Part 2 (1/2)
Jeune Hoant]
[Illustration: _A Concert Probably by titian Pitti Palace, Florence
Froraph by Alinari_]
Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the Venetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ lish cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest ain depicted with the saes the readeraccount of titian's intrigues against the venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi We see there how, on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo proposed to titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded hinaninori for the first vacant broker's patent for life, on the saes and exemptions as are conceded to Giovanni Bellini The petition is presented on the 31st of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that daytitian's offer with all the conditions attached
Though he has arrived at the extreme liiven new proof of his still transcendent power in the great altar-piece of S Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still under the encroacher than himself by half a century On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, butdaunted, titian petitions again, asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer, which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is accepted by the Council titian, like most other holders of the er to receive its not inconsiderable e of which is the one essential duty attached to the office
So takes place with the Council on the 18th of January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at the end of November in the sarant to titian of Bellini's patent; notwithstanding which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is allowed the full enjoyo di Tedeschi”
(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close of this same year, 1516
[Illustration: _Portrait of a Man Alte Pinakothek, Munich Frol_]
It is in this year that titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and entered into relations with Alfonso I, which were to becoreater and nised in Italy It was here, as we may safely assume, that he completed, or, it reat _Bacchanal_ or _Feast of the Gods on Earth_, now at Alnwick Castle It is there that he obtained the commission for two famous works, the _Worshi+p of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, designed, in continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's _Feast of the Gods_, to adorn a favourite apart completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the whole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery
Bellini appears in an unfanificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date, 1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still ionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--andaltar-piece of S Giovanni Crisosto All adories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice, which constitute, besides the present picture, aly and sy, however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a fire which in the _Bacchanal_ has died out[33] Vasari describes this _Bacchanal_ as ”one of the oes on to reular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the Gerely attributes this to an iht years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo, adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi This particularity, noted by the author of the _Vite_, and, in soive rise to the sur to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti round and the figure of St Jero year for S Giovanni Crisostoh he cannot have wholly devised, the Bellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of San Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period Even in the _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino's finest landscape of the late tiest the possibility of a es of the _Bacchanal_, however--especially the figures of the two blond, fair-breasted Goddesses or nyainst the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are as beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has produced up to the date of the picture's appearance Very suggestive of Bellini is the way in which the hair of soes is dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by artificial means These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his earliest or Paduan period, when they are id
Still this coiffure--for as such it hout the ories_ just mentioned
[Illustration: _Alessandro de' Medici (so called) Haraph by Spooner & Co_]
Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into the chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac veherand serenity, unconsciously betraying life-weariness, replaces the ah the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and titian The audacious gestures andto this rustic festival, in which the Gods unbend and, after the homelier fashi+on of h, it would seem, only _pour la forme_ A careful examination of the picture substantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ was painted upon by titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in es a titianesque hand It may well be, at the saht in their conjecture that what the younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left unfinished by him The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini His are the carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the iround of the picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky forround with its s, croith a castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution By titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that ht be taken to betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the right If it is titian that we have here, as certainly appears most probable, he cannot be dee or developing the Bellinesque landscape The task may well, indeed, have presented itself to hi to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
CHAPTER III
The ”Worshi+p of Venus” and ”Bacchanal” Place in Art of the ”assunta”--The ”Bacchus and Ariadne”--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The ”St Sebastian” of Brescia--Altar-pieces at Ancona and in the Vatican--The ”Entomb titian's works of ”St Peter Martyr”
In the year in which titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosobought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_[35] A greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of titian's career, when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far froly been surmised that in the _Worshi+p of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we have proof that he yielded to the influence of the roinative literature of the Italian Renaissance In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in their unforced e of humanity to its environan and Greek, not by any process of cold and deliberate iroundwork provided by Nature herself It was the passionate and unbridled Dosso Dossi who a painters stood in the closest relation to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous eccentricity
[Illustration: _The Worshi+p of Venus Prado Gallery, Madrid Froraph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_]
In the _Worshi+p of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind already the fresh ionesque works already enuht noon Another forward step has been taken, but not without soionesque perfuenius of the first period The _Worshi+p of Venus_ ht be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of Venus_ The subject is taken froines_[36] of Philostratus, a renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Rorace and charm of the hellenistic mode of conception The thes, supposed to have been seen by hiroup of modern scholars held to be creations of the author's fertile brain Before a statue of Venus more or less of the Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named the ”Townley Venus” and the ”Venus d'Arles”--, playing rhyth faction, to which challengeof apples Incoour, the life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable es of tian _aelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the Quattrocento had already converted into s than their predecessors had iined Such painters of the North, in touch with the South, as Albrecht Durer, Mabuse, and Jacob Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier and no on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in similar subjects from these Loves of titian[37]
The suave the commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a perforour than its coy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus, it has been very generally assuhter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus, whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance No Dionysus is, however, seen here aies, do honour to the God, Ariadne's new lover The revel in a certain audacious abandon denotes rather the festival fro the scene to the reeure of the Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so lately won back froure,[38] both in its attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped Bacchante, or Goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick titian's lovely io's dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain fenity spiritualises and shi+elds from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise defenceless The climax of the splendid and distinctively titianesque colour-harar his white-robed partner, turns his back to the spectator This has the stronglyrobe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture, and yet again in the gar little _Tambourine Player_, which is No 181 in the Vienna Gallery, reat works just now described, but rather before than after them
What that is new remains to be said about the _assunta_, or _assuin_, which was ordered of titian as early as 1516, but not shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the 20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world
Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_ Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _ of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in Florence Aroup as Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at S Maria Formosa his fa year had produced his characteristic and, in its charely unconventional altar-piece for S
Bartoloamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_ In none of these masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by titian, which was far fro the case, was there any help to be derived in the elaboration of a hich cannot be said to have had any precursor in the art of Venice There was in existence one altar-piece dealing with the saht possibly have obtained a hint This was the _assuin_ painted by Durer in 1509 for Jacob heller, and now only known by Paul Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort The group of the Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its fine balance of line, aa too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact between this group and the corresponding one in the _assunta_ But titian could not at that tiinal of the heller altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it remained for a century[39] He no doubt did see the _assumption_ in the _Marienleben_ coh it stands in a definite relation to the heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore The _assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dih altar Joshua Reynolds, when he visited the Frari in 1752, says that ”he saw it near; it was most terribly dark but nobly painted” Now, in the Accadeain, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the greatest productions of Italian art at its highest The so in the lower half, so well adapted to express the supreolden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is triuels and cherubiure the divine serenity of which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the Deity, so relentless in their superhuh the Infinite and fill the beholder with awe The over-substantial, the in, in her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and not without some reason Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the cli more diaphanous, more ethereal? It is only e strive to replace the colossal figure in the n of another and a more spiritual character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised
[Illustration: _The assunta Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_]
Placed as the _assunta_ now is in the ihbourhood of one of Tintoretto's best-preserved oes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely triu,in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of ladly renounces his power and right to exercise a sane judghly penetrated with his subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above the earth than the elder erated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in poetic significance of colour, in grasp of huer competitor If, unhappily, it were necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the life-work of the other-- the world the poorer by the loss of titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face with the enius of the latter?
But to return for a ement of dinificent group of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth It carries the subject into the do it of the great pulsation of life If in subliures, taken one by one, cannot rank with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of vitality The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second This is not always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character titian himself in the _St Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St Peter the Dominican_, sins in the saainst his better self
Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art[40]