LITMIR.BIZ

      The letter was preceded by the delivery to Titian of the canvas for Bacchus and Ariadne and a sweetener of twenty-five scudi.

      A few months later it must have occurred to Alfonso that for all the good his sudden rush of common sense had done he might as well have gone along with the St Sebastian swindle. By the summer of 1521 Leo X, having enthusiastically formed an alliance with the twenty-one-year-old Habsburg emperor Charles V, was as committed to driving Alfonso’s French allies out of Italy as Julius II had been. Leo excommunicated Alfonso and imposed an interdict on Ferrara, and while the French and Venetians dragged their heels, his troops attacked and occupied key territories and towns of the dukedom of Ferrara. Even with the cards so heavily stacked against him, Alfonso refused to surrender or disarm. He was saved only at the last minute by an event that could not have been predicted. Leo, who was only forty-six, was found dead in bed on the morning of 1 December. He was overweight, drank too much and had been in poor health for some time, but his death was so sudden that poison was suspected, although it seems more likely that he had contracted malaria on a hunting expedition along the Tiber. He had left the papacy all but bankrupt. But what mattered to Alfonso at the time was that Leo’s death gave him the opportunity to recapture most of his hinterland, including Reggio and Modena. He celebrated with a minting of silver coins on which a shepherd rescues a lamb from the jaws of a lion with the biblical inscription de manu leonis.

      Alfonso was less fortunate in his negotiations with Titian, whose work on the Bacchus and Ariadne had been delayed by yet another distraction. This time it was an enormous fresco commissioned in the summer of 1521 by the local government of Vicenza for the loggia of their communal palace. The subject was the Judgement of Solomon, an obvious reference to the administration of justice. It was over six metres wide, more than twice the size of his Miracle of the Speaking Child in Padua, which probably explains the substantial fee of 100 ducats plus six more for painting the vaults of the loggia, and another ten for expenses and three helpers: his brother Francesco, who worked alongside him for thirty days, a certain Gregorio and a Bartolomeo, a ‘master painter’. Nothing more is known about Gregorio and Bartolomeo, who may have been local painters taken on for this job only. Paris Bordone, possibly Titian’s former studio assistant, was working on a much smaller Drunkenness of Noah (for which he was paid twenty-one ducats) adjacent to Titian’s fresco.8 If he was still smarting from Titian’s treatment of him several years earlier (in connection with the San Nicolò ai Frari altarpiece) he was never able to throw off the master’s influence. It was said that when a group of government officials came to survey the completed decorations of the loggia they praised Bordone’s fresco as the equal of Titian’s. If the story is true it may have reminded Titian of the occasion, more than a decade earlier, when Giorgione had been congratulated for painting Titian’s façade of the German exchange house, which everyone considered superior to his own. Giorgione had sulked. Titian by now was too well established, and far too busy, to worry about rivalry, especially from a painter he knew to be his inferior. Alas, we cannot judge either of their frescos because the loggia was destroyed in 1571 to make way for the one designed by Palladio that we see today.