, Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, 111, 24Hf. and the frontispiece, which illustrates Titian's escutcheon from the document of 1533. 7. On this theme: Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, "Apelles Redivivus," Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann (Marsyas supplement. N e w York, 1964), pp. 160-70. On Titian's position in Venice, see now Michelangelo Muraro, "Tiziano pittore ufficiale della Serenissima," in Tiziano, nel quarto centenario della sua morte, 1576-1976, Lezioni tenute nell'Aula Magna dell'Ateneo Veneto (Venice, 1977), PP- 83-100. 8. The significance of the golden chain—indeed, with special reference to artists—has been discussed by Julius S. Held, Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies (Princeton, 1969), pp. 3 2 - 4 1 . 9. "Certo Titiano hoggidì è una merauiglia della sua arte, onde parlando de i dipintori, si tragga sempre il

35

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suo nome," declares one of the participants in Sperone Speroni's Dialogo iamore; Dialoghi del Sig. Speron Speroni (Venice, 1596), pp. l^f. 10. Further discussion of the critical terms and context of the disegno-colorito controversy will be found in Rosand, "Crisis," pp. 5 - 1 2 . 1 1 . Some recent contributions to the subject—which nonetheless underscore the difficulties of interpreting this radiographic evidence—are: M. Hours, "Contribution à l'étude de quelques oeuvres du Titien," Laboratoire de recbercbe des musées de France, Annales (1976), pp. 7 - 3 1 ; Mercedes Garberi in the catalogue of the exhibition Omaggio a Tiziano: la cultura milanese nelietà di Carlo V (Milan, 1977), pp. 1 1 - 3 8 ; Ludovico Mucchi, "Radiografie di opere di Tiziano," Arte veneta (1977), 31:297-304. Among the paintings examined by Mucchi was the Naples Danae, the x-ray composite of which was fuori catalogo at the Milan exhibition. Despite his attention to the smallest pentimenti, Mucchi overlooked the most obvious and significant fact revealed by his own technical study: namely, that the picture painted in Rome for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese was developed on the basis of a replica of the Venus of Urbino. (With respect to the comparison of the two compositions in the cinquecento, see the observations of Giovanni della Casa, reconsidered by Charles Hope, " A Neglected Document about Titian's 'Danae' in Naples," ibid., pp. i88f.) 12. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1568), Gaetano Milanesi, ed. (Florence, 1878-85), VII, 427t". 13. On the topos of ars simia naturae: H . W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952), pp. 287-325, with further references. 14. Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura, intitolato iAretino, in Paola Barocchi, ed., Trattati d'arte del Cinquecento, 1 (Bari, i960), 200. 15. Ibid., pp. 152, 183^ 16. I quote from the edition of 1568: Di Battista Pittoni pittore vicentino. Ano. M.D.LXVIII. Imprese di diversi prencipi, duchi, signori, e d'altri personaggi et huomini letterati et illustri. . . Con alcune stanze del Dolce che dichiarano i motti di esse imprese. Titian's impresa is no. x x x x m , and its motto is dichiarato by the following verses of Dolce: Molti in diversi età dotti Pittori, Continuando insino a tempi nostri, Han dimostro in disegni e bei colori Quanto con la natura l'arte giostri: E giunti f u m o al sommo de gli honori, E tenuti fra noi celesti Mostri. Ma T I T I A N , merce d'alta ventura, Vinto ha l'arte, l'ingegno, e la Natura. T h e ascription of this device to Titian was repeated by Joachim Camararius, Symbolorum et emblematum ex animalibus . . . (Nuremberg, 1595), no. xxii: "Usurpavit hoc symbolum Celebris iste pictor Venetus Titianus quo indicare voluit, incertis quibusdam rebus Artem plus valere quam Naturam ipsam." Although the motto alone was listed by Jacopo Gelli, Divise, motti e imprese di famiglie e personaggi italiani, 2d ed. (Milan, 1923), no. 1201, Titian's impresa was fully reintroduced to modern scholarship by Hans Tietze: "Unknown Venetian Renaissance Drawings in Swedish Collections," Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1949), 35:183f. For further references, see Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata, Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1967), col. 442; although it is less useful, see also G u y de Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans Fart profane, 1450-1600 (Geneva, 1959), vol. 11, col. 293. Tietze had located the original publication of Titian's impresa in Dolce's own Imprese nobili e ingeniöse, misdating it to 1562, but responsibility for the book belonged to the painter and printmaker Pittoni, who clearly conceived it as a volume of images—"con alcune stanze del Dolce." Only in 1578 (that is, immediately following the expiration of Pittoni's fifteen-year privilegio), in an edition published by Girolamo Porro, does Pittoni's name disappear from the title, which now reads: Imprese nobili e ingeniöse di diversi prencipi et d'altri personaggi illustri neirarme et nelle lettere . . . con le dicbiarationi in versi di M. Lodovico Dolce & rrer, Venice, and Dr. Jiirgen Julier of the Bayerisches Landesamt fur Denkmalpflege, Munich.

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Calle Ca' Lipoli, detail from Jacopo de' Barbari, Bird's Eye View of Venice Cleveland Museum of Art

conducted at her bedside when she was seriously ill. It was there that he was living when his servant, Alvise of C y p r u s , was murdered in 1528. 3 A nineteenth-century tradition, the source of which is unknown to me, claimed that a house in Calle Ca' Lipoli, behind the Frari, had once been Titian's. 4 Since the calle is in the same sestiere of San Polo, this house may have been the T r o n property mentioned in the documents. T h e house in question was demolished in the nineteenth century. 5 As shown in Jacopo de' Barbari's great bird's eye view of Venice of 1500, the entire Calle Ca' Lipoli was built up as one continuous row of housing (fig. 3.1). Jacopo often simplified or conventionalized the forms he reproduced in his view, so that we cannot depend on this representation as an unimpeachable source. 6 Still, from its appearance in the woodcut, the T r o n property—if this indeed was it—looks like one of the most common architectural types of Venice: the housing block. 74

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3.2

Corte Colonna, detail from Jacopo de' Barbari, Bird's Eye View of Venice

Cleveland Museum of Art Blocks like this one, of the fourteenth century and later, survive in extraordinary abundance in Venice. T h e y show many different plans, by which anywhere from two to over a dozen independent, multi-story dwellings are accommodated in a single structural unit, and they manifest all the architectural styles of the city, from late Veneto-Byzantine through Utilitarian Nineteenth Century. What they have in common is the basic system whereby a compact block is articulated into a series of self-sufficient habitations rising through several stories of the building, each having separate street entrances and interior stairs. 7 T w o typical examples that can be distinguished on Jacopo's view, which still stand today in essentially the forms he represented them, are Corte Colonna and Calle de Preti near the Arsenal. T h e former was founded by the Republic in 1 3 3 5 as a housing development for aged and disabled sailors (figs 3.2-3.4); the latter is of unknown origin. 8 It can be seen that these housing developments provided in miniature all the rooms a civilized Venetian required. O n the ground floor were storage rooms, used for provisions, firewood, boating supplies, and the like. T h e kitchen could be either on the ground floor or upstairs. T h e upstairs flat 75

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Corte Colonna, exterior of the eastern tract

contained small rooms, one of which was normally singled out as the chief room by the massing of windows, as one finds it in the great reception room or portego of a Venetian patrician palace, only on a small scale. Generally there was access to a shared well and latrine; later, more ample examples of the type provide each unit with a separate courtyard with its own well and latrine. The number of rooms and their sizes could vary, although they were always small. It was a comfortable style of house, offering quite as much space as a modern American inner city flat. Housing developments of this type originated in the early Middle Ages as a species of almshouse, meant for the deserving poor or the sick. They were built ad pias causas, by private persons, the government, charitable trusts, and religious groups. 9 As time passed, their exclusively charitable purpose began to disappear; they were now also built or acquired by private investors and by the managers of investment trusts for rental income. 10 In Venetian documents the apartments in such buildings are not distinguished by a special term; they are called by the umbrella label domus de 76

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sergentibus or, in the vernacular, case da sazenti.11 This label was applied without distinction to units in housing blocks and other multiple housing projects, whether large or small, to rental flats maintained on the mezzanine floor or in outbuildings of a patrician palace, and to small free-standing houses of the kind that are still found today in Burano and that were common throughout metropolitan Venice in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It defined a kind of habitation appropriate to working people, whether professionals, shopkeepers, self-employed artisans, or laborers. By Titian's time, the "investment portfolio" of a patrician family normally contained a large number of such case da sazenti, either units in housing blocks or other properties. And it seems that it was in one such privately owned development that the artist lodged at the beginning of his career. Titian did not have his studio here. As is well known, he had use of working space in the Ca' del Duca. The latter was a property located in the district of San Samuele, across the canal from the present-day Accademia. It was a very large site, containing the beginnings of a vast residential palace on the Grand Canal and Rio del Duca, a number of case da sazenti at the rear (where the Teatro di San Samuele was built in the seventeenth century and where there is a public school today), and a great deal of open ground. 12 The palace had been begun in 1457 by Andrea Corner, to a design of the sculptor Bartolomeo Bon. Four years later the entire property was sold to Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan (whence the name, Ca' del Duca). He ordered plans for completion of the building from an architect of his own, but seems never to have had them put into execution. The property languished for decades in an unfinished state and eventually came into the hands of the Venetian government, whether by seizure, in 1499, during the war with Lodovico Sforza "il Moro," or in some other way, we do not know. It remained in state ownership for the whole first quarter of the sixteenth century, and it is during this time that several artists employed by the state were given working space in the various structures on the site. Titian obtained his grant of space apparently in 1513, when he promoted himself into the extraordinarily honorific commission of painting the so-called Battle of Cadore for the Hall of the Great Council in the Doge's Palace. That he was executing the painting in a studio at the Ca' del Duca is stated in an order of payment issued November 1514 by the Council of Ten to cover his salary and the expense of repairs to his place of work. 13 Eventually the building was returned to private ownership and was acquired by the Grimani. 14 The latter slowly sold off the property bit by bit. In 1531 they sold the rental houses at the back; in the 1580s they began to sell pieces of the unfinished palace. 15 From the documents pertaining to these sales we can reconstruct how the site had been developed in the intervening time. The palace on the Grand Canal had been raised in Corner's day through the mezzanine level at the corner of Rio del Duca and the Grand Canal, and through the ground-floor elsewhere, but it had not been roofed. By the time the Grimani began to sell it off it had been roofed both front and back and made usable in this truncated form. At the corner of the Grand Canal and the Rio del Duca there had been created at least one simple dwelling. At the middle and back of the site there had been created utilitarian rooms, called magazzini or volte in Venetian, of a kind that existed throughout the city and were used not only for storage, as the name suggests, but also as shops. Except for creation of the corner dwelling, all this construction must have occurred after the year 1500, for in Jacopo de' Barbari's View of that year the rest of the building is still open to the skies (Fig. 3.5). There were at least twenty-two magazzini when the Grimani began their sales, and it is in some of them that we must imagine Titian's studio to have been installed. Rooms of this kind could be very large and were normally severely plain, so that they were well suited to such use. Titian apparently enjoyed use of several of the magazzini, judging from an invoice for repairs made in 152s. 1 6 In 1531 Titian moved, and moved both up and sideways in terms of the kind of house he chose.

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Ca' del Duca, detail from Jacopo de' Barbari, Bird's Eye Vien- of Venice Cleveland Museum of Art

His new residence was located across the Rio dei Gesuiti from the church of that name, behind the later Palazzo Dona dalle Rose, in a zone then still very sparsely settled, called Biri G r a n d e . 1 7 At its northern edge, where Titian's house stood, the properties fronted on the Lagoon. Later landfills have extended Biri Grande, so that today Titian's house and neighboring houses are distant from the water. 1 8 In the artist's day there was an unimpeded view to Murano, as we know from contemporary descriptions. Titian's house was quite new, having been built in 1527. When he first rented it he took the upper floor alone. There were two rental flats on a mezzanine floor directly beneath him, and eventually, in 1 5 3 7 - 3 9 , he rented these as well because he found the downstairs tenants a nuisance. T h e building was surrounded by open ground laid out as a garden, as we gather from a description of 1540 to which I shall return. This garden Titian expanded significantly in 1549 when he leased an adjoining plot of open ground that belonged to the same landlord. T h e house served Titian for the rest of his days. After his death it was briefly occupied by his ne'er-do-well son Pomponio, then by the painters Francesco Bassano and Leonardo Corona, and then by a succession of unsung tenants. T h e ownership changed many times, but each owner in turn rented it out to third parties for income. T h e trail of owners can be followed uninterruptedly to the modern day, and the house can be identified with a long, narrow block standing on a dead-end street named after the artist, Campo Tiziano (in the nineteenth century it was called Campo Rotto), and bearing the street numbers Cannaregio 5179-83 (fig. 3.6). 1 9 Its drab exterior makes it look like a utilitarian structure of the nineteenth century, and the rectangular windows and doorways and stucco facing of the street front are certainly of that period. But Renaissance frames around six round-headed windows on the top floor of the street front attest to the fact that in origin the building is old. T h e interior consists of five separate habitations reached by three different street entrances and internal stairs. This interior division is also modern. From early nineteenth-century descriptions we learn that there was on the top floor a large principal room, part of which had already then been partitioned o f f . 2 0 T o d a y it has been partitioned entirely out of existence. Entry to the interior in the early nineteenth century was by means of an outside staircase, in the garden at the north end of the block, leading to the mezzanine floor and thence to an inner stair that continued to the top floor. T h e outside staircase appears in a lithograph of 1833, but by 1877 it had already collapsed. 21 T h e owner responsible for adaptation of the house into a tenement may have been Antonio Busetto, who bought it in 1826. Busetto, who went by the nickname Petich, was one of the numerous entrepreneurs who made their fortune in Venice during the Austrian occupation as contractors for demolition and construction and as real estate speculators. 22 It was he, for instance, who built the railway bridge across the Lagoon and who began commercial development of the Lido as a bathing 79

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Titian's house in Biri Grande

resort. More to the point, it was he who in 1838 bought the most splendid of the city's high medieval palaces, the so-called Fondaco dei Turchi, with the intention of demolishing it and selling off the salvageable materials. (In the event, he tore down only three quarters of it because the city managed to buy him out.) T h e way that Titian's house was chopped up and its dreary finish are quite in keeping with Busetto's practices as an investor and builder. Whatever the case, the original character of Titian's house can be reconstructed to some extent from the documents published by Cadorin and from the surviving shell. It was a long, narrow, blocklike structure of three floors: ground floor, mezzanine, and first floor proper. Of these, the ground floor was presumably used for storage, not as a dwelling. T h e mezzanine contained the two minor habitations that Titian eventually took over himself. The top floor was Titian's dwelling and contained, as we have heard, a large hall among its rooms. This was no doubt aligned with the four massed windows near the center of the facade, framed by sixteenth-century columns and arches, and was theportego or reception room of the dwelling, a standard feature of all Venetian residences. So

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Country houses among the gardens of Castello, detail from Jacopo de' Barbari, Bird's Eye View of Venice Cleveland Museum of Art

A d j o i n i n g the house stood a separate, barnlike structure, part masonry and part w o o d , enlarged and raised in height by T i t i a n during his tenancy. It is called a tezza and a bottega in the documents; the f o r m e r means " s h e d , " the latter means " s h o p , " both in the sense of a store and a craftsman's shop or studio. W e may assume, I think, that this was Titian's studio. A l t h o u g h w e know so little of its original plan and elevation, the house at Biri G r a n d e can nonetheless be typed. A blocklike house, articulated on the exterior by a f e w massed and a f e w isolated w i n d o w s , and sometimes provided with a ground-floor arcade (confusingly also called a portego in Venetian parlance), was a common f o r m for an owner's residence in country estates throughout the Venetian terraferma. Dozens of examples from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries still survive in the V e n e t o . 2 3 T h e t y p e was once common in V e n i c e itself; several such houses can be distinguished on J a c o p o de' Barbari's view in the more open parts of the city, on the G i u d e c c a and in M u r a n o (fig. 3.7). 2 4 G e n e r a l l y , the more rural corners of the Venetian archipelago were built up in the Renaissance like the mainland countryside, with country residences set amidst tilled fields and gardens. T h e more lavish of them, as was true on the mainland as well, imitated city palaces in plan and elevation. 2 5 T h e more modest took the f o r m of an unadorned block, as did Titian's house. Both kinds were built b y landowners, men of substance, and, indeed, Titian's house had been put up originally in 1527 b y a patrician, Alvise Pollani, for his own use. T h a t it was a house of a certain social status can be inferred not only from this fact, but also from the considerable sums Titian paid in rent (forty ducats a y e a r initially, fifty after 1 5 3 6 , sixty after 1549), and the appellation of casa da statio and chaxa grande given to it in the documents. ( T h e latter are terms to which w e shall return; they denote an 8

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upper-class residence, or one with upper-class pretensions.) Nor was it small; it accommodated a fairly large household consisting of Titian, his three children, his sister, various pupils, and regular guests like his brother Francesco Vecellio, to which we must add the indispensable complement of servants. 26 Set among carefully planned gardens, this ample and modestly distinguished house was comparable in every way to a suburban residence of a Venetian patrician. And in it Titian seems indeed to have followed something of the life style of a countrified Venetian gentleman. T h e house was decorated with many paintings, although we have no knowledge of the range and quality of the collection. After Titian's death, when the house was bought by the Barbarigo, it contained a great many works by the artist himself. Many can be identified with pictures that were purchased from the Barbarigo family in 1850 by Czar Nicholas I of Russia and are now in Leningrad. They are chiefly late works and studio replicas of autograph works delivered to illustrious patrons. This suggests that they were not so much the remnants of a private collection as the inventory of a shop that went out of business—that is, what was on Titian's hands at the time he died. Despite the greed and pettiness in money matters that speak from his letters, Titian had a reputation for entertaining generously at his house. We have a glowing account of one such entertainment, given sometime before 1540, the year the description was published by Francesco Priscianese. I shall quote it as a final testimony to the artist's house. 27 I was invited on the day of the calends of August to celebrate that sort of Bacchanalian feast which, I know not why, is called ferrare Agosto—though there was much disputing about this in the evening—in a pleasant garden belonging to Messer Tiziano Vecellio, an excellent painter as everyone knows, and a person really fitted to season by his courtesies any distinguished entertainment. There were assembled with the said M. Tiziano, as like desires like, some of the most celebrated characters that are now in this city, and of ours chiefly M. Pietro Aretino, a new miracle of nature, and next to him as great an imitator of nature with the chisel as the master of the feast is with his brush, Messer Jacopo Tatti, called il Sansovino, and M. Jacopo Nardi, and I; so that I made the fourth amidst so much wisdom. Here, before the tables were set out, because the sun, in spite of the shade, still made its heat much felt, we spent the time in looking at the lively figures in the excellent pictures, of which the house was full, and in discussing the real beauty and charm of the garden with singular pleasure and note of admiration of all of us. It is situated in the extreme part of Venice, upon the sea, and from it one sees the pretty little island of Murano, and other beautiful places. This part of the sea, as soon as the sun went down, swarmed with gondolas, adorned with beautiful women, and resounded with the varied harmony and music of voices and instruments, which till midnight accompanied our delightful supper. But to return to the garden. It was so well laid out and so beautiful, and consequently so much praised, that the resemblance it offered to the delicious retreat of St. Agata refreshed my memory and my wish to see you; and it was hard for me, dearest friends, during the greater part of the evening to realize whether I was at Rome or at Venice. . . . In the meanwhile came the hour for supper, which was no less beautiful and well arranged than copious and well provided. Besides the most delicate viands and precious wines, there were all those pleasures and amusements that are suited to the season, the guests, and the feast. And so we come to Aretino. When Pietro Aretino first visited Venice, in the spring of 1527, he was not intending to make it his home. But there wasn't any other "home" for him to return to. At Arezzo he would presumably have felt humiliated and isolated. At Rome he had offended a host of powerful persons, from the pope on down. At Mantua, where he had landed in 1526, a piece of 82

I I O L S K S OF T I T I A N , A R K T I N O , A N D

SANSOVINO

jetsam cast up by the fortunes of war, he was compromising his host (the Marquis Federico Gonzaga) by his biting satires of public figures. Prudence, and perhaps the sense that there were opportunities here, seem to have suggested to Aretino that he had better just stay at Venice. 2 8 It was hard. He had no private means. H e tried to publish some of his recent writings. Federico Gonzaga (who was ready to take pleasure in Aretino's outrageous personal remarks if they were produced at a distance) occasionally sent gifts of money and cast-off clothing. But the pickings were slim and remained so until the 1530s. T h u s , when we first meet Aretino installed in a place of his own it is, not surprisingly, a modest affair. In 1529 or 1530 he moved into one floor of a small palace on the Grand Canal, in the district of Santi Apostoli. 2 9 T h e building had been owned by the Dolfin and passed to the Bollani at the time Aretino moved in. We can identify it from his description of the view from its front window. It faced the Pescaria on the other side of the Grand Canal, and from it one could see the Rialto Bridge toward the south. At the side of the house ran the Rio di San Giovanni Grisostomo, which (in typical hyperbole) our hero said was now called the Rio dell'Aretino. It is the house at the corner of the Grand Canal and Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo, still called Palazzo Bollani today (figs. 3.8, 3.9). In plan and elevation the house is a patrician palace on a miniature scale. In their tax declarations, the owners called it a casa di stazio. T h e term (its Latin form is domus a statio) is again one that describes a building's social rather than its architectural character. 3 0 Originally it signified the seat of a patrician family, their principal residence, identified with several generations of the family and thus the outward expression of their continuity and rank. In early acts it is often found in the form casagrande di stazio (domus magna a statio) or, by metonymy, ca'grande {domus magna, domus maior). T h e modifying adjective seems to have been meant to signify not a superior size, but a superior importance, for many domus maiores are not particularly large. Indeed, a casa di stazio did not need to be a separate building; it could be a self-contained portion of a larger structure. 3 1 T h e determining characteristic, in short, was its function as a seat, not its size or structural integrity. T h e nature of any individual family's casa di stazio did not necessarily reflect their means. That is, patricians occasionally found themselves living in dwellings far larger than they could really afford to maintain, or again, they continued to reside in fairly modest houses when their fortunes had risen beyond such modesty. It was the house that their ancestors had bequeathed to them, and tradition held them there. Testaments usually restricted ownership of a casa di stazio to the direct male descendants of the testator and specifically prohibited future generations from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise tainting free title to the property in any way whatever. 3 2 When a family physically moved out of their casa di stazio they would still retain ownership of the property because of such testamentary restrictions and because of sentiment, renting out their casa to third parties. 3 3 In general, these case di stazio always have an ample reception room {portego), but otherwise their layout and scale vary a great deal. 3 4 Not only that, but as Venetians prospered in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, other classes began to inhabit case di stazio too, so that their social character became less distinct: professionals, civil servants, businessmen of non-noble origin. T h e occupancy of a proper residence or seat implied certain means and conferred a certain status that were desirable. For the most part, such occupants were renters rather than owners. T h e demand for residences they generated meant that in later times many case di stazio in Venice were maintained by real estate investors, who had built them expressly as income property or had acquired them by inheritance, private treaty, or at tax sales and turned them to this use. Often enough they were buildings that had been alienated after all, despite the restrictions laid down by an early owner. 3 5 T h e Bollani house is a very small casa di stazio. A part of it had been inhabited in earlier times by its then owners, the Dolfin, and the rest rented out. It was rented out in its entirety by the Bollani

83

JLF.RGKN

3.8

SCHLLZ

Ca' Bollani

after they inherited it in 1 5 3 c . 3 6 It had been rebuilt not too long before, in the fifteenth century, judging by the forms of its facade, but in Aretino's day it was in poor condition. In a tax declaration of 1534 it was said to be in need of constant repair and to be partially held up by shoring. Aretino, when he moved out, called it a wreck and said rain was coming in on all sides. 3 7 In their tax declarations the Bollani call Aretino's flat the soler de meza. Soler (or solaro) is the Venetian term for a full-size upper floor; meza signifies a mezzanine. T h e flat was thus on the lower of the two main floors of the existing building, on the level occupied by a mezzanine when there is one. T h e reduced height of Aretino's floor suggests, in fact, that it started as a mezzanine and was then converted to a residential flat, presumably when the building was rebuilt in the fifteenth cenT h e house's soler de meza is laid out as a kind of vest-pocket piano nobtle, identical in plan to the chief residential floor immediately above but with lower ceilings. Aretino never described his flat in detail, but a modern floor plan of the building (fig. 3.9) shows a longportego and three other rooms. T h e suite was reached by what Aretino called a "scala bestiale" and by a long dark alley off the campiello on the landward side. 3 8 T h e situation reflects very well Aretino's means and ambitions at the beginning of his Venetian career. H e was living in one of the older quarters of the city, one that had been fashionable in the high Middle Ages but that by this time had declined. Yet he was on the G r a n d Canal (a desirable situation in every age) and only a stone's throw from downtown. His rooms were f e w , but they had the layout of a well-to-do person's residence and the exterior appearance of a proper palace. It was precisely the kind of situation in which one found noblemen of a reduced condition. A n d , best of all, it cost him nothing. 84

J L KRGKN SCH L I./ We do not know by what magic Aretino managed this trick, but during the twenty-two years he lived here he seems not to have paid any rent. T h e property belonged to the minor sons of Benedetta Bollani, a direct descendant of the last Dolñn owner, and it has been suggested that she believed Aretino could be helpful for the future advancement of her boys and therefore remained content with the arrangement. 39 Whatever the reason, Aretino continued to live rent-free until 1 5 5 1 , long after Benedetta's death, when one of the sons finally evicted him. By then Aretino's circumstances had greatly improved, but with regard to housing his thoughts had gone not to payment of rent but to embellishing his apartment in an up-to-date style. 40 He had had a new fireplace made and new pavements laid, rebuilt his sleeping alcove, and commissioned a painted ceiling for the bedroom. T h e pictures were painted in 1545 by Tintoretto, then an ambitious young artist who was trying to win recognition in an art world dominated by Titian and artists of the latter's generation. 41 One of his methods was to paint pictures free of charge for places where his art would get public exposure. We do not know whether Aretino's ceiling paintings were also a gift, but it would seem quite in character for the latter if the only payment he ever made to Tintoretto was the enthusiastic letter about these paintings he wrote as soon as they were finished, and broadcast in print the following year. When in 1551 Aretino was forced to leave, he moved to far grander quarters. He abandoned with a princely flourish all his improvements at the old house, including the painted ceiling, and ran into print a letter to Jacopo Bollani, contrasting the latter's stinginess with his own generosity. His new apartment was in a house on the Riva del Carbon owned by a branch of the Dándolo family. Here he took a whole floor, at an annual rent of sixty (later sixty-five) ducats, over twice the asking price of his previous flat. This time too he managed to avoid paying any money; he got Cosimo de' Medici to pay the rent for him. 4 2 Aretino's new home was owned by Lunardo Dándolo, son of the late Girolamo, and is listed among his various properties in a tax declaration filed in 1554. He describes it as a casa di statio in two floors located on the Riva del Carbon and reports Aretino as occupying the soler di sopra, that is, the upper residential floor.43 Lunardo Dándolo and his relations formed a branch of the clan called the Dándolo of San Luca. They owned the whole row of houses on the Riva del Carbon, between the Sottoportego and Calle del Carbon. In order to determine which particular building is the casa di statio inhabited by Aretino, one has to unravel the complicated history of this entire set of properties. 44 Along the Riva, they consisted of three buildings: a large one in the center and a smaller one on either side. Of the three only two survive today: the small palazzetto with a beautiful, late-Gothic facade at the east end of the row (at the corner of the Sottoportego and Riva del Carbon), and a large palace with a now-mutilated Gothic facade of somewhat earlier date in the center. T h e building standing today at the west end of the row (at the corner of the Calle and the Riva del Carbon) is an early twentieth-century replacement for the palace that had stood there before. Earlier writers who have tried to locate Aretino's second home have identified it with the palazzetto on the east. 45 This turns out to be mistaken. T h e building owned in the 1550s by Lunardo Dándolo and inhabited by Aretino was the central one, the largest, and historically the most distinguished, of the group (fig. 3.10). Its history can be traced back all the way to the early thirteenth century, when it, or the precedessor structure on the site, was owned by Johannes Dándolo, Count of Ragusa. 46 It had served as the family seat for Johannes's descendants right down to the very moment when Lunardo Dándolo rented it to Aretino. In the soler di sopra of the historic family seat of the Dándolo of San Luca, Aretino had found a truly noble apartment. T h e palace is much rebuilt today, but its original layout can be reconstructed (fig. 3.11). 4 7 Aretino's new flat contained something like twice as many rooms as his old one; its 86

HO U S KS OF T I T I A N , A R E T I N O , A N D

SANSOVINO

3.10

Ca' Dandolo (the ca'

grande)

ceilings were higher, its portego was larger, and it even had an outdoor terrace (liago) at the rear. Aretino was located in a far more venerable building, and at a far more central address. Alas, he was to enjoy it all for only five years. H e died here in 1556 and was buried in the nearby parish church of San Luca. 4 8 Unlike the Bollani house, the Dandolo's building was a full-scale patrician palace. It was laid out in the characteristic fashion of these buildings, with a large portego through the depth of the entire floor, giving access to rooms at either side and receiving light from a few groups of massed windows. T h e Ca' del Duca as originally planned by Bartolomeo Bon was to have a similar layout. In the Dandolo's house, the portego seems to have widened at the front to embrace roughly half the width of the building. It is a common plan in Venetian Gothic palaces. Access to an upper floor in Gothic palaces like this one was normally by an open exterior stair, located at the rear or in one of the lateral courtyards. During the Renaissance such outside stairs were often enclosed or entirely suppressed in favor of new interior stairs. In Aretino's house the former is the case: his flat was reached by a staircase, now enclosed but certainly once exposed, off a court on the building's east side. Above Aretino's floor lies a cramped suite of five rooms, lower in height than the soleri. T h i s is a soffitta, where servants usually lived. Below his floor lies another soler laid out like his own and of equal height. Beneath that is the ground floor (the building seems to have been built ab initio without a mezzanine), comprising an entrance hall (beneath the portegbi) that leads from the Riva to the northern courtyard and two magazzini. T h e latter were always rented out to artisans and merchants; among the tenants recorded in Aretino's day were an oil seller, a wine seller, and a cooper. 4 9 T w o similar residential floors as they occur here and in Ca' Bollani are often found in Venetian patrician palaces. T h e y reflect the custom of patrician brothers to live under the same roof and administer their patrimony in common, forming a kind of family corporation that was called a fra-

87

I.l.l.l.l.l 3.11

YTÌ

Ca' Dandolo (the ca grande), reconstruction of second-floor plan

88

H O L S K S OF T I T I A N , A R K T 1 N O , A N D

SANSOVINO

terna. T w o brothers would occupy the two residential floors of the same building, dividing the rental income from the ground-floor and mezzanine flats, just as they divided other income from their patrimony, and sharing the maintenance expenses of the building. Each such residential unit was called a casa di stazio, as I have explained. While the Bollani's building had served a mixed function in its early day, part owner-occupied, part rented, and later had been rental property in its entirety, the Dandolo's house had the history of a pure-bred patrician palace. Family members had shared occupancy of its two soleri for several centuries. 50 Thus, with his translation from Santi Apostoli to San Luca, Aretino had moved into a residence that not only by its expansiveness, but also by its history was even more a nobleman's lodgings than his cramped and leaky lodgings at Ca' Bollani. H e was now living exactly like a Venetian nobleman belonging to a patrician fraterna, indeed, like Lunardo Dandolo himself. We do not know how Aretino furnished his flat. Altogether, the use of the different rooms in a typical Venetian casa di stazio is something that has never been examined. Descriptions in sale and rental contracts are little help because they do not enter into the function of interior spaces other than service rooms, such as the kitchen and latrine. But early inventories occasionally group the articles they list by the rooms in which they were found. From them we learn that in the Renaissance the smaller rooms were furnished invariably with beds and chests and sometimes with occasional tables and chairs as well; they seem to have functioned as bed-sitting rooms. The portego was normally furnished with large tables and dozens of chairs and seems to have served as a dining room. Occasionally there were chests and cupboards in it and works of art. In a patrician home, furthermore, the portego normally contained banners, arms, and pieces or whole suits of armor, displayed in cases or on racks. 5 ' They were conceived as the insignia of noble rank. 5 2 Thus, a portego in a patrician house typically displayed a family's noble trappings and served as the setting for the most ritualized and representational of our daily acts, eating. More than any other room in a Venetian palace, the portego exhibited the status of its owner. It is here, we may assume, that Aretino displayed his most prized works of art, 5 3 and here that we may imagine him entertaining. Like Titian he was a generous host, communing not only with artists and men of letters, but also with foreign ambassadors and the idle sons of the Venetian nobility. Jacopo Sansovino's situation was entirely different. He lived in one of the flats in the Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco, namely the first adjoining the Clock Tower (figs. 3 . 1 2 , 3.13). 5 4 T h e building was owned by his employers, the Procurators of San Marco, and its use had been granted him in 1529 when he was appointed the Procuracy's supervising architect (protomaestro). He never moved for the rest of his life, but he spent upwards of 360 ducats on improvements in the apartment, as we learn from his son Francesco, who, after his father's death, besieged the Procurators with demands for reimbursement for these works. Jacopo had built new stairs, moved beams and doorways, made new fireplaces (including one with two stone figures and a stucco relief), floors, ceilings, door and window frames, and kitchen cabinets, and installed a work table and file cases in a mezzanine room. 55 The flat lay on what we would call the third floor and Europeans the first, and occupied the first two bays of the building. Below it was a ground floor and a mezzanine. It consisted of a small portego, three other rooms, a kitchen with maid's room, and an attic space under the roof. (The latter was separated from the flat by a second residential floor occupied by another tenant.) In 1531 Sansovino was given use of a ground-floor shop and two mezzanine rooms beneath his flat. They were meant to be rented out by the artist for his own account and thus to constitute an emolument additional to his regular stipend. 56 89

3.12

Procuratie Vecchie

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Procuratie Vecchie, floor plan of apartments 90

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I I O L S K S OF T I T I A N , A R K T I N O , A N D S A N S O N I N O At the front Sansovino's rooms overlooked the Piazza. (In 1549 Aretino sent his daughter Adria to Sansovino's to watch the Maundy Thursday bull running on the Piazza. 57 ) At the rear they overlooked a calk running axially down the middle of the Procuratie Vecchie. T h e kitchen was on the other side of the calk, reached by an aerial bridge. Above it lay a room reached by stairs from the kitchen, which, I assume, was the maid's room. These rooms overlooked the backs of houses fronting on the Merceria. 58 T h e interior of the Procuratie has been much rebuilt, but one can still recognize the layout of Sansovino's house as being that of a Venetian housing block. In Sansovino's day the entire Procuratie Vecchie were divided into a series of vertical slices, each of which was an independent unit, or rather two units, one above the other. Each had its own entry from the street and contained a full apartment like Sansovino's, with reception room, minor rooms, and kitchen. 59 We do not know where they had their bathrooms and water supply, but obviously these were provided in some way too. T h e building was erected by the Procuracy of San Marco at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the design of a certain Giovanni Celestro of Tuscany. 6 0 It took the place of a structure that looked very similar on the exterior but had only one main residential floor. The latter is represented in Gentile Bellini's famous painting of a St. Mark's day procession in Piazza San Marco of 1496. 61 Although both the older structure and its sixteenth-century replacement went under the name of Procuratie, neither was built for the Procurators' own use. Until 1443 all the Procurators lived on the opposite side and at the west end of the square; after that time some were housed in the Procuratie, but only as a temporary measure, because of a want of adequate space elsewhere. With construction in the later sixteenth century of the Procuratie Nuove on the south side of the square— procurators' houses properly speaking—they moved back to where they had lived before. 62 The regular tenants of both the medieval and the Renaissance Procuratie Vecchie were actually shopkeepers (on the ground and mezzanine floors) and a mixture of ordinary apartment dwellers and keepers of rooming houses (in the upper stories). Among others, Gentile Bellini was living in the old Procuratie Vecchie in 1463, and the painter Giovanni Francesco Bonsignori signed a lease in 1517 for an unfinished apartment in the new building, occupancy to begin when the structure was completed. 63 T h e Procuratie Vecchie, in other words, were a housing block in usage as well as in plan, a block of case da sazenti. They differed from those built as almshouses and those maintained by private owners for rental income in the fairly generous scale of the apartments, the development of the entire ground floor for commercial use, and the elaborate treatment of the facade. These were features dictated by the site, for the Procuratie Vecchie had been conceived from the beginning as an integral part of a public square, and therefore had borrowed elements of form and planning from models of public rather than private architecture. It must have been especially the monumental exterior that Aretino had in mind when, in 1537, he invited visitors to Venice to take the measure of the Republic's generosity toward its employees by observing the style in which it kept Sansovino. 64 T h e interior, to the extent that it was luxurious, was, as we have heard, the result of Sansovino's own efforts. We do not know how the master furnished his flat, nor even what works of art he owned and kept there. Nor do we know much of whom he received there and how. The only report I know of is Benvenuto Cellini's account of a dinner at Sansovino's in 1535. Cellini had come to Venice with Nicolo Tribolo to seek employment. Tribolo, a meek and credulous man, had had a letter from Sansovino, which he had interpreted as an invitation to come to Venice and work with the latter. Fortified by the company of Cellini, he had set out for Venice to present himself. Cellini remembered the meeting in his Autobiography,6S 9>

JLKRGEN

SCHUL/

He received me most kindly, and invited us to dinner, and we stayed with him. In course of conversation with Tribolo, he told him that he had no work to give him at the moment, but that he might call again. Hearing this, I burst out laughing, and said pleasantly to Sansovino: " Y o u r house is too far off from his, if he must call again." Poor Tribolo, all in dismay, exclaimed: "I have got your letter here, which you wrote to bid me come." Sansovino rejoined that men of his sort, men of worth and genius, were free to do that and greater things besides. Tribolo shrugged his shoulders and muttered: "Patience, patience" several times. Thereupon, without regarding the copious dinner which Sansovino had given me, I took the part of my comrade Tribolo, for he was in the right. . . . Upon this he [Sansovino] and I rose from table blowing off the steam of our choler. If we look back on what we have learned about the way all three men were housed, Titian, Aretino, and Sansovino, I think we can draw a few general conclusions. Artists and men of letters in sixteenth-century Venice in no way distinguished themselves from other Venetians in the way they lived. Their residences were scattered throughout the city, not collected together in a favored district, and had no uniformity among themselves. They were not artists' houses in a distinctive way. But Aretino's first and second home, Titian's first studio, and Sansovino's apartment were free, that is, had cost them nothing. In the case of Sansovino this fact may signify no more than that the frugal Procurators tried to minimize expenses by paying their employees in kind. But it is curious that at one time or another all three men sidestepped a straightforward exchange of money for space, as if the living and working spaces they considered fitting and necessary were somewhat more expensive than an artist could ordinarily afford. Both of Aretino's lodgings and Titian's house at Biri Grande were of a rather higher class of housing than Renaissance artists in Venice generally enjoyed. T h e few explicit records that are known show artists lodged in case da sazenti, either rented or owned by them: for example, Giovanni Mansueti, from 1504 to his death, Girolamo Mocetto in 1 5 1 4 , Giovanni Buonconsiglio from 1 5 1 4 to his death, Paris Bordone from 1536 to 1566, Lorenzo Lotto in 1548, Antonio Abbondi in 1548, Battista Franco in 1554, and Jacopo del Giallo in the same year. 6 6 Titian had begun his independent life in the same way. But as he grew older and more prosperous, he aspired to a more dignified house, and Aretino found one for himself right away. It is a sign of the social rise of the artist in the sixteenth century that some were breaking away from the traditional pattern. Still one more consideration: if we reflect upon the kinds of houses Titian and his compari occupied in their maturity, we shall find that they match quite well the kind of self-image we perceive them to have had. Titian ended his days in a species of villa at the margins of the city, overlooking an ample garden, the Lagoon, and the Alps, like a gentleman withdrawn from the cares and bustle of urban life. Aretino spent his final years in a huge and venerable noble "seat" at the heart of the city's downtown, like a patrician man of affairs, living but a step from the offices and persons of the politically and economically powerful. Sansovino spent his entire Venetian career in a government flat, indistinguishable on the exterior from a host of others but located at the nerve center of the state: a powerful and watchful functionary.

91

HOUSES

OK T I T I A N ,

ARETINO,

AND

SANSOVINO

APPENDIX

The Dandolo of San Luca and Their Houses

T h e building inhabited by Aretino in the 1550s was part of a property on the Riva del Carbon that had belonged to the Dandolo continuously since at least the early thirteenth century. It is first heard of in an act of 1225, the original of which is lost, but the contents of which are partly summarized and partly copied in a document of 1418. 6 7 This act, dated J u l y 1225, records the division into separate shares by order of the Giudici del Esaminador of properties in the confinii of San Luca and San Salvador previously held undivided by the brothers Johannes Dandolo, Count of Ragusa, and Marcus Dandolo, sons of the late Jacobus Dandolo, residents of the confinio of San Luca. 6 8 T h e two brothers and the father are unknown to the Venetian genealogists and family historians of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries on whom we still depend today for the early history of the city's leading families. 6 9 However, we can reconstruct an outline of their lives and relationships from a variety of documents. A series of acts concerning trade between Venice and its colonies at Acre and T y r e (on the coast of modern-day Israel and Lebanon, respectively) shows that Johannes and Marcus were in business there on a regular basis at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In 1204 Johannes, together with two business partners, had bought the right to farm the revenues of the third part of T y r e and of the Venetian district of Acre, which belonged in part to the Republic and in part to the Basilica of San Marco. Johannes himself was named Viscount and Head (vicecomes et prelatus) of the two colonies for five years. 7 0 In the years that followed, down to 1 2 1 1 , Johannes and Marcus several times wrote letters of exchange for Venetians trading with these colonies. 71 In 1 2 1 4 - 1 5 Johannes was first appointed Count of Ragusa (1comes; the post was roughly equivalent to that of a foreign-born podestà in an Italian medieval commune) and served again in this capacity in 1222, 1225-26, 1229, 1 2 3 1 , and 1234. 7 2 In 1 2 3 5 , back at Venice, Johannes drew up his will; 7 3 presumably he died soon after. T h e various acts from which these details are taken also mention the names of relatives, so that it is possible to draw a family tree for these first known owners of the Dandolo property on the Riva del Carbon (table 3.1). Johannes, clearly, was a person of some consequence. H e held important offices for many years and was related to many of the city's leading families. His mother was a Badoer, his sister had married a Dolfin, and his daughter married a Querini. H e had a more distant relationship with the Giustinian 7 4 and the Enzio 7 5 and was even related to Doge Pietro Z i a n i . 7 6 In the division of 1225, the family patrimony at San Luca is described as a parcel of land and multi-story houses with courtyard ("proprietas terrae, et casae soleratae cum sua curia"). T h e portion of this that was awarded to Johannes is called a parcel with courtyard ("proprietas cum ipsa sua curia"), and is said to face at one end upon the share (undescribed) that fell to Marcus, and at the Manuscripts cited below by their shelf number alone (e.g., P . D . C-935) are in the Library of the Museo Civico Correr, Venice. Other archives and libraries in Venice are abbreviated as follows: A S V = Archivio di Stato, Venice; A M V = Archivio del Municipio, Venice; B N M = Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. The originals of quoted acts are dated Venetian style (more veneto), which began the new year on March 1, but unless otherwise specified all dates in this account are given in the modern style. Contractions have been expanded by supplying the missing letters in italics. 93

JLF.RGKN Table 3.1

SCULL/

Johannes Dandolo, Count of Ragusa, and His Relations

Johannes m. Gisla . . Jacobus living iiSf d. btf. uSi

Filippa m. . . . Dolfin

Jacobus m. Maria Badoer

Marcus living 120$, 1211

Johannes, Count of Ragusa m. Orabile . . . living 120i2j$ test. i2js Arminia m. BaUuinus Querini living i2js

other end upon the Grand Canal. 7 7 In his testament Johannes called it a residence ("proprietas magna"); he bequeathed it to his daughter, Arminia Querini. By themselves, the words used to describe Johannes's property are not sufficient to identify it with any of the buildings on the Riva del Carbon recorded later in the possession of the Dandolo family or standing there today. But the act of division, as do all such acts in Venice, defines Johannes's share in terms of its boundaries, that is, the properties adjoining it on all sides, and these can be recognized again in two later acts. T h e y are two other patrimonial divisions, one of 1309, the other of 1418. These again say relatively little about the actual appearance of the properties being divided but record in circumstantial detail their boundaries on all sides. N o t only do the boundaries, as defined in these acts, establish an identity between the properties mentioned in them, but the act of 1418 is predicated on the belief that the proprietas magna allotted to Johannes in 1225 is the nucleus of the patrimony now being divided anew. We have no reason to doubt this belief. In 1309 the property had as yet grown little if at all beyond the confines of that parceled out to Johannes in 1225. That year the brothers Nicolaus and Jacobus Dandolo, residents of the confinio of San Luca, agreed by private treaty to divide their buildings in the district, which they had previously held undivided and which they had inherited from their forefathers ("que fuerunt condam Aui nostri, et inter nos in fraterna Societate fuerunt hactenus indiuise"). 78 T h e portion assigned to Jacobus was a residential palace ("domus maior") facing on the Grand Canal and bounded at its rear by the portion assigned to Nicolaus. A passage on the ground floor ("porticus de inferiore") led through the building from one end to the other (i.e., from its rear to the "junctorium de supra canalem"). Nicolaus's share consisted of several rental flats ("domus de sergentibus") facing on the square called today the Corte del Treatro. In 1 4 1 8 both portions were united once more in the estate of the then recently deceased Marcus Dandolo, son of the late Andrea. T h e early genealogists identify him as a direct descendant of one of the two brothers who had entered into the division of 1309, namely, Jacobus. 7 9 (They show the 94

HOUSES

3.14

OF

TITIAN,

ARETINO,

AND

SANSOV1NO

T h e area of Corte del Teatro and Riva del Carbon in 1886 Venice, Archivio del Municipio

other brother, Nicolaus, as having died without male heirs, which may explain how Marcus came to possess his share as well. 80 ) Marcus already enjoyed ownership of the building in 1379, when he drew up the first of his two known testaments, in which he bequeathed to one of his four living sons his residential palace in the district of San Luca together with its downstairs ("la mia cha granda de 95

3.15

The houses of the Dandolo seen from the Grand Canal

3.16

The houses of the Dandolo seen from Corte del Teatro 96

H O U S E S OF T I T I A N , A R E T I N O , A N D

SANSOVINO

san lucha con quela de soto"). 81 By the time he drew up his final will, however, in 1 4 1 2 , he had added to the property, for he now left his sons several palaces rather than one ("le mie caxe grande da san lucha"). 82 Only three sons were then living, and they were left an undivided patrimony. Six years later, in 1418, the patrimony was divided. It is this division that is the most informative of the surviving documents, for it exhibits extracts of eleven earlier acts bearing on the formation of Marcus' estate. 83 Among the exhibits are not only the division of 1225, which we cited above, but also the deeds of purchase by which, in 1409, Marcus had acquired two further domus a static, one on either side of his ca grande.84 N o w the Dandolo patrimony embraced the entire Riva del Carbon between the Ramo (or Sottoportego) del Carbon on the east and the Calle del Carbon on the west and reached back to the present-day Corte del Teatro and Calle Dandolo (figs. 3 . 1 4 - 3 . 1 6 ) . A host of acts of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries show that the Dandolo compound was owned in later times by the descendants of Marcus's two junior sons, Lunardo and Piero. It would take us too far afield to give a narrative account of all these generations, but it will be useful to display the documented kinships and vital statistics in the form of a genealogical tree (tables 3.2). 85 The tree shows that by the sixteenth century all but Lunardo's and Piero's lines of the family had died out. It must be for this reason that all rights to Marcus's patrimony had passed into their hands. During the 1550s and 1560s the heads of family were Lunardo quondam Girolamo Dandolo and Costantin quondam Piero. The first was a namesake and direct descendant of Marcus's son, Lunardo. He owned, and for some time inhabited, the great family seat, the ca'grande, identifiable in his tax declarations and other papers from its ground-floor passage, leading from the building's rear to its front on the Grand Canal and mentioned already in the division of 1309. 86 Costantin quondam Piero was descended from Marcus' son Piero. He and his brother Lorenzo owned two nearby case da stazio.87 One stood immediately to the east of Lunardo's ca' grande and was inhabited for some time by Lorenzo. 88 T h e other stood immediately to the west and was inhabited by Costantin. 89 Their position is identical with that of the two domus a statio purchased by Marcus in 1409. 90 Lunardo's and Costantin's shares of the estate included as well numerous rental shops and storerooms located on the ground and mezzanine floors of their respective palaces and in adjoining buildings around the Corte del Teatro and on the Calle Dandolo. Costantin (and his brother) also enjoyed the rental income from the ferry (tragbetto) across the Grand Canal that operated from a landing stage in front of Costantin's palace. 91 Lunardo's ownership of the ca grande lasted from 1538 until his death in 1582, but he inhabited its second residential floor (soler di sopra) already in 1534 and lived there no longer after 1 5 5 1 . 9 2 He had moved to rented quarters in the confinio of Santi Giovanni e Paolo and leased his own residence to Aretino. 93 After Aretino's death in 1556 a series of tenants occupied this floor, and neither Lunardo nor his descendants seem to have lived there again. Eventually Lunardo moved to the confinio of Santa Giustina, where his sons were still domiciled in 1588; 9 4 in 1645 the chief of his grandsons, Polo, was living in the confinio of Santa Marina. 95 T h e family fortunes had declined from the evident prosperity enjoyed by Marcus in the early fifteenth century. Venetian inheritance practices, which gave each male descendant a share in his forefathers' patrimony, led necessarily to an increasing fragmentation of an estate if the pool of heirs grew larger. Lunardo quondam Girolamo had been an only son and therefore had managed in his own day to enjoy total ownership of the ca' grande with all its downstairs shops and magazines and annexed rental flats. But he himself left five sons, and when he died his estate suffered fragmentation to such an extent that the sons, in 1588, had to plead straitened circumstances to the tax authorities. 96 97

T a b l e 3.2A

Bellelo Dandolo of San Luca and His Descendants Bellelo

Antonio (see table 3.2B)

Andrea d. btf.! i}97

Costanza living 1412

Marco Testadore 1412

I

I

Lu nardo bttw. ¡379-97 living 1411, ¡4$2

Andrea beivi. 1379-97 living 1412, 1418 I Angelo living 1452

I Toma

Polo living 1602 d. 1667

Nicolò bctvi. 1379-97

1 Marco living ¡¡40

I 1 Lunardo Marina . . . (d. btf. t ¡60) living ¡¡34, ¡¡73 d. btf. ¡¡89 1

r - H

1 Laura

Polo b. btf. >¡54 living 614

1

Vicenzo living 1612

Girolamo m. Maddalena Contarmi (btf. 1660) living 1627 (under age), 1633 d. btf. ¡667

Polo Micbitl living ¡680

Marieta nun in 1412

Lu nardo living 14S2, 1490

1 Girolamo m. Marietta Contarmi living 1S03, ¡S3' d. btf. ,s38

Lunardo

Ciacbomelìo bttw. 1379-97 i. btf. 1412

Toma Ittvi. '379-97 d. btf. 1412

Marco d. btf. 147Í

Zuanne m. Nicolosa . living 1482, 1490 d. bef. 1503

Girolamo b. btf. ISS4 m. Paula Bragadin 1579 living ¡¡¡o, 1614

Piero b. bttvi. 1379-1412 living 1412, 1452 (see table 3.2c)

1

1 Zuan Francisco living 1S14, i¡23

1 Laura m. Lunardo da Molin

m. Lion da Molin q. Nicolò

1 Marina m. . . . Navagtro bef. i¡óo

1 Vicenzo b- >*f 5Si living 1596

Zuanne m. Marietta Morosini