Author: Sir Claude Phillips

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ISBN: 978-1-78525-938-8

Sir Claude Phillips

TITIAN

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Self-Portrait, 1565-1570.

Oil on canvas, 86 x 65 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN

THE LATER WORK OF TITIAN

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTES

THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN

Tiziano Vecelli was born in the last quarter of the fifteenth century at Pieve di Cadore, a district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice. He was the son of Gregorio di Conte Vecelli and his wife Lucia. His father came from an ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in the valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tiziano would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who was a lawyer of note concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of obsequious friendship with his famous cousin in Venice. The Tizianello who in 1622 dedicated an anonymous Life of Titian known as Tizianello’s Anonimo to the Countess of Arundel, and who died in Venice in 1650, was Titian’s cousin thrice removed.

Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery in the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the Dialogo della Pittura, or of ten, according to Tizianello’s Anonimo, Titian was taken from Cadore to Venice to begin his painting studies. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision. What is much more vital in our study of the master’s life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his native Cadore left a permanent impression on his landscape art, and in what way his descent from a family of hardy mountaineers and soldiers of a certain birth and breeding contributed to shape his individuality in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of Cadore in the backgrounds of his pictures. However, except for the great Battle of Cadore itself (now known only in Fontana’s print, in a reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Galleria degli Uffizi, and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altarpieces, Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. The majority of the time, however, the middle distance and foreground to these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts, monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring. It is the richer vegetation of the lower slopes of the Friulan Mountains, or beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the play of light, and richness more suitable to the character of Venetian art. He had the amplest opportunities for studying these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery of his native Cadore itself in the course of his many journeys from Venice to Pieve and back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland. The extent to which Titian’s Alpine origin, and his early upbringing among impoverished mountaineers, may account for his excessive eagerness to reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah Gilbert – quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4] – pertinently asks, “Might this mountain man have been something of a ‘canny Scot’ or a shrewd Swiss?” In the earning of money, Titian was certainly all this, but in the spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and profusion, particularly in the second half of his career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodging in Venice with his uncle, an “honourable citizen”, who, seeing his great inclination for painting, placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became an expert. Dolce, in his Dialogo della Pittura, gives Sebastiano Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first master. He then makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and thence into that of the caposcuola (founder) Giovanni Bellini. Dolce then asserted that Titian took the last and by far the most important step of his early career by becoming the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione, but this has never been confirmed. Morelli[5] would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini out of Titian’s artistic descent altogether. However, certain traces of Gentile’s influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especially in the earlier portraiture, but particularly in the methods of technical execution generally. On the other hand, no existing earlier works suggest the view that he was part of the inner circle of Giovanni Bellini’s pupils – one of the discipuli (disciples), as some of these were fond of describing themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his following or not. Giovanni Bellini exercised upon the contemporary art of Venice and the Veneto an influence as strong as that of Leonardo on that of Milan and the adjacent regions during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and Borgognone; such men as Ambrogio de’ Predis, Bernardino de’ Conti and the somewhat later Bernardino Luini. Even Alvise Vivarini, the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest quattrocento development, bowed to the fashion for the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and San Giovanni in Bragora in Venice, and the similar one now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Bernard Berenson was the first to trace the artistic connection between Vivarini and Lorenzo Lotto, who was to a marked extent under the influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altarpiece of Santa Cristina near Treviso, the Madonna and Child with Saints, and the Madonna and Child with Saint Peter Martyr in the Naples Museum. In the Marriage of Saint Catherine at Munich, though it belongs to the early period, he is, both as regards exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour, essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who up to the date of Alvise Vivarini’s death was intimately connected with him, and so far as he could faithfully reproduce the characteristics of his incisive style, was transformed in his later years into something very like a satellite of Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, was to a great extent overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.

What may legitimately intrigue in both Giorgione and Titian’s early years is not so much that in their earliest productions they leant to a certain extent on Giovanni Bellini, but that they were so soon independent. Neither of them is in any existing work seen to have the same absolutely dependent relationship with the veteran quattrocentist which Raphael for a time had with Perugino, and which Sebastiano Del Piombo in his early years had with Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also of Lorenzo Lotto, who in the earliest known examples – such as the Saint Jerome of the Louvre – is already emphatically Lotto. As his art passed through successive developments, however, he still showed himself open to more or less enduring influences from elsewhere. Sebastiano del Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he undoubtedly was in every phase, was never throughout his career free of influence. First, as a boy, he painted the puzzling Pietà, which, notwithstanding the authentic inscription, Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus (sic) is so astonishingly like Cima that, without this piece of documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next he became the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produced, in a quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque, that series of superb portraits which under the name of Sanzio have acquired a worldwide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul to Michelangelo, he remained enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the very end of his career, only unconsciously allowing, from the force of early training and association, his Venetian origin to reveal itself.

Giorgione and Titian were both born in the last quarter of the fifteenth century; Giorgione around 1477 and Titian approximately ten years later, although there is still an ongoing debate on that matter. Lorenzo Lotto’s birth is to be placed around the year 1480. Palma was born around 1480, Pordenone possibly around the years 1483-1484 and Sebastiano Del Piombo around 1485. This shows that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier half of the cinquecento were born within a short period of about fifteen years – between 1475 and 1490.

It is easy to understand how the complete renewal brought about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini’s teaching and example operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fullness of sensuous yearning mingled with spiritual aspiration. The fascination exercised both by his art and his personality was irresistible to his youthful contemporaries; the circle of his influence increasingly widened, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellini himself was brought within it. With Titian and Palma the germs of the Giorgionesque fell upon fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a quite distinctive kind. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to its highest point of material development, and made a new thing of it in many ways. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than Giorgione, Titian or Lotto. Morelli called attention to that energetic element in his mountain scenes, which in a way counteracted the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interpreted the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic attributed this to the rustic origin of the artist, showing itself beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this terre à terre energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the Giorgionesque an extra element of something much nearer to the everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and this almost indefinable element is peculiar also to Palma’s art, in which it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the important Adam and Eve of his earlier period now in the Prado – once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione – and the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in Titian’s Three Ages in the National Gallery of Scotland. This can also be found in his Sacred and Profane Love (Medea and Venus) in the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred pieces as the Madonna and Child with Saints Ulfo and Brigida which is now called Virgin and Child with Saints Dorothy and George in the Prado Museum of Madrid, and the large Madonna and Child with four Saints in Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped of a little of its poetic glamour but retaining unabashed its splendid sensuousness, which is thus made to stand out more markedly. We notice, too, in Titian’s works of this particular group another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin and the muscular form of a male saint, or of a shepherd of the uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy gold, of a female saint or fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess or a heroine of Antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing characteristics as these as wholly and solely Titian of the early period? If so, we ought to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main, be made with all the allowances that the situation demands?

When a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines everywhere. One or two more modern examples may roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that developed between the youthful Bonington and the young Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre. One would communicate to the other something of the stimulating quality, the frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the English from the French school; the other would contribute, with the fire of his romantic temperament, to the art of the young Englishman who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – Millais, Rossetti and Holman Hunt – who is to state ex cathedra where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the third the conscience of the group?

In days of artistic upheaval and growth such as the last years of the fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the milieu must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be doubted that when the first sparks of the Promethean fire had been lit in Giorgione’s breast, which, with the soft intensity of its glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth. The blood of his contemporaries and juniors was of the material to ignite and flame like his own.

The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that “they who were excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of flesh, etc.”[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first years of the cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when – to take one instance only among many – the ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was always of love. In that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina’s courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty, Pietro Bembo wrote for “Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa illustrissima di Ferrara,” and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius, the leaflets which, under the title Gli Asolani, ne’ quali si ragiona d’ amore,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.

The Virgin and Child in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, popularly known as La Zingarella, which is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class, is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength and richness of the colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already Giorgionesque. Even Titian here asserts himself, and lays the foundation of his own manner. The characteristics of the divine Child differ widely from those adopted by Giorgione in the altarpieces of Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The Virgin is a woman beautified only by youth and the intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione and Titian in their loveliest types of woman are sensuous compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But Giorgione’s sensuousness is that which may easily characterise the goddess, while Titian’s is that of the woman, much nearer to the everyday world in which both artists lived.

The famous Christ Carrying the Cross in the Chiesa di San Rocco in Venice was first ascribed by Vasari to Giorgione in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The biographer quaintly adds: “This figure, which many have believed to be from the hand of Giorgione, is today the most revered object in Venice, and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life.” Indeed the embers of this debate remain hot to this day, as the Scuola di San Rocco now reattributes this work to the Castelfranco master, Giorgione. The picture, which presents “Christ dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the background,” resembles most among Giorgione’s authentic creations the Christ bearing the Cross. The resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this latter – one of the earliest Giorgiones – still recalls Giovanni Bellini, and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception. In both renderings of the divine countenance there seems to be a sinister, disquieting look, almost a threat underlying that expression of serenity and humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the Christ between Saint Andrew and Saint Catherine. Here the head of the infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest. Crowe and Cavalcaselle refused to accept this picture as a genuine Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place among the early works.

Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the Three Ages and Sacred and Profane Love, one is inclined to place the Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI to Saint Peter, once in the collection of Charles I[9] and now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The main elements of Titian’s art may be seen here, in imperfect fusion, as in very few of his early productions. The somewhat undignified Saint Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in the Sacred and Profane Love, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his immediate followers. The magnificently robed Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, echoes the portraiture style of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio, while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro – an ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of fleets, as the background suggests – is one of the most characteristic portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos and intensity contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same Baffo in the renowned Retable of the Madonna of the Pesaro, painted twenty-three years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It is the first in order of a great series, including the Ariosto of the National Gallery, the Man with a Glove, the Portrait of a Man in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and perhaps the famous Concert in the Palazzo Pitti, once ascribed to Giorgione. Crowe, Cavalcaselle and Georges Lafenestre[10] have all called attention to the fact that the detested Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot well have been executed after that time. It would have been a bold man who attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI into a votive picture painted immediately after his death. How is it possible to assume that Sacred and Profane Love, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art, was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or at the latest in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted his Castelfranco altarpiece, his Venus nor his Three Philosophers (Aeneas, Evander and Pallas). Old Gian Bellini himself had not entered upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great San Zaccaria altarpiece finished in 1505.[11]

Vasari’s many manifest errors and disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained relations between Giorgione and our painter, which are supposed to have arisen around the fresco decorations painted by the two artists on the façades of the new Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on the 28th of January 1505. That they decorated it together with a series of frescos for which the exterior of the Fondaco is famous is all that is known for certain, Titian being apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of these frescos only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved in a much-damaged condition, the few fragments that remained of those facing the side canal having been destroyed in 1884.[12] Vasari shows us a Giorgione angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty of some work on the “facciata di verso la Merceria” which in reality belonged to Titian, thereupon implacably cutting short their connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but refuted by Tizianello’s Anonimo. There is one factor that makes it particularly difficult to make even a tentative chronological arrangement of Titian’s early works. This is that in the painted poesie of the earlier Venetian art of which the seeds are to be found in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, and the development of which is identified with Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian, but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed, even in Titian’s later period – checking an unveiled sensuousness which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright sensuality – the influence of the master and companion who vanished half a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this renewal of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives such an exquisite charm to the Venus of the Pardo, such a strange pathos to that still later Nymph and Shepherd.

The sacred works of the early period are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a majestic placidity, a fullness of life, a splendour of representation, very different from the tremulous sweetness and spirit of aloofness and reserve which inform such creations as the Madonna of Castelfranco and the Madonna with Saint Francis and Saint Roch of the Prado Museum. Later, leaving ever farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, we have the overpowering force and majesty of the Assunta, the true passion going hand-in-hand with the beauty of the Louvre’s Entombment, the rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the Saint Peter Martyr.

The Baptism of Christ, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome, was attributed to Paris Bordone by Crowe and Cavalcaselle instead of to Titian, but the keen insight of Morelli led him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to the Venetian master. Internal evidence is indeed conclusive, as the picture must be assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[13] Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries. The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here and there a naked branch among the foliage – and on one of them the woodpecker – strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust, round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here as Saint John the Baptist, who in the Three Ages appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The image of Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine Tribute Money. The question at once arises: Did Titian derive inspiration for this type of figure from Giovanni Bellini’s splendid Baptism of Christ? It was finished in 1510 for the Church of Santa Corona at Vicenza, but the younger artist might well have seen it a year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the workshop of the venerable master. Apart from its fresh naivety and rare pictorial charm, Titian’s conception appears trivial and merely anecdotal next to that of Bellini, so lofty, so consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset colour![14] Only in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram, placed awkwardly in the picture which is attractive in its naivety, but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing alone.

The beautiful Virgin and Child with Saints Dorothy and George, placed in the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now officially restored to Titian, having been for years ascribed to Giorgione, whose style it echoes. It is in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle defined as “Palmesque”. The Saint Dorothy and the Saint George are both types frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamo painter, and it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with hair of wavy gold must have sat for Giorgione, Titian and Palma. This can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type of the beautiful Venetian blond, “large, languishing, and lazy”. The hair of his women – both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally classical or wholly Venetian – is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the execution, sound and finished without being finicky, and the high yellowish lights on the crimson draperie are all very characteristic of the first manner of Titian. The green hangings at the back of the picture are generally associated with the colour schemes of Palma. An old replica, with a slight variation in the image of the Child, is in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, where it long bore – indeed it does so still on the frame – the name of Palma Vecchio.

Vasari assigns the exact date 1507 to the Tobias and the Angel now in the Galleria dell’Accademia, describing it with greater accuracy than he does any other work by Titian. He mentions even “the thicket, in which is Saint John the Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of light”. The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from this view, and in this instance to follow Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who assign Tobias and the Angel to the a much later time in Titian’s long career. The picture, though it hangs high in the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to those who interrogate it without parti pris. Neither in the figures – the magnificently classical yet living archangel Raphael and the more naive and realistic Tobias – nor in the rich landscape with Saint John the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power of the brush and the glow of the colour from within, we have so much evidence of a style in its fullest maturity. It would be safe, therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian’s middle period.[15]

The Three Ages in the National Gallery of Scotland and the Sacred and Profane Love in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of Titian’s Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the spirit of the master-poet among Venetian painters, yet possibly falling short a little of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces carry the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the trammels of the quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to the last – not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm – the naivety, the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely fully fledged.

The Three Ages, from its analogies of type and manner with the Baptism in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, would appear to be the earlier of these two imaginative works, but in fact dates from later.[16] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite silveriness; clear, moderate daylight, though this relative paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may be a little disconcerting at first sight for those who have known the lovely pastoral only from warm-toned, brown copies. It is still difficult to battle with the deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his school, without the accompaniment of rich brown tones. The shepherdess has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks approach the blond cendré hue that distinguishes so many of Palma’s donne, as opposed to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generally affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed pipes, which she still holds in her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned – a reversal, this, of the Rustic Concert in the Louvre, traditionally attributed to Giorgione but now credited to Titian, where the women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque amorini; the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor himself, while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged round him on the ground – obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of the figures, each aiding the other to express the moment of pause in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks, and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers’ own, and they profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint notes of music borne on the still, warm air.

The Sacred and Profane LovedonnaProfane LoveVenusVenusVenusZingarellaVenus of the PardoVenus