new Venetian art. It was then that Titian temporarily left his adoptive city to do work in fresco at Padua and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-like wood engraving, The Triumph of Faith, is to be accepted, it must be held that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[21] cites painted compositions of the Triumph of Faith as either the originals or the repetitions of the wood engravings, for which Titian himself drew the blocks. The frescos themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished; but there does not appear to be any direct evidence that they ever came into existence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the process of translation into wood engraving, are not materially at variance with those in the frescos of the Scuola del Santo. But the movement, the spirit of the whole, is essentially different. This mighty, onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled forward by the Emblems of the four Evangelists, with a great company of Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescos of the Scuola del Santo. It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the Triumphs of Mantegna, then already widely popularised by numerous engravings. Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked obviously intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in nearby Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like the famous Tribute Money, with which we shall have to deal presently, on the “Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo”, which was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more careful consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion. It was not until he reached extreme old age that such an impulse of sacred passion would again colour the art of the painter of Cadore as it did here. In the earlier period of his working life the Triumph of Faith constitutes a striking exception.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Daniel and Suzanne (Christ and the Adulterous Wife), 1508–1510.
Oil on canvas, 139.2 × 181.7 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1506–1507.
Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Scuola del Santo, Venice.
Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian’s share in the much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Of the sixteen frescos executed in 1511 by Titian, in concert with Domenico Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are from the brush of the master himself: The Miracle of the Newborn Child, Saint Anthony Heals the Leg of a Youth and The Miracle of the jealous Husband. Here the figures, the composition and the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the trace of Giorgione’s influence. The composition has just the timidity and lack of rhythm and variety that to the last marks that of Barbarelli. The figures have his naive truth, his warmth and splendour of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The Miracle of the jealous Husband is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what our neighbours would today call the crime passionnel.
A convenient date for the magnificent Saint Mark with Saints Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian is 1511, when Titian, having completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the truculent Saint Mark; but so were the recently terminated frescos. The noble altarpiece[22] symbolises, or rather commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the terrors of the League of Cambrai. On one side are Saint Sebastian, standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, and Saint Roch for plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, Saints Cosmas and Damian, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli’s own could also be described. In particular it shows points of contact with the colouring of the Three Philosophers, which, on the authority of Marcantonio Michiel (the Anonimo), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both sumptuous and boldly contrasting in hues, the sovereign unity of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, nor by any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques. Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last are among the most admirable portrait-figures in Titian’s life work. In them a simplicity and concentration akin to that of Giovanni Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and flexibility of Barbarelli. The Saint Sebastian is the most beautiful among the youthful male figures, as the Venus of Giorgione and the Venus of the Sacred and Profane Love are the most beautiful among the female figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such presentations of youth in its flower abounded. There is something androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a delight in portraying the fresh comeliness and elastic beauty of form proper to a youth on the point of becoming a man was common to many Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had coloured the whole art of Greece.
The singularly attractive, yet a little puzzling, Holy Family with a Shepherd, is in the National Gallery. The landscape is of the early type, and the execution is, even for that time, curiously small and lacking in breadth. In particular the projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescos. The noble type and the stilted attitude of the Saint Joseph suggest the Saint Mark of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of the thick-set young shepherd, who recalls Palma more than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, with a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly in the Miracle of the Newborn Child of the Scuola. Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Tribute-Money, c. 1516.
Oil on wood, 75 × 56 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Baptism of Christ, c. 1513–1514.
Oil on wood, 115 × 89 cm. Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Noli me tangere, c. 1514.
Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 91.9 cm. The National Gallery, London.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Entombment, c. 1520.
Oil on canvas, 148 × 212 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The splendidly beautiful Salome with the Head of John the Baptist in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but definitively placed by Morelli among the Giorgionesque works of Titian, belongs to about the same period as Sacred
One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian is to speak of the
