Book Review

Shooting star of the Renaissance

Titian: the last days

I nearly did this book a great wrong. I nearly abandoned it in the first ­­chapter, in which case I would have missed one of the most perceptive books on an artist which I have ever regretted finishing. Please don’t, as I did, get to page 3, with the author trudging Venice in search of Titian’s house, encountering shaven-headed receptionists, blue dusk and pizzerias, and think that the whole book will be filtered through the ego of a twenty-first-century flâneur.

Four pages later he is straight into the meat of Titian’s story with The Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari church (“swept heavenward on a billowing carpet of clouds and putti”), and has left behind everything contemporary except for his own eye. And it is the eye of a writer who encountered Titian as an art student, and who kept on looking at his paintings until he found that he wanted the rest of the world to be able to look at them with the same vivid engagement and passion. So this isn’t another book by an art historian in which the documentary evidence behind the paintings is the line on which they must hang; it’s a book where the author has been forced to tussle with documents, certainly, but in which he goes to the pictures themselves and the physical evidence of their making and subject matter to find his story.

Between the various paintings the historical background is teased out, and the sketchy figure of the artist given substance, like a pencil outline coloured in and shaded. We see Titian as boy-apprentice to Gentile Bellini (the book’s title is rather misleading); Titian influenced by and then surpassing Giorgione; Titian as the shooting star of the Italian art world, manipulating patrons such as Alfonso d’Este, Federico Gonzaga, the Pesaro family, the Venetian government and the Pope.

He gets so much work that juggling it becomes difficult; he is a perfectionist who cannot compromise on the control he exercises over his studio, so he is forced to pretend illness. Alfonso’s agent goes to check, and finds that Titian “has no fever at all. He looks well, if somewhat exhausted”, which the agent attributes to hanky-panky with his models. Examining this cliché, Mark Hudson shows us instead a professional who runs a busy workshop full of assistants, needing a continual injection of large-scale commissions to survive; who services with his paintings the clients of the same ­courtesans who model for him; and who has little opportunity to use those models for anything but sitting in one pose until they weep with exhaustion. And beyond the studio is Titian the entrepreneur, rooted in his home town of Pieve, choosing a close network of relatives to run the family timber business and handle his contracts.

This grounding of the book in practical details is enormously productive. Hudson ferrets around in the background of the paintings, wrestling out meaning, hunting down sitters, disentangling the work of different artists. He sets the putative lover, Violante, model for goddesses and allegories, against the real Cecilia, housekeeper, mother of Titian’s children and the possible face of some Madonnas. He wonders about the model for the Venus of Urbino, describing her and her sisters in such sensuously evocative prose that you hardly need the pathetically small number of colour plates in the book to summon up the golden Venetian light unfurling over landscapes of creamy skin.

Then there are the great faces of the late Renaissance: Aretino’s “furious sprawl of beard radiating a saturnine energy”; Pope Paul III and his grandsons, in “a painting that’s as much about red as Matisse’s Red Studio”; and two of the Hapsburg ­emperors: Charles V – “supremely confident on his black charger”, the prototype of the heroic equestrian king – and Philip II.

With Philip we are into the late works, autumnal and painterly with an undertow of terror. If you were ambivalent about the country spending £50 million on Diana and Actaeon, read this exegesis by a painter “on how far painting can go” and contribute your mite to saving Diana and Callisto. And see if you can remain unmoved by the very last picture, the nocturnal pietà with the artist as the elderly St Jerome, himself about to die as the plague sweeps away his son Orazio, alienated from his other son, his sight failing, but still painting, still ­transcendent.

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