Vecelli was
now at the height of his fame; and towards 1521, following the
production of a figure of “ St Sebastian “ for the papal
legate in Brescia (a work of which there are numerous
replicas), purchasers became extremely urgent for his
productions. In 1525, after some irregular living and a
consequent fever, he married a lady of whom only the Christian
name, Cecilia, has come down to us; he hereby legitimized
their first child, Pornponio, and two (or perhaps three)
others followed.
Towards 1526
he became acquainted, and soon exceedingly intimate, with
Pietro Aretino, the literary bravo, an influence and audacity
hitherto unexampled, who figures so strangely in the
chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to
Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. A great affliction befell him in
August 1530 in the death of his wife. He then, with his three
children—one of them being the infant Lavinia, whose birth
had been fatal to the mother—removed to a new home and got
his sister Orsa to come
from Cadore and take charge of the household. The mansion,
difficult now to find, is in the Bin Grande, then a
fashionable suburb, being in the extreme end of Venice, on the
sea, with beautiful gardens and a look-out towards Murano. In
1532 he painted in Bologna a portrait of the emperor Charles
V., and was created a count palatine and knight of the Golden
Spur, his children also being made nobles of the empire— for
a painter, honours of an unexampled kind.
The Venetian
government, dissatisfied at Titian’s neglect of the work for
the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the money
which he had received for time unemployed; and Pordenone, his
formidable rival of recent years, was installed in his place.
At the end of a year, however, Pordenone died; and Titian, who
had meanwhile applied himself diligently to painting in the
hail the battle of Cadore, was reinstated. This great pjcture,
which was burned with several others in 5577, represented in
life-size the moment at which the Venetian captain,
D’Alviano, fronted the enemy, with horses and men crashing
down into the stream. Fontana’s engraving, and a sketch by
Titian himself in the gallery of the Uffizi in Florence,
record the energetic composition. As a matter of professional
and worldly success, his position from about this time may be
regarded as higher than that of any other painter known. to
history, except Raphael, Michelangelo, and at a later date
Rubens.
In 1540 he
received a pension from D’Avalos, marquis del Vasto, and an
annuity of 200 crowns (which was afterwards doubled) from
Charles V. on the treasury of Milan. Another source of
profit— for he was always sufficiently keen after
money—was a contract, obtained in 1542, for supplying grain
to Cadore, which he visited with regularity almost every year,
and where he was both generous and influential. This reminds
us of Shakespeare and his relations to his birthplace,
Stratford-on-Avon; and indeed the great Venetian and the still
greater Englishman had something akin in the essentially
natural tone of their inspiration and performance, and in the
personal tendency of each to look after practical success and
“ the main chance “ rather than to work out aspirations
and pursue ideals. Titian had a favourite villa on the
neighbouring Manza Hill, from which (it may be inferred) he
made his chief observations of landscape form and effect. The
so-called “ Titian’s mill,” constantly discernible in
his studies, is at Collontola, near Belluno.
A visit was
paid to Rome in 1546, when he obtained the freedom of the
city, his immediate predecessor in that honour having been
Michelangelo in 1537. He could at the same time have succeeded
the painter Fra Sebastiano in his lucrative office of the
piombo, and he made no scruple of becoming a friar for the
purpose; but this project lapsed through his being summoned
away from Venice in 5547 to paint Charles V. and others, in
Augsburg. He was there again in 1550, and executed the
portrait of Philip II., which was sent to England and proved a
potent auxiliary in the suit of the prince for the hand of
Queen Mary. In the preceding year Vecelli had affianced his
daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and
painted various times, to Cornelio Sarcineffi of Serravalle;
she had succeeded her aunt Orsa, now deceased, as the manager
of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian
made by this time, was placed on a corresponding footing. The
marriage took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in
1560.
The years
1551 and 1552 were among those in which Titian worked least
assiduously—a circumstance which need excite no surprise in
the case of a man aged about seventy-five. He was at the
Council of Trent towards 1555, of which his admirable picture
or finished sketch in the Louvre bears record. He was never in
Spain, notwithstanding the many statements which have been
made in the affirmative. Titian’s friend Aretino died
suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate, the sculptor and
architect Jacopo Sansovino, in 1570. With his European fame,
and many sources of wealth, Vecelli is the last man one would
suppose to have been under the necessity of writing querulous
and dunning letters for payment, especially when the defaulter
addressed was lord of Spain and of the American Indies; yet he
had constantly to complain that his pictures remained unpaid
for and his pensions in
arrear, and in the very year of his death (February) he
recites the many pictures which he had sent within the
preceding twenty years without receiving their price. In fact,
there is ground for thinking that all his pensions and
privileges, large as they were nominally, brought in. but
precarious returns, it has been pointed out that in the summer
of 1566 (when he was elected into the Florentine Academy) he
made an official declaration of his income, and put down the
various items apparently below their value, not naming at all
his salary or pensions. Possibly there was but too much reason
for the omission.
In September
1565 Titian went to Cadore and designed the decorations for
the church at Pieve, partly executed by his pupils. One of
these is a Transfiguration, another an Annunciation (now in S.
Salvatore, Venice), inscribed “Titian us fecit,” by
way of protest (it is said) against the disparagement of some
persons who caviled at the veteran’s failing handicraft. He
continued to accept commissions to the last. He had selected
as the place for his burial the chapel of the Crucifix in the
church of the Fran; and, in return for a grave, he offered the
Franciscans a picture of the “ Pieta,” representing
himself and his son Orazio before the Saviour, another figure
in the composition being a sibyl. This work he nearly
finished; but some differences arose regarding it, and he then
settled to be interred in his native Pieve. Titian was
ninety-nine years of age (more or less) when the plague, which
was then raging in Venice, seized him, and carried him off on
the 27th of August 1576. He was buried in the church of the
Fran, as at first intended, and his “Pieta was finished by
Palma Giovane. He lies near his own famous painting, the
Madonna di Casa Pesaro.” No memorial marked his grave, until
by Austrian. command Canova executed the monument so well
known to sightseers. Immediately after Titian’s own death,
his son and pictorial assistant Orazio died, of the same
epidemic. His sumptuous mansion was plundered during the
plague by thieves, who prowled about, scarce controlled.
Titian was a
man of correct features and handsome person, with an uncommon
air of penetrating observation and self-possessed
composure—a Venetian presence worthy to pair with any of
those “most potent, grave and reverend signors” whom his
pencil has transmitted to posterity. He was highly
distinguished, courteous and winning in society, personally
unassuming, and a fine speaker, enjoying (as is said by Vasari,
who saw him in the spring of 1566) health and prosperity
unequalled- The numerous heads currently named Titian’s
Mistress might dispose us to regard the painter as a man of
more than usually relaxed morals; the tact is, however, that
these titles are mere fancy-names, and no inference one way or
the other can be drawn from them. He gave splendid
entertainments at times; and it is related that, when Henry
III. of France passed through Venice on his way from Poland to
take the French throne, he called on Titian. with a train of
nobles, and the painter presented him as a gift with all the
pictures of which he inquired the price. He was not a man of
universal genius or varied faculty and accomplishment, like
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; his one great and supreme
endowment was that of painting.
Ever since
Titian rose into celebrity the general verdict has been that
he is the greatest of painters, considered technically. In the
first place neither the method of fresco painting nor work of
the colossal scale to which fresco painting ministers is here
in question. Titian’s province is that of oil painting, and
of painting on a scale which, though often large and grand, is
not colossal either in dimension or in inspiration. Titian.
may properly be regarded as the greatest manipulator of paint
in relation to color, tone, luminosity, richness, texture,
surface and harmony, and with a view to-the production of a
pictorial whole conveying to the eye a true, dignified and
beautiful impression of its general subject matter and of the
objects of sense which form its constituent parts. In this
sense Titian has never been deposed from his sovereignty in
painting, nor can one forecast the time in which he will be
deposed.
For the
complex of qualities which we sum up in the words color,
handling and general force and harmony of effect, he stands
unmatched, although in particular items of forcible or
impressive execution—not to speak of creative
invention—some painters, one in one resnect and another in
another, may indisputably be preferred to him. He carried to
its acme that great colounist conception of the Venetian
school of which the first masterpieces are due to the two
Bellini, to Canpaccio, and, with more fully developed suavity
of manner, to Giorgione. Pre-eminent inventive power or
sublimity of intellect he
never evinced. Even in energy of action and more especially in
majesty or affluence of composition the palm is not his; it is
(so far as concerns the Venetian school) assignable to
Tii’itoretto. Titian is a painter who by wondrous magic of
genius and of art satisfies the eye, and through the eye the
feelings— sometimes the mind.