Everything about Titian totally explained
Tiziano Vecelli or
Tiziano Vecellio (c.
1485 –
August 27,
1576), better known as
Titian, was the leader of the 16th-century
Venetian school of the
Italian Renaissance. He was born in
Pieve di Cadore, near
Belluno (
Veneto), in the
Republic of Venice. During his lifetime he was often called
Da Cadore, taken from the place of his birth.
Recognized by his contemporaries as "the sun amidst small stars" (recalling the famous final line of
Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits and landscapes (two genres that first brought him fame), mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of
Western art. During the course of his long life Titian's artistic manner changed drastically; what unites the two parts of his career is his deep interest in colour. His later works may not contain vivid, luminous tints as his early pieces do, yet their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic modulations have no precedents in the history of Western art.
Biography
Early years
No one is sure of the exact date of Titian's birth; when he was old he claimed it was 1477 in a letter to
Philip II, but this seems most unlikely. Other writers contemporary to his old age give figures for his age which would equate to birth-dates between 1473 to after 1482, but most modern scholars believe a date nearer 1490 is more likely. He was the eldest of a family of four and son of Gregorio Vecelli, a distinguished councillor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia. His father was superintendent of the castle of
Pieve di Cadore and also managed local mines for their owners. Many relatives, including Titian's grandfather, were
notaries, and the family were well-established in the area, which was ruled by Venice.
At the age of about ten to twelve he and his brother Francesco (who perhaps followed later) were sent to an uncle in Venice to find an apprenticeship with a painter. The minor painter, Sebastian Zuccato, whose sons became well-known mosaicists, and who may have been a family friend, arranged for the brothers to enter the studio of the elderly
Gentile Bellini, from which they later transferred to that of his brother
Giovanni Bellini. Finally this was the period when the artist composed the half-length figures and busts of young women, probably
courtesans, such as
Flora of the
Uffizi, or
The Young Woman at Her Toilet in the Louvre.
In 1525 he married a lady named Cecilia, thereby legitimizing their first child, Pomponio, and two (or perhaps three) others followed, including Titian's favorite, Orazio, who became his assistant. About 1526 he became acquainted, and soon exceedingly intimate, with
Pietro Aretino, the influential and audacious figure who features so strangely in the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to Gonzaga, duke of
Mantua.
In August 1530 his wife died giving birth to a daughter, Lavinia, and with his three children he moved house, and got his sister Orsa to come from Cadore and take charge of the household. The mansion, difficult to find now, is in the Bin Grande, then a fashionable suburb, at the extreme end of Venice, on the sea, with beautiful gardens and a view towards Murano.
Maturity
During the next period (1530-1550), Titian developed the style introduced by his dramatic
Death of St. Peter Martyr. The Venetian government, dissatisfied with Titian's neglect of the work for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the money which he'd received, and
Pordenone, his rival of recent years, was installed in his place. However, at the end of a year Pordenone died, and Titian, who meanwhile applied himself diligently to painting in the hall the
Battle of Cadore, was reinstated. This major battle scene, was lost along with so many other major works by Venetian artists by the great fire which destroyed all the old pictures in the great chambers of the
Doge's Palace in 1577. It represented in life-size the moment at which the Venetian general,
D'Alviano attacked the enemy with horses and men crashing down into a stream, and was the artist's most important attempt at a tumultuous and heroic scene of movement to rival
Raphael's
Battle of Constantine and the equally ill-fated
Battle of Cascina of
Michelangelo and
The Battle of Anghiari of
Leonardo (both unfinished). There remains only a poor, incomplete copy at the Uffizi, and a mediocre engraving by Fontana. The
Speech of the Marquis del Vasto (Madrid, 1541) was also partly destroyed by fire. But this period of the master's work is still represented by the
Presentation of the Blessed Virgin (Venice, 1539), one of his most popular canvasses, and by the
Ecce Homo (
Vienna, 1541). Despite its loss, the painting had a great influence on
Bolognese art and Rubens, both in the handling of details and the general effect of horses, soldiers, lictors, powerful stirrings of crowds at the foot of a stairway, lit by torches with the flapping of banners against the sky.
Less successful were the
pendentives of the cupola at Sta. Maria della Salute (
Death of Abel,
Sacrifice of Abraham,
David and Goliath). These violent scenes viewed in perspective from below — like the famous pendentives of the
Sistine Chapel — were by their very nature in unfavorable situations. They were nevertheless much admired and imitated, Rubens among others applying this system to his forty ceilings (the sketches only remain) of the
Jesuit church at Antwerp.
At this time also, the time of his visit to
Rome, the artist began his series of reclining Venuses (
The Venus of Urbino of the Uffizi,
Venus and Love at the same museum,
Venus and the Organ-Player, Madrid), in which is recognized the effect or the direct reflection of the impression produced on the master by contact with ancient sculpture.
Giorgione had already dealt with the subject in his Dresden picture, finished by Titian, but here a purple drapery substituted for a landscape background changed, by its harmonious coloring, the whole meaning of the scene.
Titian had from the beginning of his career shown himself to be a masterful portrait-painter, in works like
La Bella (Eleanora de Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, at the Pitti Palace). He painted the likenesses of princes, or Doges, cardinals or monks, and artists or writers. "...no other painter was so successful in extracting from each physiognomy so many traits at once characteristic and beautiful," according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Among portrait-painters Titian is compared to
Rembrandt and
Velásquez, with the interior life of the former, and the clearness, certainty, and obviousness of the latter.
The last-named qualities are sufficiently manifested in the
Portrait of Paul III of
Naples, or the sketch of the same
pope and his two nephews, the
Portrait of Aretino of the Pitti Palace, the
Eleanora of Portugal (Madrid), and the series of
King Charles V of the same museum, the
Charles V with a Greyhound (1533), and especially the
Charles V at Mühlberg (1548), an equestrian picture which as a symphony of purples is perhaps the ne plus ultra of the art of painting.
In 1532 after painting a portrait of the emperor Charles V in Bologna he was made a Count Palatine and knight of the Golden Spur. His children were also made nobles of the Empire, which for a painter was an exceptional honor.
As a matter of professional and worldly success his position from about this time is regarded as equal only to that of
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 from the treasury of
Milan.
Another source of profit, for he was always aware of money, was a contract obtained in 1542 for supplying grain to Cadore, where he visited almost every year and where he was both generous and influential.
Titian had a favorite villa on the neighboring 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.
He visited Rome in 1546, and 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
Sebastiano del Piombo in his lucrative office as holder of the piombo or Papal
seal, and he was prepared to take
holy orders for the purpose; but the project lapsed through his being summoned away from Venice in 1547 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 useful in Philip's suit for the hand of
Queen Mary.
Final years
During the last twenty-five years of his life (1550-1576) the artist worked mainly for Philip II and as a portrait-painter he became more self-critical, an insatiable perfectionist, keeping some pictures in his studio for ten years, never wearying of returning to them and retouching them, constantly adding new expressions at once more refined, concise, and subtle.
He also finished off many copies of earlier works of his by his pupils, giving rise to many problems of attribution and priority among versions of his works, which were also very widely copied and faked outside his studio, during his lifetime and afterwards.
For each of the problems which he successively undertook he furnished a new and more perfect formula. He never again equaled the emotion and tragedy of the
Crowning with Thorns (
Louvre), in the expression of the mysterious and the divine he never equaled the poetry of the
Pilgrims of Emmaus, while in superb and heroic brilliancy he never again executed anything more grand than
The Doge Grimani adoring Faith (Venice,
Doge's Palace), or the
Trinity, of Madrid.
On the other hand from the standpoint of flesh tints, his most moving pictures are those of his old age, the
Dan of Naples and of Madrid, the
Antiope of the Louvre, the
Rape of Europa (Boston, Gardner collection), etc. He even attempted problems of chiaroscuro in fantastic night effects (
Martyrdom of St. Laurence, Church of the Jesuits, Venice;
St. Jerome, Louvre). In the domain of the real he always remained equally strong, sure, and master of himself; his portraits of Philip II (Madrid), those of his daughter, Lavinia, and those of himself are numbered among his masterpieces.
Titian had engaged his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle. She had succeeded her aunt Orsa, then deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made by this time, placed her on a corresponding footing. The marriage took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in 1560.
He was at the
Council of Trent towards 1555, of which his admirable picture or finished sketch in the Louvre bears record. Titian's friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate, the sculptor and architect
Jacopo Sansovino, in 1570. 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
Titianus fecit, by way of protest (it is said) against the disparagement of some persons who cavilled 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
Pietà, 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 extremely, and famously, old when the
plague raging in Venice seized him, and he died on
27 August 1576. He was the only victim of that plague to be given a church burial and was interred in the
Frari (
Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), as at first intended, and his
Pietà was finished by
Palma the Younger. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di Ca' Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave, until much later the Austrian rulers of Venice commissioned
Canova to provide the large monument.
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.
Printmaking
Titian himself never attempted
engraving, but he was very conscious of the importance of
printmaking as a means of further expanding his reputation. In the period 1517–1520 he designed a number of
woodcuts, including an enormous and impressive one of
The Crossing of the Red Sea, and collaborated with
Domenico Campagnola and others, who produced further
prints based on his paintings and drawings. Much later he provided drawings based on his paintings to
Cornelius Cort from the Netherlands, who brilliantly engraved them.
Family
Several other artists of the Vecelli family followed in the wake of Titian.
Francesco Vecellio, his elder brother, was introduced to painting by Titian (it is said at the age of twelve, but chronology will hardly admit of this), and painted in the church of S. Vito in Cadore a picture of the titular saint armed. This was a noteworthy performance, of which Titian (the usual story) became jealous; so Francesco was diverted from painting to soldiering, and afterwards to mercantile life.
Marco Vecellio, called
Marco di Tiziano, Titian's nephew, born in 1545, was constantly with the master in his old age, and, learned his methods of work. He has left some able productions in the ducal palace, the
Meeting of Charles V. and Clement VII. in 1529 ; in S. Giacomo di Rialto, an
Annunciation ; in SS. Giovani e Paolo,
Christ Fulminant. A son of Marco, named Tiziano (or Tizianello), painted early in the 17th century.
From a different branch of the family came
Fabrizio di Ettore, a painter who died in 1580. His brother Cesare, who also left some pictures, is well known by his book of engraved costumes,
Abiti antichi e moderni.
Tommaso Vecelli, also a painter, died in 1620. There was another relative, Girolamo Dante, who, being a scholar and assistant of Titian, was called
Girolamo di Tiziano. Various pictures of his were touched up by the master, and are difficult to distinguish from originals.
Few of the pupils and assistants of Titian became well-known in their own right; for some being his assistant was probably a lifetime career.
Paris Bordone and
Bonifazio Veronese were two of superior excellence.
El Greco (or Dominikos Theotokopoulos) was said (by
Giulio Clovio) to have been employed by the master in his last years.
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