Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice - Sheila Hale

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ducats. It was customary, but not a contractual obligation, that an artist receiving the brokerage would also contribute to the cycle of paired portraits of doges that since the ninth century had been placed in a frieze that ran above the main cycle of history paintings.6 The holders of sanserie, of whom there were only thirty at any one time, were in effect tax farmers. They paid an agent to collect money from the German merchants on behalf of the government and in return were allowed to keep a certain proportion of the funds. Although both Bellini brothers had enjoyed these lucrative brokerages, Alvise Vivarini, who had joined them as an assistant in 1488, had asked to be paid in cash for each completed picture, while Carpaccio, Giovanni Bellini’s assistant and some twenty-five years older than Titian, had only a spettativa, an indication that he would receive the next available brokerage. Titian’s request is all the more striking considering that the Bellini brothers and Carpaccio were members of the cittadini caste while he was an outsider from a deeply provincial background. Nevertheless, he, Titian of Cadore and proud of his origins, intended to demonstrate his patriotism by serving Venice rather than the pope and other foreign lords who were insistently requesting him to paint for them. The scene he proposed to paint was the Battle of Spoleto, an episode in the Alexandrine legend in which Spoleto was destroyed by Barbarossa for its loyalty to the pope, who had previously taken refuge in Venice. Although Titian didn’t say as much, the subject of a battle would give him the opportunity to compete with Michelangelo and Leonardo, both of whom had begun, but never finished, battle scenes for the Great Council Hall of Florence. The painting required courage because it would be hung high up on the south wall between windows facing the lagoon and thus would have to be seen against dazzling light flooding into the Hall.

      Although there is little doubt that Titian believed he could meet the challenge, his promise to complete the battle scene speedily was perhaps disingenuous. He was probably aware that the brokerage he was requesting was usually paid for as long as an artist could convince the Council of Ten that he was working on canvases for the palace. This forgiving approach encouraged procrastination and if cleverly negotiated could amount to a sinecure for life. The government had shown no sign that it was in any great hurry to complete the redecoration programme of the Great Council Hall, which was intended more for propaganda purposes than for the pleasure of the noisy throng of mostly philistine patricians who assembled there on Sunday afternoons. The Hall, which had been built in 1340, was cold and draughty in winter, and a heat trap in summer. The higher elected officials and their secretaries spent most of their time in the more comfortable surroundings of their offices and smaller council chambers. Thus the campaign to replace with canvases the ruined medieval frescos of episodes from the Alexandrine legend had been progressing slowly despite the occasional efforts of the Council of Ten to move things along. In the early 1490s Sanudo had boasted that the ceiling of the Great Council Hall was ‘all done in gold, which cost more than 10,000 ducats’.7 By 1494, however, the programme of replacing the medieval frescos with canvases by modern artists was so far behind schedule that the Umbrian painter Perugino, who was then most famous for his frescos in the Sistine Chapel, was offered 400 ducats to paint the Battle of Spoleto. He had refused, and that was the scene that Titian now proposed to provide in return for a studio of his own, two assistants, colours and the first available brokerage.

      The Council of Ten voted, by ten to six, to accept Titian’s proposal. Eight days later a further resolution ordered the Salt Office to pay his two assistants four ducats a month but not until they had started work on the battle scene. On 1 September 1513 Titian employed Luca Antonio Buxei and Lodovico de Zuane, who had previously worked on paintings for the Council Hall, and moved his practice into a set of spacious warehouses on the premises of the unfinished Ca’ del Duca – the palace so called because it had once belonged to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan – where the government gave working spaces to artists employed by the state.8 (It is the building with the heavily rusticated base at the bend of the Grand Canal opposite the Accademia Gallery.) But then, just as he was settling into the new studio, the Republic suffered the most catastrophic reversal of the entire war. On 6 June a French army that was supposed to come to its aid was defeated at Novara by Swiss mercenaries in the service of Massimiliano Sforza, who governed Milan under Swiss protection provided by the emperor. Sforza allowed free passage to Spanish and imperial troops, who laid siege to Treviso and Padua, penning in the inadequate Venetian army. With Louis XII suffering from what seems to have been premature senility the French alliance was all but useless. Venice was alone. In July the normally reticent Doge Loredan addressed the Great Council, beginning his speech with the familiar threnody about the arrogance and sinful habits of the patricians as the cause of disasters and defeats. He threatened to dismiss from office those patricians who were delinquent in the payment of their taxes, and appealed to them to join the army in defence of Padua and Treviso.

      By September a Spanish army had reached the edge of the lagoon and aimed their cannon at the Virgin City, which was saved from bombardment only by the four kilometres of shallow water that put it beyond the reach of contemporary firepower. Once again, as in 1509, Venetians saw their mainland towns, villages and farms in flames. On 26 September Sanudo climbed to the top of the bell tower of San Marco to survey the devastation.

      I saw the terrible destruction wrought by the enemies, who, if they had been Turks, could not have done worse … and everywhere one saw enormous fires that were billowing smoke, so that at the twenty-third hour the sun was as red as blood from the smoke of so many fires … It has been heard around town that the enemy front has crossed the Brenta, burning everything as they go, and that tonight they will burn Mestre and the villages and dwellings and whatever they find …

      Yet another sign that God had withdrawn His protection from His once chosen city came on a freezing night in January when an oil lamp overturned in a canvas depot at the Rialto. The flames were spread across the Rialto by a high wind, and by the time the firefighters had arrived shops, warehouses, banks, merchants’ lodgings and thousands of ducats’ worth of merchandise had been destroyed. Sanudo devoted ten double-columned pages of the printed edition of his diary to a vivid eyewitness account of the catastrophe, which he compared to the Fall of Troy and the recent sack of Padua. The work of putting out the fire was impeded by the throngs of Venetians trying to rescue what they could and by looters, some but not all of them foreigners. The wind did not die down until morning, when the doge sent his senior officials to bring order. Among the crowds who assembled to watch the spectacle Sanudo saw many foreigners, including ‘our rebel Paduans … and in my heart I believe that it gave them great joy to see our ruination’. It was, however, a good omen that the little church of San Giacomo al Rialto, the oldest Christian foundation in Venice, was miraculously saved despite its proximity to the source of the fire.

      On 20 March 1514 the Council of Ten took the decision to revoke the terms of Titian’s petition. He would have to wait his turn for a vacant sanseria like everyone else, and to save the state money they cancelled the salaries of his two assistants. Titian wisely bided his time. It might have seemed small-minded and unpatriotic to contest the decision when the state finances were overstretched by rebuilding the Rialto as well as by the soaring expense of the war. He waited until 28 November that year to present a revised petition to the Council of Ten in which he accepted that he would have to wait for his sanseria until the death of Giovanni Bellini unless one became available earlier. Meanwhile, he hoped that the Salt Office would resume paying for his assistants’ salaries and for his colours. He claimed that he had begun work on the battle scene, which would have been well in hand had it not been for the ‘skill and cunning of some who do not want to see me as their rival’. He added that without the promised expenses he would die of hunger. Although he did not name his enemies he must have been referring to Carpaccio,9 who was now in his fifties and out of fashion although ahead of Titian in the queue for the next vacant brokerage. (Carpaccio lived into the 1520s but never worked in the palace again.) The next day the Council of Ten agreed to the revised terms, this time by the narrow margin of seven to six votes, and ordered the Salt Office to pay the assistants, to provide Titian with pigments as required and to repair his workshop in the Ca’ del Duca, which was letting in the rain and might damage his preparatory sketches for the battle scene, thus

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