Titian. Sir Claude Phillips

      A small group of early portraits – all of them somewhat difficult to place – call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our painter – leaving out of the question the Baffo and the portrait-figures in the great Saint Mark of the Salute – is the magnificent Ariosto (also known as The Man with the Quilted Sleeve) in the National Gallery of London. There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara, but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here conceded to it. The soberly tinted yet sumptuous picture is thoroughly Giorgionesque in its general arrangement and general tone, and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of Giorgione’s Antonio Broccardo at Budapest and his Knight of Malta at the Uffizi. Its resemblance to the celebrated Sciarra Violin-Player by Sebastiano del Piombo, often ascribed to Raphael, is very striking, particularly regarding the general lines of the composition.[26] The handsome, manly head has lost both subtlety and character through some too severe cleaning process, but Venetian art has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a place in the picture.

      The Concert of the Palazzo Pitti, which depicts a young Augustinian monk playing on a keyed instrument, on one side of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded clerk holding a bass viol, was, until Morelli, almost universally looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[27] The most gifted of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this Concert his exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt, however, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of Barbarelli, and tentatively assigning the subtly attractive and tender Concert to Titian’s early period. To express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state of the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modish young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness renders tonsure impossible – that is just those portions of the canvas which are least well preserved – are also those that least conclusively suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of the young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco master’s Antonio Broccardo, to his male portraits in Berlin and at the Uffizi, and to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of Evander, in the Three Philosophers. Closer to it, all the same, are the Raffo and the two portraits in the Saint Mark of the Salute, and closer still is the supremely fine Man with a Glove of the Salon Carré, that later production of Vecelli’s early period. The Concert of the Palazzo Pitti displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in its technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything that we can with certainty point to in the life work of Barbarelli. The large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful motif – music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of sympathy three human beings – is akin to that in the Three Ages, though there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be found also in Titian’s Rustic Concert in the Louvre, in which the thrumming of the lute is one among many delights appealing to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which youth revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the early Titianesque male portraiture. Altogether apart, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the exquisite sensitivity of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret, indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra Violin-Player of Sebastiano del Piombo; only there it is already tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and Roman portraiture. There is little or nothing to add after this as to the Man with a Glove, except that as a representation of aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master’s works except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less distinguished, portrait in the Palazzo Pitti.