come from Cadore and take charge of the household. The
mansion, difficult now to find, is in the Biri Grande, then a
fashionable suburb, being in the extreme end of Venice, on the
sea, with beautiful gardens and a look-out towards Murano.
In 1532 he painted in Bologna a portrait of the emperor
Charles V., and was created a count palatine and knight of the
Golden Spur, his children also being made nobles of the empire—for
a painter, honours of an unexampled kind.
The Venetian government, dissatisfied at Titian’s neglect of the work for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the money which he had received for time unemployed; and Pordenone, his formidable rival of recent years, was installed in his place. At the end of a year, however, Pordenone died; and Titian, who had meanwhile applied himself diligently to painting in the hall the battle of Cadore, was reinstated. This great picture, which was burned with several others in 1577, represented in life-size the moment at which the Venetian captain, D’Alviano, fronted the enemy, with horses and men crashing down into the stream. Fontana’s engraving, and a sketch by Titian himself in the gallery of the Uffizi in Florence, record the energetic composition. As a matter of professional and worldly success, his position from about this time may be regarded as higher than that of any other painter known to history, except 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. on the treasury of Milan. Another source of profit—for he was always sufficiently keen after money—was a contract, obtained in 1542, for supplying grain to Cadore, which he visited with regularity almost every year, and where he was both generous and influential. This reminds us of Shakespeare and his relations to his birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon; and indeed the great Venetian and the still greater Englishman had something akin in the essentially natural tone of their inspiration and performance, and in the personal tendency of each to look after practical success and “ the main chance ” rather than to work out aspirations and pursue ideals. Titian had a favourite villa on the neighbouring 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 (see R. F. Heath’s Life of Titian, p. 5). A visit was paid to Rome in 1546, when he 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 Fra Sebastiano in his lucrative office of the piombo, and he made no scruple of becoming a friar for the purpose; but this 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 a potent auxiliary in the suit of the prince for the hand of Queen Mary. In the preceding year Vecelli had affianced 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, now deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made by this time, was placed on a corresponding footing. The marriage took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in 1560. The years 1551 and 1552 were among those in which Titian worked least assiduously—a circumstance which need excite no surprise in the case of a man aged about seventy-five. He was at the Council of Trent towards 1555, of which his admirable picture or finished sketch in the Louvre bears record. He was never in Spain, notwithstanding the many statements which have been made in the affirmative. Titian’s friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate, the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, in 1570. With his European fame, and many sources of wealth, Vecelli is the last man one would suppose to have been under the necessity of writing querulous and dunning letters for payment, especially when the defaulter addressed was lord of Spain and of the American Indies; yet he had constantly to complain that his pictures remained unpaid for and his pensions in arrear, and in the very year of his death (February) he recites the many pictures which he had sent within the preceding twenty years without receiving their price. In fact, there is ground for thinking that all his pensions and privileges, large as they were nominally, brought in but precarious returns. It has been pointed out that in the summer of 1566 (when he was elected into the Florentine Academy) he made an official declaration of his income, and put down the various items apparently below their value, not naming at all his salary or pensions. Possibly there was but too much reason for the omission.
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 Frari, 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 ninety-nine years of age (more or less) when the plague,[1] which was then raging in Venice, seized him, and carried him off on the 27th of August 1576. He was buried in the church of the Frari, as at first intended, and his “Pietà” was finished by Palma Giovane. He lies near his own famous painting, the “Madonna di Casa Pesaro.” No memorial marked his grave, until by Austrian command Canova executed the monument so well known to sightseers. 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, who prowled about, scarce controlled.
Titian was a man of correct features and handsome person, with an uncommon air of penetrating observation and self-possessed composure—a Venetian presence worthy to pair with any of those “most potent, grave and reverend signors” whom his pencil has transmitted to posterity. He was highly distinguished, courteous and winning in society, personally unassuming, and a fine speaker, enjoying (as is said by Vasari, who saw him in the spring of 1566) health and prosperity unequalled. The numerous heads currently named Titian’s Mistress might dispose us to regard the painter as a man of more than usually relaxed morals; the fact is, however, that these titles are mere fancy-names, and no inference one way or the other can be drawn from them. He gave splendid entertainments at times; and it is related that, when Henry III. of France passed through Venice on his way from Poland to take the French throne, he called on Titian with a train of nobles, and the painter presented him as a gift with all the pictures of which he inquired the price. He was not a man of universal genius or varied faculty and accomplishment, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of painting.
Ever since Titian rose into celebrity the general verdict has been that he is the greatest of painters, considered technically. In the first place neither the method of fresco painting nor work of the colossal scale to which fresco painting ministers is here in question. Titian’s province is that of oil painting, and of painting on a scale which, though often large and grand, is not colossal either in dimension or in inspiration. Titian may properly be regarded as the greatest manipulator of paint in relation to colour, tone, luminosity, richness, texture, surface and harmony, and with a view to the production of a pictorial whole conveying to the eye a true, dignified and beautiful impression of its general subject matter and of the objects of sense which form its constituent parts. In this sense Titian has never been deposed from his sovereignty in painting, nor can one forecast the time in which he will be deposed. For the complex of qualities which we sum up in the words colour, handling and general force and harmony of effect, he stands unmatched, although in particular items of forcible or impressive execution—not to speak of creative invention—some painters, one in one respect and another in another, may indisputably be preferred to him. He carried to its acme that great colourist conception of the Venetian school of which the first masterpieces are due to the two Bellini, to Carpaccio, and, with more fully developed suavity
of manner, to Giorgione. Pre-eminent inventive power or sublimity- ↑ Out of a total population of 190,000 there perished at this time 50,000.
