He grew fat, but never ceased to vaunt his sexual powers. He frequented brothels, and became more and more religious, he who in his youth had laughed at resurrections as “nonsense” which “only the rabble takes seriously.”21 In 1554 he went to Rome hoping to be crowned with a red hat, but Julius III could only make him a Knight of St. Peter. In that year he was evicted from the Casa Aretino for failure to pay his rent. He took more modest quarters, away from the Grand Canal. Two years later he died of apoplexy, aged sixty-four. He had confessed some fraction of his sins, and had received the Eucharist and Extreme Unction; and he was buried in the church of San Luca as if he had not been the very paragon and apostle of lechery. A wit composed for him a possible epitaph:
Qui giace l’Aretin, poeta tosco,
Chi disse mal d’ognun fuorche Dio,
Scusandosi col dir, Non lo conosco;—
which is to say:
Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, “I never knew him.”
III. TITIAN AND THE KINGS: 1530–76
In 1530, at Bologna, Aretino introduced Titian to Charles V. The Emperor, absorbed in reorganizing Italy, sat impatiently for a portrait, and paid the astonished artist a single ducat ($12.50). Federigo of Mantua, calling Titian “the best painter now living,” added out of his own pocket a princely 150 ducats to the fee. Gradually the Duke brought Charles to his own point of view. In 1532 artist and Emperor met again. During the next sixteen years Titian painted a dazzling sequence of Imperial portraits: Charles in full armor (1532, now lost); Charles in brocaded coat, embroidered doublet, white breeches, stockings and shoes, and black cap with an inappropriate white feather (1533?); Charles with the Empress Isabella (1538); Charles in shining armor on a prancing steed at the battle of Mühlberg (1548)—a glory of color and pride; Charles in somber black, seated meditative on a balcony (1548). It is a credit to painter and King that these portraits make no attempt to idealize their subject, except in costume; they show Charles’s unprepossessing features, his bad skin, his gloomy spirit, and a certain capacity for cruelty; and yet they reveal the Emperor, a man of burdens and authority, a cold, hard mind that had brought half of western Europe under its rule. He could be kind nevertheless, and atone handsomely for his initial miserliness. In 1533 he sent Titian a patent making him a count palatine, and a Knight of the Golden Spur; and from that year Titian was officially court painter to the most powerful monarch in Christendom.
Meanwhile, presumably through Federigo, Titian had entered into correspondence with Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who had married Eleonora Gonzaga, Federigo’s sister and Isabella’s daughter. Since Francesco was now commander in chief of the Venetian armies, he and his Duchess were frequently in Venice. There Titian painted their portraits: a man nine tenths mail (for Titian liked its sheen), a woman pale and resigned after many illnesses. For them Titian painted on wood a Magdalen attractive only for the remarkable variations of light and hue that the artist gave to her auburn hair; and again for them a lovely portrait, in green and brown, known only as La Bella, and now in the Pitti Gallery. For Federigo’s successor, Duke Guidobaldo II, Titian made one of art’s most perfect nudes, the Venus of Urbino (c. 1538). Titian, we are told, had put some finishing touches on Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus; now he imitated that masterpiece in all but the accompaniments and the features. Here the face lacks the guileless peace of Giorgione’s version; and instead of a quiet landscape we see a rich interior of green curtain, brown drape, and red couch, while two maids search for robes gorgeous enough to fitly clothe the lady’s golden flesh.
From Duke and Emperor Titian passed on to paint the Pope. Paul III was also imperiaclass="underline" a man of virile character and subtle craft, with a face that recorded two generations of history; here was a better opportunity for Titian than he had found in the uncommunicative Emperor. At Bologna in 1535 Paul faced bravely the realism of Titian’s portraiture. Aged sixty-seven, tired but indomitable, he sat in his flowing papal robes, the long head and large beard bent over a once powerful frame, the ring of authority conspicuous on his aristocratic hand; this and Raphael’s Julius II contest the distinction of being the finest, deepest portrait of the Italian Renaissance. In 1545 the Pope invited Titian, himself now sixty-eight, to Rome. The artist was lodged in the Belvedere, and received all the honors of the city; Vasari acted as his cicerone in showing him the wonders of classic and Renaissance Rome; even Michelangelo welcomed him, and, in a moment of courtesy, concealed from him an opinion expressed to friends, that Titian would have been a greater painter had he learned to draw.22 There Titian painted Paul again, older, more bent, more harassed than before, between two obsequious grandsons who were soon to rebel against the Pope; this, too, is among Titian’s profoundest works. For one of these grandsons, Ottavio Farnese, he painted the voluptuous Danaë of the Naples Museum. After eight months in Rome he traveled slowly back via Florence to Venice (1546), hoping to spend his remaining days there in rest and peace.
But a year later the Emperor urgently called him over the Alps to Augsburg. There he stayed nine months, making two of the imperial portraits listed above, and immortalizing slim Spanish grandees and mountainous Teutons like the Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony. On a second visit to Augsburg (1550) Titian met the future Philip II of Spain, and made several pictures of him; one of these, in the Prado, is among the master portraits of the Renaissance. Lovelier still is the likeness that he painted of Charles’s Portuguese wife, the Empress Isabella. She had died in 1539, but the Emperor, four years later, gave Titian a middling representation of her by an obscure artist, and asked him to change it into a work of finished art. The result may not resemble the Empress, but even as an imaginary portrait this Isabella of Portugal must rank high among Titian’s pictures: a refined and melancholy face, a most royal costume, a book of prayers to console her premonition of an early death, a distant landscape providing overtones of green and brown and blue. Titian many times over earned his noble rank.
After his return from Augsburg (1552) Titian felt that he had traveled enough. He was seventy-five, and doubtless thought that he had not much longer to live. Perhaps his busyness made for his longevity; absorbed in painting after painting, he forgot to die. In a long succession of religious pictures (1522–70) he gave his own colorful and dramatic rendering of the Christian creed and story from Adam to Christ.* He commemorated with powerful images the Apostles and the saints. The best and most unpleasant of these is The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1558, I Gesuiti, Venice): the saint is being roasted on a gridiron by Roman soldiers and slaves, who add to his discomfort with hot irons and flagellation. These religious pictures do not move us as deeply as the similar works of the Florentines; they excel in anatomy, but give no sense of piety; one look at the athletic figures of Christ and the Apostles makes it clear that Titian’s interest was purely technical, that he was thinking of splendid bodies, not of ascetic saints. In the interval between the Bellini and Titian Christianity, while still proposing topics, had lost its spiritual hold on Venetian art.23