LITMIR.BIZ

      He also praised the leaders of the other states that had formed the league of aggression against Venice nine years earlier, giving special mention to ‘Maximilian Caesar, whose old age, weary of so many wars, has determined to seek rest in the employments of peace, a resolution more becoming to his own years, while it is fortunate for the Christian world’. Erasmus did not in this letter mention Venice as one of the peacemakers. Nor did he foresee that one of the ‘pious princes’, Francis I, and the grandson of Maximilian Caesar would be once again at war within a few years and that their long fight for dominance in northern Italy would delay the harmonious international relations that he had so earnestly anticipated.

EIGHT

       ‘His Industrious Brush’: Pentimenti and Portraits

      Confronted by a rival, whose name may be Pordenone or Michelangelo, Titian responds by engorging him. He appropriates his opponent’s style, or some part of it, which remains, for a brief moment, undigested within his own … The result is not, as with Hogarth or Renoir, disappointing: it is harrowing and short-lived. Titian works through the challenge, and his style reasserts itself.

      RICHARD WOLLHEIM, PAINTING AS ART, 1987

      When Titian was in his sixties he told a doctor that there were some days when he couldn’t paint at all and others when he could do and think of nothing else. Although his style changed radically in old age, his working habits were formed early in his career. When he was stimulated by competition or by the threat of losing a commission or by painting in fresco, he could work fast. But while the biographers of artists across different times and civilizations have told stories about wizardly speed of execution, as though the artists’ hands were directed by some supernatural force,1 Titian was known for his slowness and the procrastinations that stretched the patience of his patrons. He liked to work concurrently in different styles on paintings of different genres, stacking pictures that failed to satisfy him against a wall, leaving them unfinished or returning to them months, years or in some cases decades later. With growing success came the habit of taking on more tasks than he could realistically finish to a deadline. And he was capable of producing indifferent work on an off day or if the fee wasn’t high enough to merit his full attention: there are dull paintings – some come on the market or are stored in the basements of public galleries – that can be securely attributed to Titian, as well as some that are given to him without documentary evidence on the grounds of their high quality alone.

      Painting conservators can detect the layers of dust that accumulated while he set his paintings aside until he had solved a problem or could no longer put off the demands of a patron. He made his alterations over dry paint, cancelling out previous attempts with white lead paint, which shows up on X-rays. Joshua Reynolds, who claimed to have taken a painting by Titian to pieces to discover the elusive ‘Venetian secret’, would have envied our up-to-date technologies, which allow us to watch Titian at work, rearranging, adding and cancelling, searching for the composition and the tonal relationships in his mind’s eye. Titian was an explorer in paint, trying out new ideas, striking out in new directions, assimilating lessons from other masters and quoting them before discarding their example to find his own way into an unmapped future. Although he frequently quoted motifs from paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael, the story goes that later in his life he once said to an imperial ambassador in Venice, ‘who saw him use a brush as big as a birch-broom’, that he wished to paint in a manner different from that of Raphael or Michelangelo, because he was not content to be a ‘mere imitator’.2 He was, as his contemporaries liked to say of him, an exemplar of the Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the effort that goes into great art.3 But the false starts and the pentimenti – changes of plan while he worked on a painting4 – that can be detected beneath the assured surfaces of his masterpieces give us an idea of just how great the effort was. Bellini and Giorgione had taken advantage of the slow-drying property of oil paint to make changes, but Titian’s more numerous changes were so characteristic of his working methods that they have become a hallmark for distinguishing autograph Titians from imitations or mainly studio works.

      Although some of Titian’s compositions look as though he must have worked them out on paper before starting to paint, the majority of the preparatory sketches, if they existed, have long since disappeared, as have all but a few dozen of his other drawings, many of which are of debatable attribution. The whole question of Titian’s drawings, and what use he made of them, is one of the more vexed issues of Titian scholarship. The surviving sketches and drawings that are accepted, at least by some authorities, as autograph cover a wide variety of subjects – landscapes, animals, anatomical studies, sketches for portraits, studies for

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