and Sated Love, for which they have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show no more than languid desire to solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures described by Marcantonio Michiel (the Anonimo of Jacopo Morelli), in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the Inferno with Aeneas and Anchises and Landscape with the Birth of Paris, Franz Wickhoff[18] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of Barbarelli’s best known works. The Three Philosophers he calls Aeneas, Evander and Pallas, the Giovanelli Tempest with the Gypsy and the Soldier he explains anew as Admetus and Hypsipyle.[19] The subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and popularly called, or rather miscalled, the Dream of Raphael, is recognised by Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione. He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it), the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in peaceful sleep.
Passing on to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to work on the world-famous Sacred and Profane Love, and shows us the Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus – that wearisome imitation of the similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea – the sumptuously attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love – sits at the fountain in unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea’s father, irresistibly pleading that she must go to the alien lover, who waits in the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist; it is the subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible – in Titian’s realisation of the legend – to the woman she tempts, that constitutes the main theme upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[20] had already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he described the Borghese picture as The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the Well. The likelihood of Wickhoff’s brilliant interpretation becomes greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice afterwards borrowed subjects from classical Antiquity, taking his Offering to Venus, now at Madrid, from the Erotes of Philostratus, and the wonderful Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery from the Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos of Catullus.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Madonna di San Niccolò (San Niccolò Altarpiece), c. 1520–1525.
Oil on wood transposed onto canvas, 420 × 290 cm. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), Madonna of Foligno, 1511–1512.
Oil tempera on wood transferred onto canvas, 308 × 198 cm. Musei Vaticani, Vatican City.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–1518.
Oil on panel, 690 × 360 cm. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Retable of the Pesaro Family, or Retable of the Madonna of the Pesaro, 1519–1526.
Oil on canvas, 385 × 270 cm. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice.
It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard, clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours. It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we need not mourn overmuch, nor too painfully set to work to revise our whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years of the cinquecento. True, some humanist such as Pietro Bembo, no less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry for Titian and Giorgione, which luckily for the world they have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits and their classical legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of the golden prime disdained to represent – or possibly unconsciously shrank from representing – the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. In such pictures as the Adrastus and Hypsipyle and Aeneas and Evander, Giorgione represents less that which has been related to him of those ancient legends so much as his own mood when he is brought into contact with them. He transposes his motif from a dramatic into a lyrical atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something “rich and strange”, coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly human fantasy. Titian, in Sacred and Profane Love, as for identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for the splendour of female loveliness unveiled and for the piquant contrast of female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian have consciously or unconsciously achieved in these exquisite idylls is the indissoluble union of humanity with nature; outwardly quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion. It is nature herself that mysteriously responds in these painted poems, that interprets for the beholder the moods of man, much as a mighty orchestra – nature ordered and controlled. This is so that it may by its undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we may be deeply grateful to Wickhoff for his interpretations, no less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old ideals, nor force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from another more prosaic, precise and literal standpoint.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Saint Mark with Saints Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian, 1511.
Oil on wood panel, 230 × 119 cm. Santa Maria della Salute, Venice.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Virgin with Saint Francis, Saint Blaise, and the Donor Alvise Gozzi, called the Gozzi Retable, 1520.
Oil on wood panel, 312 × 215 cm. Pinacoteca Civica Francesco Podesti, Ancona.
It has been pointed out by Titian’s biographers that the wars which followed the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation all over northern Italy. It was not long after this – on the death of his master Giorgione – that Sebastiano del Piombo migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook
See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the
M. Thausing,
